I blame it on the youth gone un-wild, our state of affairs. The current pulse, so wan and weak like a tired old bulimic baby.
A big part of the problem of today's youth is the "smart-phone" though it's arguable that the "phone" portion of the SmartPhone(tm) barely exists. I think iPhone6 is going to make the calling feature optional as an upgrade for $299 additional as an "app", since I find no kid under 30 is really using the phone as.. well, as a phone; instead, it's a toy: a modern GameBoy with porn-ish features and low-grade internet browsing and some low-qual GPS gadgetry thrown in, oh, yeah, and a Chinese, 20-Megapixel but fuzzy crap, tic-tac-sized plastic-optics camera you could buy at the Dollar Tree store for.. well, a dollar.
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| Better resolution than iPhone5S due to 35mm grain-quality (seriously!) |
I myself have a Google Nexus 4 (Phillip Dick disallowed the Nexus 6 nomenclature for good reason, as few look like Rachel Tyrel or Steve Decker, though have you seen Sean Young lately?) It's an "Android OS" smart-phone and I find the audio quality of actual phone-calls to be no better, if slightly worse than my T-Mobile 3" Samsung E105 flip-phone I got back in 2004 which had a battery life of about 8 days and good audio quality (talking/listening anyway). I'm not that impressed with the Nexus 4, now recently usurped JellyBean OS with the KitKat OS version Nexus 5 a few weeks ago, with a very slightly better resolution rate and CPU. Smart-phones make you (dumb..) and download applications as the system is packed with some basic, boring stuff. My wife Becky as an iPhone 5 and it too is rather.. meh. I don't see why people waited in lines for these things. Now, granted, I've downloaded through the Play Store some useful applications, such as car-finder, some neat-o games, a stellar-chart, local news and weather notifications, banking things, comic strip browser, guitar chord finders, and happily Netflix, XM Radio, and Hulu Plus apps, generally for free or near-free and they're kinda fun but not worth it ultimately. There's nothing it offers I can't live without, a mild convenience for having an actual phone to call something other than 911. All the executables (aka "apps" for the pseudo-hipsters) are much, much better on a desktop computer by miles in every conceivable way aside from portability. Just another example of Generation Zero embracing low-quality, something I've been blogging about since 2004 on MySpace. (Note* MySpace has changed it's format to something looking like a worse Windows 8, but I was able to have my older blogs restored and emailed to me, all 6 years of it. I guess I'll post some of the better ones as a Christmas present coming up for reader's delights, known as the Ghosts of Blogging Past). Regardless of all this, minus the moderate convenience of something I really could do without (I really can wait until I get home to find out the name of a song and use my neurons to hold it instead of using Shazam to find out what song is playing at IHOP) [Note, Not Black Adam].
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| Our owls are artificial, or your money back. |
Another G-Zero point is the whole video-game trophy bullshite. Really? You need some sense of accomplishment to fulfill your inner 2-year-old? Trophies for everyone! Trophies for attendance. Trophies for sort-of-trying. Trophies for not biting the teacher too many times. Trophies for not exploding suddenly. Trophies for knowing what an oven is. Sigh. Seems everyone needs the doggy-cookie (wag wag). This limits sense of pride of "job well done" because it's replaced (not augmented) with empty trophies. Hopefully this B.F.Skinner response / reward thing (yeah, you can click each of the 3 links there, Dave.. if you dare) will stop and be considered out-of-fashion. A lot of things I hope will go out-of-fashion, though I fear we're headed towards a quite dysfunctional, dystopian cyberpunk, Aldous Huxley's nightmare with all the drugs seemingly everyone's taking to "be normal". Huh? Well, I take some Gummy Flintstones sometimes. Er.. what's this restless-leg syndrome that one of the side-effects is "gambling urges"? Huh? W..wuh? ADD? That's "bad parenting" no drug will fix that. Get that kid off Ritalin. Remember kids, doctors will kill you, or at best, maim you. You'd be surprised how well your body works without docs. Seriously.
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| "My parents did drugs when I was in the womb and they feed me gluten-free bread and keep my sugar-content zero so my brain never developed because media told them it was right and they don't have an opinion of their own because they're retarded and didn't do any research. Now I'm brain-dead and will likely kill people in a theater in 2012. Ahhhh!!!" |
So video games are so easy these days. I've mentioned it before, but there's so much by way of cinematics. Huge, sweeping cinematics with sometimes decent voice actors slumming-it for a cheap buck and a Diet Pepsi Big Gulp coupon. So if you play something these days, you're "rewarded" 30 minutes of cinematics, followed by "Now press the X button" where you can "Continue" to.. more cinematics. Yay! I'm winning! I'm winning the game! I got a trophy for winning! I watched the cinematic! My character is so badass! Win! (Just like football fans say, "We" instead of "my favorite team". We? Really? You think any of those multi-millionaires give two schmecks about you? Nope. No sir-ee). I encourage any kid these days to get to level 5 on Donkey Kong Jr. and I'll PayPal them $100. Just send me the bill via PayPal.com. Granted, it must be an arcade machine (the re-release in 2002 [sic] is okay too) not the MAME version or Nintendo, Wii, or any other version (try Dave & Busters). No one will be able to do it, mostly because they're too lazy. Generation Zero unite in your nihilism!
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| "No, Gloria! Turning it on doesn't mean you automatically won! Oh, wait.. yes it does these days. Drat." |
Finally, what really ruined this generation is TV. Before the year 2000 there was sitcoms and other interesting shows. The Gong-Show clone Survivor aired and everything changed. Scripted "reality" shows in the vein of WWF wrestling of the 1960's turned everyone's minds to oh-eff-eff mode to the likes of Idiocracy's "Ow! My Balls!" Ugh. Shows like Jerry Springer had made-up contestants with horrible, obvious over-acting. Fake hype-inducing shows like American Idol (it's fake, kids) continue on. People go to try-outs for TV-show hype-effect, having long wait lines to get people in to try-out to be on the show. The theme went from morals and good-values to "what's in it for me?" From oh so "boring" lawful-good to selfish neutral-evil. The show Married..With Children parodied this satirically, taking Little House on the Prairie and The Cosby Show and inversing the Golden Rule, doing exactly the opposite for an experiment. Oddly, most people I've talked to admire Al Bundy and not loathe him as they should in the same way one should loathe Chevy Chase's "Clark Oswald" of the National Lampoon: Vacation series. You're supposed to dislike these people, friends, not identify with them! I strongly suspect the producers of these reverse-morality shows were very surprised, not expecting the slithering evil oozing out of the Nielsen Ratings like ectoplasmic slime! Even Ed O'Neill didn't understand why. TV often reflects the moral code of America at the time, often guiding Americans. You can see this throughout the years. Current TV is a wasteland. It describes the youth today, like the hippies of the '60s, wanting but never taking like Alice's Restaurant (now no longer played on Thanksgiving since FM-radio died in the early '90s when "Clear Channel" took it all over).
So, America's broken. It might be fixed, but not at the rate it's going. I suspect it'll eat itself though. I'm right about most things (though not scintillation recently, woops, it was some hardware piece). It'll burn itself out and evolve (or devolve )and change. I myself will stay the course as I have been, as I'm doing well for myself (but not overly so) by doing hard work and putting effort in, and it's working for me and has been for about 20 years now. Like a previous post on this subject, I've brought up regards concerning G-Zero's survival. I suspect it'll not last forever, and that these people will give-up and start working bad jobs with useless degrees and not smoke pot and survive. My worst fear that America will become a failed nation by the likes of the Roman Empire to the likes of China's perseverance but China (and India) are at the civil breaking-point in my opinion and won't survive the century without a civil war against the totalitarian government caste systems and will have a Philosophical Renaissance Era by 2050. I might live to see it, maybe. Still, just like I was when I was 20, kids have a better, louder voice than before by way of social media and want their entitlements. When I was 20 I felt the World owed me a fortune, but I didn't voice this on YouTube. In 1990, the Internet was barely there, as well as Bulletin Board Systems and dial-up 9600-baud modems (at best.. some where 300 baud. I've known 3-baud with a phone-coupler on pulse-dial analog rotary-dial, which is about one letter-character per 3 seconds). So the "Voice" hasn't changed, just the availability, ease, and throughput, so it seems louder. It's not. It'd be nice if there was an Internet Driver's License of sorts that under-21 kids can't post jack and squat until they've earned wisdom. My vision of the future was not this, and involved flying cars and robot brides (though some girls are close to that these days, and aren't even blonde (jk)..sorta..) Maybe some sites will implement that drivel, greasy-kid stuff. I think we take their vomit too seriously, these pupa-stage larvae. Yet, it makes me wonder and consider the Future and where it's headed... and where we've been.
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| Doc? Marty? Are we in an alternate 2013 or what? Maybe society needs to remember the future! |
Fin.
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