Don’t you remember all the computers bursting into flames and every nuclear bombs going off?

I know that it is one of the most senselessly self destructive acts that one can commit, and that many people think it smells bad, and that it is a representation of class struggle and poor education, but I miss when all of the Cool people that didn’t give a fuck hung out outside of a workplace swapping stories whilst killing themselves at similar rates.

I guess people could stand around and look at their phone for fifteen minutes part way through their shift, but it doesn’t hold the gravity of wincing against a sheet of sleet and recalling the harrowing tale of the Nor’ Easter of ‘95. Or that one time Sheila kicked you out of the apartment for No Reason during the Nor’ Easter of '95.

If I see someone out on a 15 they have their headphones on because they have their reality so bespokely edited that their world is filled with carefully selected music or bantering friends they will never meet.

The shrooms are wearing off, so I should stop yelling at clouds soon.

You just triggered me. ToT

And the days go by…

I changed jobs in late 99, so I got to go through all the Y2K bullshit in one job, then do it again in the new one.

One dude at my old job had his panties in a bunch because he said all the U.S. Navy ships were vulnerable and he said WW3 was going to start, but he was generally an idiot anyway, so that was par for the course.

In the new job I had to certify that DEC impact printers were Y2K certified. Which way basically me putting stickers on all of them saying they were certified because they weren’t smart enough to care what the date was.

My boss at the new job required us to be onsite on January 1st, which was kind of a drag, but that’s the way it goes. There was nothing for us to do. He stopped at a deli on the way in and picked up an absolutely fantastic pile of food for us, so it just became a casual brunch and we just kind of hung around eating and chatting until he was satisfied that nothing was going to go wrong.

I’d kill to know what the deli was. I was too young and stupid to save the name.

Y2K was a nightmare for us GenX. Months of overtime and late nights with lots of contractors coding 24/7. I hope I never have to go through that again.

Even as a teenager I was pretty crystal-clear on the fact that anybody who knew anything about how a computer worked also knew that Y2K was not the cataclysmic society-ending event that the fucking braindead news media were making it out to be at the time.

And we need to start calling it, sucking up economics.

Also to add to your list.

• Patriot act, establishment of the surveillance state.
• Obama betrayal to the Oligarchs.
• You will own nothing and be happy.
• 2008 recession and ongoing housing capture
• America exiting the rules based international order.
• Climate denial turning into climate-“fuck off, we are a death cult”
• Growing wealth chasm.

Oxycontin crisis, satanic panic, Columbine and the proliferation of the modern school shooting crisis, all the tobacco execs lying to congress about nicotine being addictive and facing no consequences, and the open and acknowledged deployment of weapons of war in space thus opening us up to a brand new version of the Cuban missile crisis… In Space (space space space)

Don’t forget all the climate stuff happening exactly as predicted like twenty years ago.

The AMOC is collapsing, we get nothing and like it…

I’m trying to remember the name of it, but there’s a micro-generation made up of late X and early millennial (Like 78-85 or sokething) that’s seen as the transition generation from the analog world to the digital world.

We’re old enough to clearly remember pre-digital/internet life, but young enough to have been exposed to tech while our brains were still developing. We’re the generation that’s comfortable in both worlds.

We’re also good with computers generally because we developed alongside them and had to learn more about their inner workings and quirks as they were less automatic. All my new college graduates at work are surprisingly illiterate on tech because they grew up in a world of apps that are so automated they didn’t have to learn anything.

Stuff as simple as navigating a network is weird to them, because they’re used to apps just handling stuff like file locations.

Don’t forget Tchernobyl and the fall of the Berlin wall…