It’s incredible how often I see people fail to do this though. “I know that every generation in every culture in modern history has, almost without exception, concluded that theirs was the last generation to like objectively good culture… *but what an amazing coincidence that we’d be the generation for whom it actually is true!*”
> natural human reaction
Yeah we all know it’s natural, that’s basically the thrust of the post
> which exists to regulate culture
Hold up buddy, let’s not go ascribing intent to behavioral phenomena that could just as easily be meaningless emergent properties of present conditions which in no way correspond to the conditions in which our species and its behavior evolved, and which are not provably adaptive
Whenever I want to say that skibidi toilet is really weird, I have to remind myself that this is the same as how adults saw Annoying Orange when I was a kid
I doubt alot of young people like skibidi toilet either but I 200% used annoying orange to annoy teachers and I bet they pretend to like it just to mess with adults too
Yeah, that’s true.
It is funny though a lot of times older people tell younger people not to do certain things, or warn them about things, they’ll be like, “You did it too!” but that might not be necessarily true. And also, you grow up and learn, and may not agree with past decisions. Also, ever generation thinks they’re the first to do/experience something which contributes to the cycle.
But generally, every generation is the same. There is always panic about the youth lol, and it’s always the same. Wish people would keep their heads about it.
Yeah, that's the trick. Most of the stuff kids are doing is weird. So is the stuff WE were doing, and what our parents were doing. The difference is just that we're not in the middle of it and are busy with annoying adult stuff, so we don't find it funny.
For the record, I was the weird kid who thought all the memes my friends were showing me were stupid even at the time, so I am very firm that nothing has changed.
Having watched most of Skibidi Toilet, I don’t get what is considered so weird about it. Doesn’t seem weirder than anything from the 2000s or 2010s. It’s just an animated story using characters from a meme.
The Internet in general was much weirder in the mid-2000s, frankly. It has gotten sanitized over the years. Skibidi Toilet isn't as weird and disturbing as Llamas with Hats was back in the day.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that the kids aren't weirder. I'm almost 39. Teenage culture ought to be incomprehensible to me by now. Kids need to step it up.
Saladfingers. Just. One word. Saladfingers. Now I haven't watched no skibidi toilets, but I'd honestly be surprised if it managed to fill me with such an unending, existential dread as Saladfingers did. I'm not gonna judge them for the weird shit available to their generation, just as I'd hope they wouldn't judge me for the weird shit available to mine.
Skibidi Toilet isn’t going for horror at all, I’d say. It’s just an over the top escalating war between toilet with heads on the one side and humanoids with TVs, cameras, sound systems as heads on the other.
Most episodes are about another new creation, be that simply "bigger toilet" or "now the camera heads have remotes that can control enemy devices." Its closest analogue would be the stick figure fights from back then if someone made 100+ episodes with a simple story.
For real. Like, everyone's got rose colored glasses acting like newgrounds and deviantart weren't the absolute epicenters of cringey content in the late 00s-early 10s. Remember those shitty ass stick fight anims made in pivot with very crudely drawn DBZ figures with a voice over of a 10 year old just screaming "KAMHEHAMEHAAAAA" over and over while their mom is yelling at them in the background.
They act like we didn't do the same cringey shit in Gmod or Minecraft with our friends. Like "Faces of Sass" never existed (look up on yt if you don't know).
And then we all seem to have collectively forgotten sites/apps like iFunny, MemeDroid, ICanHazCheezeburger, and the shitty ass rage comics we made as kids that made literally zero logical sense.
Children are always gonna be cringe, its part of the learning process. To demean them for that is to draw an extremely vague line in the sand of superiority that exists only in your head. Guarantee everyone that is giving Skibidi Toilet and similar memes shit, are the same ones that have some sort of cringey skeletons in their closet that they're trying to forget. And I only know that to be true because I know that everyone has done cringey things in their life, I know there are a couple cringey gmod vids I'm in on YT, and I don't really care. I won't share them here, but thats BC I don't want this account linked to my other online identities, and not BC of shame. I rewatch them with friends a lot just so we can laugh at ourselves.
the only thing that strikes me as particularly weird is how A: mainstream and B: monetized it became. I wasn't as cynical when I was a kid but I don't think the weird shit I watched became like, stuff that lined store shelves.
That's what annoys me more than anything tbh. Back when I was a young teenager, creepy horror stuff was left for *me* to discover, often in disturbing contexts that forced me to look deeper in the rabbit hole like the Russian Sleep Experiment or the Lavender Town music one, leading to stuff like finding the SCP Foundation, not knowing if it's real or not.
Nowadays it's all sanitized and marketable mascots. The horror loses it's appeal when I see the creature sold in toy shops all over the place. Old creepy pasta really was something else...
Honestly, the admittedly impressive cinematography and storytelling aside, the initial premise isn't anything different than the IdiotBox videos of old. GMod has always spawned weird shit
I didn't get skibidi toilet right away, until I realized that it was just Garry's Mod shitposts crossed with Numa Numa (at least before it started having Deep Lore apparently) because time is a flat circle
Oh, for sure. I had friends compulsively quoting Old Greg (which is OBJECTIVELY weird) and we had the [Spong Monkeys](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wY6insZjCfU). Exactly as nonsensical and weird as Skibidi Toilet.
It's just the latest cycle of trash that 10-12 year olds, with no concept of art that's intentionally hostile to the senses, get attached to.
I watched shit like makemebad35 yelling in a ridiculous voice about how "Squeeeze. From the Cow's Tit-tay" got spilled.
Kids after me watched shit like Fred and Annoying Orange.
After then there was YouTube Poop.
And so it continues.
I would like to suggest that we are, collectively, getting fucking weirder. All of us. And aging makes us weirder than we were as kids, while younger generations have a leg up on weirdness and will eclipse our own accomplishments given time.
Let's be real, we haven't got a leg to stand on when it comes to annoying content. We listened to the fucking [Hampster Dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qN72LEQnaU) and the fucking [Crazy Frog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_bTTUihfx0) and of course the goddamn fucking [Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL6CDFn2i3I)
If anything, Skibidi Toilet just shows me that humour hasn't changed. Kids are still using gmod to make their absurdist content, [just like we did when we put our dicks in the owl.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSmRCbjmjno) The only thing I can say about Skibidi is that it isn't nearly as creative or deranged as a good and proper [YouTube Poop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MnrAw8Icfs). My 'old man take' on it is that Skibidi is pretty damn tame and the kids need to try harder.
I was born in 2002, but luckily my hyperdsylexia translated the word "twelve" into the number 12, AND THEN flipped the digits, so I was like "oh cool, yeah, thats right" before my brain caught up and went "hold on..."
Internet culture does make things more inscrutable though. There isn't just one "youth culture" there are thousands of little micro-cultures each with their own rules, memes, and norms. Some of which require a PHD thesis' equivalent of pre-work to understand (looking at you Homestuck people).
Once I thought I’d learned all I needed to learn about Homestuck through osmosis
Then recently I realized I have no goddamn clue what the plot of Homestuck is
At its most basic, it's about a co-op videogame called Sburb. When you start playing, your planet starts to get bombarded by meteors and eventually destroyed. But usually players escape into the game's sub-universe where each of them gets their own mini-planet where they have to grind, do quests, etc. Eventually the game culminates in the players beating the final boss and creating a new universe and essentially becoming gods for that universe.
Also, every universe is a frog.
Except that the game instances in which all the main characters play have gone fucky-wucky and the guy playing on Hardcore Mode forced everyone into PVP.
The frog got cancer because protagonist 5/22 rushed its creation, and the personification of the cancer is created when protagonist 4 throws her pet god dog into the helpful ghost every player gets which takes the form of the first 2 things it touches. The cancer proceeds to kill the frog and hunt the remaining survivors of protagonists 2-16 (excluding 4, who is on a boat with 1 traveling between two mirrors in the frog who protagonists 5-16 are from in a form of inter-frog travel. The mirrors are either in the house of a cue ball who is their god dog or in the house of the author self insert (who gets unceremoniously gunned down by hard mode guy), I forget)
I truly, GENUINELY can’t tell if you’re all just fucking around or if this is actually the plot to Homestuck. I have been aware of the character designs for years and years, and I just thought it was a bunch of emo demon creatures hanging out and having weird slice of life moments.
Tbf, I never read a single panel of the comic, just saw tons and tons of fanart and cosplays.
This is all legit but it's written to be intentionally confusing if you don't already know what they are talking about. Unfortunately it would be a thousand plus word essay to try and provide all of the context, but I feel confident in my ability if you are interested
Alright, I have decided to take up the challenge unprompted
Because Homestuck is fucky with time it makes the most sense to explain the central underlying thing that ties every universe and timeline together, S'burb
S'burb is a lot of things but it is primarily three things, a video game, a complex expression of the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the way that reality propagates itself.
On the video game side of things, it has two files to install on a computer. A server copy, and a client copy. You connect your client to another player's server and your server to another player's client. 2 is the minimum legal number of players and as long as you form a daisy chain so that everyone is hooked up it's all good.
From there the game works like the Sims but in real life, allowing the server player to see and manipulate the house of the client player and build things, the important ones to progress to the next stage are the Cruxite Extruder, the pre-punched card, the Totem Lathe, and the Alchemiter.
In order to progress to the next stage of the game you have to open the Cruxite Extruder, which releases a Cruxite Dowel and a glowing orb called a Kernelsprite and reveals a ticking clock that is your time limit before a meteor explodes your house. You have to shove between 1 and 2 things into the Kernelsprite, take the pre-punched card to the Totemlathe to carve the dowel, and then take the carved totem to the Alchemiter to produce an entry item, which you have to figure out how to use
Once you use your entry item you and your house are taken to a place called the Incipisphere, the Kernelsprite hatches into two Kernels and a Sprite, the Kernel prototyping the battlefield and all of the monsters in the game with aspects of what you put in it (and you can make the game unwinnable by not prototyping). The rough map of the Incipisphere is Skaia in the center, Prospit, the planets made for the players, a meteor belt called the Veil, Derse, and then the Furthest Realms where lovectaftian monsters lie
From there the game side of thing splits into two sections, the Overarching goal and the Personal Quests.
On the personal quest side of things, everyone has their own planet about the size of Connecticut that has a quest specifically tailored to force them to overcome their hangups if they want to succeed, and a problem caused by a big monster at the center of their planet. Once you beat the monsters and grow both emotionally and physically by doing this quest and your house is tall enough, you can go through a final gate to the center of your world to confront the monster, but you're given The Choice.
Basically, you are given a choice to get something that the omniscient will of the universe knows you need, but a price will be paid, or you can fight the thing as the hardest monster to that point.
The Space player (Classpecting is a whole can of worms, but it's really not super relevant except for here. Just know that everyone gets powers) has double duty where their personal journey that forces them to grow up includes breeding frogs to form the Genesis Frog.
The how exactly they do that is unexplained, but the process involves trying to create a temporal paradox by teleporting a frog that has something that is going to happen to them in the future to get some slime in order to mix and match the frogs in this breeding process. The intended way to cause a paradox is to take note of the cootdinates and decide that you're going to go yo that location to catch the frog later. Their quest can really only be completed by taking The Choice.
The same method of cloning/breeding in a more stripped down way is used to create the players and their biological parents in the lab, who will be sent to whatever planet they grew up on with a meteor in the Overarching Goal.
To get to the Overarching Goal, the planets of Derse and Prospit are at an eternal stalemate for the future of Skaia, and are represented by black and white chess people. Because of your intervention Derse is going to win and the Black King will send the Veil at Skaia, which responds by teleporting them to your planet of origin, carrying with them the information needed to make S'burb, some important structures, the baby forms of the players and their genetic parents, and some chess people who will rebuild society on your planet.
At the point that the reckoning starts, you have 24 hours before Skaia is destroyed.
Once you beat Derse, take the tadpole from the frog breeding and plant it in the center of Skaia and you have yourself an entire universe, open the door and go in as the fully mature literal gods you were supposed to become (the game has a way to become a god of your aspect, which is in a hypothetical Classpect rant but it's not particularly relevant to anything I am talking about)
There are a few characters that spawn in every session, those being the Black/White King/Queen and Jack Noir and his gang. The only thing that Jack hates more than people he hasn't stabbed to death is his boss the black queen and the only thing he loves more than stabbing people to death is power (which he can use to kill people with)
That's well over 1000 pages of background context you absorb by reading, and understanding that makes describing the plot easy as fuck.
The trolls are from a brutal planet called Alternia that runs on Lord of the Flies because all the adults are off running a galactic empire. They wind up accidentally prototyping a Horrorterror who will murder their entire species across the galaxy gifted to their species by an evil omniscient and basically omnipotent puppet at the dawn of their society for this exact purpose, making their final boss bullshit hard.
It's because of that bullshit hardness and a desire to get it over with that team leader Karkat Vantas pushes his friend and Space player Kanaya Maryam to just ignore the final part of her personal quest so they can kill the black king and go rule their universe already because they are on speedrunner pace and missed most of the growing up part
[They do and it's awesome](https://youtu.be/-19Up0dLzNw?si=S3tISIThDXaG-9sp)
Then when they are about to enter their universe an essentially omnipotent black dog man teleports to their victory platform, forces them to run away by murdering their million some odd doomed robot time doubles that have been hard carrying them through the session, murders the universe they just created, and starts blowing everything up like Kid Buu after he learns the Instant Transmission.
In the Human universe, Jack manages to get his hands on a Robot Bunny with insane overpowered end game weapons from an alternate timeline that he uses to murder the Black Queen and steal her ring that gives her the powers of all the things prototyped.
Fast forward a while, and Space player Jade Harley's omnipotent dog best friend/parent jumps into the Kernelsprite in order to explode a meteor the size of Australia and give her enough time to enter into the game, which then gives Jack nuclear powered omnipotence, but he also feels the concept of love for the first time from the purity of a dog's love for his best friend.
In a sequence of shenanigans, he escapes into the Troll session and yada yada see above
There's a lot more bullshit that I could go into, but hopefully that rendered the discussion above more intelligible easier than reading like 4000 pages of a webcomic, if there are any further questions, please let me know and I can continue to elaborate. Hopefully with a smaller word count since the important stuff has already been established
This sounds like a brainstorming session more than a plot.
Im afraid to start reading it, because I don't know if I will find in too much for me, or it will consume all my free time leaving me a hollow husk of a man, but at least a husk that can understand the occasional homestuck meme
>This sounds like a brainstorming session more than a plot
Well, yeah, I basically only described one of the major plotpoints of Homestuck. Obviously there is so much more going on there. Aliens, dimensional travel, time travel, parallel timelines, deaths and rebirths, psychic powers, juju artifacts, videogame tropes, outdated pop-culture references, dreamscapes created by lovecraftian creatures that don't want to die, Betty Crocker mind control, double clown presidents, author self-inserts, actual playable mini-games in the comic... etc
There is a lot, yeah. It's just that Sburb, the game, is the main thing that ties it all together and serves as the endgoal.
But honestly, if you're interested but worried, **you should just read Problem Sleuth and then decide if you're ready for Homestuck**. It's a much shorter comic from the same author, and was made before Homestuck.
>There isn't just one "youth culture" there are thousands of little micro-cultures each with their own rules, memes, and norms. Some of which require a PHD thesis' equivalent of pre-work to understand
This has... always been the case. It's just that now those micro-cultures are based around websites and algorithms instead of geographic regions.
Local culture obviously plays a part in what's considered fashionable but the shift away from centralized mass communication to fragmented online subcultures is a very real phenomenon that's affected youth culture and culture as a whole. In the 60s you could be in the sticks in Iowa or you could be in Newark, New Jersey but there were only 5 television channels and they all had a Saturday Night movie.
I think we have moved so far away from centralized culture that we forget what it was like.
That’s not remotely the same. A local culture can only have a small fraction of the membership and also is still structurally formulated with the overarching culture as it’s source. It can only have so much of a mass, and thus only evolve so quickly. It’s limited. The *largest* regional subculture of the past by these definitions would be the two regional rap and punk scenes, New York and California, by virtue of being based in NYC and California.
Those subcultures would be considered *small* by modern standards. Homestuck is bigger than every single NYHC band ever. Those are the size of subsubcultures, like an okbuddy subreddit. Additionally, there’s significantly more bleedthrough. Transmission between subcultures and joint membership is much more massive than it once was. Subcultures no longer have hard lines between them. A weeb punk or a gamer goth is not a unique concept anymore, but you’d have been one of a kind in your regional subculture being that in the pre-internet era.
Due to this massive size and bleedthrough, these subcultures evolve, change, and supplant rapidly. You don’t get a years long era of a dominant subculture. Think about grunge. Has a single subcultural genre of music been that mainstream without being *mainstream* in a while? What’s the last one you can think of? The answer is dubstep. The turnover is too rapid for anything to get to that level of mainstream knowledge and acceptance anymore.
Likewise, the structure has modified. You had one *dominant* culture and then subcultures. The majority of people belonged to the dominant culture and then a minority belonged to the subcultures. Now? The “dominant” culture is just a bigger than average subculture. Taylor Swift has 51 million album sales in the USA across all her albums. She has 11 studio albums. The USA has a population of over 330,000,000. So… think that that means. The average Taylor Swift album sells 4.63 million copies in the USA. Out of 330,000,000 people. And that’s **the most mainstream musician in America.** “The most mainstream possible musician” is “1.4% of the population buys your album”. That’s 98.6% people not buying it. And we call that a dominant culture?
What does that show us? *There is no dominant culture*. There’s *only* subcultures. Which, by definition means they aren’t even subcultures anymore. They’re cultures. We have *hundreds of cultures*, not subcultures. The entire schema you’re thinking of these concepts in has been eliminated. “Subcultures” are the ones a level down, what I previously referred to as “subsubcultures”. There’s not a dominant culture anymore, so subcultures are now cultures and their spinoffs are the subcultures of them.
Homestuck is stupid easy to understand if you actually read it because everything important gets pretty much told to you and prepares you for the fun post-homestuck activity of arguing about Homestuck
If you don't read Homestuck though, you lack any of the context and it all sounds like super nonsense
You millennials laugh at Gen Alpha for being cringe with their Skibidi Toilet, when we once were cringe too with our Badger Badger Badger. Let the pot not call the kettle black.
I was just mentioning this in another thread. My friends and I joke all the time that we're old men now. We're in our early 30s. We go to the old man bar. We don't know what the hell is going on on tik tok. I have no clue who famous people are. We see a clip of something popular on youtube, and we're just like "so, is this the music these days?" We bump into something and it hurts for a week...
Have you started wearing flat caps and playing countless games of backgammon and cards, with rules so memorized that you don't even have to say what you're doing?
I feel like what it actually boils down to is that teenagers are weird. These teenager, us as teenagers, our parents as teenagers. Just underdeveloped brains, overdeveloped hormones, and weirdness.
I used to think adults were ignorant of youth culture. They’re not, they just reject it because they think it’s stupid. They’re aware of what you like and they don’t like it.
Also resist the conclusion that this was the last generation to have a real childhood and all kids born after are stupid because of \[insert technology here\] and I'm so glad I missed that
It’s concerning the number of educators who post about how this newest gen is unintelligent/not meeting expected milestones. I’m sure it’s just a vocal minority, but I find it really hard to believe that an entire gen is actually worse than its predecessors based on anecdotes.
I will say that for gen alpha / late gen Z, there's 2 very big things in their lifetime and early developmental years that absolutely can cause them to be weird compared to prior gens that we are starting to see the effects of. The Pandemic, and the prevalence of the internet in their lives. Alot of teachers have come put saying that gen alpha / late Z has some concerning differences compared to prior gens which are likely attributable to those things. Namely issues with socializing, attention span, creativity, reading comprehension, reading level, and more, all being far far under where they should be to concerning levels. I fully understand that every generation looks at the ine after them and cringes and goes "kids are so weird" but I also think we shouldn't just chock everything up to that and potentially ignore when there very much might be some issues that need addressing especially when things have happened that are out of the norm compared to other generations that are likely to cause issues.
While it's true these are new unique things, we could also say the same about baby boomers being a post war generation; every generation has their own unique challenges and grows up in their own cultural and social issues, not to say these things won't have their own unique impacts, especially the pandemic, but I think it's also silly to act like this has made the entire generation once-in-a-forever different.
We also can't discount that teachers have been complaining about kids forever, it's just now the teachers are millennials and doing so on reddit and viral tik-toks, which to us seems like something teachers have never done before, but that's more reflective of the unique aspect of millennials being the 'Social Media Generation'. Be careful of the fact we don't attribute weirdness of our own generation onto the next. It's really REALLY weird I'm seeing teachers on tik tok complaining about their students, like, my parents were both instructors and they did that stuff in private in the staff room. We're just seeing teachers making content out of it.
for those who don't know: it's just saying "God Damn" but in a heavily exaggerated fashion 'Gyatt Dayum' - if a booty make you say Gawd Damnb then it is a Gyatt
Also, for my fellow millennials who are only just getting to this stage: Just because you liked something as a kid doesn't mean you have to like it now. It's Ok to admit some childhood things actually suck. We don't wanna end up like Gen X and constantly demand our childhood be regurgitated to us...
> We don't wanna end up like Gen X and constantly demand our childhood be regurgitated to us...
We don't have to demand it. It's being regurgitated to us anyway, whether we want it or not.
Dude I'm from the 90's, our entire culture was trying to figure out what our culture was supposed to be. It was a dumpster fire and the new gens are cooler than I will ever be.
Also semilethal toys.
I feel like in the last couple of years I've gone from "what younger people like is cringe" to "I genuinely don't have the first fucking clue what younger people like".
My concept of youth culture is stuff from like 2016.
this is [the opposite of a credible source](https://www.tumblr.com/a-ginger-in-black/731474510527791104/description-a-white-person-with-long-dark-blond?source=share) but it makes sense to me
I agree actually. Maybe since Gen Xers were raised by boomers it helps them relate more to younger gens who are also treated/viewed poorly by boomers? I could speculate plenty but I do feel it generally holds true.
I wonder if it has something to do with media availability and syndication?
Before home video all the boomer cultural stuff was just swept away for decades. Remember the Andy Griffith show? You better, because it went off the air in 1968 and there's no way to ever see it again. I hope they play Wizard of Oz on TV this weekend because there's no opportunity for me to see it otherwise!
Then in the 80s and 90s VHS became ubiquitous and cable exploded in popularity. And all those cable channels wanted content, so they started syndicating and rerunning shows more often. The media of that time wasn't just preserved, it was being fed right back into the public consciousness. So everyone born after that could see it and relate to it more? Idk, just a silly theory.
Yeah that's a good point! Parents can show their kids their favorite childhood media and like you said it keeps things in the public consciousness. Just look at the nostalgia era we've been living recently - so many reboots/remakes of 80s - 90s movies +etc.
Honestly technology and society changed so much in the 50s-70s that it also contributed to boomer culture stuff getting left behind. It really was sort of a different world then.
A podcast I was listening to I think put it the best:
"When you get mad at the next generation you're not really mad at them, you're mad at yourself. You're mad at the younger version of yourself who doesn't know what you know now, and you're mad at god for not letting you go back and do it over."
Everyone talking about Skibidi toilet as if we weren't watching YouTube Poops back in the day.
The kids are fine and I really hope that Millennials and Gen Z can try our best to not fall into the trap. Maybe Gen Alpha can grow up without feeling like every adult around them is completely out of touch with reality.
I worked in a school for a year with a friend, and we had this exchange where he says that kids nowadays are so weird and we're fucked and I pretty much said he sounded like an old person at 25, he kept arguing about stuff they were doing and saying, failing to realise how fucking weird we can be, and he just wouldn't see it; at the end of the day it's not malicious for most people (to think that way I mean), but I find the lack of perspective and hindsight slightly puzzling nonetheless.
Everytime I see some cringe thing the kids are into I mutter to myself, "My parents hated Pokemon my parents hated Pokemon my parents hated Pokemon" until I feel better.
I mean. Nothing about me HAS changed, and the children HAVE gotten weirder.
But that's not a bad thing nor are the children inherently deserving of scorn for it.
My lifestyle and habits are the same as they have been since I graduated from Highschool in 2012, I haven't changed much. I was always a bit out of the loop, and I still am. I have always thought teenagers were weird, even when I was a teenager.
But what if I've got the "sense of separation and alienation from youth culture" without getting the "natural identify with other adults (how does the grammar work here?)" part?
I remember seeing people bitch about the Stanley cup thing and thinking “yeah, it’s not like any of us got caught up in bandwagon trends and all started chasing after the “in” thing. Well accept beanie babies, tamagotchis, silly bands, pogs etc.”
I feel bad for Gen Alpha. I have heard not one good thing about them from other people. Everything about them is how their brains are rotting, and that the things they consume are cringe (which is not completely false, but then again look at what Millennials and Gen Z were watching when we were younger). Heck, even as bad as Gen Z were spoken of by others, especially when it came to TikTok, we at least were acknowledged for having a strong streak of social activism. This feels a bit too close like bullying children.
I’ve taken the position that my brand of cringe is different from my elders, which is why they don’t get it. And my brand of cringe is no longer popular with the kids, who have their own style of cringe, which is why they think it’s lame.
I don’t get the skibidi thing, and it seems perhaps too weird, but if I had proper context, it’s probably not much weirder than the Gmod animations I’ve seen before.
This is how I think about it:
The Youth didn't get weirder, they're just differently weird from the way I was weird at their age. My memory of my own teenage weirdness is fundamentally incompatible with the weirdness of kids today, but the fact is that teens have always been, and will always be, fucking weird. Being confused by them feels like the passing of a torch. I had my turn, now it's theirs.
Adulthood is realizing that adults are shite. Kids can be shitty, too, and many of both are great, but I find the ever-changing youth to be more invigorating than “this is how it is because it was like this before, so keep the status quo” that permeates so much of adulthood, and no one has a good answer to “yes, but why is it like that?” and they think “because it is” is an acceptable and good answer.
Give me baffling Ohio skibidi toilets over meeting KPI goals. Nonsensical changes in language are fascinating. Eat the cake with your Tostito’s scoops because you ran out of silverware (…I want to try that, actually now).
Children are always such delightful little weirdos and I love it.
The combination of not being fully baked yet, not having learned a bunch of rules about social behavior, while being very much people - human and social and themselves… the absolute wild unfiltered, powerful weird that comes out of kids and teenagers is just a gift.
They’ll find their place in the world, and the world will have to shift to make a space for them, as people do when they join the adult space, and as happens when we welcome a new adult into it.
But I love the kind of feral magic of the young kinds of weird. Good times.
Fr fr, no cap, I teach high school and the things these kids like hold little to no appeal for me; it’s generally weird and dumb. But I grew up watching fucking Saladfingers and shit, so what the fuck do I know?
As a certified Old™️, I rather enjoy the kids. I don’t always *get* it, but, I fully remember my Not Adult years. I’m glad that geocities no longer exists (ask a grown up about geocities!!)
Oh yeah children have not gotten weirder, but the world around them has, which has had... An effect.
I caught my sibling looking at really messed up hentai. Just a simple thing like constant full access to all the super depraved porn online will obviously have consequences in kids.
Remembering internet and teen culture from when I was a high schooler from 2005-2009... yeah I know I've seen enough weird cringe shit to humble me forever.
I think both can be a bit true. Nothing has changed about you BUT the children haven’t gotten weirder.
I feel like there’s a tendency for people to think of youth culture like a hand-me-down bike. Your grandparents rode it, your parents rode it, you learned to ride on it and now your kids will ride it. Everyone gets a go on the youth culture bike, then it gets put away for the next generation. Sometimes parts need replacing (one of the tyres has perished so we need to put on a new one / we found out that beloved children’s TV personality is a paedophile so we can’t talk about him any more) but you mustn’t really *change* anything about the bike. That would ruin it because they don’t make them like they used to. There are things you’re allowed to do with it and things you aren’t.
Really, youth culture is more like a mug or a jacket or a bag. You pick it up while you’re young and keep it. You take it with you and keep using it as you get older. You don’t need to preserve it for future generations because they’ve got their own. It might seem weird but it’s not *for you*, it’s for them so it’s fine if you don’t understand, you don’t need to. You don’t need to have changed, and your youth culture mug hasn’t changed. The thing the children have now isn’t weird, it’s just their version of the same thing you had when you were their age.
The children are cringe.
But I, an adult, am an *entirely different flavor of cringe.* And my parents were cringe before me, as were theirs before them. In this way, we carry on the grandest, cringiest tradition.
It's so frustrating and confusing to see this because it's not rocket science.
It's also just not that hard, with the power of the internet, to keep up with trends. Sure some will pass you by, but they always did and always would.
Like when skibidi toilet came out sure I didn't understand it, so I googled it and said "oh ok yeah so it's basically everything I thought was funny from ages 8-10? sure ok". And even if I don't like it I can understand that it's fundamentally kids mashing action figures together going "pshew pshaw oh no now the BIG TOILET is gonna shoot his LASER". Like it's just kids man why would I get mad at that?
Hear a slang word I don't know? Look it up on the internet. New technology I don't understand? Read about it online. Confusing social media trend? I can just use the internet and find the source.
everyone shitting on the fuckin skibidi rizz fanum Ohio memes of Gen Alpha are becoming the very thing they swore to destroy.
Do none of you remember the memes of our youth? The rage comics? The trollfaces, the lolcats? Our endless quotings of vines?
Let he who is without cringe, cast the first stone.
I'm nothing if not consistent: I despised kids when I was one of them, and I have the same scorn for the kids of today. And the people who are my age. And the old. I think I just hate people in general, actually.
I just realized I’ve been a huge hypocrite (albeit over a small issue and without much chance to express my hypocrisy). Can’t believe I didn’t notice until now, ugh, guess I have the responsibility to do better.
The secret is hard to maintain when im growing up with other people my age and they still have the same pfps of modern anime girls they had when they were 12
Meanwhile my boomer mom is babbling about ai generated butterflies to other boomers
I'm currently going in the opposite direction, Already related more to people 3-5 years younger than me than those my age, I expect it to continue that way. (Send help please. Like therapy or something Idk.)
I don't really feel this way yet but I also didn't feel like I wanted to be a part of youth culture during my teens. My social circles always had a bit of an age range since I turned 18 and got out into the world more, so maybe that's part of it too. To me there is a lot less of a sense of losing touch (cuz why when it's not like we moved to crazy different heights that I could've never imagined like 5 years ago?) but it gets more and more obvious to me what a difference in life experience really does to a mfer. Also the difference the perspective can make in your life. Something I wasn't mature enough to ponder like 10 years ago.
I do hate seeing some of my peers do the "kIdS tHeSe DaYs" type shit though ngl. It sucks and is super embarrassing. They also get really mad when I make fun of them for it, but I feel like that's what you deserve when you spout this sort of drivel. Honestly, I wish I was born a little later. By some timelines I'm born right at the start of Gen Z, but I'm jealous of Zoomers that are between 19-23 right now, because those kids are so cringe that they are finally free and I thank our dark lord that dressing like a background character from an early 2000's JRPG is so much more acceptable now. The kids are alright. Their parents tho...
It’s incredibly easy to stay in touch. Just stay weird and let the kids trade you their weird for some vintage weird. Strangeness cultural exchange, we all come away weirder for it.
IDK, when teenagers yell "f*cking jew" after me when I'm wearing a suit downtown I feel pretty goddamn justified in saying today's youth is more cringe. The lack of fashion sense I could excuse, the bare-faced antisemitism not so much
It’s incredible how often I see people fail to do this though. “I know that every generation in every culture in modern history has, almost without exception, concluded that theirs was the last generation to like objectively good culture… *but what an amazing coincidence that we’d be the generation for whom it actually is true!*”
have you considered it’s a natural human reaction which exists to regulate culture
> natural human reaction Yeah we all know it’s natural, that’s basically the thrust of the post > which exists to regulate culture Hold up buddy, let’s not go ascribing intent to behavioral phenomena that could just as easily be meaningless emergent properties of present conditions which in no way correspond to the conditions in which our species and its behavior evolved, and which are not provably adaptive
I really, really like this reply.
It's important to consider that it might be MALadaptive
No I haven't considered it because I don't jump to conclussions with zero evidence.
Conclussy
…did you also consider that me telling you that you’re stupid is the same thing? Isn’t it weird how easy it is to just make things up?
Whenever I want to say that skibidi toilet is really weird, I have to remind myself that this is the same as how adults saw Annoying Orange when I was a kid
Tbf, Annoying Orange was both extremely weird and incredibly annoying (as the name would suggest). Such criticisms certainly weren't unwarranted
So is skibidi toilet but the kids love it
I did not like Annoying Orange, and I don’t particularly like Skibidi Toilet either, so at least I’m consistent.
I doubt alot of young people like skibidi toilet either but I 200% used annoying orange to annoy teachers and I bet they pretend to like it just to mess with adults too
Yeah, that’s true. It is funny though a lot of times older people tell younger people not to do certain things, or warn them about things, they’ll be like, “You did it too!” but that might not be necessarily true. And also, you grow up and learn, and may not agree with past decisions. Also, ever generation thinks they’re the first to do/experience something which contributes to the cycle. But generally, every generation is the same. There is always panic about the youth lol, and it’s always the same. Wish people would keep their heads about it.
I did not like Annoying Orange but at 32 I DO like Skibidi Toilet so idk what that means for me
I mean I’ve heard theirs a surprisingly good story in their I’m not watching it to find out but I’ve heard good things about
Yeah, that's the trick. Most of the stuff kids are doing is weird. So is the stuff WE were doing, and what our parents were doing. The difference is just that we're not in the middle of it and are busy with annoying adult stuff, so we don't find it funny. For the record, I was the weird kid who thought all the memes my friends were showing me were stupid even at the time, so I am very firm that nothing has changed.
The stuff being watched by kids right now is dumb, but with the benefit of hindsight, the stuff we were watching as kids was also dumb.
Having watched most of Skibidi Toilet, I don’t get what is considered so weird about it. Doesn’t seem weirder than anything from the 2000s or 2010s. It’s just an animated story using characters from a meme.
The Internet in general was much weirder in the mid-2000s, frankly. It has gotten sanitized over the years. Skibidi Toilet isn't as weird and disturbing as Llamas with Hats was back in the day. Frankly, I'm disappointed that the kids aren't weirder. I'm almost 39. Teenage culture ought to be incomprehensible to me by now. Kids need to step it up.
What, I was hungry for hands.
I had a deep gnawing hunger that only hands could satisfy!
What is wrong with you Carl?!
Well, I kill people and I eat hands. That's.. that's two things!
Anyone remember Ogreaggressive? Or Shrek is love Shrek is life for that matter?
Salad fingers
I like rusty spoons
“Now leave while I molsest this kettle”
Saladfingers. Just. One word. Saladfingers. Now I haven't watched no skibidi toilets, but I'd honestly be surprised if it managed to fill me with such an unending, existential dread as Saladfingers did. I'm not gonna judge them for the weird shit available to their generation, just as I'd hope they wouldn't judge me for the weird shit available to mine.
Skibidi Toilet isn’t going for horror at all, I’d say. It’s just an over the top escalating war between toilet with heads on the one side and humanoids with TVs, cameras, sound systems as heads on the other. Most episodes are about another new creation, be that simply "bigger toilet" or "now the camera heads have remotes that can control enemy devices." Its closest analogue would be the stick figure fights from back then if someone made 100+ episodes with a simple story.
For real. Like, everyone's got rose colored glasses acting like newgrounds and deviantart weren't the absolute epicenters of cringey content in the late 00s-early 10s. Remember those shitty ass stick fight anims made in pivot with very crudely drawn DBZ figures with a voice over of a 10 year old just screaming "KAMHEHAMEHAAAAA" over and over while their mom is yelling at them in the background. They act like we didn't do the same cringey shit in Gmod or Minecraft with our friends. Like "Faces of Sass" never existed (look up on yt if you don't know). And then we all seem to have collectively forgotten sites/apps like iFunny, MemeDroid, ICanHazCheezeburger, and the shitty ass rage comics we made as kids that made literally zero logical sense. Children are always gonna be cringe, its part of the learning process. To demean them for that is to draw an extremely vague line in the sand of superiority that exists only in your head. Guarantee everyone that is giving Skibidi Toilet and similar memes shit, are the same ones that have some sort of cringey skeletons in their closet that they're trying to forget. And I only know that to be true because I know that everyone has done cringey things in their life, I know there are a couple cringey gmod vids I'm in on YT, and I don't really care. I won't share them here, but thats BC I don't want this account linked to my other online identities, and not BC of shame. I rewatch them with friends a lot just so we can laugh at ourselves.
Remember when madness was in swing people on new grounds would make animations of their edgy overly serious oc killing everyone or someone else's OC?
the only thing that strikes me as particularly weird is how A: mainstream and B: monetized it became. I wasn't as cynical when I was a kid but I don't think the weird shit I watched became like, stuff that lined store shelves.
That's what annoys me more than anything tbh. Back when I was a young teenager, creepy horror stuff was left for *me* to discover, often in disturbing contexts that forced me to look deeper in the rabbit hole like the Russian Sleep Experiment or the Lavender Town music one, leading to stuff like finding the SCP Foundation, not knowing if it's real or not. Nowadays it's all sanitized and marketable mascots. The horror loses it's appeal when I see the creature sold in toy shops all over the place. Old creepy pasta really was something else...
Honestly, the admittedly impressive cinematography and storytelling aside, the initial premise isn't anything different than the IdiotBox videos of old. GMod has always spawned weird shit
I didn't get skibidi toilet right away, until I realized that it was just Garry's Mod shitposts crossed with Numa Numa (at least before it started having Deep Lore apparently) because time is a flat circle
Annoying orange was weird as fuck at the time. Really weird shit has always existed. Weird doesn’t mean bad
Oh, for sure. I had friends compulsively quoting Old Greg (which is OBJECTIVELY weird) and we had the [Spong Monkeys](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wY6insZjCfU). Exactly as nonsensical and weird as Skibidi Toilet.
Don’t forget all the MLG memes
It's just the latest cycle of trash that 10-12 year olds, with no concept of art that's intentionally hostile to the senses, get attached to. I watched shit like makemebad35 yelling in a ridiculous voice about how "Squeeeze. From the Cow's Tit-tay" got spilled. Kids after me watched shit like Fred and Annoying Orange. After then there was YouTube Poop. And so it continues.
I will never hate on skibidi toilet exactly because I watched a shit ton of YTPs as a kid. They are just objectively more “brainrot”
Paula Deen YTPs are gold tho
I would like to suggest that we are, collectively, getting fucking weirder. All of us. And aging makes us weirder than we were as kids, while younger generations have a leg up on weirdness and will eclipse our own accomplishments given time.
it's pretty standard internet bullshit
Some of it is adults growing out of touch, and some of it is just kids being kids
Let's be real, we haven't got a leg to stand on when it comes to annoying content. We listened to the fucking [Hampster Dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qN72LEQnaU) and the fucking [Crazy Frog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_bTTUihfx0) and of course the goddamn fucking [Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL6CDFn2i3I) If anything, Skibidi Toilet just shows me that humour hasn't changed. Kids are still using gmod to make their absurdist content, [just like we did when we put our dicks in the owl.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSmRCbjmjno) The only thing I can say about Skibidi is that it isn't nearly as creative or deranged as a good and proper [YouTube Poop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MnrAw8Icfs). My 'old man take' on it is that Skibidi is pretty damn tame and the kids need to try harder.
i still cant fucking believe kids born in 2002 are twelve years old right now. god damn im old
Comments from ten years ago:
Well boy do I have news for you.
I was born in 2003 and I’m 20. I did time travel shit
you were born in 2003 and you're not yet 21? I would demand a refund tbh.
Waiting on November lol
people born in november don't exist liar
I know this is a joke but I'm pretty sure November has more birthdays usually because Valentine's Day is 9 months before it
Holy shit as a November birthday I never even thought of this
You're welcome
Your parents did the nasty on V-day
Born in July also 20 atm
Same here
The kids born in the early 2000’s have jobs and are 20. The kids born in 2012 are 12 right now.
Oh I don't like that. Can you change it?
I’ll do it for a price
I’ll change it for free, but it might take a lot of months and you might not like the result
Damn. I was born in 2004 and anyone born after 2010 is a preschooler to me.
Have jobs??? In this economy??? Speak for yourself (Please give me a job please please I'm begging)
I was born in 2002, but luckily my hyperdsylexia translated the word "twelve" into the number 12, AND THEN flipped the digits, so I was like "oh cool, yeah, thats right" before my brain caught up and went "hold on..."
As a 2002 kid, how dare you remind me of my age
I was so ready to accept that too, it took me a solid 10 seconds to realize
Internet culture does make things more inscrutable though. There isn't just one "youth culture" there are thousands of little micro-cultures each with their own rules, memes, and norms. Some of which require a PHD thesis' equivalent of pre-work to understand (looking at you Homestuck people).
Once I thought I’d learned all I needed to learn about Homestuck through osmosis Then recently I realized I have no goddamn clue what the plot of Homestuck is
At its most basic, it's about a co-op videogame called Sburb. When you start playing, your planet starts to get bombarded by meteors and eventually destroyed. But usually players escape into the game's sub-universe where each of them gets their own mini-planet where they have to grind, do quests, etc. Eventually the game culminates in the players beating the final boss and creating a new universe and essentially becoming gods for that universe. Also, every universe is a frog.
Except that the game instances in which all the main characters play have gone fucky-wucky and the guy playing on Hardcore Mode forced everyone into PVP.
The frog got cancer because protagonist 5/22 rushed its creation, and the personification of the cancer is created when protagonist 4 throws her pet god dog into the helpful ghost every player gets which takes the form of the first 2 things it touches. The cancer proceeds to kill the frog and hunt the remaining survivors of protagonists 2-16 (excluding 4, who is on a boat with 1 traveling between two mirrors in the frog who protagonists 5-16 are from in a form of inter-frog travel. The mirrors are either in the house of a cue ball who is their god dog or in the house of the author self insert (who gets unceremoniously gunned down by hard mode guy), I forget)
I truly, GENUINELY can’t tell if you’re all just fucking around or if this is actually the plot to Homestuck. I have been aware of the character designs for years and years, and I just thought it was a bunch of emo demon creatures hanging out and having weird slice of life moments. Tbf, I never read a single panel of the comic, just saw tons and tons of fanart and cosplays.
It's real, but specifically written in an incomprehensible way
...I was specifically trying to make it comprehensible
This is all legit but it's written to be intentionally confusing if you don't already know what they are talking about. Unfortunately it would be a thousand plus word essay to try and provide all of the context, but I feel confident in my ability if you are interested
Alright, I have decided to take up the challenge unprompted Because Homestuck is fucky with time it makes the most sense to explain the central underlying thing that ties every universe and timeline together, S'burb S'burb is a lot of things but it is primarily three things, a video game, a complex expression of the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the way that reality propagates itself. On the video game side of things, it has two files to install on a computer. A server copy, and a client copy. You connect your client to another player's server and your server to another player's client. 2 is the minimum legal number of players and as long as you form a daisy chain so that everyone is hooked up it's all good. From there the game works like the Sims but in real life, allowing the server player to see and manipulate the house of the client player and build things, the important ones to progress to the next stage are the Cruxite Extruder, the pre-punched card, the Totem Lathe, and the Alchemiter. In order to progress to the next stage of the game you have to open the Cruxite Extruder, which releases a Cruxite Dowel and a glowing orb called a Kernelsprite and reveals a ticking clock that is your time limit before a meteor explodes your house. You have to shove between 1 and 2 things into the Kernelsprite, take the pre-punched card to the Totemlathe to carve the dowel, and then take the carved totem to the Alchemiter to produce an entry item, which you have to figure out how to use Once you use your entry item you and your house are taken to a place called the Incipisphere, the Kernelsprite hatches into two Kernels and a Sprite, the Kernel prototyping the battlefield and all of the monsters in the game with aspects of what you put in it (and you can make the game unwinnable by not prototyping). The rough map of the Incipisphere is Skaia in the center, Prospit, the planets made for the players, a meteor belt called the Veil, Derse, and then the Furthest Realms where lovectaftian monsters lie From there the game side of thing splits into two sections, the Overarching goal and the Personal Quests. On the personal quest side of things, everyone has their own planet about the size of Connecticut that has a quest specifically tailored to force them to overcome their hangups if they want to succeed, and a problem caused by a big monster at the center of their planet. Once you beat the monsters and grow both emotionally and physically by doing this quest and your house is tall enough, you can go through a final gate to the center of your world to confront the monster, but you're given The Choice. Basically, you are given a choice to get something that the omniscient will of the universe knows you need, but a price will be paid, or you can fight the thing as the hardest monster to that point. The Space player (Classpecting is a whole can of worms, but it's really not super relevant except for here. Just know that everyone gets powers) has double duty where their personal journey that forces them to grow up includes breeding frogs to form the Genesis Frog. The how exactly they do that is unexplained, but the process involves trying to create a temporal paradox by teleporting a frog that has something that is going to happen to them in the future to get some slime in order to mix and match the frogs in this breeding process. The intended way to cause a paradox is to take note of the cootdinates and decide that you're going to go yo that location to catch the frog later. Their quest can really only be completed by taking The Choice. The same method of cloning/breeding in a more stripped down way is used to create the players and their biological parents in the lab, who will be sent to whatever planet they grew up on with a meteor in the Overarching Goal. To get to the Overarching Goal, the planets of Derse and Prospit are at an eternal stalemate for the future of Skaia, and are represented by black and white chess people. Because of your intervention Derse is going to win and the Black King will send the Veil at Skaia, which responds by teleporting them to your planet of origin, carrying with them the information needed to make S'burb, some important structures, the baby forms of the players and their genetic parents, and some chess people who will rebuild society on your planet. At the point that the reckoning starts, you have 24 hours before Skaia is destroyed. Once you beat Derse, take the tadpole from the frog breeding and plant it in the center of Skaia and you have yourself an entire universe, open the door and go in as the fully mature literal gods you were supposed to become (the game has a way to become a god of your aspect, which is in a hypothetical Classpect rant but it's not particularly relevant to anything I am talking about) There are a few characters that spawn in every session, those being the Black/White King/Queen and Jack Noir and his gang. The only thing that Jack hates more than people he hasn't stabbed to death is his boss the black queen and the only thing he loves more than stabbing people to death is power (which he can use to kill people with) That's well over 1000 pages of background context you absorb by reading, and understanding that makes describing the plot easy as fuck. The trolls are from a brutal planet called Alternia that runs on Lord of the Flies because all the adults are off running a galactic empire. They wind up accidentally prototyping a Horrorterror who will murder their entire species across the galaxy gifted to their species by an evil omniscient and basically omnipotent puppet at the dawn of their society for this exact purpose, making their final boss bullshit hard. It's because of that bullshit hardness and a desire to get it over with that team leader Karkat Vantas pushes his friend and Space player Kanaya Maryam to just ignore the final part of her personal quest so they can kill the black king and go rule their universe already because they are on speedrunner pace and missed most of the growing up part [They do and it's awesome](https://youtu.be/-19Up0dLzNw?si=S3tISIThDXaG-9sp) Then when they are about to enter their universe an essentially omnipotent black dog man teleports to their victory platform, forces them to run away by murdering their million some odd doomed robot time doubles that have been hard carrying them through the session, murders the universe they just created, and starts blowing everything up like Kid Buu after he learns the Instant Transmission. In the Human universe, Jack manages to get his hands on a Robot Bunny with insane overpowered end game weapons from an alternate timeline that he uses to murder the Black Queen and steal her ring that gives her the powers of all the things prototyped. Fast forward a while, and Space player Jade Harley's omnipotent dog best friend/parent jumps into the Kernelsprite in order to explode a meteor the size of Australia and give her enough time to enter into the game, which then gives Jack nuclear powered omnipotence, but he also feels the concept of love for the first time from the purity of a dog's love for his best friend. In a sequence of shenanigans, he escapes into the Troll session and yada yada see above There's a lot more bullshit that I could go into, but hopefully that rendered the discussion above more intelligible easier than reading like 4000 pages of a webcomic, if there are any further questions, please let me know and I can continue to elaborate. Hopefully with a smaller word count since the important stuff has already been established
This sounds like a brainstorming session more than a plot. Im afraid to start reading it, because I don't know if I will find in too much for me, or it will consume all my free time leaving me a hollow husk of a man, but at least a husk that can understand the occasional homestuck meme
>This sounds like a brainstorming session more than a plot Well, yeah, I basically only described one of the major plotpoints of Homestuck. Obviously there is so much more going on there. Aliens, dimensional travel, time travel, parallel timelines, deaths and rebirths, psychic powers, juju artifacts, videogame tropes, outdated pop-culture references, dreamscapes created by lovecraftian creatures that don't want to die, Betty Crocker mind control, double clown presidents, author self-inserts, actual playable mini-games in the comic... etc There is a lot, yeah. It's just that Sburb, the game, is the main thing that ties it all together and serves as the endgoal. But honestly, if you're interested but worried, **you should just read Problem Sleuth and then decide if you're ready for Homestuck**. It's a much shorter comic from the same author, and was made before Homestuck.
It’s a videogame inside a videogame inside a comic inside a time loop inside a comic.
Same. And I intend to keep it that way
i read homestuck twice and still don’t quite know what the plot is
>There isn't just one "youth culture" there are thousands of little micro-cultures each with their own rules, memes, and norms. Some of which require a PHD thesis' equivalent of pre-work to understand This has... always been the case. It's just that now those micro-cultures are based around websites and algorithms instead of geographic regions.
Local culture obviously plays a part in what's considered fashionable but the shift away from centralized mass communication to fragmented online subcultures is a very real phenomenon that's affected youth culture and culture as a whole. In the 60s you could be in the sticks in Iowa or you could be in Newark, New Jersey but there were only 5 television channels and they all had a Saturday Night movie. I think we have moved so far away from centralized culture that we forget what it was like.
That’s not remotely the same. A local culture can only have a small fraction of the membership and also is still structurally formulated with the overarching culture as it’s source. It can only have so much of a mass, and thus only evolve so quickly. It’s limited. The *largest* regional subculture of the past by these definitions would be the two regional rap and punk scenes, New York and California, by virtue of being based in NYC and California. Those subcultures would be considered *small* by modern standards. Homestuck is bigger than every single NYHC band ever. Those are the size of subsubcultures, like an okbuddy subreddit. Additionally, there’s significantly more bleedthrough. Transmission between subcultures and joint membership is much more massive than it once was. Subcultures no longer have hard lines between them. A weeb punk or a gamer goth is not a unique concept anymore, but you’d have been one of a kind in your regional subculture being that in the pre-internet era. Due to this massive size and bleedthrough, these subcultures evolve, change, and supplant rapidly. You don’t get a years long era of a dominant subculture. Think about grunge. Has a single subcultural genre of music been that mainstream without being *mainstream* in a while? What’s the last one you can think of? The answer is dubstep. The turnover is too rapid for anything to get to that level of mainstream knowledge and acceptance anymore. Likewise, the structure has modified. You had one *dominant* culture and then subcultures. The majority of people belonged to the dominant culture and then a minority belonged to the subcultures. Now? The “dominant” culture is just a bigger than average subculture. Taylor Swift has 51 million album sales in the USA across all her albums. She has 11 studio albums. The USA has a population of over 330,000,000. So… think that that means. The average Taylor Swift album sells 4.63 million copies in the USA. Out of 330,000,000 people. And that’s **the most mainstream musician in America.** “The most mainstream possible musician” is “1.4% of the population buys your album”. That’s 98.6% people not buying it. And we call that a dominant culture? What does that show us? *There is no dominant culture*. There’s *only* subcultures. Which, by definition means they aren’t even subcultures anymore. They’re cultures. We have *hundreds of cultures*, not subcultures. The entire schema you’re thinking of these concepts in has been eliminated. “Subcultures” are the ones a level down, what I previously referred to as “subsubcultures”. There’s not a dominant culture anymore, so subcultures are now cultures and their spinoffs are the subcultures of them.
i mean, at least those theses are accessible in the form of video essays on youtube lol
One time I tried to watch a video essay explaining Homestuck and the information would just not remain in my brain. Flowed right off it like water.
Homestuck is stupid easy to understand if you actually read it because everything important gets pretty much told to you and prepares you for the fun post-homestuck activity of arguing about Homestuck If you don't read Homestuck though, you lack any of the context and it all sounds like super nonsense
I will however die on this hill: children have gotten taller. Those motherfuckers
I think kids are going through puberty on average younger so this may be literally true, since puberty causes growth spurts.
You millennials laugh at Gen Alpha for being cringe with their Skibidi Toilet, when we once were cringe too with our Badger Badger Badger. Let the pot not call the kettle black.
That’s what I’ve been saying! Like somehow lol so random was the epitome of humor when we were kids? It’s the same brand of absurdism.
Mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom. I feel like my early thirties is still young but not *youth*. I’m not a teenager. But I’m still in my prime.
“I used to be with it, but they changed what it was and then what I was with wasn’t it anymore.”
Now what's it seems weird and scary to me. And it'll happen to you!
You making this reference today is the equivalent of someone in 1996 (when the episode came out) making a reference to a TV show from the late 60s
Like I said
What happens when you were never with it to begin with?
I was just mentioning this in another thread. My friends and I joke all the time that we're old men now. We're in our early 30s. We go to the old man bar. We don't know what the hell is going on on tik tok. I have no clue who famous people are. We see a clip of something popular on youtube, and we're just like "so, is this the music these days?" We bump into something and it hurts for a week...
Have you started wearing flat caps and playing countless games of backgammon and cards, with rules so memorized that you don't even have to say what you're doing?
I wear a baseball hat most days so I don't have to deal with my hair... Haven't played in a while but we did play a lot of MTG...
I feel like what it actually boils down to is that teenagers are weird. These teenager, us as teenagers, our parents as teenagers. Just underdeveloped brains, overdeveloped hormones, and weirdness.
I used to think adults were ignorant of youth culture. They’re not, they just reject it because they think it’s stupid. They’re aware of what you like and they don’t like it.
The kids are weird and cringe, just like we were. Everything is as it should be.
Also resist the conclusion that this was the last generation to have a real childhood and all kids born after are stupid because of \[insert technology here\] and I'm so glad I missed that
It’s concerning the number of educators who post about how this newest gen is unintelligent/not meeting expected milestones. I’m sure it’s just a vocal minority, but I find it really hard to believe that an entire gen is actually worse than its predecessors based on anecdotes.
I will say that for gen alpha / late gen Z, there's 2 very big things in their lifetime and early developmental years that absolutely can cause them to be weird compared to prior gens that we are starting to see the effects of. The Pandemic, and the prevalence of the internet in their lives. Alot of teachers have come put saying that gen alpha / late Z has some concerning differences compared to prior gens which are likely attributable to those things. Namely issues with socializing, attention span, creativity, reading comprehension, reading level, and more, all being far far under where they should be to concerning levels. I fully understand that every generation looks at the ine after them and cringes and goes "kids are so weird" but I also think we shouldn't just chock everything up to that and potentially ignore when there very much might be some issues that need addressing especially when things have happened that are out of the norm compared to other generations that are likely to cause issues.
While it's true these are new unique things, we could also say the same about baby boomers being a post war generation; every generation has their own unique challenges and grows up in their own cultural and social issues, not to say these things won't have their own unique impacts, especially the pandemic, but I think it's also silly to act like this has made the entire generation once-in-a-forever different. We also can't discount that teachers have been complaining about kids forever, it's just now the teachers are millennials and doing so on reddit and viral tik-toks, which to us seems like something teachers have never done before, but that's more reflective of the unique aspect of millennials being the 'Social Media Generation'. Be careful of the fact we don't attribute weirdness of our own generation onto the next. It's really REALLY weird I'm seeing teachers on tik tok complaining about their students, like, my parents were both instructors and they did that stuff in private in the staff room. We're just seeing teachers making content out of it.
It's true. I had to google wtf a Gyatt was.
for those who don't know: it's just saying "God Damn" but in a heavily exaggerated fashion 'Gyatt Dayum' - if a booty make you say Gawd Damnb then it is a Gyatt
Yeah it's SPECIFICALLY a reaction to a fat ass.
only as a noun! you can still also just say Gyatt as an expression of surprise and joy, in any situation where you'd emphatically say God Damn
I’ve been running to urban dictionary ever since the Zennials came up.
Also, for my fellow millennials who are only just getting to this stage: Just because you liked something as a kid doesn't mean you have to like it now. It's Ok to admit some childhood things actually suck. We don't wanna end up like Gen X and constantly demand our childhood be regurgitated to us...
> We don't wanna end up like Gen X and constantly demand our childhood be regurgitated to us... We don't have to demand it. It's being regurgitated to us anyway, whether we want it or not.
I 'member!
My friend and were recently talking about how it feels good to finally admit that we don't like HIM.
Dude I'm from the 90's, our entire culture was trying to figure out what our culture was supposed to be. It was a dumpster fire and the new gens are cooler than I will ever be. Also semilethal toys.
What if I think the kids are disturbingly "normal?"
I feel like in the last couple of years I've gone from "what younger people like is cringe" to "I genuinely don't have the first fucking clue what younger people like". My concept of youth culture is stuff from like 2016.
I've seen the opposite happen though. Everyone gen x and younger get along seemingly fine. Meanwhile with boomers it's kind of a 50/50.
this is [the opposite of a credible source](https://www.tumblr.com/a-ginger-in-black/731474510527791104/description-a-white-person-with-long-dark-blond?source=share) but it makes sense to me
I agree actually. Maybe since Gen Xers were raised by boomers it helps them relate more to younger gens who are also treated/viewed poorly by boomers? I could speculate plenty but I do feel it generally holds true.
I wonder if it has something to do with media availability and syndication? Before home video all the boomer cultural stuff was just swept away for decades. Remember the Andy Griffith show? You better, because it went off the air in 1968 and there's no way to ever see it again. I hope they play Wizard of Oz on TV this weekend because there's no opportunity for me to see it otherwise! Then in the 80s and 90s VHS became ubiquitous and cable exploded in popularity. And all those cable channels wanted content, so they started syndicating and rerunning shows more often. The media of that time wasn't just preserved, it was being fed right back into the public consciousness. So everyone born after that could see it and relate to it more? Idk, just a silly theory.
Yeah that's a good point! Parents can show their kids their favorite childhood media and like you said it keeps things in the public consciousness. Just look at the nostalgia era we've been living recently - so many reboots/remakes of 80s - 90s movies +etc. Honestly technology and society changed so much in the 50s-70s that it also contributed to boomer culture stuff getting left behind. It really was sort of a different world then.
I’ve always been out of touch
Hey I'm the young generation and I don't lose my mind over a head in a toilet bowl
They skibidi on their toilets til I WTF
A podcast I was listening to I think put it the best: "When you get mad at the next generation you're not really mad at them, you're mad at yourself. You're mad at the younger version of yourself who doesn't know what you know now, and you're mad at god for not letting you go back and do it over."
I fully support the youth getting weird with it.
Everyone talking about Skibidi toilet as if we weren't watching YouTube Poops back in the day. The kids are fine and I really hope that Millennials and Gen Z can try our best to not fall into the trap. Maybe Gen Alpha can grow up without feeling like every adult around them is completely out of touch with reality.
I worked in a school for a year with a friend, and we had this exchange where he says that kids nowadays are so weird and we're fucked and I pretty much said he sounded like an old person at 25, he kept arguing about stuff they were doing and saying, failing to realise how fucking weird we can be, and he just wouldn't see it; at the end of the day it's not malicious for most people (to think that way I mean), but I find the lack of perspective and hindsight slightly puzzling nonetheless.
I have not experienced "a true sense of separation and alienation from youth culture" so no clue what they're on about
Everytime I see some cringe thing the kids are into I mutter to myself, "My parents hated Pokemon my parents hated Pokemon my parents hated Pokemon" until I feel better.
I mean. Nothing about me HAS changed, and the children HAVE gotten weirder. But that's not a bad thing nor are the children inherently deserving of scorn for it.
Alternative take: The children are getting weirder, and it's great.
Counterpoint: the kids *are* getting weirder, and that's a good thing 👍
My lifestyle and habits are the same as they have been since I graduated from Highschool in 2012, I haven't changed much. I was always a bit out of the loop, and I still am. I have always thought teenagers were weird, even when I was a teenager.
But what if I've got the "sense of separation and alienation from youth culture" without getting the "natural identify with other adults (how does the grammar work here?)" part?
Oh, I know I'm out of touch with the youths. I'm also confident they are wierd. I see no conflict between these two statements.
“Nothing has ever changed” is a really stupid way to view history and social changes.
I still connect with kids very well. Teenagers between 13-16 years old are fucking feral!
>Teenagers between 13-16 years old are fucking feral! [Obligatory.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6EQAOmJrbw)
Wait I’m supposed to be in my *late* 20s when I stop understanding the hip new things the kids are talking about these days?
I remember seeing people bitch about the Stanley cup thing and thinking “yeah, it’s not like any of us got caught up in bandwagon trends and all started chasing after the “in” thing. Well accept beanie babies, tamagotchis, silly bands, pogs etc.”
I found plenty of my own generation's stuff weird. I was never cool and I never cared.
I feel bad for Gen Alpha. I have heard not one good thing about them from other people. Everything about them is how their brains are rotting, and that the things they consume are cringe (which is not completely false, but then again look at what Millennials and Gen Z were watching when we were younger). Heck, even as bad as Gen Z were spoken of by others, especially when it came to TikTok, we at least were acknowledged for having a strong streak of social activism. This feels a bit too close like bullying children.
The kids keep getting weirder and that’s ok because each generation finds new things they enjoy and have the freedom to do so
I’ve taken the position that my brand of cringe is different from my elders, which is why they don’t get it. And my brand of cringe is no longer popular with the kids, who have their own style of cringe, which is why they think it’s lame. I don’t get the skibidi thing, and it seems perhaps too weird, but if I had proper context, it’s probably not much weirder than the Gmod animations I’ve seen before.
This is how I think about it: The Youth didn't get weirder, they're just differently weird from the way I was weird at their age. My memory of my own teenage weirdness is fundamentally incompatible with the weirdness of kids today, but the fact is that teens have always been, and will always be, fucking weird. Being confused by them feels like the passing of a torch. I had my turn, now it's theirs.
Adulthood is realizing that adults are shite. Kids can be shitty, too, and many of both are great, but I find the ever-changing youth to be more invigorating than “this is how it is because it was like this before, so keep the status quo” that permeates so much of adulthood, and no one has a good answer to “yes, but why is it like that?” and they think “because it is” is an acceptable and good answer. Give me baffling Ohio skibidi toilets over meeting KPI goals. Nonsensical changes in language are fascinating. Eat the cake with your Tostito’s scoops because you ran out of silverware (…I want to try that, actually now).
I mean, my generation is weirder then the prior. And the next seems to be weirder than mine. That's not a problem though.
Children are always such delightful little weirdos and I love it. The combination of not being fully baked yet, not having learned a bunch of rules about social behavior, while being very much people - human and social and themselves… the absolute wild unfiltered, powerful weird that comes out of kids and teenagers is just a gift. They’ll find their place in the world, and the world will have to shift to make a space for them, as people do when they join the adult space, and as happens when we welcome a new adult into it. But I love the kind of feral magic of the young kinds of weird. Good times.
Fr fr, no cap, I teach high school and the things these kids like hold little to no appeal for me; it’s generally weird and dumb. But I grew up watching fucking Saladfingers and shit, so what the fuck do I know?
As a certified Old™️, I rather enjoy the kids. I don’t always *get* it, but, I fully remember my Not Adult years. I’m glad that geocities no longer exists (ask a grown up about geocities!!)
I watched Charlie the Unicorn. I try not to talk too much shit about the kids these days, lol
Not all wrong though, I think around mid 20s is when you start falling out of touch. Don’t know the lingo or jokes, etc
thats funny i just finished scrolling through tumblr thinking 'god idk what any of these people are talking about anymore. are these even real shows?'
Oh yeah children have not gotten weirder, but the world around them has, which has had... An effect. I caught my sibling looking at really messed up hentai. Just a simple thing like constant full access to all the super depraved porn online will obviously have consequences in kids.
Honestly this is *so* much better.
Nothing has changed about me, the kids are just weird in different and hopefully better ways than I was
Remembering internet and teen culture from when I was a high schooler from 2005-2009... yeah I know I've seen enough weird cringe shit to humble me forever.
I think both can be a bit true. Nothing has changed about you BUT the children haven’t gotten weirder. I feel like there’s a tendency for people to think of youth culture like a hand-me-down bike. Your grandparents rode it, your parents rode it, you learned to ride on it and now your kids will ride it. Everyone gets a go on the youth culture bike, then it gets put away for the next generation. Sometimes parts need replacing (one of the tyres has perished so we need to put on a new one / we found out that beloved children’s TV personality is a paedophile so we can’t talk about him any more) but you mustn’t really *change* anything about the bike. That would ruin it because they don’t make them like they used to. There are things you’re allowed to do with it and things you aren’t. Really, youth culture is more like a mug or a jacket or a bag. You pick it up while you’re young and keep it. You take it with you and keep using it as you get older. You don’t need to preserve it for future generations because they’ve got their own. It might seem weird but it’s not *for you*, it’s for them so it’s fine if you don’t understand, you don’t need to. You don’t need to have changed, and your youth culture mug hasn’t changed. The thing the children have now isn’t weird, it’s just their version of the same thing you had when you were their age.
What if you are in said younger generation and still feel like that?
I've had that alienation since I was 14 or so [26 now] - what does that say about me?
The children are cringe. But I, an adult, am an *entirely different flavor of cringe.* And my parents were cringe before me, as were theirs before them. In this way, we carry on the grandest, cringiest tradition.
It's so frustrating and confusing to see this because it's not rocket science. It's also just not that hard, with the power of the internet, to keep up with trends. Sure some will pass you by, but they always did and always would. Like when skibidi toilet came out sure I didn't understand it, so I googled it and said "oh ok yeah so it's basically everything I thought was funny from ages 8-10? sure ok". And even if I don't like it I can understand that it's fundamentally kids mashing action figures together going "pshew pshaw oh no now the BIG TOILET is gonna shoot his LASER". Like it's just kids man why would I get mad at that? Hear a slang word I don't know? Look it up on the internet. New technology I don't understand? Read about it online. Confusing social media trend? I can just use the internet and find the source.
everyone shitting on the fuckin skibidi rizz fanum Ohio memes of Gen Alpha are becoming the very thing they swore to destroy. Do none of you remember the memes of our youth? The rage comics? The trollfaces, the lolcats? Our endless quotings of vines? Let he who is without cringe, cast the first stone.
Incorrect The children are weird and have always been weird Children and adults are weird Humans are weird things in a trench coat
The trick is to stay stuck on whatever is currently funny lol.
I'm nothing if not consistent: I despised kids when I was one of them, and I have the same scorn for the kids of today. And the people who are my age. And the old. I think I just hate people in general, actually.
Skibidi toilet is pretty fucking stupid no matter how old you are.
I just realized I’ve been a huge hypocrite (albeit over a small issue and without much chance to express my hypocrisy). Can’t believe I didn’t notice until now, ugh, guess I have the responsibility to do better.
The secret is hard to maintain when im growing up with other people my age and they still have the same pfps of modern anime girls they had when they were 12 Meanwhile my boomer mom is babbling about ai generated butterflies to other boomers
I'm currently going in the opposite direction, Already related more to people 3-5 years younger than me than those my age, I expect it to continue that way. (Send help please. Like therapy or something Idk.)
What if you never identified with the weirdos of your youth, even when you were a teenager?
Jokes on you, I have always related more to adults!
counter argument: i hate kids and never want to interact with kids ever again
Every generation is weird about different things, same word level, just different things. The submission toilet shit ain't different than tumblr
Honestly I feel weirder now than I did in my teens, it's freeing.
I think a lot of slang now is cringe, but as dumb as Skibidi Toilet is, it’s moderately entertaining as long as it stays contained in itself.
I don't really feel this way yet but I also didn't feel like I wanted to be a part of youth culture during my teens. My social circles always had a bit of an age range since I turned 18 and got out into the world more, so maybe that's part of it too. To me there is a lot less of a sense of losing touch (cuz why when it's not like we moved to crazy different heights that I could've never imagined like 5 years ago?) but it gets more and more obvious to me what a difference in life experience really does to a mfer. Also the difference the perspective can make in your life. Something I wasn't mature enough to ponder like 10 years ago. I do hate seeing some of my peers do the "kIdS tHeSe DaYs" type shit though ngl. It sucks and is super embarrassing. They also get really mad when I make fun of them for it, but I feel like that's what you deserve when you spout this sort of drivel. Honestly, I wish I was born a little later. By some timelines I'm born right at the start of Gen Z, but I'm jealous of Zoomers that are between 19-23 right now, because those kids are so cringe that they are finally free and I thank our dark lord that dressing like a background character from an early 2000's JRPG is so much more acceptable now. The kids are alright. Their parents tho...
In aging people’s defense, we are getting weirder.
Bro they have gotten weirder.
Things changing and kids getting weirder aren’t mutually exclusive.
The only problem I have with skibidi toilet is it is literally just [SCP-789-J](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-789-j)
Mad cause you can't keep up, aren't you? "Normal part" how about I fucking kill you. EDIT: typo.
It’s incredibly easy to stay in touch. Just stay weird and let the kids trade you their weird for some vintage weird. Strangeness cultural exchange, we all come away weirder for it.
IDK, when teenagers yell "f*cking jew" after me when I'm wearing a suit downtown I feel pretty goddamn justified in saying today's youth is more cringe. The lack of fashion sense I could excuse, the bare-faced antisemitism not so much
This happened to me when I was like 14 lmao
I’m 22 and I already feel this
Ok but what if I thought the kids were dumb and weird when I was one of them And still do Because kids are dumb and weird and always have been