On getting Crotchety

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Is it just me, or does it seem like, as you get older, or at least in this modern age…that stuff has gotten played out?

I’m having a hard time putting it into words, but video games used to be a big deal (grew up with them in the 80’s) and now they seem to be another Zombie Minecraft Call of Duty MMORPG with 4 skill trees and 5 cash equivalents…and loot crates.

Sci-Fi…man, I grew UP with crappy Sci-Fi…one every couple years was all that could get made. Fishbowl helmets, dryer tube arms in the space suits, the ships had fireworks and fishing wire. And we LIKED it! Now with cellphones and green bedsheets, anyone can make speculative fiction and a LOT of people do. And it’s BAD.

Had Hotrods for 25 years or so. Moved on to other things. In the last 2 years, all the Hotrods from California and All the Cowboy Cadillacs from Texas have moved here. I don’t mind it, much, but they sure are noisy in the evenings.

Cooking! Wonderful, rare, asian fusion sushi with a sous vide reverse sear steak…and…well. It tastes good, but throwing that kind of money at a meal? Not so much anymore.

Signs of depression? Maybe a little. Signs of getting crochety? Most definitely.

It just seems like now there are many more people and they’re all trying to get your attention, and fewer and fewer of them are doing anything new.

(And whatever you do, don’t search YouTube for 'things I learned RV’ing…HUNDREDS of people all trying to fund their nomadic tendencies with Youtube and Patreon.)

So, ending the rant with a question to instigate conversation: What have you noticed? Would you agree? Do I need to, perhaps, find another hobby or use a little less internet?

P.S. Don’t go creeping around my post history, I bitch about this every couple of years…probably just before winter sets in.

2

Most people interpret crotchety as just being irritable. Here is the definition I like, courtesy online Merriam-Webster:

having a highly individual and usually eccentric opinion or preference

I think you qualify. I think I do too, but that opinion may not be shared by others, I may just be irritable.

As for your examples, I agree with all the ones I know anything about. Probably due to the online ubiquity of everything, all the formerly minor cultural pockets of interest have been subsumed into a giant mediocre goop. Any individuality beyond surface quirkiness has not been a value for some time. Instead we have influencers with no qualifications, celebrities with nothing of interest to offer, reality shows whose only point seems to be to make me nauseated, and everyone who’s entitled to everything they think they want. We have sold our souls and most of our intellects for easy faux luxury, convenience, and mindless entertainment.

Oh, there are remnants. Art museums, orchestras, opera companies, public broadcasting, all supported by the top 10% who, when they meet, tsk about the sad state of current culture, while hiding the fact that last night they watched one of the Real Housewives franchises.

I could go on, but why? None of you are still reading this. I challenge anyone to mention one current cultural phenomenon that is not crap and that has risen above niche interest. I’ll be only too happy to be proven wrong.

3

They were saying exactly this a hundred years ago. Seriously.

4

And Plato lamented how kids didn’t respect their elders.

But this is different. I’m watching some Sci-Fi movie with Battlestar Galactica (rebooted) chick and it reads like something written by people that didn’t have Sci-Fi chops. Everybody lands on the planet, and the one guy that leaves his helmet on gets razzed by everyone else…and then they start eating the local fauna. It’s science written by people that don’t know science. Badly.

But it’s not JUST the pages and pages of pablum Sci-Fi on Netflix.

It’s the VR games that are all just Zombie shooters, and as Roderick_Femm stated, the reality show about tiny homes… (subtext: because people can no longer afford housing, so they buy small…with wheels.)

It’s also that ‘all the famous people are dying’ because the 80’s was when we had enough mass media to cover the population…now it’s been democratized so that ANYONE can create…but we’re all BAD at it.

It was a BIG DEAL to know about that Band nobody in my town knew about…now it’s ALL bands nobody knows about because there are so many bands.

5

Have you ever read any science fiction of the past 100 years? Or worse, watched any tv show or movie science fiction? This is one of the worst arguments of all time.

I get it. I’m 70. I was an sf nerd back when it was ridiculed. I love 60s rock. I collect vintage paperbacks. I remember when the two sf shows on television were Lost in Space and Star Trek and many sf people hated both because of how stupidly unscientific they were.

I also know that popular culture has been increasingly aimed at the youth audience for most of the last hundred years. I’ve aged out of that group. So have you apparently. Isn’t is a BIG DEAL to know IG influencers and Tik-Tok dancers and the weirdest Twitch artists and a dozen dozen things I don’t even have the vocabulary for? Neither of us, therefore, should be criticizing what isn’t any business of ours.

I’m crotchetyer than thou. Let’s have at it.

6

Get off my dang lawn! Don’t you find it’s drafty in here?

7

Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s not them, it’s me…and the stupid amount of time I’ve spent on tvtropes.com…it’s ruined me for a LOT of entertainment.

That and I built my career on being the smart guy, knowing the niche knowledge that’s now freely available on Youtube.

8

May I introduce you to Dust. It’ll change your mind.

9

Seconded

10

Oh, There’s good stuff out there…it’s just that it gets increasingly hard to find. (I’m starting the Expanse…it’s great, too…and need to finish Better Call Saul after finishing up Breaking Bad and El Camino.)

Which brings a subtle logical inconsistency to my rant: There’s more and more good stuff and more all the time so that you’ll never actually see all of it.

So, there’s a LOT of bad, and more and more Good…and there’s only so much of me.

Don’t get me started on Super Heroes.

11

Turn up the heat; I already put on all my sweaters.

12

Thanks to the internet, I’ve learned more in the last 20 years than in the previous 20 when I spent a large chink of my time on libraries.

Learning new things keeps me un-curmudgeonly.

However, returning to the library post-covid, I see they’ve abandoned the Dewey Decimal System. I’ve been convinced that this was done for the convenience of staff and the inconvenience of the patrons, by the facile explanations by library PR that the opposite is the reason.

So I won’t entirely relax my liver-spotted grip on curmudgeonhood.

13

Wild Art aka Art found in the Wild, usually by unnamed artists. Stuff like this:
Imgur

14

Sounds like maybe you need to find something new (to you) to learn about. Yes, I’m getting crotchety too, but it’s good exercise to shake up the brain by climbing a different mountain, or the same mountain in a different way.

Remember the scene in Dead Poet’s Society where he has the students stand on their desks to look at something from a different viewpoint. We all need to do that. Especially if it requires that we have to go to some effort to make it happen. There might not be anything new under the sun, but it might be expressed a different way in a different language. It might even make you wonder at it. Better go check.

15

Another 70 YO here who continues to be disappointed in movies and series with “modern” CGI. I used to love SF, horror, and action, watching just about anything I could find. Of course, I blame young people who play games. They’ve come to accept game-quality CGI in movies and series as perfectly fine.

End crotchety session here.

16

Well, I have to figure you’re just looking at the AAA games and becoming disillusioned. In a lot of ways, today’s video game landscape resembles today’s movies/TV landscape more than many would like to admit.

The big movie and video game releases look good, sound good, and are more often than not, derivative crap aimed at the lowest common denominator, i.e. 14 year old boys with nothing better to do. Which usually means some variant in an established franchise, like as not. How many Assassin’s Creeds are there these days? Calls of Duty? Forzas?

But just like in the TV/Movie world, there’s a whole next level of indie/smaller studio games that are often fantastic. Like as good as anything you played back in history. They don’t get the press, the shelf-space, or the more conventional media coverage, but they’re there. Steam is probably the best place to find them, IMO.

17

What did they replace it with?

18

Public libraries now have Fiction, Travel, History, cooking, etc. Categories instead of numbers. This is OK, but it loses the winnowing-down of the decimals.

I like essays, so I have to find where they’ve put all the thin humor books written by sitcom actors: and there is Ralph Waldo Emerson too (who never even got a walk-on on a pilot). But, for admin purposes, better to call Emerson an essayist than Dave Barry a philosopher.

19

The default mode of capitalism—private ownership of the means of production, meaning most people have to work for those who own said means of production, production for profit, not need, and production for sale in a competitive market means the default mode is to try to lower production costs. This means some combination of lowering wages, reducing the costs of inputs—eg replacing steel parts with plastic—and aiming the product at the lowest common denominator. That isn’t the only mode, and there are always exceptions, but it’s the logic of a lot of what we buy, including culture.

My attempt to find some solace as I age is to “grab the glee!” wherever I can, though you wouldn’t know that from my posts.

20

To defend Dewey, humor essays were first in 814, then 814.54, before being moved to 817. As far back as my abridged 8th edition from 1959, 817 was labeled American Satire and Humor. 814 is simply American Essays.

Dewey doesn’t consider Emerson a philosopher. Philosophy has its own category, all of the 100s, and subcategories elsewhere. Emerson is an essayist and goes in 814.

Dave Berry continually moved up the 800s over time. He started in 814, shifted to 814.54, jumped to 818, American Miscellany, and is now in 818.54. It would be nice if these changes were chronologically consistent but they aren’t.

I am constantly baffled by the seemingly random classifications thown at books by Washington. I can’t tell you how many times I couldn’t find a paperback edition because it received a different DDN than the hardback.

The point of Dewey is and always was twofold. Primarily it served to fix a book’s place on a shelf so that once you looked up the code in the catalog you could go immediately there. But the secondary expectation was almost as important. Scanning the books around the chosen number should provide a significant choice of similar books on the subject so that the interested reader or researcher didn’t have to know the title of every book on the subject in order to go on from the first.

None of the libraries I go to have abandoned Dewey. But I have to wonder if putting all of Dave Barry’s books together isn’t a far better system than putting them in four different places, plus 004.0207 for Dave Barry in Cyberspace.

Crotchety? You bet.