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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Not sure if you meant it this way, but this comes off as a pretty flippant take on humanity’s evolutionary history and psychology as applied to a middle school classroom. There’s a lot more going on than just humanity’s supersocial nature.

    Of course, we’re social animals lol but within that reality, we have largely been able to communicate effectively and engage in learning. What the original commentor is saying is that those kids, apparently one third of each class, are severely lacking in any functional communication skills and framework.

    Throughout our species’ history, we have developed efficient ways of communicating and learning. These kids mentioned are not trained to consider (or, in some cases, are completely oblivious to) how their communication and behavior is perceived by peers, teachers, and concerned parents and bystanders. As was stated by @[email protected], many kids think/care only about how their actions and words are perceived by their target audience. That has always been part of the learning process, but I see it has become more prevalent and somewhat louder/more pronounced in older kids than it has been in the past.

    I see a lot of factors feeding into this, but I think most of them boil down to the increased isolation and anxiety experienced by teens and preteens, today, and the lack of exposure to/familiarity with efficient, substantive, respectful, and effective communication.

    Growing up is confusing and frightening enough, and, now, these kids are exposed to a lot more information that’s increasingly curated into smaller and smaller sound bytes and memes designed to highlight outrage, anxiety, and disillusionment.

    I think a lot of the “brainrot” culture we see today stems from young people wanting to communicate nonsensically as they are desensitized by the sheer amount of similarly coded content and communication they are exposed to. I grew up with other ways to shut off my brain and deal with the anxiety and inherent loneliness that comes with growing up and finding more of a sense of self, but these kids don’t have the same breathing room as I did.

    To your last point about education systems fighting against social behavior, I actually see the opposite. A massive amount of studies and practices have been implemented on how best to utilize the double edged sword of our social nature. Nearly every professional development training or meeting I go to deals with encouraging positive social interactions and discourse. I think if you look to schools and districts that actually walk the walk of education, you’ll see a lot of progress.

    Edit: I also want to say that a lot of these kids are really searching for ways to make sense of their confusing world and when they are presented with alternatives to unwind and even learn communication skills, a lot of them absolutely LOVE it. I run a biweekly D&D group for my 7th and 8th graders and one of them even refers to it as his “therapy” lol one of the best compliments I’ve been given and all the more meaningful considering kids are often such harsh critics.



  • The delisting is what gets me most (and we’re dealing with that in basically every media catalogue from film/tv to games).

    Well, that and the blatant cash grabs I see with rereleases that end up being console specific and basically unsupported like with the cases of the Wii store and basically every iteration of their online stores since.

    I played Wii and eventually Wii U with buddies for smash but am glad I didn’t own the systems. I know one of my friends gave a lot of money to Nintendo multiple times getting classics like Pokemon Snap and other nostalgia buys on multiple systems.

    My most recent experience with Nintendo was borrowing a buddy’s switch to play Breath of the Wild back around when it came out. I’m pretty meh on their new content and by the way a lot of their recent releases were received, I’m not super interested. Might bug someone to play the Pokemon Arceus one which seems kinda cool, but that would be the extent of my interest and it’s not really nagging at me, anyway.

    My main gripe is that they seem to be doing the bare minimum with their IP (with little innovation in the field/botched releases) and wasting money/resources on what I see as frivolous, shortsighted, lawsuits in the name of protecting their property as well as corporate heavy production that ends up with forgettable and formulaic games.

    Maybe I am now become old, but I don’t care to see the most recent iteration of the Pokemon, Zelda, Mario, or Smash Bros sagas and am perfectly content with replaying N64 to GameCube classics in those series. Probably doesn’t help that I went to college with a bunch of friends who hung out and played Project M with some Halo 3 or Reach sprinkled in for variety lol.


  • I getcha, just have not been stoked about Nintendo’s continual deathmarch against the hydra of emulation.

    I honestly think it’s more of a waste of money than it’s actually worth and the publicity of taking down emulation sites is pretty bad for them (especially when they take down ones which deal with largely abandonware or really old games, like Vimm’s lair did).

    Without getting into the debate over the ethics of piracy or anti consumer practices, jumping into the fray by aggressively litigating and making a splash like Nintendo and Sony seem to focus on likely hurts their bottom line and certainly hurts their reputation with consumers.




  • Interestingly enough, my local Wendy’s has the best fries out of any fast food chains I’ve tried. They are consistently perfectly crisp and salted. Better than how I even remember McDonald’s fries in their heyday.

    I do know that Wendy’s leaves more up to their franchisees than some places, so maybe I just got lucky with the people who own the one by me.