all mysty eyed
<< Mar 22, 2005 @ 02:51 >>
Thirteen is an amazing age. I remember being 13, and having tackled batch programming and BASIC at age 10 and 11, I was well into C programming already. It's maybe too easy to discount "children" as being stupid or something... maybe that's not the right words for what I mean.
It's like this– my sister has an almost 4 year old son. It has been amazing watching my nephew grow up. I mean, not having any younger siblings myself I was pretty much convinced that children were brain dead until age 5 or 6, but actually being around to watch them grow up you see their faculties come into being right there before your eyes. One day they are pooping their diapers and the next they are talking to you on the phone describing the depth of snowdrifts and their appreciation for the Lord of the Rings toys Grandpa just bought them... language fully intact. It's pretty cool.
I wasn't that old when the first Myst game was released. Younger generations wig me out because they don't know about the same stuff I know about by default. They weren't raised on Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy, and the golden years of The Simpsons. They weren't raised on Colecovision and 8-bit Nintendo. The first Mario they ever played could very well have been Mario 64. That's crazy. Back to my point... the fact that this 13 year old kid went back to the very beginning of this video game series... all the way back to Myst itself (despite the fact I hate the Myst series)... I think that is so cool.
It puts a sparkle in my eye to think that there's hope for some of these kids. That they have enough curiosity about the world to go back before their time. I don't mean this to be self-aggrandising, even if it sounds so, but I remember how much older someone in their twenties felt to me when I was in my teens – even late teens – so to think that some of these kids actually look up to us as the forefathers of subculture, specifically computer subculture... well, maybe we aren't totally fucked after all?
Irish whiskey and 80s movies make me sentimental.
Reader Comments...
March 22, 2005 @ 13:48:28
sith33 (#999)
Zach. Right now congress is try to figure out a way to keep a braindead woman from being allowed to pass away according to her wishes because of the Value Of Life(tm), while simultaneously choosing to ignore death and abuse caused by the US government throughout the world. We won't give health care to children, but we'll spend millions to keep a dead woman from looking dead.
The truth is, we're fucked and you know it.
March 22, 2005 @ 13:51:21
sith33 (#999)
Oh, and have a good day.
March 22, 2005 @ 17:28:52
xopl (#001)
We don't all need Prozac, we all need to do something about the shit that's putting us down.