The first ten on today’s playlist:

Why the Nineties rocked.

The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence. In the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.

Some of the nostalgia is misplaced, but this is true: In the 1990s, we believed — nearly every one of us — that we could and would make the world better, that this was achievable, and furthermore that we were well on the way to doing so. That core optimism pervaded everything, even the soi-disant “pessimistic” works of the era. Every media artifact was imbued with this spirit, ineluctably. Every movie, song, painting, poster, billboard and (even) Trapper Keeper. Everything.

There is no way to describe how different that felt, how variant from now where we believe collapse, catastrophe and calamity are absolutely inevitable. But I can tell you we were living in a different, better world.

And here’s a secret: One of the reasons so many claim to find nearly everything from that era “offensive” is the extreme foreignness of everyone’s belief system and affect from that era. It has nothing directly to do with anything actually objectionable in the sense the offended claim, but it’s hard to blame them because they have not the words nor the experience for what they feel. Rather, the offense is in the incompatibility of our current apocalypse-oriented sociocultural immune system with the more robust and bountiful possibilities from that time. This discordance elicits a sub rosa horror that rises to consciousness as an offense, indeed, though not the offense of the wrong word (which is its surface manifestation), but rather the grief of what has been irrecoverably lost, what has been foregone that could have been realized, what we all could have had.

This extended yawp of unrecognized grief is what we see now, and not just from those who were alive then and conscious of the zeitgeist. No — we all feel it. It pervades our bones, our minds. And as then it has echoed through all media, all we consume, and stains this era just as the optimism of the 1990s tinged that time’s entire nous and expression thereof with much brighter shades.

Who are the 12% of people consuming half of all beef in the US?

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

And I do not plan to stop. Beef yum. Me eat.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Do men actually imagine having sex with every woman they meet?

No the hell we do not. I’d say that happens basically never for me, and probably more often for some men. But even women I find attractive I very, very rarely think about sex with them or what it’d be like (maybe once every 2-3 years if that?). Even then it’s a fleeting thought and not really anything substantial.

This was true even when I was 18-22 by the way.

That men are just ravening sex beasts is just not true.

Some women are so convinced men are nothing but unthinking sex beasts that they believe that the only reason we go or live overseas is to sleep with foreign women, the only reason we’d ever talk to a woman is to attempt to bed her, and the only thing we ever think about is sex.

These pathetic women are more telling on themselves, of course, with this set of beliefs than revealing anything about men in general. I remember some blog I went to written by a couple of idiots (both women, but that’s incidental to idiocy) that asserted in extremely confident tones that the only reason any man became an ex-pat was to sleep with poor foreign women. (And why this is even bad if it were the case — which of course it is not — is also a mystery.)

These foreign women were assumed by the these clown blog women to have no agency at all, and were just somehow forced to have sex with ex-pat men because they appeared in country. That’s one of the things that bothers me most about the recent consensus: women anywhere are assumed to be as children, with no ability to make decisions and no way to possibly resist these horrid foreign men. It does not and did not occur to those blog (and other) women that the Slovenian women in question might’ve very much wanted to sleep with who they slept with. Never even a fucking thought about that.

Hilariously and nearly invariably, these same “all ex-pats are secretly rapists” women will lustily recount their overseas study semester in Italy that they spent with the smoldering but aloof Matteo or Emiliano — and they won’t recognize the hypocrisy or just base stupidity of that at fucking all. Because they want it both ways and they hate the competition foreign women represent to their undesirable asses.

Feminism went way, way wrong somewhere.

Economists are nothing if not consistent. Consistently wrong, that is.

Why do I have to just blindly accept my partner becoming unattractive?

I’ve noticed that only men are supposed to meekly accept their partner becoming a beluga while women definitely, definitely are not expected to allow the blubber buildup to be commented upon (Yasss Queen!).

Another one of those double standards.

Film critics Siskel and Ebert couldn’t stand each other. That’s what made their show great.

Used to love their show so much during the 1980s. They taught me how to watch movies. Miss their erudition and their love of movies. And their passion. They would not fit in these times and that’s what made their show worth every minute.

Men, what’s the most scared you’ve ever been in your life?

When I almost dropped a large pizza walking out of a Papa John’s one time. That was terrifying and traumatizing.

Track My Phone, Please: Teens Feel Safer When Parents Monitor Their Every Move.

I want to doubt this but alas I have met too many Gen Z wimps and losers and know this is probably true. Wanting this sort of surveillance is nearly unimaginable for someone of my generation. I was raised by wolves, but most of my friends spent a lot of time trying to avoid being monitored or interfered with by their parents.

It just seems crazy to me that anyone would want this. Just…why? It does mesh sociologically with the “complete safety” obsession that came to the fore as the pandemic was receding. Which there never is, of course.

We have failed Gen Z; they cannot handle reality.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

How do I show my girlfriend I want to have sex with her? Subtly?

Just ask? It ain’t that hard. We got mouths and can talk.

An old girlfriend of mine being funny one time — but who was also very direct by nature — turned to me out of nowhere as we were sitting on the couch and asked me, “Do you want Big Fuck?” (I capitalized it because I swear she said it with capital letters.)

Turns out I did.

A scammer cloned my voice using AI and made a phone call to my grandma telling her I was kidnapped and needed money.

This is happening a lot already but is only going to get way more common.