> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
I do have a strange nostalgia about those days. It was a culture that didn't exist in meatspace, and there was something fun about that.
However, when covid hit and my wife and I started playing games, I quickly learned my wife severely disapproves of typing "kys" to others in games, and now I try to only say positive things. It is a better experience, but then again I'm now a parent and hoping to spare my children from interacting with college me.
It's what the Internet is for -- a place where things don't matter and where you could go to blow off steam. The Dionysian night to real life's Apollonian day.
Needing to be polite in every aspect of our lives because of this stupid demand to collapse down to the lowest common denominator of humor or mental fortitude is ruining the Internet and making the world and media less fun. It's also Orwellian. There's people who want to dox you and make sure you get fired or never get hired for being mean in a CoD lobby. That's psychotic. Those people are mentally ill, and we've let them run the show and tell us what to do. And of course, it's symbiotic with corporations and advertisers who want things as anodyne and rated E as possible since that makes the most $$$ (if only we can collectively accept more mediocre art and experiences as we forget what better ones we had).
I'm glad the pendulum seems to be swinging back as people are figuring out that having had less for fun for the last 10 years accomplished absolutely nothing worth caring about.
I do have a strange nostalgia about those days. It was a culture that didn't exist in meatspace, and there was something fun about that.
However, when covid hit and my wife and I started playing games, I quickly learned my wife severely disapproves of typing "kys" to others in games, and now I try to only say positive things. It is a better experience, but then again I'm now a parent and hoping to spare my children from interacting with college me.