Nangijala @ Nangijala @feddit.dk

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Lol, your comment reminded me of when I got to confirmation age and I was the only one in my class who chose to not get confirmated. The priest would come to me in class a few times to convince me to join in on Bible studies and I asked him several questions that pissed him off enough to leave me alone. One of them was: do you believe in Satan?

And he said no.

And I said: do you believe in Jesus?

And he said yes.

"How can you believe in one and not the other when they are part of the same religion?"

Only said in a 13 year old way of speaking so probably a lot more clunky. Anyway, I kept pushing him to admit that if he believes in the good he also must believe in the evil because they belong together and one without the other is just lying to yourself and making yourself vulnerable to evil - but again, in a 13 year old clunky way of saying it.

He got mad and never spoke a word to me again.

I still believe in this sentiment even though I'm not religious. I am painfully aware of the evil inside of me and how I must be observant and aware of how I affect the world and how the world affects me. If I turn a blind eye to evil, I will open myself up to it. That is how people end up in cults and I know I have a high chance of becoming one of those, so there's a lot of talks in the mirror and reflections on my own behavior.

13 year old me was nowhere close to understanding the complexities of the conversation I was trying to have with the priest back then, I just wanted him to not be a hypocrite and admit that if he believes in God he also must believe in the devil even if he disagrees with his teachings. You cannot be good if you ignore evil.

I can't tell if there are actually people put there who don't know what Blade Runner is. I may be getting too old to follow along with the youth of today, but to me, Blade Runner is as much a part of popculture as Star Wars and Harry Potter.

Blade Runner, at its core is about a dystopian future where artificial humans, called "replicants" have become part of society, yet are seen and treated as lesser. This is a very simplistic description, but there's a lot of philosophical discussions about what it means to be human and whether or not we can dehumanize artificial humans if what they sense and feel is real to them despite their bodies, brains and memories all being artificial.

In essence it is about empathy.

Sadly, a lot of people who watch blade runner fail to understand its message and just see a protagonist be an unempathetic pos to replicants in several scenes and deem it a misogynistic and bigoted work, which is certainly a take one can have if they insist on being complete media illiterate, but on a deeper level, the movie is definitely wanting people to consider what humanity is and what makes someone human and that everyone deserves empathy. Else we will end up with a cold, brutalist society where you can meet someone and question their validity as a human.

Sounds pretty gay.

In case you aren't joking: Blade Runner

This one always makes me laugh because I have known guys like him with that exact smug look on their face and similar worldviews and none of them had their lives together.

I love Linklater, but Waking Life is his worst movie in my humble opinion. It was almost impossible to get through for me. The only relief in that film is that Jesse and Céline got a cameo.

The Before Trilogy is his superior work. I'm still upset he didn't make a fourth movie in 2022, but I get it. A trilogy is more marketable than a quadrilogy or more.

Yeah, I could never say if you're right or wrong, but yeah. I want there to be a reason and not for it to have been an owner who just wanted to get rid of their dog, so I'll think it was parvo from now on.

As for the vets in that clinic, they were very nice people. The one who euthanized the dog was an incredibly nice and empathetic man and he took me under his wing all week while the other was a hardcore surgeon and he was utterly hilarious and very intimidating. Which is a great combo, I suppose. I have no doubt these guys cared about the animals they took care of.

My best experience was probably the big operation on an elderly dog with a huge tumor that grew out of the spleen. It legit looked like the tumor was a grey, smooth rock and the spleen was a shriveled slug sitting on top of it. It was incredible witnessing them work on the dog and it took such a long time. Afterwards the intimidating vet took me out to the sink and cut the tumor in half and left me look at it inside. It was one of the ugliest things I had seen. Just all grey and hard and alien and the smell of it was something I have never smelled since. I can best describe it as a cold smell. I dunno.

I was tasked with babysitting the dog after it woke up from surgery. He was so scared and confused and kept snuggling up into my arms despite being a fully grown lab. I made sure he ate some food and got something to drink, but he kept ending up snuggling up against me and wanting kisses and hugs. It felt like i was comforting a little child who was crying. He was such a sweet dog. He was 9 years old and was named Rico. The family that owned him had a bunch of kids and I understood why they had decided to spend all that money to save him instead of putting him down because he was too precious. He was so loved. That tumor was huge. I can't imagine what it must have been like to carry that around in his body.

Anyways, I loved that dog even though I only got to spend a day with him where for most of it he was unconscious and split open like a hotdog, lol. I legit got to see all of his insides because the tumor was so big, they had to cut him open all the way. They poured water into him before closing him back up and holy shit, so many layers of tissue and skin to sow before calling it a job done. If it wasn't for the euthanasia of the puppy, then the operation of Rico, would probably have convinced me to become a vet.

This gave me a flashback to when I was 14 and interning for a week at the local vet.

Super eventful week where I got to observe operations on animals with everything from handball sized tumors to cysts and even one or two castrations.

Got to go with the vet to slaughterhouses and farms and all that jazz.

I also got to assist in euthanizing a dog and I think that was what made me second guess a career as a vet.

I still think I would have loved that type of work, but in my naive little mind, I thought that euthanasia would be done only out of mercy and necessity. If the animal was too old, too sick or too injured to save.

But I was wrong. It was an 8 month old puppy. I don't know the breed, but a smaller dog. Very energetic. He was so happy and excited. The owner came and dropped him off and didn't make eyecontact with either the vet or me. He left, almost ashamed.

I asked the vet what was wrong with the dog and either the vet didn't give me an answer or I have forgotten what he said.

To my 14 year old self, that dog looked completely healthy and normal. Why were we putting him down? I kept asking if we really had to do it. Couldn't we figure out a way to let him live and the vet let me know that euthanasia was what was going to happen today.

He asked me to hold the dog. He was such a happy puppy. I held him and he was very hyper. First the vet gave him sedatives. "Then he won't feel anything."

The puppy calmed down in my arms and I hugged his warm little body. I didn't want it to happen, but I was 14 and had no rights to the dog.

The vet filled a syringe with a neon purple liquid and I will never forget that because I didn't expect it to have a color like that. As an adult, I'm sure the color was to distinguish it from other fluids so that the vet would never accidentally push that shit into an animal that came for shots or sedation. But 14 year old me didn't know that. Just looked at that purple syringe as he pushed it into the dog and the dog became heavy in my arms.

I didn't cry because I grew up in the countryside and had already seen my fair share of births and deaths which are both brutal experiences, so I had an emotionally distanced approach to these things.

But I gotta say that it left a deep impact on me that I had helped killing a dog that looked so healthy and happy. I didn't think I could do that for a career. There was no mercy in killing an animal that had barely gotten to live and was so happy to exist. And maybe there was something wrong with him that I was just too young to understand or not allowed to know. Maybe he just looked healthy but was actually really sick. Maybe the owner didn't leave so much in shame as he left out of grief.

I'll never know. But from my perspective at the time, it was just so wrong to kill something just for the sake of it.

It's over 20 years ago now and I still remember the warmth in the dog's body and how heavy he became in my arms. He was brown and white. He was such a happy little guy. I don't even know what his name was, but I'll never forget.

Lol, well, if we go by that standard, then we can all ride the coat tails of the soldiers of every generation who were drafted to fight someone else's war. My country, per capita, were the country to lose the most men in Afghanistan. I have friends who went to Afghanistan and their experiences were varied.

But my point still stands: the bad in every generation came in intervals and affected groups differently. A lot of boomers had nothing to do with Vietnam just like a lot of Gen X and millennials had nothing to do with Iraq and Afghanistan.

But we all had slower lives and we did get to be relatively protected in childhood from the worst of the news out there.

In this day and age, youths and children are bombarded woth the most heinous shit 24/7 and it is everything, everywhere, all at once.

None of the prior generations have had back to back to back terrible world events happening like the youths of today have. We all live through it, but most of us are old enough and hardened enough by life that we deal with it.

I don't think it is a coincidence that anxiety among children and youths today has sky rocketed. And it isn't just news, it is also the negative effects of social media and that whole psychosis and how it distorts and perverts identity and self love nowadays.

There is no contest. It is not remotely anything our generations had to deal with.

And yeah, we can make a ton of whataboutisms where we pick out minority groups who went to war or were brought up in war torn countries. That has happened and will happen always.

But none of us old facts had the perversion of current day internet to deal with on top of intervals of this and that crisis and none of us had to deal with all our generations' crises all at the same time over the span of a few years. That is what I'm saying. We simply cannot imagine what it is like for the young ones today because their world is so far removed from the world we grew up in.

I am a millennial, neither an old or a young millennial, but an in the middle one. I grew up in a world without internet and had myself introduced to the world wide web in my teens. My childhood and teen hood is still much closer to that of a boomer's childhood and teen hood than it is the kids and teens today. I cannot comprehend what childhood even looks like or feels like for kids today. All I know is that anxiety and body image issues and thoughts of world problems have sprung from the mouths of kindergarteners and that is not something I have seen to this extent ever before.

The goofy part about this type of generational cock contest meme is that we all live through it together. Every generation alive has gone through horrific shit and every generation has gone through periods of peace. Some for longer than others.

I'm a millennial and I have been pretty lucky if I may say so myself. Compared to what young people and kids go through today, us older generations had it good.

Yes, our times of youth also brought on wars and economic struggles and what not, but they came in intervals.

Nowadays it is all happening at the same time and at lightening speed.

And us peeps, boomers, Gen X and millennials sit here all smug about it, like we went through ANYTHING comparable to what young people go through today.

We had it good. We are lucky to all be in our 30s and up during this stretch of history. I feel for the youths of today. They are the ones going through some shit in their formative years.

The 2020s are happening to all of us, but the kids of today have way more worries thrust upon them than any of us old fucks ever did.

I vote for "the screaming twenties" to be the official name for this decade. Brilliant.

It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.

Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.

I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.

It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.

I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative "social media" like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn't suck ass like they do nowadays.

The only comfort I have these days is that I know that the highs these mf'ers håbe been on since January is going to come back to them tenfold when all is said and done. Felon Musk is the first casualty because he was the dumbest one with the biggest hubris. But the others, who are probably looking at him and snickering at his downfall, are going to feel it themselves. Tenfold.

I'm not a patient person, but I am looking forward to this fallout when the dust settles someday. All these cunts are in for one hell of a ride. I thank Felon for giving us an appetizer early for what is to come.

But at some point, there will be no skip button. You know it, I know it, we all know it. This is like the creepy uncle who starts out by giving you candy and playing football in the yard. Then he wants you to sit on his lap before candy or football, but you can jump off whenever, until the day, he won't let you. That is what these companies have been doing. I still remember the arm twisting they did when they took over youtube and we all liked youtube so much, we ended up giving in to it.

The end game for them is to own all your personal information and have total control over your online activity. Them giving you a skip button is a fake comfort. They probably already know where you live too.

For my part, I have just accepted that my basic bitch info is out there. Whatever I haven't shared myself, have been shared either by a phone book service in my country or by databrokers who have sold my info to random companies and scammers.

Anonymity online is an illusion unless you are a very tech savvy which most of us are not.

If you were concerned, then why not send a private message instead? "Not trying to be rude", sure. Sounds like you're trying to intimidate. Maybe you shouldn't do that.

Because tooth fairies only want milk teeth that have fallen out naturally and is given willingly. If it started graverobbing dead people or knocking out adult's teeth when they are sleeping, they would lose their ability to fly and they would become a dark shadow creature, alone and hiding from the light of day. And tooth fairies love the sun and they love the smile on children's faces when they lift their pillows in the morning to see what the tooth fairy left them. That is what makes them fly and what makes their stomachs tickle with happiness.

And that is why tooth fairies don't rob graves.

What they have basically done is mug a rape victim.

I mean, if it was posted when millennials were young, it is still not at all accurate.

True. It is not a boomer who made that meme. It is either a troll or yet another bitter Gen X.

When the fuck do we get to retire from the "young and stupid" category?

Also, I had red eyes in most photos from my child- and teenhood. I spent a lot of money on film in my teens before I got my first phone with a proper camera in 2007.

Next you're gonna condescendingly explain what a floppy disc or a cassette tape is too? Even Gen z is old enough to know about those.