RetroGaming

I remember playing the Atari when it was new(ish). I have seen plenty of consoles come and go. I watched people handle my old toys like they were fossils before the Xbox 360 was a manic twinkle in Steve Ballmer's eye.

But I think my childhood stuff was about the last generation of stuff that was already kind of old by the time the internet really came into the popular consciousness.

It's cool to see people grapple with watching things that they remember from their childhood, things they discussed on internet forums as they came into being, become old. The internet is new enough that this is still a pretty recent phenomenon. Like, kids who were ten when this came out are thirty-one now. Old enough that some of them have their own kids, and more of them are dodging questions from their parents and relatives about kids. They're old enough that teenagers treat them like authority figures rather than somewhat older peers.

It happens to everybody, but this is the first group of humans where the whole process played out from start to finish on the internet. That's pretty cool.

Congratulations, gen z. your collective and individual crises of mortality are the best documented in human history.

So far, anyway.