Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:A little Birthday treat for Dakka's very own confused, infirm, incontinent old Duffer, Frazzled, he who was once known as JFrazz, for no discernible reason.

This here be a thread for us all to whinge about the younger generation, the world in general, and to view the past with ridiculously heavily Rose tinted glasses. Tinted to the point where you can't see anything due to the colour and tend to blunder into things.

You don't really have to be that old. But you do have to be grumpy. If you are young and optimistic, then sod off. Right now. Out my thread. Out. Out. Out. Out. Out. And once for luck....OUT.

Right, now the idiot yoofs have been shoed away, I shall begin with a little tirade. A tirade against something which gets right up my nose. Something so mind bogglingly banal, if defies description, despite me just having given it a fair crack.

What is this fellow misery merchants?

It's anything sodding Retro.

I am a child of the 1980's. I was born in 1980. I missed the first 5 months. But the rest of it I was there for. That was my decade.

So why do the 'fething' Students (please note, I mark students in one of two cateogories. Plain old Students, who don't really harm anyone, and 'fething' Students, to whom it does not occur that pinching a Traffic Cone to wear as a hat has in fact been done before, and much like someone on a Stag Do dressed in drag, it probably wasn't all that funny the first time around to be perfectly honest) insist on phoney retro nostalgia. They weren't there. They don't know how interminably crap the 80's actually were. Sure, some good stuff came out of it, like He-Man, Transformers, The Young Ones etc, but for the most part the fashion was crap, the music was crap, the food was crap, the culture was crap, the telly was crap, the films were crap. Everything was crap.

And it boils my blood to hear people a good ten years my junior going on about how great Marathon bars were. Well, they still are, it's just some arse decided to rename them Snickers. Why, I don't know. It's the same thing, different name (which actually, in another thing which incenses me. It's not Cif cream, it's Jif. Jif makes sense. Almost short of Jiffy, which in proper English is a short period of time. But Cif? You even have to pronounce it Sif. So why not spell it with an S instead of a C. Tossers). You can tell someone was blatantly not there when the cretinous little bunghole keeps going on about how things were so much better. They weren't. Seriously. You think Britain has problems now? 3,000,000 unemployed under that old Witch. We're in a global financial meltdown, and we're only just scraping 2,000,000. When you then look at that per head of population, you really see how bad things were. Nobody had any money. Except the arsing Yuppies (I'm sure the US had them as well, though you may have used a different word, like Greedy Dickheads to describe them) who made a point of rubbing it in to the unemployed (many of whom were desperate to work and earn a wage) just how rich they got from Thatcher screwing anyone that wasn't in the South East. Note Yuppies only lived in London, or regional offices for London based firms.

BMXing wasn't great either. That managed two things to a kid back then. Injury, and humiliation. Try as we might to do cool trick, the ramps didn't work, the brakes didn't work, you tried to do the spinny thing with the front wheel and that didn't work. Before long, face met tarmac, your tyres burst, the girls pointed and laughed, everyone got fed up, and went inside to watch The A-Team.

Dinner was a fairly basic affair. Very occasional Chinese, Pizza didn't really hit over here (well, not to my knowledge) until the Teenage Mutant Hero (no, thats right. Ninja was a bad word, in Britain, it was swapped for Hero.) Turtles kicked in, and that wasn't until what, 1989? Arse end of the 80's and we finally get something resembling exotic foods into our diet.

So why the false nostalgia for something which was so blatantly crap? Oh! I know! Because you're a 'fething' student and make a habit out of pontificating and talking absolute gak whilst trying to fill in the blanks in your day between your Media Studies course and the Student Union Show Your Bottom contest.

And it's even spreading into Wargaming! IF you were actually there for the beginnings of Fantasy and 40k, then fair enough. But how many little Oiks out there claim to be playing a 'Malal' army, or running Squats using the Imperial Guard book? All they know, they learnt from Wiki. It's just silly nerd snobbery, like Trekkies (yeah. I called you Trekkies) debating which usage of the Reverse Cockthrust Ganglion Wench is canon, and which was just sloppy writing.

GRRRRRR!

Right, feel better now. Your turn!

Kilkrazy wrote:I know some guy who's older than all of you. He used to be a real dude, playing 40K before most of you lot were born. He was pretty good, too, won a bunch of tournaments until he had an argument with his son.

Nowadays he's so fed up with the state of the modern world he does nothing but sit around all day on this big chair he's got.