All posts by Kage

Old Dude thinks about youth, gives unsolicited advice to people younger than himself at same time.

This article is aimed mostly at the youth. It’s a time, long ago, in a Galaxy far, far away, known as 2008. Back then I was 22 and unemployed as a majority of you guys seem to be, according to the internet. I did my job as a student and got the As, took the SATs, would have been pretty much garuntee ivy leagues in my age range. However, much like Obama’s change, the economy was going to tank and change everything. It was bad enough as is seeing jobs hire people with felony wraps being hired, while you worked hard, did your due diligence, flew the straight and narrow and worked towards your goals. Life’s unfair, or so I heard from people in my age all the time, bitching about the position they put themselves into. Where’s my commercial as the old saying goes? Nowhere. They drank, they drugged, they had failed relationships, they got pregnant and spit out a kid with a random and kept bemoaning their life. It’s hard to find a position that you put yourself into as something I’m supposed to understand 100. The other side, sat their ass on the couch and looked for attention on YouTube.

Now, I equally had access to YouTube as everyone did, but I saw no value past hosting on it. Sitting around in my room all day was something I mostly did as a teenager, didn’t sound like a great way to spend my 20s. So for me, I went with EBay. Back in the 80s, the Reganite was recalibrating from a late 1970s recession. 1992 would have as well and I can remember vividly how often my father would talk about the price of gas then vs the price of gas in 1992. He had a job and he would flip things on the side sometimes for extra cash. Maybe it would pan out for me as well? Well around this time, 2008, he was running a non profit that was gifted to him by a clergyman around here, because he had the experience and business acumen. That happened a few years before 2008, but he still kept it up. So since couldn’t find a god damn job, I asked if I could take the mini cola fridge from him. I took it home, cleaned it. Spent a dollar on my debit card, opened a EBay account, and put up my Nintendo DS game collection along with D&D and Whitewolf RPG collection to kickstart this thing. Two positive reviews later and boom, we sold the mini fridge next and it snowballed from there.

I was working on several other things at the time, writing being one of them. However EBay played way better than the writing was. Hence why this website came 3rd after EBay. After was college then Bestinyourgirl.,com. However I was setting things up for that back then.

I worked two hours a week on EBay and enjoyed it. Some days I woke up to $100 dollars. Nice given that it stretched pretty well in a recession world. Remember, recession and inflation are two different things.

I was definitely doing better than my peers and while it wasn’t going to make me rich, at least being able to get what I needed to do was good. I was given near perfect conditions for this too. I was young, not married, no girlfriend, no college debt, no kids, no car, no Obama care payments or other bullshit in my way. This was pretty much the best it was going to get at that point in my life.

My recession was way easier than most others. Money flowed well enough. While there could still be tough times here or there, at least I wasn’t wasting away a druggie that cared about how they had to choose their kids diapers or their next fix and I know you know that trope well, since TikTok used to be filled with the people my age that had “narcolepsy” passed out with a fellow peer of yours in the backseat. horrible things. At this point I was very thankful for the lot I was given in life. I barely spent any of my money on fun things, albeit I did redo my Freddy costume from the 90s in the modern world and bought myself a nice bit of pipe tobacco and maybe the odd cigar.

And I may or may not have listened to this a bit one too many times.

Here comes the money!

For the most part, I was happy in that. Now a days I have nothing to show for it, cause it didn’t allow for a lavishly decadent lifestyle, but it afforded me the things that truly mattered, such as time with my best friend, time with my family and plenty of guitar playing.

The conditions now, for you, are kind of similar, except for the pesky bullshit of WW3. Too be fair, we both had the war on terror looming back then as well. However you have the negative aspect of inflation, which makes the dollar stretch less. This sucks, but is manageable. You face druggies now using internet sites to fund their fix, while You get yourself ahead for the more important things in life. Fact of the matter I been there, done that and got myself in a decent positioning. While there are things I would do better, life through us all a curveball. I chose not to have kids, given the horrible pool of eligibles. You guys have some good peers and can maybe make something of that with a family. In my middle age, I’m finding the Gen Z family TikTok’s to be cute. At least I’m not a pathetic old man, so I got that going for me.

The moral of the story though, life gives you trials by fire and men and woman who walk the path are forever forged in steel. So keep rocking and don’t let this bullshit get ya down.

Here’s another song I listened too one too many times. Maybe it will serve you well too!

It’s about make a little music every day til you die, it’s a beautiful ride.

Real 90s Trends: Why you desperately out of touch, middle aged man children still struggle to fit in.

One of the many axioms of youth is that they gravitate towards what’s new and this makes perfect sense for a developing, since it works on asymmetrical wave lengths. Anything that exists before you’re born has “always been there.” Anything new that shows up on the planet in the time you’re conscious of your surroundings is interesting.

So why was Rap, a 1970s style genre, (Rappers Delight by Sugarhill gang, 1979, often considered the first rap song) considered popular among millennials, in the 90s? That’s like saying you just listened to ABBA.

If you were young in the 90s, you should have gravitated towards these things, not an exhaustive list:

  1. Grunge. It came in about 1989, but stayed and became a sound of the 90s.
  2. Industrial. Marylin Manson, NIN, and a slew of others.
  3. 90s techno. Its granpapy may be disco, but it found its own footing in the 90s. This would later give way to dubstep which came about in my 20s, or right as we went into the 2010’s.
  4. Nu-metal. Limp Bizkit, Korn, Disturbed as some people place into this genre.
  5. Death Metal. Also came about in the late 80s. It was difficult to find this anywhere prior to Amazon giving it more accessibly by the last half of the early 2000s. (2007-2008)

Those are the big four of them. Rap was not a new genre. Was rock and roll old? Sure, but it reinvented itself into relevant genres. Something the rap, hip hop and other genres ever did. It’s still lies stagnant in today’s world, desperately struggling for relevance with the youth, while Nu-Metal and Death Metal are seeing a resurgence. Right on Gen Z! 🤘

If you’re a millennial, and you were the really out of touch one, you probably listened to pop/rap and bought brands like FUBU, SouthPole, Boss, Tommy Hilfinger. You also were desperately out of touch as Jnco, Kik Wear, ball chains, trips, were all new. In other words, if you didn’t look like you hang out at hot topic, you were out of touch. Also, your parents probably dressed you and had to justify the expense of $100 dollar shirts and pants.

However, in their obtuse nature, they dared think they were indeed trendy. Try explaining to them that Pretty Fly for a White Guy wasn’t about how awesome they were, it was mocking them. I’ve had this conversation.

Now if you were in a different neck of the woods, and inclined towards “rebellion” you may have bought booze. If you didn’t look, the new brands were aftershock red/blue, red dog, zima. If you were in the “trendy” dipshits club, it was boones farm. How do I know that? Because my parents occasionally drank it. And what teenager wants to grow up to be their parents? Sure as fuck not me! Being straight edge was cooler than drinking.

Now that I’m older I drink Budweiser and JD, but that’s because I spent my youth being in touch vs millennials that don’t realize IPA’s were trendy in the 1800s.

Thankfully my pictures don’t look retro, so I have that going for me.

When it comes to TV, Wrestling was in new from. Most millennials waited until the end of the Monday night wars to watch an episode. You were WWF or WCW, and some were both. Too bad WCW didn’t win the war. You had Stargate, SG1, Babylon 5, That show about being underwater with Brody from Jaws. VIP or Baywatch. Amongst other shows. All shows associated with nerdiness. In my neck of the woods, they pretty much watched nick as nite. While I’ve seen nick at nite, there was a lot of pretty lame old shows.

The reason I know that is because one chick, in middle school, called me Fonzie, disrespectfully for my leather jacket. Wtf? It’s a Terminator 2 jacket you bitch! Was my reply.

Let’s not forget the X games, those were dope. Snowboarding, skateboarding, aggressive inlines and BMX the like would have been new-ish. In New England though, that makes you out of touch.

Now they’re fighting with Gen Z and still struggling to adapt to a changing climate, constantly showcasing how little they ever actually been with it.

The word trendy even implies new, by its nature. Nostalgic tendencies seem to be driven by failure. Two things that conflict with one another, because the past and future are two different things. Although romantiscm and nostalgic aspects are similar and I’ve used the Hashtag on TikTok. Some Gen Z’ers seem to have some romanticized tendencies, and unlike nostalgic seems mildly understandable. I mean, I like time travel and in a way, that’s tied to romanticism more than nostalgia.

Ironic that such a hip and into it youth, should be seen as being “out of touch”. Funny, cause now the people my age say it about the Gen Z youth, cause it’s never a millennials fault, like the Skinner Simpson’s meme, “No! It’s the kids who are wrong.” Which is laughable as hell, cause as I pointed out the youth go towards what is new and while a few like some older things, at least they’re not trying to be millennials and steep themselves in “influencer” culture. The ones doing that are as out of touch as onlyfans “models”.

To be fair, at least the barely literate kids, now middle aged adults, of my day, did struggle through the first harry potter novel, before it became an identity prop for praise, while they regurgitated what they watched in the movies. So they have that going for them.

But they elected a black man, to president! Yay, cause he was young and they weren’t. It’s an unintentional consequence of their ignorance. The age old adage of a broken clock being right twice a day.

Least we forget that the 90s were highly figurative. Enough millennials were concrete and literal.

Hence where I think they have fetishized fitting in and relevancy, as subconsciously, they know they don’t fit in, they know they’re misfits and not in a good way. The unintended consequences of those are being felt by the fact that an absurd number of Gen Z youth are unemployed. It’s part of the generational divide and that’s not good for the future as it rest on the youth getting jobs. Gen Z doesn’t need to come up to your level, you need to come down to theirs. Get rid of the “How do you do my fellow kids.” Mentality and understand the youth culture for the first time in your life. It’s not about what you like, it’s about their individual tendencies.

But in order for any of this to happen, millennials would have to be introspective, open to growth and change and admitting they’re just not with it. I’ve been waiting for that for decades, good thing I was smart not to hold my breath.

My thoughts are best summed up by the movie just friends, when Ryan Reynolds’ character fights with brother and he says “you’ll always be fat to me, Chris.” because no matter how many figurative pounds you shed, you’ll always be out of touch and a joke. If the Gen Z’ers didn’t pick up on that by now, they definitely will.

Stay metal 🤘

How to be productive in relationships, a guide.

Men and woman view relationships differently. A woman puts more stock into them, a man doesn’t. Men have historically been simpler than woman. However, leave it to idiotic millennials to fuck this paradigm up. So you heard of mansplain. Well now there is man keeping. Except man keeping isn’t unique to just men, it’s females that do it too.

Mankeeping is defined as a lopsided relationship trope where one partner is shouldering the emotions of another, without it being a two way street. Except men have delt with this bullshit way longer than woman.

My longest relationship, not a dating one, was about 30 years long. My girlfriend from when I was 12. We both met in preschool in the 80s and we stayed friends off and on through, due to moving around, for 30 years. It finally fell apart because she went back to doing annoying shit that I didn’t like about her in middle school. I also knew her sister for equally as long.

My next several relationships, non romantic, are two years away from turn 20. I met them in a MySpace chat, one on FB and I’ve been on good terms with most of them ever since. My bestie being the strongest relationship because we had the ability to grow it more. One friend of mine is from England so obviously we had just the internet and another of mine lived in the sticks that you couldn’t get to and now resides in the south.

After that, most of my friendships lasted about 10 years, like one male friend of mine from kindergarten that lasted up until I moved to NH.

Anything less than 5 years has been a rarity for me.

In all that time I have learned one thing and that is that why friendships are great, they’re not the end all be all. I was good in life without my friends and I would still be fine even if we never met and that is because the first rule of any relationship is a healthy sense of self. You have a whole life outside of your friends that includes family too. Without this foundation, your relationships will crumble.

The second most important thing in a relationship is setting it up as is and being as open about everything you can up front. You’re setting the tone for however long this thing lasts. Be honest and real. Too many bitches out there fronting as is.

Another way of framing this is the 1960s Batman show. If you seen it, it’s on Netflix if you haven’t or YouTube, a running gag through out the show was that Batman always had the right tool and the right time, but unlike James Bond that has Q to set up the gadgets, aka foreshadowing, it’s hokey. So if you’re a ballbust be that, if you’re in need of emotional support, be that.

The third part is that all relationships are two way streets. It requires both to be there for one another, not parasitic. Millennials have made all relationships woefully inadequate. They’re about as good at it as their idiotic boomer parents. They think they’re liked because enough people placate their ego, but the reality is that if pushed, not a single one of those people will be there for them.

The lopsided aspect has things in common with NPD. I know I’ve spoken of things like this is the past and I’m working on a bigger, overall peice in it. However, no relationship can be one way.

The reason i liken it to NPD is that, they often exhibit great deals of dejection from quasi hurtful things. Things that are so mirco no one would take your dejection seriously.

Take this example for instance. Back in the 90s I was checked for cancer in Boston. Thankfully I didn’t have it. However, this negatively impacted both of my parents, both were dejected and both worked towards supporting one another. That’s why you expect from a partnership, especially when things impact the both of you. Same when things happened to my siblings. This guy isn’t what we’re seeing with millennials. They act like things only affect them and not their entire families. There is a non medical term I like to use for these people and that’s “loser.” And we all know, as the onion points out, depression hits losers the hardest.

Communicate with your friends and partners. This is another important role in keeping relationships going. without it, everything is going to hell and millennials suck at this. It’s almost impossible to communicate with them when they’re not in your life, never mind when they are.

Which leads me to my final aspect, emotional intelligence. Read their body language and understand them. Like one time my bestie and I had a misunderstanding when I made a joke. Normally she takes it well, but not that night. Even though I knew it was more likely all the other bullshit in her life that made my joke seem worse that day, I had to man up and apologize because that was indeed my bad. I saw her body language was in dejected mode and worked towards keeping us on track. If the relationship is worth having, it’s worth sollowing your pride for.

Thankfully most Gen Zers I meet understand these and at quite young ages. People my age could learn a great deal from them.

So let’s recap as to how to start having better relationships.

  1. Sense of self
  2. Laying it all on the table
  3. Reciprocity / mutualism
  4. Communication
  5. Emotional intelligence

Working towards getting these basic elements down will result in better and stronger bonds.

Stay Metal🤘

Basic Internet Bitches and You

So the world full of idiots. Everyone but the idiots themselves know it. However, you occasionally come across an idiotic moron so dull that it perplexes even you. So numbnuts wanted to throw down in May of last year. So the dullard starts e-dicking. He’s a Mensa guy. Cool! I remember when I hung out with embittered bitches too. It was called my school years. So he got in with less IQ points than I have had since birth. I started to humble him with the whole having fucked a woman with 4k followers and the whole getting solicited by a woman with 40k or so followers and a couple other similar stories. He wanted me to go see him and redo our whole internet “sparing” with his “fans”. Well we’re almost in July and he never made good. Like we didn’t figure this out then. However, since he was a waste of flesh and oxygen, I’m burying him here for my own pleasure, because I don’t live to please, I live to piss all the basic bitch millennials off.

“Legit” musician uses cheap looking bass to impress absolutely no one.

In Honor of Jaws 50: An excerpt of a screenplay from a teenage version of myself

So I’ve been writing since I was young. I’ve done every major style I could produce and spent unteen million hours honing myself. Writing seems to run in my family. So my first screen, vs back in the 90s when I worked out a couple pages here and there for learning purposes, came about when I was 22. However, I was working out ideas in 2004 as well, long before YouTube even existed. My brother and I decided we would try to co-write a screenplay together, individually working on different scenes by ourselves and then I would type up our stuff into a word 1995 document. Remember, this is right before YouTube and we didn’t have any real reason to do this outside of wanting to challenge ourselves. So the premise? Parody Jaws. The take away? Writing screenplays by yourself is so much easier of a task. I don’t understand why Hollywood has to have 15 bajillion writers for one movie. However, it was a fun experience. So for the 50th anniversary of Jaws, here is a small example of what I was trying 20 years ago.

————————————————-

EXT. Emity docks- DAY

A crowd starts to gather excitedly. Roy walks over to a fisherman.

(Roy)

What’s all the commotion?

(Fisherman)

We caught the sharks

(Roy)

Sharks? As in more than one?

(Fisherman)

Yeah, i caught one, Ben caught one. So on and so forth.

(Roy)

Well congrats.

Roy and the fisherman shake hands as a photographer takes a picture.

(Hooper)

Roy, that’s not the shark.

(Fisherman)

What do you mean that’s not the shark. Look at the thing, it’s vicious.

(Hooper)

Its bite radius is too small for one.

(Fisherman)

Yeah, and?

(Hooper)

And it’s a dolphin.

(Fisherman)

A WHAAAT?

Above: How it could have looked if AI had existed in 2007. – couple years after we wrote it. Fisherman wasn’t supposed to look like Robert Shaw though.

Fun fact. The original shark we had in mind was a giant dildo that we put a WW2 dive bomber face on.

Also a fun fact, the original unwritten ending was going to be the Trex from Jurassic Park randomly eating the shark, making fun of Jurassic Parks deus ex machina ending.

Very glad my late teenage version of myself never got the chance to make this. Not quite cringe, but goddamn!

No doubt Jaws is a Great movie and possibly the only near perfect movie to ever get made. Hope to see it turn 60, too. Here’s to swimin with Bo legged woman. 🍻

🤘

Popeye:The Revenge Movie Review

INTRODUCTION: So when Winnie the Pooh became public domain, some Indy producers decided to get cute and turn it into a horror movie. It worked, albeit it was a poor movie. However, it started a trend that didn’t need to happen. Now we have the famous sailor hero killing people. Groan!

PLOT: Jason Vorhees returns again…wait, I mean popeye.

CHARACTERS: Sparse as fuck.

ACTING: Almost 1980s bad, which to be honest is actually the best part of this cringe fest, because Hollywood has been so sterilized with acting that finding a horrible performance is actually a nice change of pace. Look, it’s rare for me to dogg on someone for their looks, normally you got to be a real asshole for me to do that, but these actresses aren’t even ready to be on public access, never mind a movie. The point of casting pretty people is because they make good propaganda. Why? Think of a murder. Grizzly and ugly. Think of something like a hamburger, juicy and beautiful. Beauty is tied to human psychology with aesthetics and seems to always positively associate with good vs bad. So if you cast mid card actors with terrible development, it makes the movie even less effective. Well, at least one of them had nice tits, so there’s that, I guess.

STYLE: Low budget. It looks 2007 and that might as well be the 80s style wise now.

FX: Tom Savani called, he wants his retro fx back.

MUSIC: horribly mid as per the usual. You know the internet has plenty of musicians than can score well and much like Hollywood ignores the music industry in favor of horrible wanna be John Williams, we get garbage.

CONCLUSION: a movie no one needs, no one wants and managed to turn an icon into a knock off jason Vorhees. It’s no easy task to be this big of a fuck up, but boy did these assholes say “hold my beer.” Which I guess is ironically a success, because hey, here they are getting attention for it, which at the end of the day, most people are all about. Too bad this pitiful pos won’t recoup the most important part of doing this, the money.

2 out of 5 stars