Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says "It has no fixed meaning."

You lost me here. This is where you start to sound like a boomer. The annoying thing about 67 isn't that it doesn't have any sense behind it, it's the sheer ubiquity that kids say it. Which, unless you have kids or work with kids you probably really aren't seeing. Look at old MLG montage parody videos. Why was that guy saying "wow" and winking funny? There's no reason. It is just something we laughed at. 67 is the same.

A lot of everything else you say I resonate with. Ads are getting more intense and ubiquitous. My country is going mask off with fascism and disappearing citizens. There's a lot to be upset about. I don't think much of it is related though, you know? Ads just suck because they want more money and that just means showing more ads.

This is some serious advice. Find things to be thankful for, no matter how small, and focus on them. Your perception is your reality. What you fill your mind with is what you see. I know it sort of sounds obvious but, if you're thinking about miserable things all day you'll be miserable. If you think about things that make you happy, you'll be happy. I'm not saying to ignore the bad things or to give up, but you can't fight back if you're miserable. It is okay to take a break. It is okay to want to be happy.

If you're in the northern hemisphere we're in the time of year that gets dark super duper early. Seasonal affective disorder is real. The older I get the more I realize it. I'm not saying blame your thoughts on it being less sunny, but just be aware it can be a component.

I hope you can find some joy. 💜

You being confused by 6 7 is literally the reason why it's popular. The younger generation is rebelling against the older generations by doing things differently. You are just getting old.

Absolutely not.

We live in a time of so much entertainment, that there is simultaneously more bad and more good content being produced.

Everyone knows 67 = basketball star Lamelo Ball's height (6' 7"). It's a reference to a song that talks about that. It's now just a silly in-joke reaction to hearing/seeing the numbers 6 and 7, literally the exact same thing as millenials and 69.

Well not everyone knows that I guess - just everyone cool!

Also how weird is it that 2 of the biggest memes of the past decade - the dab and 67 -are both made famous by sports stars based in my hometown of Charlotte, NC (not exactly a cultural mecca)

The entertainment is still pretty good but the entertainment business is sure fucked up. The most brazen, spit in your face moment for me was, "It - Chapter 1" on one streaming service and "It - Chapter 2" on another one. They're not even trying to hide their fuckery anymore. Go Community Theatre!

Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.

For what it’s worth, I recently learned you can turn off the gooner porn bait visual novels in the store without turning off incidental sexual content games like BG3. They have gradations of sexual content.

(This doesn’t solve the other categories, but I suspect you can tailor your store experience to limit those as well.)

You just cant rely on algorithms to show you anything good, they might but dont expect them to. You have to search for content yourself and also try blocking the shitcontent so you might find anything decent more easy. In a way, internet is kind of like post apocalypse wasteland now. You might find something, or even communities that have a lot of stuff, but a lot of it is just crap.

Maybe try archiving some of the things you like best in case it disappears one day. Also try connecting with other people and communities you find that are nice, we have only eachother against the corporations that just want to show us brainrot content.

Until the pandemic the answer to this question was always you are getting older.

Not since though. Entertainment is fucking dogshit now. Good TV shows are few and far between. Most movies are utter dogshit.

Influences and micro content is just fucking terrible. I swear to god all of it is just PG Porn. Oh look a channel about a couple sailing around the world. Every shot is at her ass level in a bikini as they film the content.

theres a lot of hogs out there eager to gobble up the slop

Radio and TV always sucked. That's not a new thing. The only time I see ads is during sports.

You have less free time as you age. Happens to us all.

This is where social media shines. Go to any forum that's focused on one of your favorite entertainments and ask the users what their top 10 things of late are. Check out the most mentioned. Fuck it's December. There's likely year-end lists all over the place.

You already have a shared passion with those folks so it's likely you'll have similar tastes.

Try listening to one of the records they recommend on your commute instead of the podcast that agrees with you.

Sure that show seems stupid but it's 22 minutes and I can put it on while I make dinner. ...and since when do I hate stupid?

When you were younger you prided yourself in ignoring the spoon-fed bullshit you referenced. It takes a little bit more effort at our age. You obviously care about it.

Cheers.

Yes.

Things have been getting shittier by the day for years.

I did the math, and it looks like when the Twitter crowd came online everything went to shit.

Go to book stores and retro game stores. And the library. Some libraries have movies, music, and videogames in addition to books.

Old man yelling.

As we age, we tend to lose our connection to what's new and hip. So instead all we see is lame pop culture stuff. I think back to my teen years; my parents were only really aware of the non-pop stuff because I exposed them to it, from music to movies.

I still find plenty of new and interesting media it just takes more effort. It all came naturally back when we had plenty of young friends but now we're old with old friends and legacy media connections.

I got around to watching The Amazing Digital Circus last night. Pretty good!

Last month I listened to Sophie, because I enjoyed some hyperpop and wanted to hear more. She's not my style, but it certainly is different.

Jup. Old.

At this point I accepted we will not get stuff like lord the rings movies ever again from any studio.

If in doubt, raid the local used bookstore. Yeah, and do use uBlock Origin, Freetube as your YT front end, and maybe sail the high seas. Curate your entertainment.

I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.

I'm using Bluesky mainly as a newsfeed.

Set up ad blockers. Both in your browser and on your network. Stop using commercial streaming services. Torrent your content and watch it locally.

Use Tidal for music. It’s pretty good

Yes, it was better.

Now its still good but you need to go underground to find it

Join small clubs. Ditch corpo net and go on the small web. Leave social media walled garden bot farms. Have blockers on all devices.

And shut off the internet/phone on weekends if you can. Makes life better. Go play that ps1!

Ads are destroying everything. IDK how much of any industry’s budget goes to ads, but whatever it is, the consumer is paying for it in multiple ways even if you don’t want the thing being advertised. It’s baked in to the cost of the product or service. It’s shoved in your face driving down the highway or listening to music, or even on your refrigerator. And they do their best to handcuff you by withholding some facet of your product or service unless you watch the ad or at least permit it to be displayed even if you already paid for the thing you get the ad on. Youtube is utter garbage with everyone filling space in their videos with maddeningly useless fluff and shallow chatter (like and subscribe!) to increase the adspace available do so their videos get pushed to the top.

Entertainment? IDK, it feels like people haven’t had an original thought in decades. It’s rehashing or reviving old ideas in worse ways. Music is lyrically and musically shallow (yeah, pop music has always been mostly like this) but it seems like it’s overrun with low-effort junk. We have almost no artists who can actually weave a story into a listenable and desirable form. Maybe some indy stuff is good, but some people seem to think that different and obscure suckiness is good because it’s not mainstream suckiness.

Even books are shit a lot of the time. It’s like every author has to dumb down the book and write it as close to movie format as possible so they can hopefully get just that - get a movie deal. NYT bestsellers are emotionally manipulating triumphs, failures, Lifetime TV crap designed to be consumed on airplanes after your third vodka tonic makes it seem deep and meaningful while you’re stuck in that middle seat.

I rarely watch any TV at all. No broadcast or cable channels at all. Some streaming. I might try out a dozen books before I find anything that sticks.

Entertainment has been fully consumed in a desperate churn to be the next short-lived viral “thing.” There are too few who take the time and effort to actually create material instead of being the 150th person to make a reaction video to some clip. So yeah, I think you’re right. Things have become incredibly shallow and short-lived as desperate people fight for their viral hook and ad money.

Artists are being treated worse, that is for sure, why do the details of if artists can still manage to create equally good art as we begin to treat them worse and worse matter? I don't know if I want artists to be capable of that past a certain point as it just ends up worse for artists anyways when they do this and normalize even worse treatment of their profession.

Ebbs and flows of how life dictates how it wants you to consume things has always been there, but you still have choice. For new stuff, you can dig for what's quality to you. You don't have to give it to the AI sloptubers.

And yes, getting older objectively makes it more difficult to get into new things, but it's okay to embrace that. Have your backlog of stuff you KNOW you enjoy.

I'm here to offer no answers, but a few fun activities that help me get out of that same mood. I feel you.

• Play some DOOM WADs. It's December, the Cacowards are here, and it's a beautiful time of the year to play through some of the most revered levels and mods. Pretty pure if you remember that the original devs open-sourced the engine, the community then built many source ports and now continues to churn out all levels of quality of mods and levels.
• Read some books. Feels bizarre and unusual these days to consciously choose something slower and ad-free and intentional, with nothing to interrupt you (per the power of the medium alone, alone). Not to mention the endless choice of genres and works to choose from. The bonus here is writing stuff yourself, which has a super low barrier of entry.
• Play THE FINALS. It's been going well for over 8 seasons now and offers the most unique FPS experience so far with its core gamemode and some twists on staple mechanics. As a long-term Counter-Strike player and a massive FPS enjoyer, this one is a breath of fresh air in so many ways.

That's on top of other wonderful suggestions in this thread.

But I think the most important would be to learn when to slow down and step away from the attention- and data-hungry apps and sites and whatever.

This sounds like a perfect opportunity to start reading books.

Society changes Book is book

Media changes Book is book

Trends change Book is book

Government changes Book is book

Games get outdated Book is book

Servers get shutdown Book is book

Book will always be there in its original format, no ads, no change, no tracking, no brainrot, no trends, no algorithmic content creation.

Book is book