I thought Jupiter Ascending was kinda half decent, though super uneven and sometimes distractingly bonkers. I thought Valerian had its moments and different casting could have made it into something. I even liked "65" once I realized it was just a small-scale rumination on fatherhood and loss, an acting exercise that happened to have dinosaurs and a light glaze of bad sci-fi.
This is actually a pretty big assumption for some of the more outlandish claims. When you dig in a bit, you find many of them are kind of repetitive tropes and generally come from Senatorial-class writers about emperors whose policies were less friendly to that class.
Not to say they couldn't have happened, and even in those days better to exaggerate than to invent from whole cloth, but it seems like an unusually large number of "bad" emperors had the same kinks as each other or the same traits that the literature had always considered "unmanly."
Maybe how angsty you were feeling when the internet arrived in your town? I dunno. It feels very appropriate though, that the forgotten gen X would spawn its own even more liminal sub/pseudo group.
One: Hello, fellow Xennial. I'm just a couple of years older than you.
Two: I find we sort of sort ourselves based on life experience, family structure, etc. I have an brother 7 years older than me, so I skew Gen-X. My wife is less than a year younger than me, but she's the oldest and her parents are a touch younger a d fair bit less traditional than mine, so she skews Millenial.
The generations are a convenient shorthand to discuss broad trends about how certain cultural and economic factors affect the shared experiences of certain cohorts, but they're pretty silly, especially on the edges. Chronological astrology, really.
Seems like what a lot of people want is a hybrid of Usenet and Reddit, but what we have is more like a bunch of reddits that are willing to talk to each other. Certainly better for governance and redundancy and as a kind of organic load balancing in a cash-poor ecosystem, but the "killer app" would be (optional?) persistence of communities outside of instances.
True, but there is an almost childlike literalism to the small amount that is unique about Mormon theology, plus it all arose in the era of the printing press and governmental archives, so there are fewer excuses. It's also culturally very top down and high pressure, as you are keenly aware. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the mainline LDS church a cult, but it's definitely closer than, say, the Episcopalians.
Well hello fellow exmo. I gave it up in my late teens. Found myself playing "devil's advocate" too much in discussions with my friends. Tried to pray about it all Joseph Smith style, but just got absolutely nothing. Realized that I had never enjoyed Church, never felt at peace there, and just generally came to the conclusion that the essential problem of free will and comparative religion and the extremely specific truth claims that Mormonism requires weren't holding up. I was also completely eeshed out by the thought of a patriarchal blessing, and I felt no calling whatsoever to go on a mission. I wasn't as traumatized as some, growing up in the Mormon hinterlands of the American south (NE Florida) meant the LDS were a little less high and mighty and I had a circle outside of the church, but the pressure to conform and stay is very real.
I only resigned formally when my mom sicced the missionaries on my never-Mo wife and me after I moved to Texas.
Ultimately, even as religions go, its theology is very silly and its most ardent adherents are real jerks.
On the flip side, the variety and market segments that are open to fountain pen people are as good as they've ever been (since ballpoints became a mature technology), both for ink and pens. Sure, the Sheaffer School pens and Waterman Phileases and Cross Whatevers aren't hiding in Office Depot anymore, but you can still find a Varsity or a wick-feed Zebra pretty easily, and the Internet is so much faster than it used to be. I guess I'll never pop into the cigar shop by the office to pick up a spare Lamy Safari though.