I, too, had the Happy Days board game. The only thing I remember about it was the score-keeping jukebox which was a cute gimmick.

I can't help but think that, if the game was good, I'd remember more about it.

(The fair was quite pleasant, thanks. Though they ran out of the chicken skewers I like.)

Makes me think of the famous IRA quote: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once – you will have to be lucky always.”

This is Saul bait.

Despite appearances on the Internet, I do not think all pop culture is evil or wrong. Marvel movies can be entertaining. I think you get it correct though when you discuss how fun and entertaining childhood is for many people. Adulthood is hard. You need to work, pay taxes, be responsible, etc.

But there does seem to be something really limiting in just sticking with childhood entertainment. There is also a cultural change. I think there used to be more importance placed on sophistication. It was cool to know about Truffaut and Goddard films and appreciate them. The modern pop culture fanatic insists that there is no such thing as liking anything deep or serious. People only pretend to like contemporary art, serious literature, jazz music, whatever to "appear cool and urbane." The pop culture fanatic insists that deep down we all prefer being overly sugared diabetic ten-year olds full of squeeeee!

I can't be the only person who thinks there is more freedom and interesting things in being an adult than a child.

There's a Romulan expansion!
And a Dominion expansion!
They have new ships and new hex tiles for the star map and new missions and new decks and all sorts of cool ship models and THEY'RE ALSO $50-$90 A POP!
The game was a blast (set to stun). I thought the combat did a good job of reflecting how it usually went on the show: The Federation were seeking out new life and new civilizations and boldy going on about it and suddenly the Klingons show up and start trying to poison the quadrotriticale. Most Federation ships won't be able to stand up to the power of the average Klingon ship (as my poor fleet could attest), so--just like in the show--their best bet was to pull of some incredible engineering feat (or in gaming terms, play a ship-saving card from their hand) to escape.

If I have a complaint about the combat, it's the choice of dice. Much like Munchkin, a single d6 just doesn't leave enough room for variation. But of course, when you've got three Klingon Warbirds ganging up on the tiny little USS Equinox, the die roll doesn't really matter, anyway!

Oh, and I guess the other complaint I'd have is that the only Klingon the Federation side gets to quote are Worf's lines. Really fun game.

I had the Happy Days board game. Aaaaaaayyyyy.
I might restart No Man's Sky--apparently, the last update made it more user friendly. I played my old save for an hour so last week and couldn't remember how to do everything. I'll probably start a new save but keep my old save, too. I don't want to lose all the planets I named.
(I hope you went to the fair today, as the weather has been fairly mild.)

While I agree that "do what you love" doesn't work terribly well as life advice, I can't help but feel a little absolutism in your position here Kristen.

Now in the Dead Poets Society case we have someone wanting to act as a job, which is a career you want to have a back-up for at minimum. But why must soccer or Roller Derby be careers to be worth pursuing? My office (which is a government department, just as a reminder) participates in an inter-office soccer league, and I know of at least one person in the department who is involved in Roller Derby. I've worked with amateur actors, artists and musicians. I, of course, have my own hobbies, I spend much of my off-hours playing games of various sorts. I note that the Ellen Page character in Whip It was moving her work schedule around to play Roller Derby, not quitting her job. That isn't a foolish youth pursing pleasure at the expense of responsibilities, it's a young woman balancing her responsibilities in order to pursue something she enjoys - to become her own person instead of a reflection of her parents. Isn't that an adult thing to do?

It strikes me as an essentially American idea that as adults we should do nothing but work until we fall over dead some day. An adult must meet their obligations of course, but many people can do that and pursue other things as well.

No trap intended; I started thinking about this post ages ago because I understand his reasoning, and I like to think about why things have evolved the way(s) that they have. This is what I've come up with that feels truest to me. Would welcome his thoughts and input but there is no adversarial intent whatsoever on my part, simply curiosity.

I was well aware upon writing that many commenters would have plenty of examples that don't fit the bill, but it's widespread enough that many of us find it offputting and as I've not ever heard anyone discuss it before (would love to read the NYT piece if it crosses your mind who wrote it) I thought it was worthy of discussion.

Thanks for reading.

There is also absolutely that element of it, which I skipped over because I felt like others had mentioned it before. But yeah, I def. feel many days like I don't particularly want to watch Saving Private Ryan or similar equivalent, KWIM? I just don't have the emotional energy left to spare.

I should have very likely split this piece but I liked the overall theme.

ps - love your idea! :) Fun!

Yeah, if I'd had enough time I'd have split it into three pieces, because I already split it into two, gonna post the other on my blog shortly. I felt some (totally self-imposed) time pressure on this one and it shows, unfortunately. Big gear shift towards the end. Would have been better for a month of rumination, no doubt.

I'm not super interested in offering solutions. I'm a libertarian and that means that I believe when there's a problem, eventually someone will come along and start fixing it, and I think we're already seeing that happen with quite a few of the superhero shows really bringing the heat (S3 of Daredevil, and the newly released The Boys, for example). I'm just naming the problem as I see it, because I'm tired of everyone acting like people don't want to grow up, when in reality they just don't want to read/watch a certain type of show.

Thanks for reading.

You had me for most of this piece until about the third act. I'm not on a Saul level disgruntlement with pop culture. I follow my local sports teams too much and watch too many dumb horror movies to claim to have totally jettisoned the cotton candy of youth. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't find a lot of it cringey, insipid, and over-indulgent.

But where this goes off the rails to me is when it turns into yet another defense of the merits of super heroes, YA literature, etc. which itself has become a genre of its own. I'm in the Xennial range so not a true Gen Xer but my parents are boomers and I agree that a sort of failure to pass the baton came out of the 60s. It's something I often think about with my son, and how I can do a bit better, and how we all could do a bit better with the next generation.

I don't want to criticize the essay you did write for the essay me, a random (and appreciative) reader for not being the essay you didn't write but here's the question I'd ask. How do you think we can do better? Because I feel like a defensive appreciation for Star Wars or whatever else isn't going to pick up the baton and better pass it off. To me the correction you seem to be calling for requires considering those issues.

My sense of it is: what do you do "in the clutch"? What do you do when there's an emergency at work, a death in the family, a budget crisis?

Some people flake totally on everything. They say they'll do whatever they're supposed to to take care of the emergency at work, but then they don't do it. And they sometimes lie about it. I've seen families (NOT MY OWN) where when a member was grieving, other close relatives "ghosted" on them. And I've seen people incapable of being responsible about money.

That's being childish.

I've become MUCH more unapologetic and open about traveling with a favorite stuffed animal to sleep holding crushed to my chest in recent months. Because I've come to realize: I'm pretty damn good at being an adult out in the world. I survived a major budget crisis at work and kept a smile on my face and kept helping my students even when both they and I knew I was being paid 1/3 of what I normally made one summer. I made some hard decisions after my dad died when my mom was too overwhelmed by other decisions she had to make. I've managed to live within a budget for the past 30 years.

So no one gets to tell me crap about liking "The Goonies" (which I just bought on dvd) or needing to watch cartoons instead of the news some times

One of the things the grief counselor pointed out to me yesterday afternoon, after talking to me for a while about what I was doing to cope and hearing my concerns: the things I was referring to as "distractions" (re-reading "The Hobbit" for about the thirtieth time, watching cartoons, going fabric shopping) are actually "breaks" - that I AM processing the grief, but humans need a break from the grinding quality of something like that from time to time.

I think it's a spectrum: yes, I'm sure there are the people who stay up until 3 am playing Fortnight and aren't functional at work later. But then there are people who spend a couple hours watching, yes, "My Little Pony" and who show up to work the next day *more* rested than maybe they would be if they watched what passes for grown-up fare these days....

I think the other thing is, a lot of us, we look at the world now and we see a nearly-literal dumpster fire. Huge fires in the Amazon and a circular-firing squad of passing-the-blame for who set them. World leaders who seem more interested in working out their own personal beefs with each other than the well being of the people they're supposed to lead. Being told in a pre-semester meeting that fundamentally, if a shooter comes to campus, some of us will die, and maybe faculty be prepared to make the sacrifice to protect the students. Talk of recession, which would wipe out the retirement savings of those of us in Gen X who were privileged enough to HAVE retirement savings. It's all terrible! And so I do take hot baths with fizzies in them, and think about what color I'm going to paint my toenails next, and spend time looking for amigurumi (crocheted toy animal) patterns online, and watch cartoons and work on my epic-but-totally-imagined mental story and check my Neko Atsume cats.

Because I'd go absolutely mad if I always had the awfulness of this world shoved in my face 24/7.

And I think in the 50s and earlier, grown-ups had OTHER coping strategies - they drank a lot, or they carried on affairs, or they ran off and played golf. Is watching cartoons *really* worse than downing three martinis most evenings in order to "cope"? I don't think so.

(And sitcoms used to be funnier and nicer some years back - somehow, something you said, made me think "What if The Golden Girls, but with My Little Pony characters" and now I am so on-board for this I may have to find a random GG script online and try to rewrite it. And yeah, GG had more than its share of racy jokes, but it seemed different, somehow)

Likely comparatively few non-fatal gunshot injuries were suicide attempts. Perhaps a couple thousand. Suicide attempts using guns have a success rate on the order of 90%.

Indeed. There's a good TED talk on this. TL;DR version: Goliath likely had macromegaly and very poor vision. A sling was both a hunting weapon and a standard weapon of war; slingers could reliably knock birds out of the air and were the artillery of their day. The stones in that valley were made of some really heavy and hard mineral, twice as heavy as a normal rock. So David's weapon had the accuracy of a modern gun and the projectile had roughly the kinetic energy of a .45.
Goliath never stood a chance.

ThTh3: I love when they find treatments that are so effective it's unethical to keep on with the placebos. Renews my faith that things can work out.

ThTh5: What should we think if a hundred years from now we still haven't found such a planet? Idle curiosity, it's another of those things where I'm almost certainly not going to live long enough to find out if the negative answer is correct. I spent a chunk of my technical career doing predictions, but seldom more than ten years out. I seem to be making longer-term predictions these days, and it's frustrating as hell that I won't get to find out if I'm right.

It definitely existed in a situation where an unscrupulous leader could manipulate the populace, but pre-railroad, this was unavoidable.

Just like finding an animal with sharp teeth implies it ate meat, finding scumbag-friendly dogma (like Indulgences) implies that abuse happened on a vast scale in the past. And we know from the likes of Martin Luther this was true. And since the Church can be on any side of any issue, then this was a choice.

It is "unavoidable" that there will be some abusive Priests, even in the modern era. However aspects of the church are designed to enable them. The well oiled church machery and well established church practices which protect transgressor priests from any consequences and enable his next round of misadventures are the source of the current sex scandals, not the "unavoidable" issue that there are going to be problems when you deal with people.

My expectation is the same machinery also works for fiscal crimes, we just don't hear about it because it's less interesting.

You say that “God’s special teachings match up well with what serves the church’s interests, that’s where we get Indulgences and so forth.” Does it really match up so well? Take indulgences off the table. What else?

Priests as superheroes. Divinely inspired teachings that can't be argued with, i.e. whatever the Priest says goes. Separate legal systems. A total lack of accountability to the people the church supposedly serves. A religious structure and dogma which claims Priests are needed at every level of interaction with god, and historically, every level of politics/control.

The idea that you can be tortured forever for thought crimes against the Churches teachings seems pretty much in the Church's best interests. Ditto the entire concept of Papal infallibility (discovered right after he lost his army).

If you were going to create a self-serving religion, it’d be wildly different than Catholicism.

What would be beyond "priests-as-superheroes and the-voice-of god?

Did the Church ever fail to preach that child-rape is sinful?

So what? They talk a good game and they have great marketing. However "character" is judged by what you do when you can get away with it, not what you proclaim. Tony Soprano talking about how a nice guy he is doesn't make him a nice guy. Me claiming to be a world class supermodel doesn't make me that.

The Church really, really wants to claim moral authority. They also have problems with things like enabling child-rape. They're extremely reluctant to deal with that problem in spite of the disconnect.

If an organization fails to police itself for *that*, then my expectation is it also fails to police all sorts of things... and this is a matter of design. The flock are there to be fleeced. The Priests aren't accountable to them for a reason. If that reason is "god says so" then we can substitute "the priests say so" and that works just fine.

These are not new problems and were why Martin Luther tried to Reform the church, which resulted instead with splitting the church.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation