#this was prompted by a reddit post as well as sims 4 modding and cc moving to curseforge

[rackartyg]

it continues to astound me how people my age … just kinda don’t know how to use computers. like, i was born in 2001, right? i’m an “older gen z”. what is it they say, “digital natives”? there is a significant portion of my age cohort that is proficient with computers, but the rest just aren’t. and the non-proficient share goes up and up and up the later the birth years get. it’s not that they don’t use information technology, they use it every day, but it’s phones and tablets and, at most, for school, chromebooks, which are computer-shaped but not much else. like, mostly i’m thinking about file systems. people don’t understand them.

i probably wouldn’t either if it weren’t for the fact that since i was a small kid i’ve been into (1) pc gaming and more importantly installing mods for pc games, and (2) writing, starting out with word 2004 as my primary word processor, because my dad had an old license lying around around the time i started writing longer stuff that wasn’t practical to keep in physical notebooks, and only moving on to google docs and cloud storage in my teens, when school forcibly assigned me a chromebook that i HATED because it is literally just a glorified internet terminal. that’s all it does.

like, it was modding minecraft back in 2012 when it was actually a bit difficult that taught me the basics of How Puter Work. so i was wrangling files and directories starting at, like, nine or ten years old. i used the family desktop and it sat at windows xp for so long we skipped vista entirely, because xp was fine and upgrading cost money, until i modded minecraft too hard and it caught fire and we had to replace it lmao

so i’ve always just assumed everyone else my age knew roughly as much as i did, that i wasn’t particularly adept, just kinda lower end of average. but nope! for my age cohort, i’m actually a genius! just the fact that i sometimes have intuitions about what might be wrong, and don’t need to consult the kinda arcane manuals every time, because i’ve troubleshot PCs enough times on my own, makes me a god among mortals. and i’m only slightly exaggerating.

this effect is even more pronounced for my little brother (2004). he knows more than me tbh, especially hardware-wise. and on the software end he has more practical knowledge than me, i’ve gotten kinda complacent. back in the day, i modded our minecraft clients and he set up servers for us on our raspberry pi. (we had to limit the world to a like 500x500 block square otherwise it would melt lol.)

meanwhile his friends can barely manoeuvre chromeOS because they’re used to the even more locked-down iOS. if a program isn’t on the app store, they have no idea how to install it. what’s the ‘downloads directory’. and my friends are like this too! even the very online ones! especially the very online ones! it’s so fucked!

#this was prompted by a reddit post as well as sims 4 modding and cc moving to curseforge #which is only ‘easier’ if you want EA to nanny your game even MORE #literally there’s nothing as easy as installing mods for sims 4. what the fuck #and you know i 🏴‍☠️ that shit and on the site i use for that sims players keep making absolute FOOLS of themselves #they don’t know what a zip file is. mainly because they can’t see the file type extension because windows hides that by default now #im guessing #people going into hysterics over a .bat file in the comments section #it’s EXTREMELY embarrassing #she speaks #simsbloggin #young woman yells at cloud? #a tentative entry into girl gamerhood #the only reason i got into pc games was because my parents did not want my brother and i to play video games at all #or at least as little as possible #so they were never going to buy a console. but the family pc was already there #so they could not stop me #… and then years down the line they ended up helping to finxance leagues more expensive gaming pcs #my birthday present a couple of years ago was 75% of my graphics card lolololol #my current pc which tbf is a monster and hilariously overkill for most games i play cost 24k SEK which was all my money at the time #like. all of it. #i had been saving for YEARS #oh! we did get a wii. in like 2012. mainly because it had movement games on it i think #like just dance and shit