Artemis Fowl deserved the fandom that Harry Potter got, that series was fucking nuts
Harry Potter: what if wizards played cricket on brooms and a trust fund orphan jock led an army of child soldiers against wizard Hitler also the author is a terf?
Artemis Fowl: What if Hans Gruber from Die Hard was 12 years old and Irish and he and his Eurasian bodyguard decided to declare war on the realm of the Fae also there’s no antisemitism or transmisogyny but a bunch of guns?
First issue of the best Batman run:
Harry Potter: What if goblins were just a really shitty cartoon version of Jews?
Artemis Fowl: What if dwarfs could unhinge their jaw like a snake and then dug tunnels by just inhaling dirt and then immediately shitting it back out again?
There’s Now a Name for the Micro Generation Born Between 1977-1983, and according to Dan Woodman at the University of Melbourne, it’s… Xennials. I’ve heard other names, quickly shrugged off: the grunge generation, the Oregon Trail generation, Generation Y. None quite fit. I don’t think Xennials does, either. It’s a mashup term, a shipper name for the two things you desperately want to bring together.
The thing is, a name produced by Venn diagramming labels already given to other generations doesn’t fit us. We’re not the overlap between the Gen X and Millennial generations. We’re the gap between them–and the bridge.
Our salient characteristic is not the seven years of our birth. It’s that we spent our seven teenage years in the mid ‘90s, specifically 1995 and 1996: the years the internet matured and home computers became affordable for the middle class.
Before that, if you’d been on the internet at all, you were very likely an upper-middle class subscriber to one of the companies that tried to create walled gardens of insipid internet-delivered pablum: Prodigy, CompuServe, or AOL (in that order). After 1996 or so, it became commonplace to have one of those services, or a connected computer you could use a little bit at school, or dialup at home through a local ISP, or a shiny new ethernet port in the wall of your dorm or office–and to use those things to explore the parts of the internet that hadn’t been built or curated by your provider. The internet at large was pervasive among the middle class by the late 90s. The original providers started eating their oxen and dying of dysentery before the boom years finished them off entirely.
And the important thing for our generation is that we encountered the new, wild-grown internet when we did. It arrived in our homes and high schools just as we were shaping our worldviews, and it wrenched us from local to global perspectives. We went online, we looked up fans and hobbyists talking and teaching about our favorite things, and we made friends. They were from all over the world! It was cool!
It was more than cool;, as it turned out: it gave us an ambient awareness of the daily lives of people in other countries. Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook have amplified this awareness to a constant scream, but it was there on mailing lists and in IRC chats and in newsgroups. Our teenage pen-pals were internet users, and we got to talk to them almost daily.
Generation X were mostly adults when they underwent the internet paradigm shift, with mixed results. In my work, I encounter a lot of Gen Xers who understand the usefulness of the web (or hell, built the thing), but are just not enthused about social media networks. They’re on Facebook so they can share pictures of their kids with their parents… and that’s about it. If they work in a field that doesn’t keep them online all day, it’s easy for them to retreat to the local sphere of awareness.
Millennials didn’t have to shift their paradigms at all; for them, the internet was always there once they started school, woven throughout their childhoods and educations. They grew up thinking globally–though somewhat hobbled by their incomplete social studies educations, since they’re also the No Child Left Behind generation.
Our generation did have to shift paradigms, and we didn’t yet have many teachers or parents who could explain this new world to us. We walked that bridge from analogue childhood to digital adulthood, one by one. Some of us didn’t take to it–the kinds of people who didn’t enjoy dinking around on dialup on a Saturday afternoon, soaking up the world’s coolest-looking assembly of human knowledge, largely stayed on the analogue side, and those folks are camouflaged as Gen X.
Those of us who work online, or found online communities we couldn’t have locally, have built our lives with those connections in mind. We’re camouflaged as Millennials.
But we are neither. In reality, we’re a single group that is sharply defined by the fact that we stumbled into the new global internet paradigm on our own. If Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL built the bridges between DARPAnet and the internet we have today, then our generation are those bridges’ travelers.
We’re the Prodigy kids, the proto-Millennials who showed up to the internet party a little early, accompanied by the buzz-click-whir of dialup connections in progress. We’re the salty aunts sliding drinks over to our Millennial friends, explaining how we remember childhood before the internet and adulthood before 9/11. We remember the world we thought we were graduating into until the Boomers’ post-9/11 isolationism, jingoism, and Islamophobia settled into our institutions like a virus for which we’d been vaccinated.
We have the advantages of pre-Bush era educations, memories of how things were done before we relied on computers, and a global network of friends and family who help us see news and perspectives other than our local 6 o'clock anchor’s. There’s a role for us to play in this post-Trump world. I trust we’ll find it.
I was talking about this article earlier when I was discussing millennial identity – glad it came across my dash again because now I can share it!
the statue in the bottom right is Le génie du mal, carved by guillame geefs to replace a different lucifer (known as either Le génie du mal or L’ange du mal) carved by his younger brother. why did joseph geefs’ lucifer get removed from the cathedral? it was too sexy. the statue was too sexy by far.
st. paul’s cathedral in liége went from one lucifer, whom they called ‘too sublime’ and removed because he was distracting ‘pretty penitent girls,’ to another lucifer, who they’ve left there for 170 years even though he’s so hot that satanists visit the cathedral to meditate in the presence of this Most Sexy Of Lucifers
here’s how i imagine that went down.
liege cathedral: hmm. you know what we need? a nice satan for our church. let’s ask joey geefs
joseph geefs: sculpts this
liege cathedral: no!! too hot!! now we all want to fuck lucifer! we need a different satan. let’s ask… the sexy lucifer sculptor’s BROTHER. yes. willy geefs is older so he definitely doesn’t want to fuck lucifer
guillaume geefs, who DOES want to fuck lucifer, and the only sign of his being older than his brother is that the lucifer he wants to fuck is somewhat older: sculpts this
liege cathedral: shit. well we don’t have any more money for lucifers so i guess we’ll keep this sexy lucifer
mlm, straight girls, and satanists in the vicinity of liege: NICE
“I have never been able to understand people with consistent lives – people who, for example, grow up in a liberal Catholic household and stay that way; or who in junior high school are already laying down a record on which to run for president one day. Imagine having no discarded personalities, no vestigial selves, no visible ruptures with yourself, no gulf of self-forgetfulness, nothing that requires explanation, no alien version of yourself that requires humor and accommodation. What kind of life is that?”
— Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (216)
