The title of this post may be a bit late. I have officially been a dad for 9 years this September and a second time 5 years last August but this week really showed that I was indeed a dad dad. When I say this I think of my own dad who when asked if he knew what class I was in at school , he would always get it wrong. He would always know the price of a pint however. My daughter came home from school and asked me what things meant. Now this was not an academic question. It was more of a trending viral social media question and for the first time ever I did not know a single thing she was harping on about so I had to say "I am not sure"
DE DE DAHHHHHHHHHHHH
How did this become of me. I used to be down with the cool people and down with the homies. But now these different questions were being asked of me and I was not uptodate with the latest viral sensations. I no longer frequeent Facebook , Instagram or any of them social medias. TikTok every now and then when someone sends me a link but overall I am off social media. I asked @bozz the other day what won of them meant but he is an auld fella as well so he told me to feck off. 🤣 Even after looking a few of these things up , I am still none the wiser about what this things are. So I shall put it to Hive so us auld fellas can piece together what some of these things mean. I will give my perception of the viral subject and if you have any opinions then blurt them out! (No pun intended on the blurt comment)
Ok lets start
Child saying Ohio all the time Example "That guy fell off his bike, Ohio. hahahahahahhaha"
So I did a bit of research. Ohio is the state in America who every other state takes the piss out of because bizarre and weird things happen. A bit like the Paddy Englishman , Paddy Irishman and Paddy Scotsman jokes in my day. So if anything funny happens in school where a teacher slips and falls into an open wheelie bin and then the wheelie bin takes off down the road and a horse then kicks the wheelie bin and the bin ends up in a bramble bush. This is an Ohio moment.
Italian Brain Rot Example :"That's Italian Brain Rot" Some internet meme of some kind that is viral on TikTok with these odd shaped characters and just a genuine head melt for me anyway. Not sure why these things are big. They give me nightmares.
POV Example: "POV teacher: Stop chatting, do your homework" I've seen POV before but in different areas. I didn't think my 9 year old would start saying it whenever she is talking about someone else. I'm a bit creeped by it"
Jet 2 Holiday Example: Something funny happens and the kids sing the jet2holiday song Still don't have a clue what this is about. Tik Tok viral sensation about the jet 2 holiday music being dupped on funny things happening I think but when I looked it up on Tik Tok I got a load of inuendo videos that were very concerning.
6/7 Example: just people randomly shouting 6/7 This is a strange one because even after I looked it up I am still non the wiser. It is meant come out of a song by a rapper Skrilla who mentions 6/7 in a song. Now this is about a basketball players height for all I can listen to it" Some other sources say it is about the 6/7 joke which is "Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7,8,9. My daughter mentioned 6 ,7 in a maths question so all the boys just kept saying 6,7 to her so her head was melted. I was a bit concerned by this and asked her does anyone bully her. Her answer was that the bullys don't come near her because she puts on the waterworks if they do so this scares them. She then started laughing and mimicked starting to cry which looked very real. Absolute genius tactics from the eldest. She went on and said she does this to me in board games so I go easy on her which came as a big surprise. She is after winning 3 from 3 in adult Catan against us so the feeling sorry for her because she is 9 has now been stopped.
So those are a few examples . You also have the ones from Fortnight and the other day I asked my daughter what her group name was and she said the boys called the team "Entity".
En- ti - fucking - ty???? What is this ?? The Apprentice. But no apparently it is fortnight. Which makes me thing what parents are letting their 9 year old kids play fortnight. I was reading a couple of @tarazkp posts about this sort of thing as he has a smallie as well and what protection he has in place for this sort of thing. I am delighted my daughter is asking me about these things as I know she is not on these platforms herself but it is concerning who IS watching them to come to school and copy these viral things on social media. Which makes me think I would much prefer my daughter to be on a platform like this than on TikTok. So some of these platforms that are being built such as Snaps may actually have a niche market for Hive to focus on.
I was on a flight a few months ago to the UK and there was this young girl beside me. Probably 18 or 19. She spent the whole 1 and a half hour flight zooming in on a photo of herself. Fixing little blemishes and zooming back out again. She was at it the whole flight trying to make herself perfect before she published her post. I was in shock. The pressure these teens are under to look like a supermodel is crazy. I kind of felt sorry for this generation. In my day mobile phones were just coming out and the Nokia 3210 came out when I was 16 for example. Camera phones didn't arrive until I was finished college. No evidence which was great. You can't do anything now without people taking a video of you. It takes away from a night in my opinion. The closest I used to come to this was the annoying lad that told you everything stupid you did last night but I soon got rid of these bozos from my life. Before a work Christmas party some of the younger staff were talking themselves up to getting wasted at the party. I was thinking "Here we go". I'm gonna have to break into the emergency fund with the cost of the drink for the night. I got the 3 young ones 3 drinks. 1 got a whiskey sour, another got a gin and tonic and one more got a neat jamesons. All very trendy and cool. But instead of drinking them they just took photos of them. It took an hour and a half to get through the whiskey sour, The gin wasn't touched and the girl who asked for the neat Jamesons disgarded it in a plant beside her seat. I think I spent €20 on them the whole night. Meanwhile the old timers were swamping the Guinness having not mentioned anything about getting wrecked. Now I have no problems with the young ones not drinking but it just shows you that the drinking culture is well and truly replaced by the GYM culture in Ireland. Nobody is getting hammered anymore, people are not letting themselves go or blow off any steam either which is actually a negative thing. They will never really and truly have the same craic as we did when we were their age.
I remember in my 20s when I went on holidays with my friends and we were all hungover in the sea, I think it was called Ladys Beach in Aiya Napa. We had a great night. One of the boys had lost a quad, another one had woken up in a house full of Chinese people with no English. Someone took home a duck and we would up to quacking.Two other friends spent the night with bendy stays on the ear that looked like a security head set and were kicking random people out of the bars. Another friend pretended to be a saxophone player and when the band finally let him up to play, it was clear from the off that he never played a saxophone in his life. That afternoon the sun was shining , we were in this clear water around in a circle talking about the night before and my friend Ken said to everyone. "I wonder if anyone in the world right now is having as much fun as we are" And I thought to myself that I had spent the whole holiday in tears laughing. There was no chance of that. The Irish really and truly have a better craic than any other nation. Maybe the Scots could contend or even the Welsh actually. They are all mad bastards. But the answer was definitely no. There was nobody on Earth having more fun than we were at that moment in time. I always remember those words because the new generation will never be as crazy and I kind of feel sorry for them. It wasn't their fault but I think technology has fucked them.