Guilt?

[ellehumour]

I remember an episode from an indie music review site - I felt bad about one of the singer/songwriters,  I think her name was Charlotte Sometimes? Because she just seemed like a 16 year old kid with some issues. She said she'd had some traumatic experiences on tour at the age of 14, and was now trying to focus just on making music - I guess the main thing I feel bad about is when people have some kind of legit trauma, which I guess ties in to people with honest-to-god serious mental health issues.

I also tend to feel guilty when it seems like the people being featured are kids. I mean, I figure, adults have made their bed, but a 16 year old kid posting about his inflation fetish or how he's mad that his friends are or aren't having sex or whatever is potentially gonna grow up to the point where he's embarrassed by all the weird/obnoxious shit he said and did, and then here there's this living record of it, complete with commentary.

[Acierocolotl]

I also tend to feel guilty when it seems like the people being featured are kids. I mean, I figure, adults have made their bed, but a 16 year old kid posting about his inflation fetish or how he's mad that his friends are or aren't having sex or whatever is potentially gonna grow up to the point where he's embarrassed by all the weird/obnoxious shit he said and did, and then here there's this living record of it, complete with commentary.

Sure.  On the surface I agree with you.  Spectrum X is a fine case in point, and I'm positive they'll grow out of all that ridiculous nonsense about believing in being a fragment of a demon soul with lords of evil gently nibbling on sandwiches.

I don't think there's any harm in remembering that a person was a dipshit as a kid.  I certainly was, and I defy anybody anywhere to tell me they didn't have their teenaged dipshit moments.  The key point is that (going back to Spectrum X), could anybody track down the Adult X to the teenaged Dipshit X on the basis of, say, their resume?  Well, no, unless they've still clung to that demonhumping persona, in which case they've got some serious issues that need sorting out with the help of a psychiatric professional.

Furthermore, with such things like the Wayback Machine and anybody with the mental wherewithal to reblog or save webpages on their personal storage, we're not the only teenager embarrassment service on the Internet, not by a country mile.

So to try and wrap all this up:  if they were smart enough and used a ridiculous alias as a cutout, didn't leave any real live spoor to make Internet detectivery easy, and grew up a bit, I don't feel any guilt in making fun of teenaged dipshittery.  It will have little impact on their lives as they grow up, and I think you'll find that in every case that we've used teenagers for amusement, they've all used aliases and none of this will impact their real life.  Those few who do look back are just as likely to find dozens of repositories of their moments of idiocy, F+ barely even registering.

[montrith]

The only reason I can still keep on living is the knowledge that the Fplus will never find the stupid shit I wrote as a teen. I look back a my younger self and I just want to tell her it's a GOOD thing Facebook hasn't been invented yet.

[Delcat]

I have volumes of terrible shit I wrote as a teen indexed across a multiple of notebooks.  I transcribed and self-snarked a fair chunk of it a few years back.  It was surprising cathartic, actually.

[Isfahan]

Everyone, you can assuage your guilt by heading over to the ten-dollar secrets thread and filling it out. I'm going there now to talk about how Teensfahan used to think he'd make a living playing Quakeworld Team Fortress. QWTF Demoman was my jam back then.

Okay, well, I guess I don't have to go to the thread now.

[Lemon]

I think reading the work of teenagers is pure, uncomplicated fun. If you had guilt in that, your perspective would be off.

Angry teenagers (along the lines of Just Rage posters, Slipknot fans, terrible poets, et al) are really simple creatures to assess. They're spoiled, undereducated, hormonal, opinionated, and absolutely filled to the brim with bullshit. And the constant need for praise and feedback means they're not interested in writing a poem so much as they want somebody to say "Hey man, nice poem."

I think it's easy to love because it's easy to identify with it. I was a particularly angsty teenager, and now I find most of those traits charming. Let me stress that I find them charming in teenagers. If you're 26 with two infant children I'm far less forgiving of your stupidity, but if you just want to write a screed about "CONFORMIST SHEEPLE R IDIOTS MUDVAYNE RULES!" it's fine, because we're all operating on the assumption that you're still figuring shit out, nobody's holding you to any of this, and presumably you'll be able to come back to this later on and realize you wrote something foolish.

[Lemon]

(PS: Drestina is in the episode 49 show notes)

[Delcat]

(PS: Drestina is in the episode 49 show notes)

(At last!  The attention I never got as a teenager!  The F+ UNDERSTANDS me man.  Stay tuned for 180 hand-scrawled pages of a 13-year-old learning magic and shapeshifting and then vampires and nagas happen and I guess someone's eyes got gouged out somewhere?  It might actually be a Spanish assignment.  This handwriting is seriously difficult to make out, sorry.)