You know, while I commiserate with young people online about a lot of things, sometimes I really wonder how much of this complaining (especially how ao3 is hard) is learned helplessness. You think I had computer science classes in 1989??? Nobody taught me about computers, they were the domain of the nerdiest nerds back then, and typing classes were only offered as a part of business/accounting schools. I decided in my early twenties that I wanted to type really fast, went on Yahoo (yes, Google wasn’t even a thing yet), looked up a bunch of websites about typing, and went on practicing. Now I type 100+ words a minute. Later on I decided I wanted to learn coding, did a bunch of tutorials, and guess what I do for a living. It’s not that deep, you think I was spoon fed any of my big girl adult internet knowledge in the era of dial up and celebrating my first ever 8MB flash drive?I get it, things are different now, the internet is a big mess, but christ what I would have given back then to be able to look up a youtube tutorial on some knitting stitch or abstract factory. Get out of this passive mindset of endlessly consuming content from corporate marketing teams, and have some curiosity and desire to learn, man.
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Man, having taught myself to knit from a printed booklet as a teen, I would have loved a fucking video tutorial where I could actually tell what those confusing diagrams were supposed to represent.
I do think the current internet is designed specifically to train people out of curiosity and experimentation, but I still have little patience for people who don’t try to buck that trend.
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