I’m close to your dad’s age. The part you may have a hard time understanding is the internet for us X-ers was less of a destination and more of a means to an end. More like a tool. The best way I can describe it is like this, in the 90s the internet was the vehicle to get somewhere (the train to pirated software or naked pictures of Asia Carerra or hobbyist forums, etc etc). Later generations see the vehicle as the destination, which is drastically different.

He has no concept of roguelikes

That’s rather ironic given that Rogue is an absolute dinosaur of a game. Your dad wasn’t even a teenager when it came out.

What you’re seeing here is that while some people keep up with whatever the shifts are in culture, others lock into whatever the cultural modes are at a certain timeframe of their life, typically mid thirties to early forties, and any changes after that just don’t compute. It being Internet culture-related is just the current variant on a long running phenomenon.

I’m a few years older than you, spend all my time on the computer and understand internet culture very well, and I can’t fucking stand it. I’m genuinely envious of people like your dad. Nobody needs to know what “copium” means, I think memespeak is intellectually and comedically lazy, and frankly just annoying. I also don’t understand why anyone would spend their limited time on this planet watching someone else play a video game, but you do you.

sorry that came across as aggressive but I genuinely detest mainstream internet/gaming culture and wouldn’t begrudge anyone for not understanding or caring about it

All I can say is, there is only so much interests you can take in before you feel

To your dad, internet culture is akin to what remembering the planet’s names is to Sherlock…

If its not much relevant to his field, why should he bother with it?

Maaaan just be glad your dad isn’t a boomer.

My parents don’t use computers except for work. They have a million tabs open on their phone which is full of malware. The only thing they use the internet for is to read the latest click bait news articles about how young people suck and China is going to kill them.

They think piracy is evil and would tell you that if everyone pirated that companies would stop making treats.

They don’t know what a meme is and if you showed them they would probably just be confused and disgusted and lament the state of the youth.

They regard video games and D&D with contempt as something for weird losers.

The only hobby they have is renovating their house and watching TV (Mostly renovating shows, News stories about youths coming to rob them, or crime dramas) really loudly because getting a hearing aid would be admitting they’re old.

I would kill for parents like yours, they sound way cooler than mine.

Being tech savvy, and being literate in “Internet culture” do not have to be synonymous. I’m in between your dad’s age and your own. I would consider myself more like you dad though. Why, am I illiterate to “internet culture”? Because I think it’s stupid and pointless. I refuse most social media. Reddit and now Lemmy are about it. YouTube is for product reviews, music videos, diy, homelab, etc. I have no desire to watch someone else play video games or follow YouTubers. Mr. Beast type stuff is just pointless IMHO. I don’t get the influncer crap. Now I like memes and think they are awesome. I also just text people, the whole snap chat, tiktok stuff annoys the piss or of me. My wife is the exact opposite is me in every way stated above.

If not for this forum I think I’d be almost like your dad, my entire awareness of social media is filtered through this and I would not otherwise go out of my way to become aware of it (I did not ever previously so on this I’m confident).

30+/-2 myself, my father was also a pirate so that’s been going on since day 1, and contributing to open software for more than half my life now, every career role has been some data or programming thing

Sounds like me, TBH. Aside from the g*mes.

Born in 78. Raised on apple 2e and 286 clones. Built my first pc when i was 10 from scrap parts donated by my dads work (he worked for Uncle Sam as a civvie contractor).

Internet culture? Wtf is that? I had a facebook account for three days when they first dropped the .edu requirement. Deleted it. Never had insty, tiktok, etc. My YT feed is remarkably nonpolitical. It is about 99% plumbing/vehicle teardowns/technical in nature. Ive never watched people play game on twitch. I know it exists, but it isn’t something i do.

For me? Theres a cut off point where i know the shit exists, i just dgaf about it. My ‘online’ life consists of this place, and this place alone tbh. I browse reddit, but i dont have an account and make no posts there. I use it mostly for the technical knowledge for my stupid hobbies like sewing, and hammock making and how to make whoopie slings for said hammocks.

Your dad and i are just a few years apart in age, and aside from this den of iniquity, probably pretty damn similar. I guess it is age. You just reach a point where some shit doesnt really matter, and the shit you grew up on/are familiar with is how you look at life.

Hows his music collection? Anything modern, or mostly older stuff? I listen to some new shit, mostly bluegrass, but by and large, everything i listen to comes from a certain time frame.

That probably doesnt answer fuck-all, but your pop isnt alone.

My brother has a degree in CS from an ivy-league university but I was the one who had to slowly explain GNU/Linux and free software to him. He’s leagues smarter than me in maths and programming but I have to hold his hand when he’s installing a new distribution (he’s only installed linux like 3 times vs. me with 50+). For context I’m a foreign language major and have not taken any math or CS courses outside of high school. I find it interesting but I think that’s just a thing personal to my older sibling.

Not exactly your situation but yeah I think your Dad is having an existential crisis internally and is just ignoring everything new that doesn’t fit into his worldview. A lot of people from that generation of computers can be like that (judging from my high school CS teachers).

We need a reminder. Your parents just did it more often.

Your parents are prime Gen Xers. Here’s my perspective as a prime millennial with boomer parents and Gen Xer coworkers, including some who are as old as your parents:

1. Meme culture started in the late 90s-early 00s and was spearheaded by xennials on forums like SA. This was back when memes weren’t called memes but fads. So, you wouldn’t say the “all your base are belong to us” meme but the “all your base are belong to us” fad. I remember sharing fads I found on Newgrounds, albinoblacksheep, and Gamefaqs with my classmates in middle school. Meanwhile, your parents would be in their 30s raising you as a baby. This is the headspace they would be in when meme culture was born. If they’ve seen me in middle school, they would’ve just seen some weird 13 year old getting hyped about shitty animation they saw online and other weird 13 year olds being bizarrely fixated on the weird 13 year old’s poor attempt at trying to describe the shitty animation with a 13 year old’s vocabulary. It shouldn’t be that surprising that they don’t really get meme culture, that it gets filed under “weird shit that I’m not going to waste brain processing power to figure out.”

2. It’s a common adage among IT tech support that the most tech savvy generation are xennials and tech literacy gets worse the further you get away from xennials until you arrive at boomers and zoomers (no offense) who are mostly tech illiterate. So, your dad being tech savvy is just him being a Gen Xer. Part of the relationship Gen Xers have with technology is that they see it purely as a tool, no more and no less. Your dad’s description of how he sees Youtube is pretty much how Gen Xers see technology in general.

3. I’m super biased, but I actually prefer gen Xer’s relationship towards technology the most. The other generations have flawed relationships towards technology. Boomers are hopelessly addicted to online slop and fall for the most transparent scams, and zoomers have their sense of self mediated by social media, which by itself isn’t that bad except social media is completely governed by corporate algorithms. And as for millennials, I don’t like my generation’s relationship to technology either. I think millennials as a whole were far too naive in the amount of damage social media could’ve done and by the time many people within my cohort woke up, they’ve already invested so much in their particular social media site. It’s like “wow, Facebook is fucked up, too bad I’ve already uploaded 10000 photos, so I might as well continue to use Facebook.”

4. Your dad just has pleb tastes in games lol. His taste is honestly closer to some millennial dudebro who only started gaming when the Xbox was released. Elitist Gen Xer gamers act completely different from your dad. If anything, they would probably do nothing but play Rogue for like 30 years, rant about how Bethesda ruined Fallout, or play some inexplicably difficult RPG made by Polish devs. Or they would pretty much only consider arcade games to be real games. My boomer dad is really drawn into 80s arcade games like Pacman and Donkey Kong, going so far as to set up MAME for me, but he pretty much doesn’t consider console or PC to be “real games.” I guess the Gen Xer version of my boomer dad would be someone who really likes Street Fighter 2 or Streets of Rage or Metal Slug. But yeah, the gaming part kinda cracks me up because he doesn’t have the same taste as his generation.

There can be great relief in realizing that keeping up with pop culture is arguably meaningless and worthless and one’s life can be plenty filled with wonder and experience via the backlog of human history or, like, a pleasant walk. #TeamDad

I’m going to frank:

Why is this a problem? I wish more people knew how to use tech and logged off.

your dad sounds cool and I want to make out with him