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Toward a unified theory of “millennial cringe”
Vox ^ | Updated Dec 19, 2022, 6:24am EST | By Rebecca Jennings | @rebexxxxa

Posted on 12/24/2022 2:12:00 PM PST by thecodont

Thirteen years ago, a man was sitting at the Denver airport. Bored, he turned his attention to his favorite website: “I see a lot of people on laptops around using the free wifi,” he wrote on the popular subreddit r/AskReddit. “Just on the off chance, any fellow Redditors here?”

What followed was a lively exchange among the platform’s most ardent superusers deciding how best to identify a fellow Reddit obsessive in the “real world.” The phrase they landed on combined several pieces of mid-aughts message board slang and coded inside jokes, yet, crucially, was otherwise meaningless: “The narwhal bacons at midnight.”

Today, this phrase is more likely to elicit groans and sighs rather than excitable recognition from anyone who was active on Reddit in 2009. That’s because “the narwhal bacons at midnight” has become a relic of an era nearly everyone who spends time on the internet feels deeply embarrassed by, whether they participated in it or not. Count it among the similarly mortifying phenomena of ironic finger mustache tattoos, job listings for “software ninjas,” the wildly popular YouTube channel Epic Meal Time, rage comics, idolizing Ron Swanson, Advice Animal memes, and dogespeak (“much feels” “very art”) and in particular the tone they’re associated with — hyperbolic, cutesy to the point of smarminess, and stuffed with seemingly “random” nouns. In short, it’s cringe.

“Cringe” is a shortened form of “cringey,” which itself is a shortened form of “cringeworthy,” referring to the embarrassment (often the secondhand kind) of witnessing something that is awkward, uncomfortable, passé, or cliché. Cringe content — whether created in earnest or as parodies of earnest cringe content — makes up an astonishingly large portion of the social internet; it combines everything from hysterical Twitter scolds to Instagram thirst traps to the entirety of the TikTok Discover page.

(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...


TOPICS: Computers/Internet; Humor
KEYWORDS: cringe; internet; millennial
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To: old-ager

I was here in ‘98 but my first account was lost to time and historical rubble. I remember prattling on about abortion. Someone said, “Where did you come from?” Thus my first welcome. I felt the glow.


21 posted on 12/24/2022 7:14:04 PM PST by Louis Foxwell (We are not fit to live free but must be enslaved to control the chaos of our unfettered appetites.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Do you remember Ababa? Amos the Prophet?


22 posted on 12/24/2022 7:17:16 PM PST by Louis Foxwell (We are not fit to live free but must be enslaved to control the chaos of our unfettered appetites.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Class of 98 here. But I was in before sign up dates were a thing.

L


23 posted on 12/24/2022 7:24:41 PM PST by Lurker (Peaceful coexistence with the Left is not possible. Stop pretending that it is.)
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To: Lurker

lol We have been together for a long time Lurker. Jim has been good to us.


24 posted on 12/25/2022 4:26:55 AM PST by Louis Foxwell (We are not fit to live free but must be enslaved to control the chaos of our unfettered appetites.)
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To: old-ager
I’m a new guy. I didn’t get here until late 2000.

I’m even newer. Early 2001. :)

Thailand?

25 posted on 12/25/2022 7:04:24 AM PST by Allegra
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To: Tijeras_Slim
Joined in 2000 and almost immediately had A+ Bert fry me in a FReepmail for something or the other.

LOL. A “baptism by fire” of sorts, indeed.

Remember Registered? He did some legendary stuff before memes were really a thing.

26 posted on 12/25/2022 7:07:20 AM PST by Allegra
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To: Allegra

Registered was great.


27 posted on 12/25/2022 7:15:58 AM PST by Tijeras_Slim ( )
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How does this Vacuum-head namecheck "epic bacon" 8 times and not know the origin?

Because she couldn't, because she's a dumb Millenial. You had to be there.

It came from the original 4chan (pre-Obama) crowd-playing The Oregon Trail every Saturday night, and one night after a long losing streak, the crowd came up with the idea of just starting out loading up with nothing but bacon, and we won. "Epic bacon" was born.

28 posted on 12/25/2022 8:47:47 AM PST by StAnDeliver (Tanned, rested, and ready.)
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