Mitch's Blog

An 18-year-old San Diego man pledd guilty to kicking a sea lion on a viral video. Sea lions are generally unthreatening but they are wild animals and will attack if stressed or threatened. They can get up to 200-800 pounds and have sharp teeth. I watched the video of that kid; he was cruelly picking on an animal that did him no harm. He’s lucky that a criminal sentence is the only penalty he received and if the sea lion had attacked him back, I would have thought of it as evolution in action.

2026-08-14

Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is.

Allegra Rosenberg has a good explanation, and she continues with a meditation on misconceptions that Generation Z have about life in the 90s and 2000s.

This misunderstanding is not unique to GenZ; I think it’s a phenomenon of being in one’s 20s. I remember reading Dickens (possibly “David Copperfield”) and coming across a casual mention of the main character sending his wife a letter one morning — he worked on one side of London, lived on another side, and expected the letter to arrive that afternoon. Mail delivery in London at that time was twice a day; people used the post like texting or email today — it was slower of course but you could still count on getting a message to someone the same day. I found that fascinating!

Rosenberg doesn’t mention Reddit. I think a good explanation of Usenet is that it was like Reddit but it was primarily text-based and complete distributed. It was not owned by a single company.

2026-08-14

2026-08-14

An example of this phenomenon, showing it’s not limited to young people: I recently re-read “Fer de Lance,” the first Nero Wolfe detective novel, published in 1934. Two of the characters are wealthy heirs, young men, who have become infatuated with flying. One has a private airfield, owns his own plane and employs a full-time mechanic, the other is studying flying with the first young man and plans to found an airline.

The first time I read the novel, when I was in my 20s, I did not make the connection that the Wright Brothers had first flown 30 years earlier. This was new technology then. These two young men were the equivalent of today’s billionaires investing in AI.

Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is.

Allegra Rosenberg has a good explanation, and she continues with a meditation on misconceptions that Generation Z have about life in the 90s and 2000s.

This misunderstanding is not unique to GenZ; I think it’s a phenomenon of being in one’s 20s. I remember reading Dickens...

mitchwagner.com

2026-08-14