A Guide to Child Culture for Adults Out of Touch With Reality: Did Harry Styles Really Spit on Chris Pine?
This week, some young people are learning that they don’t have a personal life at work. Others ask why they can’t make friends. But everyone is asking if Harry Styles spat on Chris Pine.
Did Harry Styles really spit on Chris Pine?
This week, a 10-second clip featuring Olivia Wilde, Harry Styles and Chris Pine blew up the pop culture sky. It is intended to show Styles spitting on Chris Pine as Styles takes his seat at the Venice Film Festival screening Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling . The moment might not have been seen if it hadn’t landed like an overgrown meadow right in the middle of a backstage drama about a poorly received movie , but now that it’s been spotted, millions of people are paying close attention. footage and asking “did he spit or not?”
Let’s take a look:
Now look how slow he is . You can’t see the spitting, but Stiles leans in to Pine, and Pine definitely reacts suddenly to something with an expression that could be, “I can’t believe that dude just spit on me!”
But I won’t buy it. After reviewing the footage 300 times and given the context, I’m sure there was no spitting. Here’s what I think: 1) There are no other signs of animosity between Pine and Stiles. 2) Other footage shows the couple appearing to be having a friendly chat right after the alleged spit. 3) Who spits in someone’s knees ?
The alternative theory seems more likely to me: it’s at the exact moment Stiles’ head is closest to Pine as he sits down that Pine looks down and reacts to the fact that his sunglasses are in his lap.
Watch the clip again . Watch how Pine puts his sunglasses on a chair to applaud, and then has time to think: “Where are my sunglasses?” before you look down and see the shadows in his lap? Given this interpretation, his reaction is more like “ Here are my sunglasses; God, I’m an idiot” than “Harry Styles just spat on me!” The secret is revealed! Next!
Young workers learn their bosses can read everything
Now, a deleted TikTok video has caused a stir among the “I just got my first job” group as it indicates that your bosses at work can and will read your private messages in Microsoft Teams. The shocked reaction from the video’s commenters proves they’re new to this “work at work” thing – old hands just assume their bosses can read whatever they want.
Reality: Your employer can actually access your “private” messages in Teams , as well as your deleted messages, your webcam usage, and pretty much everything else. In general, this applies to almost all other applications on a work computer. You probably also clicked on something while agreeing to it.
Whether your employer’s IT department monitors employees regularly depends on where you work. It seems strange to me that an employer pays someone to view employees’ private messages – I mean, who is really wasting the company’s time in this scenario? — but I can also be reluctant to understand an employer checking that employees are using work resources correctly. In any case: it’s good that young people learn about it through TikTok videos and not the hard way, and I have no doubt that youth ingenuity will prevail and privacy practices will spread and be widely applied.
Kiwi Farms and Rings of Power : two stories about the dark side of youth culture
I’d rather pretend that horrible people don’t exist and they don’t matter, but a lot of young people are actually horrible poops and they seem to pop out of their closets from time to time, so here are a couple of stories about online boors, nerds and jerks .
- Kiwi Farms has been the Info-verse’s number one platform for organized harassment of LGBTQ+ people. Until this week, when Cloudfare, the cybersecurity firm behind the 10-year-old hate site, dropped them in response to a campaign spearheaded by Twitch streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti. While KiwiFarms may be back with a new company protecting him, I’m guessing he’s gone for good because there must be good news somewhere.
- I have to admit, I assumed I would hate Amazon ‘s Rings of Power before I even saw it, but unlike the worst people on earth, it was only because I thought the Hobbit movies were total crap! I wasn’t put off by the choice of actors in the series, in which several black actors play elves and harfoots (for those who haven’t fully digested Tolkien’s apps yet, they were ancestral hobbits). And, of course, dumb, horrible people are so up in arms against black actors playing something in Middle-earth that they flooded online reviews of the show with negative stars. But “Rings of Power” is actually good , I promise, and Tolkien described the Harfoots as “more swarthy” than hobbits , so at least get to know your Tolkien before you babble, racists.
Viral video of the week: “Why are you single and how to make friends”
This week’s viral video from Kurzgesagt is In a Nutshell . It was viewed more than two million times in its first day online, a fact that saddens me deeply. That Why You’re Single and How to Make Friends is so widely viewed highlights a problem that I think is unique, at least in its scope, to young people: they don’t know how to make friends. COVID quarantine and the general interactive interactive interactive environment of people has created generations of people who feel lonely and friendless, even in their teens and twenties, the period of life when it is easiest to make friends.
In keeping with Kurzgesagt’s approach to science, the video takes a serious, fact-based approach to the social issue, pointing out that research shows that spending time with other people in the real world is the best strategy for making friends. I was going to praise Kurzgesagt for lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness – because the YouTube channel promotes custom meetups for their 19 million subscribers, which is supposed to make friends – but then they had to ruin it again and sell special badges and posters that you can buy from their online store if you don’t have any friends. Okay, everyone. you seriously don’t need to monetize everything .