I need to sit down and go on a rant about something that has been bothering me for quite some time now. It’s something that you, the reader, have probably also noticed.
As you all probably know, I like to play fighting games. I especially like to play them on a competitive level. Now, the thing about fighting games is that they are actually pretty fucking complicated; “getting good” is really hard. Sometimes I am stumped on how to respond to certain attacks, blockstrings, knowledge of frame data, and various other miscellaneous things. As a result, I need to hop on over to Google and type a query into its search bar. At risk of dating myself here, but back in my day, when you typed something into Google, you got the information that you needed. It was pretty fucking painless. You didn’t know something, so you asked a question, then you learned something.
These days, Google is completely fucking useless. I mentioned fighting games earlier, because that’s what kicked off me wanting to write this. I’m trying to get better at The King of Fighters 2002 and Virtua Fighter 5. No matter how specific my search query is, the result is the same: “The King of Fighters 2002 is a 2002 release for the SNK Neo-Geo arcade system.” “Press down, down-forward and punch to throw a projectile.” “Virtua Fighter Street Fighter Chun-Li Hentai Fuck Prada Bag.” Maybe I’ll get a copy/paste of the game’s Wikipedia entry from some place called cheesewheel.chgrz.notavirus.com. It is such bull shit. Like, huh, I am losing a lot of matches, and I need to figure out how not to lose so many matches, let me go to the internet for advice. Then the internet responds by being actively antagonistic about it. Sorry, I guess I should have been born with the wisdom of the cosmos.
Now, getting better at fighting games is not really all that important in the grand scheme of things, but it does help illustrate a bigger problem. Trying to look up anything these days sucks. If you are looking for help, you ain’t getting it! Google would probably save a lot more money if they changed their results page to a picture of a middle finger in front of a flashing, seizure-inducing background that called you a dumb ass idiot bitch moron retard clown shithead stupid motherfucker that doesn’t know things. Why not have your results posted to a Twitter account in real-time where Google doxxes users, like, “Dick Gosinya at 2487 Riverfuck Lane in Salt Lake City, Utah doesn’t know things!” Just go full-on insulting to my intelligence, why not?
I’m not sure what exactly caused this very quick decline. Is it capitalism? Tech bros desperate for Elon Musk’s validation? Because this is not just a problem with Google so much as it is a problem with the greater internet. A reason why I’m so adamant in my stance of making your own web site is because doing so is frowned upon by the people in charge of this new, shittier, internet. The Internet is supposed to be a tool for communication and information. It’s not anymore. It is a place where some blue check mark who makes way too much money says something asinine and inflammatory, gets dunked on hundreds or even thousands of times, and this is considered normal; profit is generated on outrage. It’s a place where you watch a couple of video on YouTube to have a laugh, then spend the next five years rolling your eyes and blocking a deluge of recommended videos where some white supremacist fuck sits in his bathtub for two hours and rants about pronouns or some shit. It’s a place where whether you are doing research on a serious scientific topic, or figuring out how to escape Orochi Chris’ corner pressure, you are instead served with ads. It’s a place where the individual no longer matters. Get on Medium. Get on Substack. Pivot to video. Become a “Content Creator.” Like, Comment, and Subscribe.
Fuck that.
I don’t have any sort of answer on how to fix any of this; I am simply here on my own web site to complain about it. I’m almost 35 and I feel like a fucking boomer. I do not get, nor do I like, this new generation of the World Wide Web. My heart goes out to the younger generation, who don’t know how things used to be. Fuck, I was frustrated when I started writing this, now I’m sad.
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