generation dust

Peggy
August 25, 2022

Today I learnt that the new term for “the tail end of the disputed territory between Generation X and Millennials” is “geriatric millennials”. At first I thought it was maybe just a new term for GenX? Nope. Just for the latter half of the transitional zone that’s mostly known as “the Oregon Trail generation”.

“Geriatric Millennials” are at least nine years younger than I am. And of course searching for info on this new term leads to discussions of generations that mention every living generation except X. If the tail end of my generation is “geriatric” then what the hell does that make me?

Nothing. Emptiness. Dust.

I am of the void. I am the mystery. I am generation meh, who gives a shit about them?

I am free of attempts to define me by marketers and pundits. The moment my cohort stopped being young adults with disposable income and not enough sense to try to ignore advertising, we stopped existing.

I am the X-factor, I am the mutant lost and forgotten. I am a mystery. I am nobody.

I am nothing, and I am free.

I have revised my infographic of generation dates accordingly.

the leaderboards as of today

Peggy
March 10, 2020

Today I got out of bed and spent a couple of hours taking Wikipedia’s lists of the largest movements of the Dow and adding which president it was under.

My initial guess was that most of Hoover’s percentage gains were when the stock price was bouncing off the cliff that began the Great Depression (1929-10/11), but it turns out all but one are later in his term. Part of me wants to add notes to the chart correlating each up and down with whatever was going on in the world, maybe a little mini-timeline showing where each entry was in the president’s term(s), and maybe add in another chart of the overall Dow, and maybe also overlay income inequity on that, but I already spent two hours on this thing and would like to get back to drawing comics.

All logos are traced off of campaign materials. Mostly auto-traced except for that totally fabulous McKinley logo and the FDR letters. I could have just autotraced a cleaner image in both cases but I really liked the look of those font choices.

White/black names and reddish/blueish colors indicate Democrats/Republicans. Older ones are generally more ‘faded’-feeling colors.

ok, boomer: a concise guide to the generations living in early 21st century America

Peggy
December 7, 2019

One thing lead to another and I ended up spending today making this infographic to help you know exactly when you will be annoying a Boomer by saying “ok, boomer” to them, and who you will be misgenerationing by saying that instead of “whatever, x’er”.

That’s a slightly truncated version of the chart I initially made; the first version goes all the way back to 1900, when the last few members of the Lost Generation was being born.

Here’s that first one; click for the full-sized version.

Originally I was going to have the “also known as” bits for every generation be something similar to “ok, boomer” but I decided to fill in those spaces with the many names people have proposed for the post-Baby Boom generations. And if you are wondering, there were not any other names for the Boomers that I left out; they are alone among living Americans in having exactly one name for their generation. Unless you count the “Generation Jones” name for the younger half.

Me, I’m smack in the middle of undisputably Bill And Ted’s Excellent Generation territory, unless you believe that one guy who says GenX is the disputed territory between Boomers and Xers, and that most of the rest of X is the Bust Generation. And my parents were both near the end of the undisputably Silent range.

I think the most interesting feature of this chart is how the multiple ranges for Jonesers all end in 1965, and the multiple ranges for the Oregon Trail generation all begin in 1977, quite neatly bookending the Indisputably GenX zone aside from one year of Jones overlap. That and the fact that there is a twelve year span of time between the earliest and latest start dates for GenY and only five years that are indisputably GenY; I already had the impression that the definition of GenX was a messy thing, but damn, y’all have us beat. Well done, kids. Well done.