The modern world. Am I right? Oh, you want me to elaborate. Well, I really don't feel I need to as anyone who still possesses a pulse knows what I mean. But I'll assume you have been living under a rock for the past decade and I'll spell it out.
If you scroll through any brand of social media, switch on any news channel or flick through any of the daily rags, you will no doubt have noticed one thing: what a miserable species we have become. This planet has always had it's share of depressing struggles. We used to, as individuals, have a way of dealing with such trauma. We would hold a mirror up to society, point and laugh at it. It really did help us wade through the mire of bullshit that is going on in the world. But that laughter, over the last few years, has slowly gone silent. The walls are steadily closing in on the things that are deemed acceptable to laugh at whereas when I was a youngster, anything was fair game and no-one seemed to cry or go running to Ofcom because of it! As a person for whom off the cuff, often insensitive, but always light hearted humour is as much a part of their DNA as their parents, this is a truly depressing turn of events.
Why am I discussing this? Because this new generation of humans who seem to actively search for something to get offended by (I would call them snowflakes, but I hate that term. Snowflakes are joyous things, these people are not) it even effect something as small and insignificant as my humble Yahtzee blog. Let me explain.
At the end of August I posted a run of the mill, light hearted, if a bit sarcastic, League Match summary. It can't have been up for longer than five minutes when I got an email telling me that the aforementioned post would only be accessible to read if the reader in question agreed that they didn't mind reading a post that could contain offensive or explicit material. I was gobsmacked. It meant one of two things. Either someone read it and flagged it as inappropriate or the site has a repertoire of words that, if used, is automatically subject to the restrictions in question. Just so you know, I am not an expert in these things so if it works differently, feel free to let me know! Anyway, I don't think anyone flagged it. I have a fair few readers of my blog these days, but not so many that it would have got reported so quickly, plus, it was a match summary which typically attracts less readers than my random weekly blogs. So I can only assume it was the second option. This left me baffled. What did I say that was so bad (for the record, the post in question will be linked below)? I re-read the post and saw nothing that glared out at me as overtly offensive. I did use a couple of words which out of context could be taken to be offensive, but when read as a whole, they really aren't. This is another symptom of the humourless majority, they seem to never have heard the word "context".
This really depressed me. The last thing I want to do is to offend anybody. I write posts to amuse people. I think this is especially important in the summaries otherwise they would just be a tedious list of numbers! It's true I poke fun at our competitors, but the basis of the joke is total fantasy. I have them being people they clearly aren't, saying things they would never say or doing things they would never do. I even try not to swear so much in my posts, which, for those that know me, know that this is totally out of character! I suppose you could accuse me of being a bit close to the bone at times, but it's not like I'm a right wing Nazi (if this post gets flagged, it will, ironically, be because of that N word, not the forbidden N word, which I would never EVER say... in public at least. Chill out, it's a joke!).
Because I've been flagged and I don't know how this all works, I have decided to class this whole blog as "for mature audiences ", not that it is and nothing will really change, it just means that you will have to accept that you know that what you are going to read may contain adult themes. Pathetic, I know, but like I said, I don't know how this works and I certainly don't want to get stuck with a "three strikes and you're out" kind of a deal. This would be devastating. I worry about these things and I could not imagine losing this blog all together after I have put in so much work (approaching 200 posts), so I thought it would be better to be safe than sorry! Plus, if you've read at least a couple of my posts, you know what to expect; no, you might not like my humour at times, but you won't be going to your priest clutching your pearls, requesting an exorcist. That's not how I roll... in public...
So, I guess you could consider this post a bit of a rant, but it honestly gets on my tits the way people are so quick to get upset over literally nothing these days, and I never thought it would reach a tiny blog that concerns itself with Yahtzee, of all things! I couldn't be arsed with such things, life is way too short! Like I said, I don't think that any individual got upset with what I wrote, if I'm wrong, I will hunt you down (JOKE, for God's sake, I'm joking), but the very fact that a website has to jump through such hoops in order to appease the thin skinned is such a dreary prospect it leaves me with great concern for the future!
Anyhow, continue to follow my highly intelligent and humorous posts. Also, laugh a lot, every day, at whatever you find funny and live your life the way you see fit, not the way others deem acceptable. The minute you stop being you, they've won... don't let them, they're twats... and that's swearing!
The post in question:
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