“Growing up, things were just easier and better” misremembers old man

A wave of nostalgia is sweeping the world today, after a man – who lived through World War 2, Apartheid and the violent civil rights protests of the 70s – reminded us all that his childhood was “a more innocent, less complicated time to be growing up as a kid.”

“Growing up back then, it was just an easier, more innocent time,” said 87-year-old Jeremy Smith with a wistful smile while completely ignoring the ugly historical and political contexts of his upbringing. “Whenever you wanted, you could go outside with your friends, play endless imaginative games outdoors and not once worry about your safety,” he added, totally washing over the horrific truths faced by thousands of women and minority groups at the time.

“Nowadays, our children’s innocence has been lost to glowing screens and an unending stream of violent imagery on TV.”

He attributes some of this latest generation’s moral degradation and degeneration of family values to the spreading scourge of technology.

“Technology is ruining society and spoiling this latest’s generation’s childhoods,” he explained while failing to mention to myriad technological, industrial, medical and social advancements and breakthroughs that make life incomparably, infinitely better than it was 50 years ago. "I mean, what good has any of it really done us?"

“In my day, people were friendly and would stop to greet each other in the street. We’ve become so engrossed by our glowing screens that we’ve lost the human touch,” he said with a sad smile that utterly overlooked the evils of the NP and Hitler's Third Reich and the human- and civil rights abuses that exposed mankind’s repugnant capacity for hatred during most of the 20th century.

“It was a simpler, easier time. A time before bank cards and cellphones and high-speed wi-fi and bottled milk and the modern industrial revolution and four hundred kinds of breakfast cereal. A time where you could just go sit on a riverbank after a long day of ploughing the fields so that you wouldn't starve to death during the winter and just enjoy the simple pleasures that this beautiful world has to offer.”

And many people agree.

Goldi is just one of hundreds of 20-something-year-old
white girls who think they should have been born in a time
devoid of modern science, medicine, technology, or civil rights. 

“I think he’s totally right,” said fashionista and lifestyle blogger Goldi Nera. “This modern era sucks so much. I was born too late.”

“I should have been born in the romantic ages of knights and chivalry,” said the twenty-something-year-old white girl who thinks she lives in a goddamn Lana Del Ray video or something.

“Or even as a youthful and carefree flapper surrounded by beautiful dresses and champagne and the dazzling parties and true elegance of the 1920s?” she added, failing to realise that statistically she would probably have been born far, far from this extreme outlier of human experience, most likely as a peasant farmer in Southern China, or a laundry woman washing the puke out of Gatsby’s sheets.

“Every day I sit in my apartment sipping my mocca-spice latte while I use my Macbook Air Pro and high-speed ADSL to look at Pintrest photos of the beautiful balls and dresses of the 18th century and I think, ‘God they had it so, so good.’”

But luckily for her, help is on its way.

“We’re only too happy to help her live this seemingly impossible dream,” said her parents in a prepared statement. “We’ve bought her some dresses, cut up her credit card, taken away her right to vote, and arranged for her to enter into a loveless marriage."

And hey, if she complains, we’ll just say ‘you’re a woman, STFU and get back into the kitchen’. It’ll be like she’s actually there!”

New App revolutionises how we remember Huge Life Events

Life-changing experiences will never be the same again, thanks to a new App that is making huge waves in social media circles.

Insta-Mem, which has been downloaded 6 million times since it hit the App Store this weekend, automatically takes your boring, unspecial photos and diary entries from incredible experiences and journeys and converts them into a more representative and social-media friendly format.

“Times have changed, and with ever-ubiquitous modern technologies in our increasingly digitalised world, it’s about time we updated and modernised the way we remember the special moments in our life,” said creator of the application, Ian Staygram. “Let’s say I went to Naples and lay on the warm white shores of the Mediterranean, gently out my slowly-bronzing legs out on the beautiful soft sands just meters from the warm waters and taking in the simple pleasures of life in a moment that hope will stay with me until I die - how am I supposed to remember that without multiple selfies, social media check-in posts and filter-heavy shots of the local cuisine?”

Thousands have agreed.

“What, really, is the holiday of a lifetime if it isn’t posted online for your friends to like and comment on? And if you do take photos of the mountains or scenery, how am I supposed to know that I, or anyone who was apparently there, was *actually* there?” asked internet user and fervent Mem-er Jake Henderson. “I think we can all agree that, whether you’re diving in the Pacific Ocean with Whalesharks and Sunfish, or sitting on Mount Everest watching the sun rise over the distant smoky hills like a magnificent orb made from burning gold, the most important thing is that everyone you know knows that you – you, with your face, maybe your mouth curled into a cheesy grin with an accompanying peace sign or thumbs-up – were there. Everything else is meaningless.”

Social-media users no longer need to fear forgetting these magical moments, says Staygram.

“The app is so simple to use, that even a Twitter user wouldn’t struggle. All you do is take a photo of yourself, and our Smartscan technology will do the rest. All those yawn-provoking shots of the scenery and panoramic views of the island snoozefest you were staying in will now be updated to have you in them, even if you didn’t take any selfies on the trip,” he said. “Hell, if you didn’t even take pics at the place, the app just searches Google for sunsets and snaps in that area and edits those into your album. It’s not like anyone will be able to tell the difference between sunsets or check that you actually took the pictures.”

The app also automatically adds a relevant filter and hashtags.

“When I visit memorable locations, I don’t want to have have the stress of taking periodic selfies that reaffirm that I do actually exist and am actually in Paris,” said another user Mary Marie. “I don’t want to bother with the profound hassle of picking between ten slightly different pre-set image filters, or the philosophical wrestling match of coming up with seventeen hashtags that adequately sum up the profound, life-altering trip I’ve taken. With Insta-Mem , never again will I forget that I travelled and visited the Top Ten places in Paris that I read about in a listicle."

Already, many thousands are wishing they had had this app when they travelled the globe to broaden their understanding of the myriad different cultures and peoples of our beautiful, rich planet.

“Nowadays I just sit in my chair trying to work out what I did between the years of 1968 and 2010,” said senior citizen Jerry Attrick. “We didn’t have Twitter or Facebook back then, so how were we supposed to remember those moments that changed us deeply and profoundly for the rest of our lives?”

Staygram now says they have their eyes set on video format technologies.

“Let’s say you go to a concert and forgot to record the entire thing from eighty-seven seats back in the cheap section on your 2.8 megapixel cameraphone. Well, with the app we’re developing, we’ll just take DVD-quality official footage and convert it to be smaller, blurrier, and filled with uncompressed, low-quality sound complete with barely audible songs being drowned out by the cheering and screaming. Imagine you’re bobbing for apples in a tub of Vaseline after corneal damage.”

Photos: Everest by Luca Galuzzi; Great Wall of China by Severin.stalder. Both Creative Commons.

Man in shower suddenly remembers he's a terrible person

Citing the soothing, calming and meditation-provoking sound and feeling of warm water pattering lightly against his skull and skin, a 38-year-old man reportedly had a silent weep in the shower this morning, after every single fucked up thing he’s ever done in his life simultaneously came rushing back to haunt him like a video montage made of sledgehammers.

“It was brutal,” said Eric Sohbes in an exaggerated bass baritone to make up for the masculinity he lost from being a fully-grown man weeping in the shower at 9am on a Wednesday. “One minute I was relaxing under the gentle torrent of blissfully warm water, and the next I suddenly remembered that time I was 17 and told a friend that women should dress ‘less like a slut’ and ‘not drink so much’ to avoid being a victim of sexual crimes. Jesus. Was I that person?”

Sohbes explained that the memories of all the times he’d made racist jokes, catcalled women, ignored starving homeless people in the street, finished Matt's last beer without asking, not replaced the TP after finishing it, and generally been a raging douche-monster in otherwise civil society – combined with the ultra-clear hindsight that he had been the dick-faced ass-hate in every failed relationship he’d ever had since seventh grade – were just too much.

“I’ve just… God, I wish I could take it back. But I can’t,” he said, crouching down on his knees in under the showerhead, bracing himself against the tiled wall with one hand and biting a fist to stem the ugly, heart-tugging sound of a grown man realising his horrifying, terrible past.

This sudden flood of memory and emotion was reportedly compounded by a feeling of hopeless despair and desperation for the future.

“It’s all so unclear,” he said. “What if, in seven years, I look back at what I am right now and regret everything I think is okay now? What’s the point of it all? Geez, I’m 38! Shouldn’t life be certain by now?”

However, at the time of going to press, Sohbe’s sudden epiphany had faded away during the car trip over to his ex-girlfriend’s house to patch things up.

“Yeah, he kinda just sat there in the car outside her place with a look of dumb incredulity smeared on his face,” said one eyewitness. “I think he had that second-wave realisation of ‘what am I doing, nah, actually I can’t have been that bad, could I?”

Friends and colleagues have confirmed this.

“He told this real knee-slapper about two jews and a black man fighting over a chicken bone at the water cooler this morning,” said co-worker Roy Sissem. “For a while there I was worried the old E-Dawg might have left us.”

His parents, too, have denied the incident.

“Yes, he took a long time in the shower this morning,” said his mom and dad, “but he always takes a bloody long time in the shower”, adding that the “hot-water-finishing son of a bitch” was “probably just fapping” again.

Pic: Memecrunch