Syd the Flying Gay Squirrel

“Nothing says I love you like a gallon of heavy cream in her pussy”

Being young enough for Minecraft but too old for Fortnite

Being alive for 9/11 but not remembering it at all cuz you were like 2

Seeing reruns of 90s shows when you were really little but being to young to really remember them

Feeling betrayed by Butch Hartman

Listening to the bops of ~2009-2012 in middle school gym class

Growing up through the transition from clunky PCs for nerds and flip phones to smartphones and sleek and easy laptops

Pictochat

My drunk ass had actually walked home without them, pounded on my apartment door, gotten let in by my rightfully-disgruntled roommate, and proceeded to pass out on the couch.  Apparently I puked in the toilet before passing out.  I do not remember this part.

The next morning, I schlepped back to the frat house.  I stood there, right in front of the front door.  This was a novel experience for me.  I’d never been at a frat house in broad daylight before.

A boy, presumably, of the house, asked me what I was doing. 

“I lost my keys in here last night,” I called back.  “I was seeing if I could go in and look for them?”

He opened the door and gestured for me to come in.

“Go wherever you want.”

I’d never seen a frat house post-party before.  Wandering up the stairs and through the halls, I was surrounded by hungover and still-drunk frat boys stumbling around in their socks and sandals and gym shorts, seeking out food and showers like moths to a porch light.  A few of them threw puzzled glances my way.  I’m sure they thought I was some post-bacchanalia hallucination.

I entered one room where a boy was drunkenly watching some Old Yeller-esque movie on a tiny TV in the corner of his room from his bed.

“Do you like dog movies?” he asked, voice all mumbly from grogginess and also from the fact that his face was squished against his pillow and half-buried by his blanket.

I told him I did.

He mumbled again, pleased, and asked what I was doing.  I told him I was looking for my keys.

“Sorry, I haven’t seen any keys around here.”

I didn’t doubt him.

Twenty minutes had passed.  I’d searched just about every bedroom and nuclear-waste-dump-site of a bathroom in that house.  I’d given up on ever finding my keys and was prepared to beg my roommates’ forgiveness and get a new set copied.

As I stood there in the hallway, silently bewailing my predicament, a particularly-burly frat boy approached me.

“You need help with something?”

“I lost my keys here last night and I can’t find them, I’ve looked everywhere.”

“What do they look like?  I’ll put it into the group chat.”  He was already pulling out his phone.

No one ever checks a group chat, I thought, but what the hell.  It was worth a shot.  “Um, it’s just a ring of keys.  The keychain is a pink plastic cat, though, like yea big.  Like bright pink, you can’t miss it.”

He nodded, presumably typing this description faithfully into the group chat.

“Alright, I sent the message out.  Good luck.”

And with that, he turned and left.

A few moments later, I heard a distant thundering.  It was coming from upstairs, and it was getting louder and louder.  One assumes that how I felt in that moment was how Simba felt seeing the wildebeest stampede through the ravine as a horde of large young men all thundered down the stairs, making a beeling for me.

“Someone tell the girl!” One of them shouted, faceless in the mob.  “Girl!  Hey, GIRL!!!  We found your keys, girl!!!”

They circled around me.  I hadn’t felt that small since I was maybe eleven years old.  One of them split himself off from the crowd.

“Are these -” he pulled out a ring of keys from his pocket, “your keys?”

And lo, there was the distinctive bright millennial pink cat keychain dangling off the ring.

“Yes,” I whispered.  “Oh my god, yes.”

“EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!”

The cheer went up.

a smiley boy :’)

stay gold ✨

Like, Cartoon Network showed stuff like YuYu Hakusho, .hack//sign, Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star, Tenchi Muyo, and Rurouni Kenshin every weekday after school on their Toonami block. 

I remember rushing home after school in second grade to watch Rurouni Kenshin. That was 7 year old me’s favorite show. 

You think Pokemon is popular now? HA! In the late 90′s, it was every parent’s worst nightmare. It was on the cover of Time Magazine for fucks’s sake. EVERY kid was obsessed with it. No exceptions. At least, until Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh came around…

You could wake up on Saturday mornings and watch highly Americanized butchered versions of Shaman King, Tokyo Mew Mew (”Mew Mew Power”), and most infamously, One Piece thanks to 4kids. 

An anime getting an extremely butchered Americanized dub was a very real, legitimate threat that could happen to any show.

Staying up late enough to watch Inuyasha was considered a rite of passage.

Teenage girls flocked to Barnes and Noble to read entire volumes of Fruits Basket and Fushigi Yuugi in the store without paying for them.

All of the kids cartoons tried to cash in on the craze. I’m sure everyone remembers Avatar and Teen Titans, but trust me when I say that you DON’T want to remember Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi and Kappa Mikey.

Hayao Miyazaki won an Academy Award.

Final Fantasy VII was considered the greatest video game ever made.

Some people still called it “Japanimation”.

So many fucking magazines. Off the top of my head: Animerica, Shonen Jump, Shojo Beat, Newtype USA (the best one by far), Anime Insider, Beckett Anime, and Beckett Anime For Girls (The most cringeworthy one. Of course I had every issue!)

The original anime, “School Ghost Stories” had completely flopped commercially and critically in Japan and the original studio and creators had washed their hands of the series.

So ADV took this show that nobody really wanted and rewrote it into a samurai pizza cat’s style gag dub and had the voice actors just improv the hell out of it.