Why 9 year olds should not have laptops
My Twitty Little Brother (TLB?) has his own laptop.
He's had it for over a year now. It's not a very nice one; just a refurbished Dell with CrapVista on it, so it's not like it cost a lot, but it's the principle of the thing!
girlbyjuly and I were both in high school when Parents gave us our desktops. And we bought most of our own electronics, too. She bought her own iPod mini, I saved for my video camera, etc. A few years later we got things like my iPod and her digital camera as Christmas gifts, but we pretty much had to buy our own stuff like that (and rightly so!).
Of course, by the time this kid gets his own laptop, he's also already received over the past year or so two gameboys, an iPod nano, a cheap digital camera, and a cell phone. WHY does an 8 year old who does not walk anywhere ever need a cell phone? Sister and I got a Tracphone (!) that we had to effing share only when I got my permit and started driving, because when you're off on your own in the car you need a cell phone. It was ages before we even got a real plan, much less our own actual phones. Not to mention that we have a SNES and a Gamecube for TLB to waste his days on.
So I'm kind of over it. It's a new day and age, kids are raised on computers (he had his own very entertaining computer games as a toddler, I remember), all the other kids are getting them, he's the youngest in the family and it's hard for him to be left out, yada yada yada. I don't really care anymore. My parents can raise him how they think works; sister and I turned out well, so why shouldn't he?
But this summer he's been spending half of his waking hours on this MMORPG called MapleStory. Not really appropriate activity for a 10 year old, I think. What happened to the simple days of Neopets or card games or paint or something? And he's been chatting on MSN to some of his Maple friends, so lately we've been a little concerned, especially Sister and I (actually, Parents don't seem to care, or maybe they just don't understand). I've been using his laptop since my surgery because it's kind of hard for me to get to my computer over in the corner of my room (uncomfortable chair, too) and also because Boy keeps unplugging my ethernet cable for his laptop and I can't bend down to plug it back in. So I just use TLB's laptop, even though he doesn't really want me too.
So the other day I'm using it, and I go snooping around. I've seen some of his stuff before, mainly incredibly lame videos that he makes and puts on YouTube ( they're really just bad slideshows about MapleStory). I go into his "My Pictures" folder (of course he's not a savvy enough computer to organize his files into sub- and sub-sub-folders like any normal person) and start scrolling through.
There's the expected... Beatles pics, Sweeney Todd, Heath Ledger as the Joker, some Inyuasha, etc
Then there's the puzzling... A Jack Daniels AIM icon? He doesn't have AIM, and does he even know what Jack Daniels is? Also, cheesy text banners that look like they came off a 13 year old girls MySpace. Also, photos of unknown scene kids that almost definitely came off of a 15 year old boy's MySpace.
And then there's the shocker... WTFHENTAI????????????????????
I secretly saved one of the images to show Sister and to put here, but Photobucket deleted it because it was too explicit! Lets just say that I saw some itsy bikinis and french maid catgirls and badly blurred boobies and naked threesomes and absolutely obscene poses.
I took the 20 or so inappropriate pics and put them in a folder entitled "delete" and moved it to my mom's files on the laptop. I showed her and she had a talk with him the next day about how he's too young to be surfing those sites (and also about how he can play MapleStory and talk to his friends from there, but that they need to know that he's 6 freaking years their junior)
He's had it for over a year now. It's not a very nice one; just a refurbished Dell with CrapVista on it, so it's not like it cost a lot, but it's the principle of the thing!
girlbyjuly and I were both in high school when Parents gave us our desktops. And we bought most of our own electronics, too. She bought her own iPod mini, I saved for my video camera, etc. A few years later we got things like my iPod and her digital camera as Christmas gifts, but we pretty much had to buy our own stuff like that (and rightly so!).
Of course, by the time this kid gets his own laptop, he's also already received over the past year or so two gameboys, an iPod nano, a cheap digital camera, and a cell phone. WHY does an 8 year old who does not walk anywhere ever need a cell phone? Sister and I got a Tracphone (!) that we had to effing share only when I got my permit and started driving, because when you're off on your own in the car you need a cell phone. It was ages before we even got a real plan, much less our own actual phones. Not to mention that we have a SNES and a Gamecube for TLB to waste his days on.
So I'm kind of over it. It's a new day and age, kids are raised on computers (he had his own very entertaining computer games as a toddler, I remember), all the other kids are getting them, he's the youngest in the family and it's hard for him to be left out, yada yada yada. I don't really care anymore. My parents can raise him how they think works; sister and I turned out well, so why shouldn't he?
But this summer he's been spending half of his waking hours on this MMORPG called MapleStory. Not really appropriate activity for a 10 year old, I think. What happened to the simple days of Neopets or card games or paint or something? And he's been chatting on MSN to some of his Maple friends, so lately we've been a little concerned, especially Sister and I (actually, Parents don't seem to care, or maybe they just don't understand). I've been using his laptop since my surgery because it's kind of hard for me to get to my computer over in the corner of my room (uncomfortable chair, too) and also because Boy keeps unplugging my ethernet cable for his laptop and I can't bend down to plug it back in. So I just use TLB's laptop, even though he doesn't really want me too.
So the other day I'm using it, and I go snooping around. I've seen some of his stuff before, mainly incredibly lame videos that he makes and puts on YouTube ( they're really just bad slideshows about MapleStory). I go into his "My Pictures" folder (of course he's not a savvy enough computer to organize his files into sub- and sub-sub-folders like any normal person) and start scrolling through.
There's the expected... Beatles pics, Sweeney Todd, Heath Ledger as the Joker, some Inyuasha, etc
Then there's the puzzling... A Jack Daniels AIM icon? He doesn't have AIM, and does he even know what Jack Daniels is? Also, cheesy text banners that look like they came off a 13 year old girls MySpace. Also, photos of unknown scene kids that almost definitely came off of a 15 year old boy's MySpace.
And then there's the shocker... WTFHENTAI????????????????????
I secretly saved one of the images to show Sister and to put here, but Photobucket deleted it because it was too explicit! Lets just say that I saw some itsy bikinis and french maid catgirls and badly blurred boobies and naked threesomes and absolutely obscene poses.
I took the 20 or so inappropriate pics and put them in a folder entitled "delete" and moved it to my mom's files on the laptop. I showed her and she had a talk with him the next day about how he's too young to be surfing those sites (and also about how he can play MapleStory and talk to his friends from there, but that they need to know that he's 6 freaking years their junior)