Post 7: The Screens of the Past & De-Aging During COVID-19
This pandemic has been tough for everyone, but it’s also brought a ton of people more in touch with themselves. All of those months locked away in our homes, particularly at the start of the pandemic, forced us all to confront the version of us we never would have confronted otherwise. This is why people have been switching majors and coming out and overall just becoming more of themselves during this unprecedented time. I am no exception.
The thing is… is that I’m reverting back to some of my hobbies and interests that I liked when I was younger. And I’m not sure how to feel about it.
Around the beginning of April 2020, after my mourning period because I knew that my senior year of high school was not going to end well, I decided to get invested in things that made me happy. Unfortunately for me, most of the things that made me happy were activities that I did outside of the house and/or hanging out with friends. It was hard to find things that made me want to get up in the morning that I could do by myself. So I looked to the past.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out on the Nintendo Switch a few weeks prior, so I fully invested all of my time in that. I would play for hours a day every day. It was the first thing I wanted to do in the morning after school and it was the last thing I wanted to do at night. It was a new game with a lot of hype around it, sure, but it mostly just made me feel like a kid again. When I was a lot younger, I was obsessed with the Animal Crossing: City Folks game on the Wii to the point where I had more than one book on its gameplay. So I reverted back to my seven year old self, being absolutely captivated by fishing and hunting for rare bugs: both of which I would hate doing in real life.
But Animal Crossing wasn’t all. Around that same period, I decided to watch a lot of YouTube, but the kind of YouTube that wouldn’t make me sad about the world. Most of my recommended page has to do with late night talk shows or SNL or behind the scenes videos, but all of these made me sad because it reminded me of a world wherein crowds and crews could interact with one another without the danger of spreading death around to everyone. So, I looked to Smosh.
That’s right, SMOSH. The channel run by Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox.
See, back in the day, Smosh was actually pretty funny. They’d do stupid skits with random songs and props, and though some of their jokes would not fly today, some of their old stuff is still good. Their new content feels similar to new SNL content where they’re trying too hard & end up failing at whatever sort of comedy they’re trying to achieve. So I found myself watching old videos of theirs, wishing I could go back to YouTube in 2012 where there were no ads and everything was in 720p. The nostalgia hit so incredibly hard that I think I traveled back in time to my ten year old self and became Her for a few months during those dark months.
Lately, however, I’ve de-aged to my sixth grade self because I am utterly obsessed with this game on the App store called Hay Day.
It’s a farming game where you harvest crops, take care of animals, make products, and sell them! It was the most popular app in my school in fifth and sixth grade, and now I’m the only one my age who plays it probably. I’m on level 52 and have no intention of stopping. Harvesting wheat in real life could never be as satisfying as harvesting wheat in this freakin’ game.
All of this being said, I did not expect these things to take over my life as an 18 and 19 year old. I expected to be off at USC, studying my butt off and going to Trader Joe’s whenever I wanted, but instead, I’m stuck at home…
…glued to the screen of the past.