Here is a take for you: Wear some goddamn headphones when you watch a video in public.
This sounds like an obvious courtesy, and yet I have noticed, with increasing dread and irritation, that people in public spaces are giving fewer and fewer fucks about broadcasting audio out loud for other people to hear. With no headphones. I have heard open audio from people’s phones in waiting rooms, at sporting events, at coffee shops, at airports, on airplanes, at schools, and any other place where blaring video out loud should be punishable by a week in the stockade. Yet these inconsiderate shitbags often operate freely, because people are polite, and timid, and don’t want to start a fracas with some butthole mom who handed her kid a phone to dick around with at top volume.
Thankfully, I am a professional rude person, and so I would like to tell all of you video blarers to FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF. Buy some headphones. There is an infinite variety of headphones available to you and your children, many of them fairly priced. It’s not that fucking hard to whip a pair out and listen privately so as not to disturb your fellow American. If you choose not to do this, you are a penis, and you are probably raising little penises. Do you know what a fucking YouTube video sounds like to secondhand listener? Here is what it sounds like:
[loud screaming]
[teens laughing about something, probably slime]
[BOINGGGGGGG! sound effect]
[mindless chatter that sounds like a gaggle of geese hanging out by a lake]
[someone shoving an ice pick into your eardrum]
[more active screaming]
If you scream at me that this is an old man take, well then you can take these two old middle fingers of mine and cram them up your insides. I’m well aware that times change and some habits become imbued in the culture. I think it’s rude as shit to whip out your phone at a meal, but I accept that’s just a fact of life now that people will do this.
But I draw the line at having to listen to some goddamn video you took at a bounce house. Oh, is that video just SO funny that you gotta watch it in the middle of a library? Fuck that video. That video is garbage. It should be deleted from existence because you suck and are too easily amused. Wear some headphones. If it’s your kid watching, give them headphones. If they do not like headphones, give them a book. If they do not like books, that’s tough shit for you. Your asshole kid isn’t my problem. What is my problem is you thinking the world is your own private listening studio. Plug it in or I will be forced to thrash you.