It's tempting to despise the young, to look at the technology today and wish fondly that the information technology revolution had arrived in OUR childhoods, or at the very least to curse fate for making us witness the rise of the video game and thus the ultimate destruction of everything we loved.

So when the voices start, just put the scissors down and try the following UK:R "Lifestyle" advice for building more positive outlook towards modern life.

1) YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN A NETKIDDIE

Think of the most embarassing and/or misguided thing you did, said or perpetrated as a tween. Maybe you thought Bon Jovi wrote the greatest lyrics ever and wanted to tell the world how clever and deep he was. Maybe you wrote prose about your Dungeons and Dragons characters falling in love and getting married. Maybe you had a "Unicorns and Mermaids" phase, or worse a nihilist gothy phase, or worse a Roxette phase.

Without the internet, all you had was a scrap book full of cut out pictures from magazines stuck on with Pritt Stick that the kids on the bus stole and threw around. With the internet, you would have had a free webpage covered in broken links screaming it from the rooftops to everyone in the world with a computer what a dork you were which would have ended up on Something Awful or Losers.org or any other of the million other sites that aren't bored with people's homepages yet.

2) ATARI ST OWNERS WERE BAD ENOUGH

Think of the most smug and irritating console or computer advocates from your school. Now give them XBoxes.

3) MOBILE PHONE CAMERAS

Remember when your pants fell down after PE and you cried for weeks because the WHOLE WORLD (ten people) had seen your arse? If that had happened today, that arse would have been circulated to the UNIVERSE before you'd even got home to watch Alias The Jester. By the time Top of the Pops was on, a nonce doing a google search for "CHILDREN'S BOTTOMS" would have found it, snagged it and uploaded it to a fileserver. When you woke up in the morning, fat greying diddlers from Toledo to Timbuctoo would have printed it out to fling string over you.

When we were young, kids simply had the amoral passion for sociopathically destroying people's lives that Davros did. Now they have his technology too. And this means:

4) THEY'RE ALL GOING TO DIE

Some day (and that day will DEFINITELY BE SOON) you're going to throw yourself off a bridge after a night of cathartic self debasement causes you to forget that you still live with your family and stagger down to breakfast with no pants on, half your head shaved, vomit caking the front of your vest and - should the gods have smiled on you - a salty floppy swinging folornly from the tip of your majesty. Still, that's taken three decades (give or take) of systematic spirit-crushing; imagine if someone had mobilised the information superhighway to give you that vital shove at an age where setting the video wrong and missing Red Dwarf meant the end of the world.

We're already seeing them burning out like Roman Candles, sometimes even doing the public service of taking their car-boot-dwelling ratfamilies with them. That's why we say to you all, hold on. A brighter day is coming. A brighter day involving lots and lots of dead scriptkiddies.

Maybe even him.



Oh please.