Nothing on Earth like a bonafied, electrified, six-car monorail. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Literally stuck on a monorail at disney, lighting struck and we immediately stopped. I'm convinced that I'm going to die
— natalie (@nnaaatttalliiie) July 13, 2014
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“We like to share what we like with people as a way of identifying whether they’re part of our group,” Gawne said.At first blush, my vast mental library of quotes from The Simpsons might just look like evidence of spending far too many afternoons watching not one but two episodes back-to-back after school. While that's true, it also has been a touchstone in many of my friendships with my fellow “indoor kids.” For other, likely more successful people, your cultural signifier may have been discussing a Gore Vidal essay; for us it was noting that Gore Vidal has “kissed more boys than I ever will.”It's easy to see why the comment section on a website like The AV Club would fill up with pop cultural references including (and perhaps most prevalently) quotes from The Simpsons. The comment section is a community that is brought together and defined only by an interest in pop culture.The quotes aren't only funny (or, maybe they aren't funny, but we still laugh out of recognition), but it's a testament of a shared past amongst people who don't even share a physical space.Given that my knowledge tapers off around season 12—when show's quality began dropping, but also I got a driver's license—it also sort of dates me. I can josh around with Generation Xers and my fellow early Millennials about Hullabalooza, and that makes us “with it.” But somewhere along the lines they changed what “it” was, and what we were with wasn't “it,” and what was “it” became weird and scary.So it seems unlikely that, say, the brace-faced teenagers tweeting from the stalled Disney monorail would've seen the humor in asking whether Batman was coming to save them, even if sociologically speaking, that's a pretty sophisticated joke to make.