I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks that Skyrim is practically non-canon. Vvardenfell's destruction, the nords being utter miserableists who are surly and hate everyone, the charmless wall-to-wall bleak... I admit I'm probably more fangirly about Oblivion than is entirely excusable, though tbh nearly all of the complaints levelled against it (which were ironically the result of listening to feedback a bit too earnestly) were comprehensively addressed by mods. The only things that weren't were its crashiness (though there were some things that mitigated it, I've seen an interesting analysis on why it is essentially unfixable) and the perplexing lack of beards, which would've offset a lot of that potato-face criticism. There was no particularly good reason to not include them and they would actually be incredibly easy to implement... except there isn't a beard slot, and the hair slot (which would otherwise colour and render them correctly) is disabled when wearing a helmet. :| Oh well.
As for the other stuff, the UK has led the way in a lot of that sort of crap thanks to our "worst in the Western world" media and craven politicians who are always looking to garner their approval. So we'd had most of that long before Y2K. Including the phones: I was commuting into London in the late '90s and they'd become such a nuisance that there were incidents of people having their annoying contraption hurled out of the window by someone who couldn't take it any more. Speaking as someone who would hear the same people, day after day, yelling into their phone I'm on the train! YES! ON THE TRAIN! at 200db and wondering to myself, why aren't you bored with this yet?
