1 re steven universe, which I don't watch, because I only watch 1940-1946 Warner Bros & silent Terrytoons, etc.: everything will be sold to you. I am on twitter because a professor has assigned participating on twitter as a horrible semester-long homework assignment, and twitter is really humiliating, because I'll add someone I think is cool, and they might add me back, and then they'll unfollow me and it's just as terrible as any other rejection. NEway, on twitter you see tons of in-the-pipeline games and if you're of a certain bent, you'll gravitate towards certain aesthetics AND
 
you start seeing all these images that you associated with the underground, or SW, or 2009 or something. You'll see blobby acid trips and unity3d freakshows, but unlike 2009, now it's on Steam Greenlight & will be properly DRMed.
 
or like this LA by way of Miami Vice pale aquamarine/magenta aesthetic, like the chillwave of computer games aesthetic. I see that, too.
 
And I think it behooves us at this point to embrace being sold to and wallow in it, not to abandon your tastes, but to not be turned off by being sold to
 
eg this guy who was literally in marketing once wrote a long blog post about ofwgkta (nb not a fan or non-fan) and his gist was that these teenagers had SOLD HIM and this made him uncomfortable, and several music critics happened to be around to read it and high fived him, like, yes, clearly these teenagers were all incredibly marketing savvy and thus inauthentic, and their music should get the side eye. Which is ridiculous, not just for coming hypocritically from a marketing dude.
 
my vision for the future is that virtually (geddit?) everyone has an advertisement, and every thing and service is advertised, and we all embrace advertisements because they're hyper relevant to our interests, like, they're not algorithmically targeted by categories, but by the very, very, very specific things you are interested in.
 
2 no 2, I guess

 
 
example of these games on steam plz?

as i was growing up (ie being a teenager) i would notice things i like and identify with get co-opted by a bunch of younger, dumber people several years after i had gotten into it, and i was really frustrated by this for a while, and then i realized that i'm just the front part of that generation of young dumb people stealing all the cool shit, and i can't articulate why i find anything frustrating. except it is genuinely uncomfortable to see a ton of things i think are really fucking stupid, but with the distinct trappings of what i was sure was my hyper-specialized and guaranteed esoteric aesthetic sense, become popular. like my own tastes are being dilated and projected onto the population around me with a few years of delay. that's getting into crazy person territory. It's actually pretty cool that a lot of things I like are trendy now. It makes for less uphill work in getting certain ideas accepted. I still don't like it because it makes me feel cheap. like you said... 90s nostalgia is getting stronger all the time... you see more and more people now making a big deal about... i dunno, web 1.0, parasites, garbage, garish and bizarre color combos (especially 80s style pink+blue), just weird stuff that i felt alone for loving my whole life. maybe everything is an illusion and i'm only convincing myself there was ever a divide. god, it feels so dumb to talk about this, but i can't get this out anywhere else in my life.
 
it's not really that i'm getting sold at that bothers me- it's more that there are plenty of people snapping that shit up and it makes me feel weirdly alienated from the past and the present at the same time. Actually you know what it really is? The fact that I've been thinking about this shit my whole life, and now lots of other people with crazy good new ideas are thinking about it too, and I still have no idea what "it" is or what to refer to it as. Just, you know, creative shit. the best way i've been able to think about it is the fusion of aesthetics with ugliness, or an extension of traditional aesthetics, just, people are slowly becoming more attuned to the idea of more outsider-y modes of representation. Okay, time to reiterate: god, for something i feel like i have an strong opinion on, i sure do feel dumb talking about this.
 
thanks a ton for makin' that thread btw - the second i saw it i was all, well, now i can't not draft up some gamer treatises.

 
I'm more interested these days not perfecting the aesthetic but like, making stuff that FEELS like the 90's maan. I mean, my own bizarre idea of what the 90's was rather than assuming there's some singular/absolute idea to the 90s
 
even like aphex twin is probably influenced by weird druggy british puppet shows from the 70's or whatever (fingerbib is a reference to this)
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU32lw4WXZw
 
I'd rather associate it with 2006+ when I discovered that stuff than some aesthetic I don't have memories of (british puppet shows). Hope that makes sense
 
 
also like I don't do drugs but I'm interested in what looks 'druggy' as an aesthetic seeing how far I could fool people that I do EVERY drug instead of none
 
 
also I look forward to the day we could like mind-meld and know the exact specific feelings somebody gets from the period of time they grew up or whatever. I thought that about earthbound, like I FEEL LIKE I'M IN SOME JAPANESE DUDE'S MIND man

hi again bamcq. pls play my real game, which is mercifully unpopular and disliked enough to not fall into the trend we are currently discussing
 

except it is genuinely uncomfortable to see a ton of things i think are really fucking stupid, but with the distinct trappings of what i was sure was my hyper-specialized and guaranteed esoteric aesthetic sense, become popular

it's true.
 
to me also part of it is that I've always been a weirdo. I've toiled for my garbage patch. I don't wallow in that, but here are these kids skating thru as normals on foundations I probably didn't really have anything to do with laying.
 
happens with irl things too tho. architecture.
 
 
 
btw the pink+blue miami vice/vaporwave aesthetic definitely owes at least part of its success to Hotline Miami, created by a former part-time GW member and featuring music tracks by a newer member who was around pretty recently but maybe not anymore. that part's cool, but then we see it being used to advertise vsauce or something idk I definitely do recall seeing it somewhere terrible recently!

I've noticed it too. I think it has something to do with the relationship between creativity and society. If you look at our current societal and political landscape, you'd see that we are prime for a resurgence of dadaism and we are only just now being pushed into the throes of it by and large. 
 
I think some of us were already disillusioned by the reality we had no choice in being a part of for a long time now, (for me it feels like my entire life has been trying and failing to deal with that) but it only took events in the last decade or so for future generations along with the rest of our current generation to finally understand that sensation, and come to terms with embracing it as an all-too-necessary catharsis.
 
I can only hope that by virtue of the invisible hand of capitalism's intrinsic pull towards literally anything popular enough, it ends up causing the whole infrastructure to come crashing down on itself as more and more folks attempt to take these qualities and render them into yet another commodity.

Good fukin shit, bamcq, goddess, Ragnar, EDC, earlchip. thanks for goddess for "feminiscense" or ?? word, it needed it's own for sure.
 
here's my two cent. Sorry for negative or nagging or complaining tone, i actually intended somewhat neutral tone so it's accidental!! but i figured you guys get my point if anyone.
 
I sorta agree on earl's and EDC's point, tho i'm not sure the good ole commodifying falls outta favour any time soon. what's really fucked up on this whole hipster - started thing (it's not just hotline miami - it started with vaporware/chillwave and bit earlier, then there's tim and eric / eric andre show making fun of those esthetics) is that instead of taking an neutral experience of experiencing this esthetic ephemera from a different time and sort of embrace it as-it-is... you know what i mean...
 
Like seeing some zany 80's tv ad for first time as a kid, and just being blown out by the mixing of sounds, the 80's synths, the vector graphics... ... No, more than this: you are blown away by the SUM experience of it. As a kid, you didn't go "oh i see what this is, this must be 80's stuff, ah this is 90's reference", you were absolutely affected by the actual experience... and you'd get weird vibrations, associations, effects in your brain from it.
Ragnar started this whole topic, I remember him talking and keep bringing this stuff up in messenger and I was thinking how much of this stuff was UNCOOL. but then you got over it and were like !!! I remember experiencing this stuff!! I forgot this sensation!
 
So what i'm saying is that what we were doing, was getting weird experiences as a kid, that we couldn't classify, that we couldn't instantly put into a category... oh, this is 90's. This is ugly, this is beautiful, this is good, this is ACCETABLE.
Remember the time as kids/teenagers when you listened to music that was COOL? and simply outright rejected with subconscious disgust that wasn't cool and YOUR GROUPS music? you then simply developed this idea further in adolescent by nerdy "oh but i'm listening to COOLER/MORE DIFFERENT OR REBELLIOUS music than you..." development. So it was all about social value and rising on top of others, yuck, here we go again.
... but despite this, we kept getting these vibes even from the media stuff from our own generation - why was there that strange detail in there, it surely wasn't accetable or expected and sorta clashed, didn't anyone else notice it? Am i alone?
 
So guess here comes EDC and EZ's point. What happens now is that these fuckers take these weird ephemera stuff and again makes it "cool" or accetable. There is no real dialogue in here. There is no "don't you find that actually beautifull?? meaningful?" and again here we go again with the conformism, commodifying, Hey It's Now COOL Again To Be That 90's Cool Kid Unironically... all that jazz. It's like weird kids trying to convince others to actually give creativity and fresh perspective another change, instead it's again turned into a background for young fuckers have sex and people selling Cool Shit to other people. Maybe some of u guys are Okay with this change - all means in love and war are accepted / 24 Jack Bauer mentality - but just don't expect people to actually respect you or your opinion, or become any more brighter on this stuff.
 
I mean wasn't chillwave basically just music nerds or kids trying to be "cool" or "sarcastically/ironically cool" with 80's ephemera stuff... So wait, why not go straight for the kill or are you guys still trying to sell yourselves rather than the idea?? you guys!! and thus we have all this dubstep and hipstery shit selling authenticity and using 80's synths and whatever.
 
It's sorta what I critized on James Blake (and unfortunely seems to turn out more true as time goes on), it's like the guy uses Soundblaster 16/Gravis Ultrasound/ PC-88 synths... he even gets somewhat how feminiscence works...
to make meaningless dubstep rnb love songs ad infinitum. : ^ (
 
even worse, guys with beards and expensive lumberjack shirts making very mediocre generic "emotional/modern" country/skiffle/bluegrass music out of authencity and reallness... and lol not to just trying to pack their childhood christian mediocricity and comfort to the cool atheistic young party generation. basically ppl going back to their parents roots without an blink of eye but then trying to sell that old security-seeking normality as coolness, lol. gimme your money.
 
some memories:
 
i remember hearing john fahey's Dance of Inhabitants... (title shortened) the first during highschool when digging into led zep and it's roots and bootleg circles (later on catamites put the song into one of his games, good on im!! a good fella, exquisite taste).
The first time I heard it, I was somewhat DISGUSTED of it. I was like, what the hell is this music? It's ugly, it's weird! and sort of dropped it and moved on. but about... a year or two from there on? i was slowly getting a weird feeling over time, like thinking "...maybe i should listen to that song..." - Just the urge repeating and getting stronger over time, like some kind of weird instinct. so i finally got back, and started feeling that There's Something VERY Important In This Song And I Can't Put A Finger On Why. i was getting terrified by the song, what is this feeling, why is this so HAPPY song and happy chords but it feels like i'm dying or something really bad is happening?? it makes no sense!!
and that's sort of where i started getting into fahey and into feminiscense in general - what is REALLY going down, under all the fucking social signifiers and cues? what does the sound/song/cut does to your sense? song had negative social value initially but then i started respecting the raw psychological force the song, sounds, timbre, atmosphere it carried. I used to have fairly strong synesthesia, where i'd see colours or feel movement when the song had this feminiscience quality to it... usually that was (and still works fairly well) a sign that the song had something genuine working for it's advantage. I used to say that best ephemera was stuff that caused existential confusion, longing, a sudden starkness and reallness to life.
Perhaps the reason is that media etc cultural stuff was originally meant to truly serve as social service and that people normally are meant to ignore the actual experience in favour of cultural group stuff? This sure seems the case for 99% of population. Food for thought.
 
another memory: as a kid, you experience stuff more acutely and accurately. a big thing that changed my life was that my parents recorded in the late 80's? some cartoons into a VHS. before that VHS, i was like any kid from 90's, all i knew was my cultural influence and 90's stuff. unfortunately or fortunately, that cartoon VHS (some were rare specials cartoons) also had 80's ads. I remember being blow away by this strange new world...it was an important gateway to new mind or alien mind.
 
What i noticed (music language ensues): 90's had strong low and high freqs, while mid is scalloped, so it sounds hollow or trashy, plus most of sounds are loudnessed and compressed. think a Nirvana record, like smells like teen spirit the song. 
 
Then this 80's esthetic had EXTREMELY scalloped low's AND mids but very punctuated highs! plus all sounds are made with these plastic fake synth sounds, with ridicilous amounts of fake reverb. Not very loudnessed btw, somewhat but not extremely so "radio" as 90's mixing. It sounded so alien and ridicilous to 90's sound!! if there was bass, it was in this thin stripe... thus virtually unnoticable.
 
(then later in adolescent i was drawn to 70's as that had strong lows and mids but muddy highs... BUT the songs had lots of overtones and timbres out of recording tools and decay of records, plus lots of natural instruments still. Plus, unlike later centuries, the songs were quite uncompressed/un-loudnessed, at least for most part. still, even 70's wasn't natural save for some rare recordings like Yes "Roundabout" the song)
 
Anyways, the important thing was that it didn't sound " 80's " to kid me. No, it gave me a different experience altogether. feminiscience experience. it's like thrown into a videogame, innit? with it's own complete esthetics and feelings and atmosphere. it doesn't help that sounds come out of analog tube television!!
 
same thing for SNES emulators later on, why they're important: ever played FF4 or Seiken Densetsu (Secret of Mana 3)? I used to really overdose on those associations and stimuli and go prophetic-ramble to ragnar on messenger on this stuff.
Anyways, have you guys noticed... like SoM3, you can barely even HEAR MUSIC OR SOUNDS?? Because it's all this weird muffled heavenly music, all the sounds and timbre are muffled, and it doesn't help all the colours are these sepia, blurry VHS mess where you can barely make out what is what.
you fucking jrpg gamers!!! don't waste your time on those CBS and numbers, just LOOK at this shit!! this is where it or life's at!!! best art comes from guys, who think they are making really sophisticated jazz fusion on snes, and end up sounding like alien hideous weirdness, hell yeah. Yo Noid! restaurant bricks.

so did i just fuck up that message by making it too long?? whadya think. do i need to tldr that one?? does it make sense to u guys.