I'm trying to ecdysially adult and go to a huge diverse place where I don't know anyone. I have a support network here but no prospects, friggin sick of the west coast towns I grew up in but haven't mustered the chutzpah to just fly to some faraway scary zone without a job lined up. What would be really cool is to go to a city with a big-ass library so I can study lots of popular books easily. Also I just had to take my car to the repair shop today so I'm fantasizing about being in a place with functional public transport.
through some fluke I never got into any podcasts or youtuber personality types, beside a handful of low-key let's play types who don't put any persona at the forefront of the content. It really bothers me to see how youtube advertisement income carrot-sticks have impacted video essays because I just do not have the attention span anymore for a ten minute video where half of it is not really about anything. Even the ones with interesting sounding ideas would be conveyed better as an old school written essay on a simple text site with small screenshots to underline points so I can easily skim their hunch-baked insights for gold nuggets. also poor humor's easier to take when you don't have to hear the actual delivery.
I'm really glad to see everyone's posts because the last time I came here there were a ton of spam topics everywhere and not a peep in days. We looked really spooky and dingy.
just wrote a bunch of stuff trying to say something insightful about how crude and weird art is casually talked about in a derisive way and I realized in summing up my thoughts on the matter for the past few weeks it was just one big complaint about my own lack of productivity.
I think it's weird that when I was a kid it felt like pop culture as a whole lost a lot of ambition and forward-thinkingness within a few years. There wasn't any big event that I remember, even 9/11, things just really rapidly got boring looking and starting focusing on, like, war instead of cartoony futur anticipating futuristic stuff. Of course it happened during such a rapid transition of technology and a massive shift in corresponding ideals and visual focus, I have no idea to what extent that was the cause, and how much that's just a completely normal thing that happens to everyone as they age and their world expands and they get snobby. Regardless I have heard other people suggest there was a change around 2k from looking to the future to the present, then really quickly to the past in the 20th century like we wanted to go back. It would also be interesting to compare the movies that come out today to then in terms of # of remakes, reboots etc.... cause I know now we don't commonly do the whole ROCKY V, FRIDAY THE 13th XIII endless sequels as much, but since I was little it seems like there's more and more tired redos of stuff that's already been done, which I always thought was kind of blasphemous but is now just normal and accepted.
To me a big part of 80s media was the insane coked-out budgets, swollen tolerance of bizarreness (also coke?), infrastructure allowing inhuman time and effort that went into making all the details that people remember (many from their childhood eyes) as exemplifying a crude spirit of the 80s. But when people try to replicate the era they usually just put in guys with mustaches or the kind of illegitimate but commonly accepted "80s" symbology, palm trees and pink+blue color schemes. You don't as often hear about stuff like the Cold War imminent nuclear death sensation, which I have heard a few people talk about like it was fairly normal back then, and how the increasing awareness of that. At least to me, what stands out to me the most was how advanced the practical effects had gotten, and how respected they were, with even crude CGI being impractical, that you could have really high-level expensive fantastic, imaginative stuff done in a stage-prop-like way that still is visibly goofy artificial the obvious work of many hands, so you can take it sincerely or not, or take sincerely what they were GOING for; you have the opprtunity to enjoy it in many ways depending on whether or not you give them creative sympathy and suspend your disbelief. In children, the disbelief organ is very undeveloped and they need no special effort to appreciate something on its own merits, which results in them frequently walking curiously off cliffs and grabbing bright, inviting fires. The same goes for drug addicts and other compromised individuals.
So in the 2010s when the fake-retro-80s trend bloomed out of timeless underground nostalgia, becoming hip on the suburbanite level thanks to movies like Drive (2011), the idea of "80s" revival in many mediums, TV/movie, music/games, became normalized and even kinda played out now because its actual investment in 80s thoughts, aesthetics, atmosphere, recent past, interests, and hopes and dreams was so shallow.
A little later and fake-retro-90s is also firmly understood and similarly ignores the actual restrictions placed upon the environment that created the people's coincidental attitudes and available technology that created the 90s media we can still observe. However because the 90s had that nascent "hipness", looking to the future and cataloguing its past in eager preparation for hot new things, perhaps fell prey inevitable horrible meta-recursive cycle that commercializing that feeling. A big part of the 90s for me was the feeling of ascension and improving technology, with the new globalized internet systems creating a world where, as a kid, I got the impression we should all know about every country and what was going on in it. Growing up that sort of diverse globality was heavily promoted by schools, offices, tech companies, eco-awareness in the face of the changing climate, corporatism in the face of affirmative action. When I was a kid I thought bigotry was on its way towards being a solved problem for various naive reasons helped along by this sort of false worldliness popular in software and office decoration at the time, which was mostly what I paid attention to, being a nerdy kid. You can see people like Jay Tholen poking at these optimistic corporate ideas now with some suspicion, (false promises) or James Ferraro back in 2006-9 with a very intelligent reverence for the idea. Personally I like the Ferraro way of thinking, like there's a core of truth to the idea of a completely new, futuristic mode of computing that brings together the world without distorting the world in the process, in any way but that that helps our fellow earthlings live better lives. And really mean it, not just for customers.
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