We're halfway through October and close to spooky season. That said, some topics are a bit spooky without even really trying, especially when talking about the entertainment landscape. For anyone who is paying attention, they know how bad things truly are.
For a bit of a change, today we're going to dive back into the pop cult world, but not for criticism or easy shots at it, but more to point out that there isn't really anything left to talk about. Years ago, I mentioned that Pop Culture was dead, a topic that took people by surprise and which I still stand by, and nothing has changed on that front t change my opinion.
In fact, it's considerably worse than it was when I wrote that post eight years ago.
All the crusty corpos can do now is recycle IP, hope for a few minutes in the current fickle meme cycle, and then wait for the audience to inevitably forget everything they had just consumed mere moments earlier. Nothing sticks anymore.
Consider the original versions of Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 4 were huge in the gaming scene for years after their initial release, and in Current Year the remakes were forgotten in mere months for the next IP cash grab. It doesn't even matter if the product well made anymore, the audience no longer cares or has any investment. The normal audience has moved on from caring, and those remaining are doing so hoping for a few minutes of potential watercooler talk (or whatever they call it on social media these days) before moving on to whatever they are told is the next thing to care about. We all know this is how it works now, even if we can't express it.
It's dead.
This isn't even a shot at the consumers, this is just how it objectively is now. A consuming content checklist is all anyone aspires to be a part of, not a scene or part of a wider connected cultural landscape. The above video shows us that this is where the pop cult has lead to, much as we said it would years back, and it will not get better. The only solution is finally putting this entire mindset out to pasture. Pop culture is dead, and we need to stop pretending it's not. Perhaps it was always dead to begin with. Regardless, there's nothing there now.
Those old, ancient IPs are now novelties, they have no greater meaning to the wider audience except as cheap references to long dead days, and jangling keys to distract their attention from reality for a few hours. There is no higher meaning, no daring ideas, and nothing vital in any of them except safe messaging for a sick society currently eating itself. These rickety properties are tired and need of eternal rest. Nothing lasts forever, especially not all this corporate IP.
What we're currently looking at is a near-future of isolated pockets of artists, entertainers, and creators, all working together to find shared ground and connection with each other and audiences they might not have expected. This won't be the permanent state of things, it never is, but it is the way it will have to be before said audiences are able to find those they can trust again who will not decay the way the mainstream has. We're going to be here for a while to come.
In the meantime, take one last look at the pop cult wasteland and remember how mighty it once was, before taking what is necessary to moving on to fertile grounds. There is nothing left here, and we need to start admitting it. The dead is to buried.
Whatever awaits ahead is not this, and there is nothing ahead like what we are leaving behind us. And there is nothing wrong with that.
We just need to be able to finally accept the way things are. The old world is dead, the old corpo IPs are done, and none of it is ever coming back. Clinging to it while not saving anything, or making the cultural landscape grow or become any better, is just lying to yourself about where we are and where we're going. We simply aren't there anymore.
And that's all there is to say about it. There isn't anything left but corpses in that old graveyard, and the only purpose of corpses is to bury them, remembering who they once were, and moving on.
We made it to October and the weather finally shifting to something seasonal, so let's really get into something eerie for the spooky season. Once again, we're going to go into today's creative climate, a horror unto itself.
Much has been said and written about how terrible the education system has been for fostering creativity and imagination, but in the end it's still not enough for the simple reason that it's frankly not good enough. We are all hungry for more.
This isn't just about the US, either, but a worldwide phenomenon of machinery designed to turn both the individual and the collective into a machine meant to churn out whatever the top of the chain desires. This mentality has turned all mainstream entertainment into pure swill bailed together by tired 20th century tropes and franchises meant to educate the ignorant masses into worldviews and behaviors that might have felt fresh 100 years ago but are clearly outdated today. We've gone over that before, so there's no sense rehashing it. Artificiality has always been valued over creativity.
As the above video shows, the system itself is not designed to stir the imagination, no matter how many TV shows or movies you see or remember that told you how important "Creativity" was, in the end it was never about that. It was only ever pretty words meant to boost the ego and coax all potential creatives to follow the same path to deliver the same Content. And looking at the modern climate today, it feels like a joke from a '90s animated sitcom. That is because it is.
And that was made in the '90s. Nothing has improved since then, but clearly it was an issue even back then. In Current Year, the film industry now is on its last legs.
So how do we create a system that incentivizes creativity over slop? Humanity over artificialness? Excitement over formula? How do we overhaul the 20th century machinery that has ground to a stop here in the 21st?
Many complain about how the AI explosion fosters an environment of lowest common denominator storytelling to churn out product, but the truth of the matter is the industry has been incentivizing it themselves over decades now. The above video from the '90s highlights the mentality as it already existed back then, and it's much worse today.
The problem has always been the artificialness has been baked into the education artists receive themselves. One cannot explore outside the socially acceptable ideologies of today. One cannot look beyond the genres the mainstream has decided are all that is, even as their stores empty and their sales crater. One cannot experiment because safety is incentivized and mass produced to blot out anything else coming up.
As the below thread shows, the issue with artificiality is not the lowering of the bar, that is already on the floor and has been for decades. The problem has always been that the education system has always desired it end there. Blaming AI for it is missing the forest for the trees. The system was always going to lead here, and it is the root of all this.
The biggest problem with all of this is that there is no easy solution. There is no switch one can flip to making everything better. In order to even begin to fix if requires an honest reflection and reassessment of a lot of bad ideas that have come since the industrial revolution kicked into high gear and became a religion for materialists. We simply aren't there anymore, no one thinks that way or believes it, and yet we float on rehashing it to diminishing returns. Now there are no returns at all.
We know the education system does not produce creative people. It also does not produce writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, or critics. Yes, people go into these schools and come out in those professions, but next to none are actually made into those things from what they learn. Kids are instead turned into automatons and widgets for the crumbling machine, meant fulfill roles no audience wants and job positions that are quickly fading away. It is detached from reality, and we all know it.
So why are we still operating in this way?
As I said, blaming AI at this juncture is stopping well short of the problem. Even if it went away tomorrow, it wouldn't stop how the audience has been trained to Consume Content and expect beltline product pumped out indefinitely. That isn't going away. All this AI stuff is simply doing exactly what those in charge want. (Which is why they are already using it without saying anything at all, and audiences will eventually accept it. Anything to keep the flood of Product going forever.)
The only way out is reorienting of systems and thought processes. The 20th century is done, as been said countless times, so why are we still clinging to it? What advantage do we have clinging to dying systems and ideas that have proven to be dead ends?
We don't train creatives. Arguments could be made that we never have, but we certainly do not do it today. We have Content Creators, not artists or creatives. All we want is nothing and everything at the same time, and that is why we have no need to educate or train anyone. And that is how you get today's dead culture. Nothing is being made: it's being produced.
We require a re-enchantment of the world, a detachment of cynicism, subversion, and emptiness. The only way to get that is to admit where we are now was a mistake and won't lead anywhere else. We have to move on.
Let's not worry too much about a dead past, but work to build a living future. It's going to happen eventually so there's no sense wasting time. We can start today.
We're finally in the autumn season, the season of change, so let's look back at a past that has long since been left behind.
I apologize for the lack of a post last week. Things merely got out of hand. Hopefully it'll happen less and less as we get out of the warmer season. I can only hope.
Today's subject is particularly niche, so I don't blame you if you find it hard to understand. That said, it is quite an interesting topic to look over, especially with the passage of time.
Anime's explosion in the West was a strange one. First slipping into the fringe underground in the '80s before becoming a part of alternative culture in the '90s, and then finally achieving mainstream recognition in the '00s, it was a bizarre series of events to get it to its current worldwide dominance that would arrive in the decades to come. No one would have imagined its gigantic size way back when passing around old badly subtitled episodes of Dragon Ball Z in class and school clubs. It was a much different world.
Speaking of a much different world, I wanted to highlight exactly one that sprang out of this subculture. During that odd transition between underground alternative culture to mainstream in the '90s and '00s came this odd era of the '00s when young audiences tried their own hand at actually making anime. Yes, we are talking about the strange world of Fanime that you have missed entirely. It was a niche of a niche, so it's very possible you never encountered it.
This short era, in retrospect, is an interesting glimpse into how a niche subculture affects a generation growing up entirely on the internet increasingly separated from the mainstream. At the same time, one can see which tropes, styles, and ideas resonated with younger audiences of the time period. Interestingly enough, most of these projects were made by girls, not guys, giving a very different idea of one might expect from such a thing. Few of them were also ever completed, which, again, in retrospect is not all that surprising for the generation in question.
The kids who grew up in this time related more to this foreign art form than they did anything in their own, and it's obvious why they connected to it more at the same time the artificial Geek Culture was at its cultural high. This stuff was simply more honest. It's also why anime would eventually overtake culture entirely. Everything else at the time was dying.
Looking back on it, where we are today was the obvious endpoint of that time, and those raging against it simply aren't trying to understand how it came about. We can't wish away reality, it simply is what it is. And this is how we got to where we are today.
The above video goes much more in depth showing many of these projects, what happened to them and their creators, and the sorts of things that would come out of it later on. Fanime still exists and still gets made, but the priority of the creators is much different in the scene than it once was. In fact, it wasn't long after the initial growth period that it would change entirely. It is funny however to see this scene contrasted with the fanfiction one from the same era. The Fanime one clearly contained those with more creative drive and potential, yet its the fanfiction one that spilled into the professional writing industry and helped drive it into the current ditch its in.
That aside, the entire subculture is much smaller than it was back in the day, splintering like every subculture has over the last two decades into a niche of a niche, but it's still an interesting subject to look over. It's something that could only have happened at one point in time in one age demographic, and it did. We will never see something similar arise again.
In a sense, Fanime still exists beyond its niche, it has just moved into other spaces. The amount of independent creators who work in other mediums from comics to animation inspired by anime only grows by the day and does not seem to be stopping anytime soon. You can see it everywhere, especially considering how anemic the mainstream western industry became pandering to fangirl shipping and trends from angry urbanites who hate their audiences, the alternative would always be much more appealing.
So take a look for yourself and see just what it was all about, and what this time period was like. Maybe you'll even be a little inspired yourself. Who knows? Things aren't always as simple as we might think they are, and this subject is one such topic.
Inspiration can strike anywhere at anytime, and it ways you might never expect. Let's just hope the next bout lasts a little longer and finally shifts this culture into better directions, and hopefully finally brings us back together again.
After last week's controversial and over-sized post, I decided to dial it back a bit with this one. Let's take it a lot slower. Since summer is officially near its end, and a lot of madness has occurred not too long ago, I felt it right to celebrate its end with something more lighthearted.
The subject today is the director Joe Dante, and the video creators in question are Red Letter Media. The videos might be long, but they are very well worth seeing. Take a load off as they cover the filmography of the legendary director of the bizarre and weird who never seemed to get the recognition he deserved despite it all.
Marvel as Rich and Jay from RLM watch through every movie directed by Joe Dante and make more good decisions (Gremlins 2: The New Batch truly is is better than the original) and questionable ones (their take on the ending to The 'Burbs is grossly incorrect and misses the entire point and appeal of the movie) as the two try to come to terms with just who this director is beneath it all. You might be surprised at just where it all leads to, because Joe Dante is a director unlike any other.
Here is the second part of their episode on him:
You might disagree with some of their choices and opinions, but the overall list between them is well chosen. It is a shame his latter work has fallen into the same problems as so many others these days, but it is what it is. His highpoint is still hard to match for anyone else, even today.
There is still no director quite like him at his best.
As for myself, I would rank the top 5 movies of Joe Dante as follows:
Innerspace
The 'Burbs
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Gremlins
Matinee
All these movies are very much worth seeing and a window into a world no one else could quite come up with. They've also aged incredibly well with time and are some of my favorites even today. You're definitely never going to find another creator with a style quite like his or manage to top what he was able to do with these films.
And to top it off, here is a shorter video highlighting director Quentin Tarantino's opinion on the works of Joe Dante:
Tarantino, whatever you might think of him, is someone who understands the appeal of the weird and bizarre, or both the high class and B film, and he shows it in the above video. Despite his image, he realizes there is more to art than the surface level. It's something we should all already know, especially as film's peak as a dominant artform is passing as by.
That's all for this week!
Have yourself a good one and I'll see you next time.
It's been quite the week, for many varied reasons, but lets put that to the side for today's post. Instead, lets discuss something else.
Today, I wanted to talk about storytelling, fairy tales, and the importance of wonder. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how it's been both deliberately and accidentally malformed over the course of the 20th century to be what it is today. No one is going to deny that things have changed, but there is also no one who will defend it as in a good place, either.
However, it isn't as if we can just discuss this subject without going into hysterics about either who is at fault or who deserves less of the blame. The truth of the matter is that finger pointing won't do much at this stage. Despite that, we also have to discuss uncomfortable truths and the unintended consequences of off-loading creativity and storytelling to out megacorp overlords. How did we get so far down the hill in a mere century?
It wasn't as straightforward a tumble as you might think.
A good place to start on this subject is this series by YouTuber Cartoon Aesthetics entitled "How Disney Stole Your Childhood" covering the beginning of the Disney Corporation's early days and ambitions up to where it is today and how it has affected how millions of people see the world along the way. It is a revelatory series that fills in a lot of gaps into how culture became pop culture before becoming the disposable trash it is today. Despite the potentially controversial title of the series, this is a story of how a simple co-opting of fairy tales to make a fledgling company's movie productions cheaper ended up replacing an entire cultural institution and warping the way generations of children see storytelling, wonder, and the meaning of their own lives.
Sound heavy? That might be because the stories we tell ourselves has always been more important than you might believe, and the fact that we've spent nearly a century outsourcing creativity to an increasingly culturally detached corporation has done untold damage to the societal fabric. It's also why we can't seem to tell stories anymore.
It's not even to say that was Walt Disney's original goal to end up here. He almost certainly didn't think such a thing as the current Disney Corporation was possible back in the day, but many of his decisions would butterfly effect out to change the entire world of entertainment, destroy reading, feminize storytelling, and also "grow" with the audience into adulthood, eventually leading to the creation of Disney Adults as the punchline they are today.
How did all that happen? That is quite the question. To go into that is a long and convoluted tale, which is why I linked to Cartoon Aesthetics' series throughout this piece. Check out the first video above and you will see the seeds of a lot poison flowers that would spring up in the decades to come. Not that anyone could see them at the time, and perhaps there is no real villain in the story, at least not in the early parts of it, but that is almost beside the point: choices have consequences, seen and unseen, and we are living with the consequences of those choices today.
Why do we have Fairy Tales to begin with? This isn't a question asked much anymore, despite how obvious it once was. Fairy Tales exist to present the world of both the imagination and the concrete intertwined with each other, not only to show children the way the universe is but also to remind adults the full encompassing view of existence we might sometimes forget. In essence, they are the stories of what makes us what we are and point is to what we should become, and what to avoid. They remind us of what being human is.
Fairy stories aren't dumbed down "proper stories", they aren't meant to be infantile, and they aren't supposed to be "time wasters" as is commonly thought to be the purpose of such stories today. No, in many ways Fairy Tales are the basis to all stories, presenting the line where wonder blurs with the mundane to create a full view of reality both seen and unseen. Yes, they might teach lessons, but they also teach reminders, which is why they have a uniting universal aspect to them which makes such creations cultural touchstones and invaluable.
Which is why outsourcing them has turned out to be a disastrous idea that has ended up doing untold damage to the cultural fabric.
The video series covers this, but goes beyond it into much of the insipidness the 20th century did with creativity, including the embarrassing watering down of "Imagination" as some effeminate magical spell that makes you smarter and above the rubes. If you are old enough, you certainly remember how lame it was back in the day. Read a book, and you'll be smart! It just happens! You might remember Gen Y being told just that with the rise of The Kid Who Reads and lame ideas in retrospect like Reading Rainbow leading to the archetype we all know well by now.
Who decided to hand over art and entertainment to the lamest people imaginable and let them rule it with an iron grip? Is it any wonder these people have lead us to where we are today?
This character didn't fall out of the sky
Yes, throughout the 20th century we not only devalued Fairy Tales, but also turned reading itself into a lame hobby purely for anti-social nerds who believed themselves special and above everyone else, two disastrous mistakes that ended up having negative consequences on more than just corporate entertainment but also social dynamics and general maturity. How else can we explain why we not only have Disney Adults but Daily Show snark as the baseline for adult behavior only becoming more and more prominent since the dawn of the 21st century? That didn't come from nowhere.
Not only that, but it became more and more acceptable to be a cruel human being, as long as you were doing it for a "good" cause. Where else this kind of behavior lead if not to total dehumanization and an unearned sense of superiority? Where else does it end anywhere other than today's Current Year misery?
There was a push when I was a kid to never grow up. If you're old enough you certainly remember it. However, the intent was to make you "retain" that childlike wonder inside yourself that was common in youth. Now, while there might be something to that advice, the reason it was even thought of to begin with was because those teaching it to the youth operated in a materialistic dead end world where your monetary gain is what gave you value as a human being and that those who died with the most toys won. Won what? Who knows. The greater point is that the "adult" world was simply not enticing, and the "kid" one was quickly being co-opted by those same forces who knew it. Essentially, none of this came out of nowhere.
This movement created the weird situation we're in now, where even those sneering at Disney Adults talk like 1980s movie bully stereotypes, megachurch pastor parodies (crafted by people who hate them to begin with), or outdated Gen X cool guys (because sarcasm from thirty years ago is still cool, like punk music!). This isn't just a Disney problem, not by a long shot, and it would be good to remember all of this sprung about from a century where those in charge deliberately committed cultural suicide and left their broken offspring to pick up the pieces. The only problem is they don't know how to do this. How could they when this is all they know?
Much of today's emptiness is undoubtedly caused by the lack of cultural cohesion and the rot of the 20th century accelerating everything into the mess it is today.
For instance, as the above video shows, the biggest reason Walt Disney achieved his success was not in aiming at males or even kids, but specifically at mothers, showing them safe, respectable, and cute, stories their children could digest without fuss. Since these mothers were the ones taking the kids to the cinema, they were the ones he aimed his marketing at. And it worked. It worked so well it changed everything.
And it would only work if society were itself structured in a way that allowed someone with this approach that level of control to begin with, not to mention a climate the prioritized safety over adventure. It is no wonder arts and entertainment became so feminized over the 20th century: that's the only direction it could possibly go, and go there it did. It's hard to blame Walt Disney himself for finding this niche, as he did not know where it would end up, but at some point those who followed after him definitely knew, which is how it all became so easily weaponized against its own customer base. Today's culturally irrelevant Disney is a result of this hubris.
Before the fall, however, Disney was unstoppable. Their approach was how the "Disney Version" of everything not only became the default view of those stories, but also morality and wonder itself. Even those destructive groups such as PMRC or ACT were not looking for a definition of wholesome that aligned with Christianity but on Disney Safetyism, itself an ideology a lot of Christians hold to this day without even seeming to realize it. Much of the 1950s stereotypes held up as the ideal (or evil) are not even 1950s ideals: they are the Disney movie version of reality.
Not only that, but the subversive entertainment to become prominent by the end of the 20th century was not reacting to any sort of objective morality or overarching view of goodness: they were reacting to the Disney view as if it were the default. Look how many still portray knights as either savage hypocritical killing machines or ignorant rubes taken up by liars (maybe even both!) which is not an inversion of reality, but a cartoon version they grew up with. You have plenty of swearing and blood in your mature story because the Disney version didn't have it, because your version of mature is effectively just Not Disney. This is not mature, but when Disney is seen as the default, perception is skewed. It is skewed not only for proponents, but also detractors.
In other words, almost all of our modern conception of storytelling, good or bad, is built on a misunderstanding formed by one man's brand that originated from nearly a century ago. This is just one great mess of nonsense, so it's no wonder younger generations find it so confusing to parse how we got to where we are today.
This is the point where one realizes that we are what we consume, and we have not been consuming reality for a long time.
In Part 2 of the series, our host moves from Fairy Tales and how they were (mostly) unintentionally co-opted and into how it affected the younger generations at the time before they were then spread to the younger generations to come. In other words, it is how Disneyfication works and how it's changed since Walt Disney was alive. And make no mistake, it has absolutely changed.
By the 1990s, Disney had grown so fat and profitable that it ended up invading every medium, every space, and every corner of the culture. Any Gen Y kids alive today would surely remember the onslaught of Disney products and noise everywhere they looked back then. It was never actually considered "cool" for guys to be into it, but that didn't mean they weren't exposed to the Disney brand at every opportunity.
This paired with both the subversion obsession of the era (again, based on Disney's wholesomeness, not the real deal), the pussification of reading as seen for girls, geeks, and weirdos, and the ubiquitous presence of the Disney brand itself, you ended out the century with a generation raised on corporate product while detached from the cultural roots it came from, yet also fed a constant diet of anti-social messaging (simultaneously paired with multi-cultural We Are The World weirdness) finally creating a generation that would be a made into a good global citizen. This concentrated unreality pushed as the New Normal would fix everything.
By the time the 2000s rolled around and the 20th century passed, everything that made Disney what it was in the first place had been destroyed, paved over, and co-opted by either Disney themselves or subversives twisting itself on the Disney view. In essence, reality had been completely supplanted by this new unreality.
Even when 9/11 came around to shatter this Disney reality as unrealistic and impossible, we clung to it all the tighter. When the media told us the Bad Guys were doing Bad Things, we snarked at them and obediently believed we could fix it all by Being Good in the acceptable way. What were these definitions of good and bad built on? They were Disney forgeries, not necessarily created by Walt Disney, but formed by a co-opting of his simplistic formula and corniness to create a weird subset of Adults who weren't Adults, but Kids who proudly Never Grew Up. Unreality.
All of this destruction originated from the same place, the same attitude.
The phenomenon of Disney Adults today is frequently focused on in the most blatant and obvious manner. We think of the ones who go to to Disney theme parks and whine about everything while acting like brats or the ones who go online to stalk or obsessively tear down anyone who dares think different from the modern Disney Media Conglomerate. However, the mentality does not stop with those obsessed with Disney (or even Disney adjacent properties like Star Wars or Marvel which are no different) but also consumes the forgery of reality known as Geek Culture.
Geek Culture itself is a mutation, born out of the 2000s where the media companies attempted to sell a Geek image to build itself a sort of Disney-like acolyte out of. All Geeks love all Geeky Products! What are Geeky Products? Why, things you were made fun of by those icky normal types who are now trying to co-opt your hobbies to control for themselves out of the blue for some reason. Forget that all of the product and brands were originally sold to kids by the millions for a quarter of a century before: you're special and unique for liking an IP and defending it against the normals (or let's just stop beating around the bush: "normies") who are invading your hobbies because . . . well, they just decided to one day. How dare they? This space was made for you so you could be cordoned off from the world and live in your own reality away from them.
You are superior and above the normie, after all: it's in their name! They're "normal" and normal is inferior. You are not normal; you're better.
Forget that normal people have no ideological compulsion to invade spaces and change them, and forget that these spaces have always been swarming with normal people (you just either never noticed them or paid attention), but it also gives cover to actual subversives to come in because all they need to do is learn the secret codewords and jargon and they can to anything they want when they get in the door. This is also what did eventually happen to Disney before it happened to anything else. These aren't normal people: they're self-centered obsessives who want control, because they are special and above everyone else.
This happened because at a certain point we became aware at how effective mass media was at altering the way people think and behave. The existence of Disney Adults even being a category at all shows just that. By the time of the "Disney Renaissance" in the late 1980s, the people in the company knew what they had and became more aggressive at pushing out what they wanted using the Disney formula but wrapped in the growing irony and cynicism of the time period. It eventually did bottom out, but by that time Disney had seized so much cultural capital (and other studios like Pixar) that they were able to weather the storm and survive like a cockroach in nuclear fallout.
That is why those who think Disney was "taken over" by weirdos or subversives are kind of missing the point. They have a vision now, one obtained through unreality, and they will work to make it real. They are so blinded by this falsehood at this point that in their quest to finally acquire the male demographic with Star Wars and Marvel they absolutely feminized and gutted them without even the least bit of subtlety, and are now scrambling for a way to get males without them somehow. As if they have already forgotten what they did wrong to begin with. No one could behave this way without having been soaked in Unreality for too long.
In other words, they are now lost and spinning out. Disney's peak has passed and as their own works have finally begun to hit the public domain (ironic, isn't it?) and they are quickly learning that very truth. That era is over, and we now are seeing the mistakes for what they were.
This is what the third and final part of Cartoon Aesthetics' series shows. We can now see the end result of the Disney Corporation's conquest of the modern world and the conquest of Fairy Tales. We see the end result of where it ended up: a soulless and empty husk of safe morality and shiny words which ultimately mean nothing and added up to nothing of value, at the end of the day. We see what a post-Disney world is all about.
Not to say that Disney itself never had value or produced anything of worth, but where its philosophy and direction eventually lead to could never go anywhere else. They weren't even necessarily the source of all of this, but more of a spirit of the times finally reaching its end point. The spirit of the 20th century is what it is, and it's long past expired.
The end result of the all of this is in the atomized dead end world we now inhabit. There is no more Pop Culture, there is no more shared monoculture, and there are no more shared values. Just as third places, local community, and the concept of identity itself has been subverted and hollowed out by modernity, so too is the remainder of old empires like the Disney corporation a vapid husk of what it once was. Old IPs made by much more talented and inspired people being worn as a skinsuit by modern Disney Adults who have no higher aspiration than to be a Good Person dictated by whatever the Good Guys in charge of them tell them is Good. Thus their own works must be constantly subverted and "updated" with modern morality and acceptable verbiage. It never ends.
Go get drunk with your friends in Disney World as you celebrate your 35th birthday. That is clearly what Walt himself intended, right? What higher aspiration can you even imagine with a mentality like that.
Nothing truly eternal can be built on or even built in the first place. All that remains is a race to the bottom of lowering standards, tired tropes and aesthetics, and emptiness disguised with bright colors and loud noises. This is the post-Disney world.
We have since lost sight of the original Fairy Tales and their aim to show us the world as it is in multiple forms. Storytelling itself is meant to present wonder, excitement, fascination, and awe--not to lock it down to trope lists, acceptable corporate language, and a weapon against your very neighbors. We have completely inverted them and in the process, lost ourselves.
Until we work to reclaim it, nothing will improve. As the above series subtly states and ends with, unreality only leads to more unreality. People cannot live in proximity with those who do not share their reality: we have all of history to show what that eventually grows into becoming. One vision will have to prevail in the end: and the one less than a century old that itself has been rotted out from the inside is not going to do much other than lead people to pills, head doctors, and the bottle. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what has happened to us.
The only solution is to go back, to remember where those Fairy Tales came from in the first place, and to build off them once again. Dead end roads and failed experiments must eventually be seen for what they are and be abandoned. Truth is more important than lies, and the best stories cannot lie: they can only tell the truth.
Truth is older than trends, it means more than sentimentality, and it runs deeper than cute images and saccharine catchphrases. It has to be rediscovered and reclaimed before everything falls apart worse than it already has. Thankfully, it is not too late yet.
There is more to everything than what we see. It is about time our stories finally reflected that again, otherwise unreality is all we will ever know. We cannot live without truth, we can only exist, and that will never be enough, not when we were made for more than this.
This is what Fairy Tales are for, after all. Until our stories change, we will not, and they cannot change until our perspective does. Here's hoping we manage before it is too late.
A very short and slow one this week. I just wanted to point you to this episode of a bunch of older YouTube guys from the old internet relaxing and messing around while talking about nothing important at all. That's right, today it's just something fun and breezy with nothing special going on. Enjoy yourselves!
The reason for this is mainly because so much nonsense has been going on recently, some of it way too heavy for this place, that I figured it would be better to take it easy just for today. Not everything has to be serious and intense all the time. Sometimes you can jut not think about anything at all. This is one of those times.
Besides, next week's post is going to be a lot more explosive, so I wanted to build up to it a little. In that one we're going to really dive into a subject that will ruffle a lot of feathers. Until then, let us actually use a weekend lounge for what it is for: lounging.
I'm not kidding about next week either. It's going to be kind of a big one, covering an issue that a lot of people might not be comfortable about. To give you a hint, it's about an old mouse that has seen better days, and will not be seeing better ones anytime soon.
And that's and all I'll say!
In other news, there is currently another Based Booksale this week, and I have once more put up the entire Gemini Man series for cheap. I chose it again because last time I heard reports that not everyone could get them all, so here is your chance to rectify that weird glitch in Amazon's system. You can find the sale here.
And that's all for this one. Very short piece this week, but again I think it's good to have lighter ones every once in a while. Just kick back as September finally rolls in to hopefully finally take this endless summer away.
The end of August is finally here, and we're heading into the last third of the year! One last stretch to go and we'll have made it. Until then, let's have a little fun as we usually do on the weekends. Today will be a more straightforward one.
Considering recent topics, I wanted to go over one we've touched on a bit, but one that seems to be coming back with younger generations: the rental experience. What exactly do we miss about rental stores, and what can we get back?
For one, obviously the preference for a long time has been to own. When DVD first came in during the late '90s and became standard in the early '00s (almost two decades ago) it became a lot more common to buy what you wanted. Rental stores themselves (the chains, particularly, though some smaller ones did this too) cleared out old stock cheap, some even offering classic games that go for hundreds on the second hand market for peanuts. It made sense why that was popular, sometimes favorites disappeared and you would never find them again. You had to grab what you could.
That era passed quickly, however. and the '00s changed as they went. By the end, social media was standard, cheap DVDs were common, and this new thing called streaming and even YouTube had taken over by the late '00s. Blockbuster died, becoming a corporate monolith pumping Hollywood product at the expense of local scenes and lack of variety, showing that the customer could have more than the hobbled selection they were left with by the end of that behemoth.
I know there are younger people (particularly '00s kids, Millennials) that don't believe me, but Blockbuster was a corporatized monopoly that replaced local industry, no different than pretty much everything we complain about today. It choked out variety, (local stores had their own selections not mandated and supplied by Hollywood directly), local filmmakers who used to have incentive to share their wares at their local store, and turned the rental experience into a bland facsimile of what it once was. Everything you complain about today in regards to places like McDonalds, Walmart, and even the recent Cracker Barrell disaster, all started with Blockbuster. Make no mistake, if it was alive today, it would be just like them.
That said, Blockbuster was not without merit, even if a part of the decline of the industry itself. There is something missing in the entertainment space without renting around. In fact, there is something missing in the entertainment space in general, as we have finally accepted it all as throwaway and interchangeable, and as we've done so we've begun to crave that missing piece we've been missing. But what exactly was it?
As the above video shows, it's all the little things, the touches of humanity that have since been lost to interpersonal Consuming and hiding away from the world.
Just think of how much the medium of cinema has changed, for the worse since the 20th century. One can also throw television in here too, and even aspects of gaming (like multiplayer). It started as a public activity in a high trust society, and ended as a private affair in a low trust one. It doesn't matter whether you "hate people" or think your taste impeccable and beyond reproach, but an activity that once included sociality as an important factor which is now completely stripped away signals something important has indeed been entirely lost.
Some might say we cannot get that back, that "progress" is inevitable and time marches on so we must adapt. While the latter is true, the former does not understand that every single change that happens in life is not automatically "progress" and needs to be kept around. We now know that something behind "new" does not preclude its quality, a lesson we had to learn after that decade of disaster known as the 2000s and the rot to come of the 2010s.
There are things we lost, important things, and we need to bring them back. We cannot keep pretending we can go on as we currently are.
Streaming has its uses: online gatherings, meetings, and even video sites, have their place. What it cannot do is replace real life needs, like social interaction. For example, online multiplayer has never come close to replicating the feeling of playing in the same room with someone you can directly interact with. Even when the games were better, they never matched up due to missing that important feature earlier classics took for granted. The cinematic experience is the same.
It goes without saying that the solution isn't to bring Blockbuster back, or to get another company to replace what it did. The corporate era is over now, and it's clear we cannot bring it back. Much like how McDonalds hanging its awful modern design wouldn't change how choked out the fast food industry has been of fresh blood in decades, just putting up logos and chanting old sales pitches and advertising lingo won't repair the larger problem.
It has to start locally. It just does. There is no other option. If one really wants the rental experience to return, it is going to have to start there. It is going to have to start where it began, in small mom and pop shops serving the local community. People are going to have to drive out of their way, even from the next town over, to scope out your wares and spread the word. Just as it once was, this is the only way it can be.
That being said, it isn't like just offering rentals will change the social climate. Telling someone to just start a business to fix social problems is a recipe for disaster. But we have to start somewhere with an idea, and that is closer to the ballpark than wishing for the return of corporate control of an industry again. That is just plain never going to happen and not a path worth traveling down. We do not need another Netflix. We do not even need the current one, to be brutally honest.
So I'm not going to make this post anti-Blockbuster or anything of the like, because it really doesn't matter at this point. However, there is something to be gained from such a simple industry being lost purely for automated digital distribution.
The arts and entertainment in general have been losing their connection with society, with real people, and it isn't a new phenomenon. We've trumpeted anti-social "leaders" and artists for decades as the people whose example is worth following, and it's led us to where we are now. We can't go any farther in this direction as it it has done little but foster acceptable mental illness in the mainstream and confuse the abnormal with the normal. All standards have been lost.
To go forward at this point requires going back. It isn't a suggestion, it is simply reality. We've spent too far mindlessly plowing ahead and ignoring the road signs while plugging our ears and repeating "progress" like it's a religious mantra of some kind. Continuing to do that, despite its very clear failure will not just magically work now, because it never did to begin with.
This goes beyond just renting, but I think that much is apparent to anyone reading this, so I'll just stop right here. What is more important is that we're aware of past mistakes so that we don't make them again just in more ridiculous ways.
That's all for today, I hope you've had a good August and I will see you in September! Let's charge into fall in style.
Thanks again for all your support. 2025 has been a weird one, but there are still many of cool surprises ahead of us. I can't wait until I can show you what I've been working on.
We're back with another one of these, this time on a subject I know we're all thinking about. The question is in just how artificial is everything right now?
This week let us tackle some questions based on this well discussed subject. What exactly is artificiality in art? Where does it come from, what is the source of it, and how can we move past it? Lastly, why does it feel like everything around us is artificial even when we know it's made by real people? We can't answer them all today, but we can scratch the surface before we can even think to strike at the heart of all this craziness.
What is really going on?!?
We're all well aware nothing in the arts or entertainment sphere is "natural" anymore, in that the ideas being expressed aren't deeper than surface level and rarely do they go beyond cliche phrases and unambitious characters or plots meant to rehash Current Year dogma. What we also don't address is that we also reshape this in the form of digestible Content meant to satisfy all the bots and algorithms that allow us to see anything anymore.
In other words, not only do we deliberately talk down to others in order to satisfy social demands, we also morph our language and alter our approach to our robot overlords so they can even be seen by anyone in the first place. In effect, we aren't actually working for customers: we're working for robots and filtering our "Content" to get it past them
The idea of "Working for the robot" has already affected video makers on YouTube and heavily filtered what they want to produce. If you wonder why so many channels have videos with wildly different view counts on their videos, this is the reason for it. They simply aren't doing what the algorithm gods demand of them. What these means is that they tailor their videos and thumbnails and advertising to be deemed worthy for acceptance by the algorithm (be it YouTube or any social media site) in order to maybe have an audience to watch their videos.
The robots aren't on your side.
This also is why so many bigger creators now have multiple channels (some focusing on livestreams, for instance) because it will not negatively impact their original one. This is because they have to work around (and for) the robots who are their real employers.
Author David V. Stewart talks about the topic in the video above. Since he is a YouTuber going back many years, he has seen trends come and go, as well as channels and creators. Whatever worked back in the day no longer does, making it more of a hassle for viewers to find channels and for channels to get viewers. Essentially, much like everything else, it's been flipped on its head backwards from its original purpose and intent. Check out the video above to see how that is.
It is difficult to blame so many video makers on YouTube since, well, there isn't much choice, especially for those doing this for a living. However, it does not change the fact that their work is being changed specifically for an entity that does not care about them or their audience, and, in the end, will negatively impact the quality of what they do. It's a Catch 22 situation, and the only way to fight it is to risk angering the very gods you are meant to placate.
Basically, as they are, the customer is not the person engaging in what you do: it's the robot sentinel watching you overhead like a hawk and ready to blow you away like an armed satellite should you fail to meet its demands. Not exactly a healthy position to be in.
The only solution, as always, is to take a risk.
We're diving so deep into artificiality we no longer even remember the purpose of producing for people isn't to pump content out like industrialization taught us. It's not to make tons of money, either (though of course that's nice), but to create something that can reach people and show them something a little higher and leave them in a better position than where they started. We can't do that if we're too busy being distracted, terrorized, and ruled over, by things that simply don't matter.
And artificiality doesn't matter. This sort of "Content" will be forgotten. It will come and go and disappear as quickly as it came into the void with the rest of it. It doesn't matter how much the "Content" mimics the real thing--it has nothing to say that isn't surface level or has been repeated hundreds of times by people who have already said it better before. This artificial product can't aim higher or show anything new.
But we can.
Hopefully sometime in the future we can build a scene that has this focus of connection at the forefront. It sure would be nice. Until then, enjoy "Content" being pumped out into the pipes, because that's all we're going to get as long as we work for the robots.
Personally, I think we've all had enough of it. Audiences want something real, something they can believe in. That said, all we can do is wait for enough pushback on how things currently are in order to find another path out of here. Until that happens, we're simply stuck waiting and in neutral, hoping for a new way.
For a post-Cultural Ground Zero society, I'm pretty sure we're used to that by now. After nearly three decades of stagnation, what's another couple years? Hopefully we won't have to wait much longer.
In other news, I recently introduced a new podcast series on the Patreon called the Drifter Mindset. This one is specifically about my writing and storytelling. I read a story, talk about where it came from, the meanings, and the themes, and what it meant to me as a writer. The usual podcast will continue on as always, but this one will be another bonus for anyone who wants to join. It's going to be as in depth as I can get it to be, so the episodes will be longer than a usual episode of Letters from the Wasteland. I have been publishing for nearly a decade, after all.
All that aside, I hope things are going well for you all out there, and I'll see you next time!
