All Mixed Up

Welcome back to the wasteland!

This week's post didn't take a lot of time in the oven because I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible. The reason for that is because it's not only a timely topic, but one I have a lot to say on. Today's subject also contains several elements I've wanted to go over for some time now, and this is the perfect opportunity to discuss it all. I also recorded an hour long episode of the podcast on my Patreon on the subject, so you can also hear more about it here. Suffice to say, I had a lot to say about this topic.

I grew up in the 1990s. I think that's very clear for anyone who has read anything from me. I am a member Generation Y (born in the '80s and grew up mainly in the '90s), also called the baffling moniker Older Millennial sometimes. My childhood memories are all encased in this decade, and impossible to remove from it. One of my own books, Y Signal, was set in 1995-1996 and I did my best to make it as accurate as possible for the story being told. Suffice to say, the decade means a lot to me, even if I am well aware of its flaws and criticize it all the time.

All this is to say that I loathe what the decade has been turned into in the modern age. Whether by my own cohort or not, it has been transformed into a theme park for bitter burnouts who also hate the era they are trying to profit off of.

I once covered the failed Netflix series Everything Sucks, which took place in 1996 and got absolutely everything wrong about it, from the fashions to the attitudes to just plain misunderstanding what normal people thought and believed back then. This turkey turned the decade into an amusement park ride of media kitsch and sarcastic eyerolls in order to sell a stock "finding yourself" story that has been told a million times before. In other words, the '90s shell was a cynical gimmick to sell garbage to both nostalgic adults and curious kids. The moral, as always, is that the past is terrible and you've always been miserable and will always be miserable in every era to come. That isn't true, of course, but it's the only reason these uncreatives use any 20th century time period to tell a story. They have no other story to tell.

Unfortunately, that failed series is not alone, as the video above highlights. In the years since, cynical nostalgia revisionism has only gotten worse. With the rise in physical media, vinyls making a comeback, and older TV and movies being enjoyed by younger generations than ever before, it is clear there is an interest in What It Was Like. Unfortunately this means propagandists and opportunists are using this thirst as a way to poison the well.

You might wonder why this subject annoys me so much, and I'll tell you: I don't like the decade I grew up in treated as a playhouse for cynical hipsters stuck in 2000s irony poisoning posturing to fool around in and lecture me over. This isn't just about historical accuracy, but about general respect for both the people who lived in that era and those who want to know about it. Basically, I hate lying, and that's all this amounts to.

I should also clarify that I'm not criticizing works that aren't 100% accurate. That is not the argument being made. When doing a period piece, things will go wrong. It happens. The difference is in the authorial intent: why those inaccuracies exist.

For instance, I once read a Dean Koontz book that took place in 1997 or so and it was fairly accurate to the time period (which it had to be before the time jump to present times for the latter half of the story) and more or less got it right except for a single mention of Pokémon cards, which were not on these shores for another year. The author probably got them confused with the game and assumed they came out at the same time and would be just as popular. He mentioned other things that were correct from what I could recall, but that wasn't. This, however, was not a big deal because Mr. Koontz tried and he did his best to treat the time period with basic respect. The book is good, too. Therefore, it doesn't matter.

The opposite of the above example is a piece of hackwork that cynically exploits the time period as an aesthetic to cash in on blanket "nostalgia" to sell the audience phony memories and attempts to rewrite the past to suit their own selfish ends. Material like the above Everything Sucks is like this. It's meant to sell a lie wrapped in a candy coating of an era it doesn't understand. Another product like that failed series is the recent Mixtape movie-disguised-as-a-video-game.

For those unaware, Mixtape is a "video game" that was made to invoke '90s nostalgia, though from what I heard the writer director of it did not even grow up in America, where the thing takes place. Regardless, there's no defined year, but you can parse it down to being around 1997 (again with that year) simply due to the music selections and the level of technology mentioned. There is no file sharing mentioned, which means it has to be before 1999. Though even that gets dicey (more on the subject later). The selling point of the game is to fool burnout adults into misremembering what the '90s were like and tricking Gen Z kids into thinking this is what it was really like back then. There is no other selling point here. Why else would you tell the story?

It certainly isn't the gameplay, as there is basically none. I can't even say the soundtrack is a selling point, because it is oddly chosen and extremely inaccurate to the time period. More on both of those later. For now it's enough to say that "recapturing" the era is its selling point, so let us talk about how it fails at that before anything else.

Mixtape lives or dies on whether it successfully inspires nostalgia in '90s kids or not, so let me start this criticism out first as a '90s kid.

The story concerns soon to be high school graduates named Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra. They were supposed to go on a road trip, but Stacey (the game calls her by her last name "Rockford" for some reason instead of her first name) decided she needs to go to New York to catch some kind of soundtrack programmer (this plot point is very vague, I'm doing the best I can) by running into this woman she has never met randomly in the street so she can get a job making mixtapes as a Music Supervisor professionally. Therefore she has to leave tomorrow morning for this one extremely vague chance to define her future. Yes, this is the inciting event of the story.

I will talk about the absurdity around the music later, but for now I want you to remember that this is 1997. While she has a computer that certainly has Windows 95 on it, there is nothing saying she has the internet. It's not even mentioned. Even if she had the dialup internet required, how would she know any of these things about this random music industry woman's daily schedule she wants to run into? It's never explained. Given that, again, this is before the internet was ubiquitous and there was no social media, coming across even vague information would not have been easy, never mind a random employee's personal schedule in a place like New York. Anyone who lived in the 1990s in North America would know how hard it was to get any deeper information on anything you liked. Again, it isn't even like the character is a computer whiz. It never comes up.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, by the way. No one talked the way any of these kids talked in the '90s. No one used the expression "Big if True" in the '90s. No one liked things ironically for "cheese" in the '90s. No one talked in stilted smirking above-it-all aphorisms that would make Joss Whedon blush in the '90s. All of this is hyper irony hipsterism that emerged out of the 2000s. The writing is no different than flops like Dustborn or Forspoken, or even older punching bags like Life Is Strange. Unless you believe teenagers have been talking exactly the same with no differences for the last 30 years, it's obvious this is fake and put on.

Everything about this game is dated, not because of the era it's supposed to take place in, but because it feels like a product of the empty-souled 2000s that produced a million Ramona Flowers wannabes. It would be like if the anti-80s slander of the '90s were still the default of today, or if tastemakers still stereotyped the '70s as disco world with giant mustaches. It's an outdated frame that should have been discarded years ago, but still it persists.

The tired revisionist '00s hipsterism is what makes this fall so flat. The core trick is to present nostalgia full of winking nods to tell you that the person writing this is just as uninvested as you should be because nothing means anything. Don't ever be invested, don't ever stick your neck out and try, just do as little as possible and convince others that you should be rewarded for doing it, or, like, you know, realize it's not for you. If '90s nostalgia is not for me, someone who grew up in the decade, then who is it for? I am the exact audience for this, which is why I'm going to tell you why it doesn't work. The '90s might not have been a pristine decade, but it was not this dead-souled as outdated '00s irony hipsters portray it as. Accuracy should not be this hard.

Not to mention that there are countless hours of home movies from the 1990s, in contrast to previous decades, one could watch for research. It should be the easiest decade to get right, and yet is the one portrayed incorrectly the most. There are also actual films from the decade starring kids and teenagers one could watch, too. They might not be 100% accurate to the times, but they are far more accurate than nostalgia pieces being made today. When the kids from the Mighty Ducks sound more mature and realistic than these supposed teenagers do, in a zany kids comedy of all things, something is very wrong with what you're doing. Fulton Reed might have had a ridiculous slapshot, but he still talked like a normal person. No one in Mixtape does.

All this to say is that I hate that '90s kids are not allowed to have our own Stand By Me or Wonder Years. By that I mean a TV show or movie that legitimately tries to adapt the time period as accurate as possible. We can't even get a Dazed & Confused or That '70s Show (both made in the '90s, ironically), a more comedic take that at least treats the decade with respect. We can't get anything at all that actually even tries. It's all dated ironic hipster-brained slop from burnouts who can't leave their warped 2000s philosophy behind. Instead of something made to try to understand the past of an era of real people, we get smirking backwash slop slathered in lies. It's hard not to get even a little miffed at this repetitive pattern of disrespect.

The 90s kid factor is only part of it: what of the music? After all, the game prides itself on nostalgia for the '90s and music as well. Music is part of the title, even. Surely this means the soundtrack is a mix of songs teenagers from the '90s actually listened to. You have an unlimited budget for your "indie game" to get songs in perpetuity that not even Rockstar could get for the million selling blockbuster Grand Theft Auto games, after all. Accuracy here should be even easier with that crutch. How could it possibly fail on that level? 

Well, it does. Spectacularly, even.

To be fair, Mixtape doesn't fail because the songs are necessarily bad. It fails because it undercuts its own nostalgic selling point (the entire reason this is being made) by completely disconnecting with the music selection of what '90s kids listened to. Let me explain what I mean by this, because it's hard to get across in only a few sentences.

The point of Mixtape is to sell nostalgia to a mass of people who actually lived in the time period in question. This means the soundtrack should have things teenagers listened to at the time, specifically delinquent loser kids since this is what the main character ostensibly is supposed to be. and yet the soundtrack comes across as, yet again, a 2000s hipster's music selection. '90s kids did not listen to almost any of these songs. The game fails monumentally on getting this aspect right. It fails so badly it ruins any hint at nostalgia its trying for.

To get to the point: No teenager in 1997 was listening to music from 1969-1989. You might have been, as in you as an individual or a few of your friends, but this was not how teenagers listened to music in the '90s. It was a constant battle to be seen as fresh and cool. The '90s were defined by an endless series of fads and no one wanted to be the one caught listening to old stuff, because it meant you were not cool. That's just how it was.

As an example, I had to convince a friend to listen to Led Zeppelin, of all things. He didn't listen to "old music" back then. Beaming over discovering Boston's self-titled in a used CD store was considered weird for a teenager. Isn't that music for old people? None of the people I'm talking about were hipsters, either. Hipsterism wasn't really a thing for teenagers. All of my examples were ordinary kids. They did not listen to old people music.

If you want to get the era right, the soundtrack should be songs from the era it was in that kids listened to. Even if its something as varied as Megadeth's "Sweating Bullets" or Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" or at least something that was playing on the radio in 1997. Rap, ska, swing, jangle pop . . . there was a lot, and Mixtape contains absolutely none of it.

The point is that this is what the majority of these kids listened to back then. If you want to connect through nostalgia then you need to connect to what the majority of the people at the time were doing, even if you weren't. No teenager was putting Rainbow, Stan Bush, Rush, or Devo, on mixtapes in 1997. Kids at the time would have thought they were old people music. I know because I saw it for myself. You would have been seen as a massive weirdo for listening to "your parents'" music. It's only in the 2000s with the combination of irony music hipsterism, file sharing, and the rise of video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, which helped introduce younger generations to this stuff that changed this perspective around. In the 90s, it was very different.

On top of this, there is the practicality of how a teenager in a small town would acquire this music in the first place. Vinyl was a relic and forgotten by teenagers in 1997 and cassettes were already fading. They bought CDs. If anything, the '90s were the decade of the CD. Therefore, the local music shop is probably the only way the main character is getting music, which would certainly only contain newer music since, again, vinyls were shoveled out by that time and not everything old had been re-released on CD yet. This is a lot to keep track of, but, well, of course it is. It's a lot of work to get things right, but it doesn't mean I shouldn't expect people to try.

If the answer to inaccuracies is "Don't think about it" then why am I tasked to think about any of this? Does any of it matter at all? If it doesn't then why was this made in the first place? If you aren't taking the music seriously, then why should I?

Lastly, in regards to music, why does the main character have burned CDs in 1997? They barely existed then due to insane cot and availability, and were in no way common until the 2000s around the time file sharing was. I know because I was burning mix CDs myself at the time. Yes, they existed in extremely rare places, but again, this is not a common or shared experience. Most people only started burning CD once Napster blew up. Why are burned CDs in a nostalgia product that is trying to sell common and shared experiences? No mass group of people were making mix CDs in 1997. On top of it, why is the movie game then called "Mixtape" at all then? The soundtrack used in the story is on a burned CD. It's all so baffling.

This is also supposed to be a "video game" that takes place right in the center of the Golden Age of the medium, and yet video games play absolutely no role in the character's lives. None of them, not even side character. Everyone in my class growing up in the '90s from kid to teenager played video games, owned a console, or knew someone who did. They were massively popular among the under 25 set. When Tony Hawk Pro Skater came out my entire class was buzzing about it, and that close to the time this movie game takes place in.

You have the premise of a nostalgic video game supposedly centered on the '90s and you don't include your own supposed medium in it. I don't even think the rental store included in the game carries video games. They're just not there at all. Strange choice. Then again, Mixtape features none of what games at the time did. There is no challenge, no lives, no score system, and no fail states. So what makes it a game when it doesn't contain what even Sierra adventure games from that same era had? It is possible to pass entire sections of this "game" without touching the controller. So why is it considered a "game" or "interactive" at all. It even gets the part where you rewind the cassette tape with a pencil wrong. It not only ignores video games as a medium, it isn't one itself. No wonder game journos love it. They've wanted movies with minimal button presses instead of video games for decades now, and here is something that gives them the bare minimum.

We went through how Mixtape failed at reflecting the '90s, how it failed at using nostalgia, how it didn't get the music right, and how it failed at being a video game or even paying tribute to them, so let's move on to the last one: the writing.

The best way to describe the writing of Mixtape is that it's written by someone who doesn't remember the '90s, loves '80s "cheese" ironically, and still thinks '00s hipsterism is cool instead of annoying like it's been for the last quarter century. No one acts like a person here. The main character is a vapid selfish idiot who talks like a listicle from Cracked circa 2004. Her guy friend is trying to channel Bill & Ted with quirk chungus random one-liners that make no sense while adding nothing to what little story is here. The two of them only seem to be friends because it's convenient and have nothing in common aside from their generic hatred of normal people, because these stories always have to star losers and never actually contain normal people except to sneer at them. The other girl is possibly the worst one, a psychotic narcissistic airhead with anger problems brought on by a cartoon strict dad stereotype that folds the instant she threatens criminal activity on him. Every other character is a non-entity that all talk in the same repetitive cadence.

The story, such as it is, contains pointless asides, one-note minigames, and dialogue straight out of a Scott Pilgrim fanfic, all on the way to . . . nothing. Whatever story just ends suddenly because it decides to. There's no real climax or satisfying denouement. It just stops. Perhaps you're supposed to take away that life is fleeing so always take a chance. That might work if the main character didn't initiate this story of leaving her hometown for a stupid reason that will never work out and would have been stopped if a single person had bothered to mention that impossibility. So no it's a series of pointless absurdities that would have been easily avoided if anyone had decided to be what hipsters like these hate more than anything in the world: normal.

You see "normal" people have problems, too. They have fears, hopes, and dreams, and they actually do matter. "Freaks" who choose to be freaks, who choose to reject normality because they think they are above it, are not more interesting people for it. Those who fall through the cracks by accident or unwillingly, then work to find their way out of the dark, are more compelling characters than those who wear their deliberate anti-social posing like a badge. You could be normal but you chose different because you're Special and Better. Good for you. You have nothing of substance to offer anyone, normal or on the fringes, because you just admitted to believing you are above them. You have no story to tell that will connect to those you dislike..

That, if anything, is the ultimate failure of Mixtape's story. It wants you to care about people who don't care, people who would actually hate you. It wants sympathy for the unsympathetic. In short, it a whole lot of nothing for those who believe in nothing.

All of this comes around to the fact that right now the past is popular even with younger kids. They want to know it better. Products like Mixtape are trying to sell them a past that never existed. They're lying to them to sell product and profit off a past they never experienced themselves. These kids are looking for honesty, for hope, and maybe a window into a world they never knew to add onto their own: and they'll find none of that here. They can tell, too. You'll find plenty of clips online of streams, reviews, and Vtubers, dogging it for its "Millennial writing and humor." They can see through it all, and that's certainly a good thing. It's saying this doesn't work anymore.

The original intent of this whole project, however, still rubs me the wrong way. It's indicative of a generation that won't move on, and I'm not talking about the 1990s. I'm talking about the revisionist brain worms that cause nonsense like this "game" to be made in the first place. That didn't exist in the '90s and no one needs it to exist now.

Much has been made of "grifting" in the current entertainment spaces. One aspect of it not elaborated on is the reason it is so prevalent is because those doing it have no respect for the people they're trying to wrestle money out of. They only want money and kudos from cliques of people like them. They have no interest in normal people, which is why they have no qualms fleecing them.

If these irony poisoned types don't want to sell honesty, then what are they trying to sell and why is it so important that you buy it from them? Every piece of art exists for a reason. Why does this lie exist to do? Who is it for?

Nostalgia might be a feeling as much as it is a time and place, but if the feeling is built on a lie, then you have been lied to by the feeling. Lies are fake which in turn makes the nostalgia phony. To what end is this lie meant to take you? What benefit do you get beyond giving money for a product pumped out for consumption? How does it benefit you, in the end?

The reason I live in a wasteland is because of lies like Mixtape, because of those who care nothing of truth or honesty beyond what they can get materially. The reason '90s nostalgia exists is because so many people want to get away from the grifters crowding in on all sides to hose them and are looking for a window to a world different from this one. For the jailer, to sell the key to another cell, then lock it up and say the prisoner is now free, is an evil act. It is wrong.

You might ask why all this matters. Why do you care so much about your past, old man? It's just a product: either consume it or shut up. I care because it's fake, it's cynical, and I am well within my right to loathe an attempt to cheaply exploit my past and lie to my face because it's easy. Art should mean something, even a silly throwaway video game, and it is silly to not expect more. At some point we need to expect more than the bare minimum.

You deserve more than to be exploited. We all do, and asking for a little bit more from people you are giving money to should be normal. What is all this for, in the end, anyway?

Hopefully more than this.

Check out the 10th Anniversary issue of Cirsova for stories of fun action and adventure! My story Infinite Alley is in this one: a story of time loop madness in a cramped place. Check it out today!

People Who Hate You

Welcome back to the wasteland!

It's been a bit, but I'm finally back with a new post. This time I wanted to expound on the way modern studios think of their audience. Mostly in that they don't, at all. Well, they do, but not in the way they really should.

You've heard the phrase before: Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You. This means that refusing to reward people who dislike you should be paramount in your decision making. Even if you like something, you shouldn't reward the people making it both so that it doesn't encourage poisonous behavior and so that you aren't complicit in rewarding it. It's been a growing notion, the phrase getting a lot more use these days than it used to, partially because of the buying public's increased apathy towards those trying to sell them products while simultaneously spitting on them.

Truth be told, separating the art from the artist is not not totally possible. The artist will always have something of himself in what he does. However, what matters is not whether you agree with his philosophy or way of life, but if what he creates is genuine art: an attempt to connect with people outside himself. This is increasingly difficult in a world where Hollywood and the music industry (and most other industries) can't help but wag their finger and sneer at those not like themselves, and inform the audience that unless they believe 100% in lockstep with them they are not only not Good People but also unworthy of purchasing their product and engaging in their wares. This unearned arrogance is why such folk should not be rewarded for what they do.

That said, most customers understand this now. The issue comes from after that realization that these people do not see you as people.

In today's art and entertainment climate, finding someone who doesn't hate you is surprisingly difficult, even more so to find one who doesn't see you as little more than a wallet with legs even if you do believe 100% of the same things they do. The only places one can seem to find and reprieve is among scattershot independent artists. It just seems as if everyone has an ulterior motive and, unfortunately, they do.

The above video from Real Life Fake Wizard highlights a recent example of a grift played with audiences that have long since gotten tired of being played with. It is what happens when you don't see the audience as people. This grift is particularly malicious since it requires many layers of lies to be explained. Check the video to see it in detail.

It once used to take a long time to discover these sorts of schemes. It could be decades before you learned that author you enjoyed secretly hated everything about you or that a certain musician was some kind of a criminal deviant as opposed to a normal drug addict. Now, we find out almost instantly because modern artists and creators (and the money men) no longer care about even trying to lie to the people they're trying to get money from. Now they just outright tell them that they hate them, if not with words than with direct action, like this. Whatever level of respect that once used to exist is gone, and the audience knows it.

There was a lot of talk recently about the destruction of "Christian Art" industries and the revelations that there never actually were any to begin with. It was an artificial genre ghetto construct no different than what happened with siffy way back in the 1940s. The people in charge catered to a fringe demographic and pretended it was now the mainstream one, and in the process alienated the majority in order to profit solely from the obsession of Fanatics. In this case, instead of anti-social materialist zealots it is Bookstore Betty, an archetype that barely even seems to exist anymore.

And not only that, they are perfectly willing to throw Bookstore Betty under the bus if it gets them a seat at the big boy table. As seen below:

This is what everyone can sense now about how things are. It's all about grifting now. There is nothing that puts the audience first before opposing sides over silly political games. The worst part is that it always ends up here, in the end.

The issue with most studios/groups/artists/whatever today is that the audience comes secondary to either monetary compensation or fame. Such people are wannabe Hollywood insiders using acceptable verbiage and rubbing the right shoulders to get what they want. They never believed in anything to start with. At some point we bought into the idea that however you make money doesn't matter. All that matters is that you make it. It's either that or become a true believer of some ideology and obtain infamy instead (which will also somehow get you tons of money from your masters for doing what they tell you). This is where the industries have ended up.

But that's never been the reason to create.

You create because something inside you stirs you to put something forth: and it's something only you can put forth. It's not so you can be famous or become showered in praise and money. You create because you have to, because there's no other choice but to create. There's a spark begging to be lit, and when it is lit it cannot be stopped. This is creation only you can make and give to the audience, and it's your responsibility to do just that.

Nothing else will do. There is no other option but to do it.

For one who creates, you can't hate your audience. You can tell yourself you do, or misdirect your frustrations at them (countless examples of that happening), but people who create never actually hate their audience. It's impossible. The reason is because the entire spark to create is due to the need to express this idea, this piece, this work, that no one else can express, in order to connect with other people so you can help make sense of it in some context. At the base of it, this need requires an audience or it's not really creation, it's just vanity. Even if it's unintentional, all art does exist for audience enjoyment. We can't keep pretending otherwise.

Therefore the way many modern companies and creators treat their audience is wrong and backwards. It is also why the audience is shrinking and walking away, and why the monoculture is gone and more or less forgotten now. There is no attempt at connection, only leeching, and there is no industry or medium that can survive for the sole purpose of leeching. This is the reverse of how it should be, and why it is not sustainable.

Lecturing in art is also leeching, by the way. It implies that you deserve an audience to berate and browbeat into submission with your work. All anti-audience motives in creation are also anti-art, a sign of death, and will not lead to any growth. Lecturing isn't connecting. If you want to learn, find a teacher, not an artist.

In fact, that subverted view of the world is why we are where we are right now.

There are plenty of creators aiming to do better than this dead end state of being, and those are the types to support in order to get the art and the work you desire. Eventually the dead wood will be cleared away and all that will remain will be the path forward.

After that? Hopefully we can finally leave this era dead and buried. I don't know about you, but I'm beyond sick of the grifting and the lecturing. I just want something to connect with again, just like it used to be.

I think we all do.

Check out the 10th anniversary issue of Cirsova for some exciting tales of action and wonder! My story, Infinite Alley is in this one. It's a tale of repeating madness on a dark planet deep in the void of stars! Can Dana escape the loop, or is she doomed to be dragged into hell? Read today and find out!

End of the Old Ways

Welcome back to the wasteland, folks!

Been a bit, but here's a new post I've been musing on for awhile. Part of it got eaten, but it is what it is. Hopefully the newer version is good enough in getting the point across. Today, let us discuss the actual point of doing something.

Do you ever wonder what it is that stories in the mainstream have been missing? No, I don't just mean "quality" or "good writing" but specific things that were once there but have been either subverted or gutted out of them entirely. We can all tell things aren't quite the same beyond preferences, to the point that even younger generations can tell something is wrong. Old industries we once thought were immortal are dying and no one can explain why.

We can go on about what values we wish were or weren't being taught and how they are or aren't, we can even quibble about how well something is done, but that wouldn't be enough to explain the lack of interest in what was supposed to be an industry meant to entertain no longer doing that. All of the above is fine for discussion, but it doesn't get to the root of the issue. What is it, at the heart of all these problems, is the mainstream missing that it once used to have?

The answer, is a point. Entertainment now only exists to be entertainment and nothing more. It is meant to be disposable from the jump.

The above video talks about recent Hollywood products showing a writing class that is devoid of answering questions they have never pondered, but also are incentivized to not even ask any in the first place. In essence, the creative industry is helmed by people who are not (possibly by choice, though it's irrelevant to the point) creative. That this happened does not speak well not only for the future of the industry but also the fact that these systems allow people like this in charge to begin with. The audience has lost their trust, and getting it back is far beyond Herculean.

We can criticize Hollywood for bad writing or improbable and alien characterizations (and they are very valid criticisms to have), but the heart of it is that the writers really don't have anything to say or get across in their creations. They don't have a philosophy or religious impulse, they just have talking points they either want to expound on that will provide the studio with a bomb, or platitudes and plot beats they will hit in order to maybe provide a safe, toothless hit. There is nothing in between these two approaches, and the majority of audiences can sense it. They either hate their audience or are scared of them, neither of which is good for creativity.

Even the video's example of kids movies are one such problem. Did you know that there were such things as family movies a long time ago? They were not made for children, but the entire family. The target audience of The Last Unicorn, Secret of NIMH, and The Great Mouse Detective, is not the same as the movies being made today. This changed because the movies stopped being made for people but for generic demographics, and over time all that has changed is the invention of more demographics and the bitter resignation that the creator will never hit the biggest possible audience this way. As a result you now get directors and stars blaming the general audience when their demographically myopic and incredibly niche movie fails to be a hit.

It was never going to be one, because it was designed to be throwaway. At some point they forgot the point wasn't for the audience to waste time, but to experience something grand. We are a long way away from that era.

Entertainment became disposable over time, and so too did the attitudes of those who engaged these products. In fact, we now use the word "consuming" when talking about entertainment, as if the only value it has is how fast you can swallow and digest it before "consuming" more product, rinse and repeat. This has also coincided with the rise of the generic term "media" as if "consuming media" is the goal instead of "listening" to "music", "reading" a "book", or "watching" a "movie", all of which are different forms of art requiring different modes of engagement. Now it's all the same slop to be shoved down your gullet.

And there is that word again: slop! That is an apt term for modern entertainment and the creators who shovel it out in an attempt to be part of the undistinguished gruel that slides down the random consumer's throat in Current Year. You can't make slop if the intent of your work is to use your medium properly, instead of just making Content for those 5 minutes of possible attention before the next flash in the pan comes around. But that point was lost long ago.

The reason kids are by and large rejecting the old media complex we still mistakenly, and without reason, think is immortal and permanent, is due to the fact that they know it's utterly meaningless. They might not know why that is, but their brain does, and it's because they see how it exists for little more than consumption of slop. Once you taste something better, something that tries even a little to do what it's supposed to do beyond the lowest common denominator, it is impossible to go back again. There is a reason Zoomers are buying vinyl records, Blu-ray/DVDs, and paperbacks, more and more these days, as streaming is stagnating. Even still, getting beaten by 20 second looping videos of silly cats and goofy memes is not an excuse: YouTube is 20 years old and video games are much older. Why is it only now a problem and with the younger audience? Why have they, specifically, given up? As I said, it's because they know what we don't. It's all worthless.

Just look at what older audiences do to "consume media" slop. We rely on intangible websites and electronic devices to supply constant dopamine. Streaming, for instance, is the ultimate Content mill of slop, even worse than cable TV was, and we're all starting to understand that. The kids, however, already know, even if they can't explain why. If it's all meaningless, then what's the difference in watching silly throwaway videos instead? They have as much meaning as the garbage the crusty old industry for old people does. None, only the videos don't pretend to have any. In many ways, it's actually more honest than what we do.

Though part of that is also because the kids have never had any entertainment made for them, therefore this system in turn means nothing to them. As far as their concerned, this is already a dead industry, and they have no problem abandoning an industry that has abandoned them. In other words, they left long ago and have no interest in changing their minds.

And why should they?

This shouldn't be that surprising, except for people who still think the 20th century is the beginning and end of history. The once-popular space battle franchise did not exist in 1976, and it will not exist in 2076. This should all be obvious. It's how it has always worked.

The solution is not to recycle old things endlessly and hope it remains relevant for younger generations. It is to make new things inspired by those old things in order to speak to the younger generations that currently have nothing to call their own. This is how art is meant to work, and it is something we must get back to once again. How do we speak with generations we're choosing to ignore? Perhaps trying would help.

Stories are meant to speak to people, to communicate to them. They don't do that if they're made purely to check boxes or to be easily consumable and tossed out at the first opportunity. "Making content" is not an approach that will improve the situation or better anything that needs bettering, as can be seen by the last decade of lowered engagement and ambition in the arts. The current approach is not working and it will not magically work again someday if we keep mindlessly doing it over and over again with no change.

To paraphrase a statement in the above video: These kids will not turn 25 and then suddenly decide to watch A New Hope. It has nothing to do with them, they have no reason to engage with it, and it is a relic of another age with no relevance to theirs. They're looking for something more than subversion or nostalgia for things they have never had. They want Creation. They want new ways.

When are we going to give it to them?

There's no better time than now, what with the ancient industries in terminal decline and options for alternatives more plentiful than ever before. As younger generations move on from the remains of the past, its time we do the same. It's time to look forward to the future!

We're about due.

It's Cirsova's 10th Anniversary! Check the anniversary issue out today! I'm also in this one!

Nothing Left to Watch

Welcome back to the wasteland!

Been a bit since the last post, but there's also been a lot going on behind the scenes. For instance I was suspended from Twitter/X last week for "Inauthenticity" despite my account being a decade old and have been given no actual explanation for it. I severely doubt a human being has even been involved in the process. That said, there's little I can do about it from my end.

Anyway, let's get to today's topic. We're in 2026 and we're nearing the end of a lot of things we thought would be immortal even a decade ago. In fact, we're closer than we've ever been before and there is no turning back.

Movies are over. I bet you've heard that statement before but never really put much thought into it. Why would you? Everyone has been saying it for years. On top of it, it's very difficult to imagine how the death of an entire industry will come about or look like, especially one older than any of us alive today. Well, now you have a very good view of it happening right now and right before your eyes. You are witnessing Hollywood dies as we speak, and it's no embellishment or lie. Everything is coming to an end, and it won't be much longer.

The above video from Red Letter Media features a look at the recent trend of a sea of flops flowing out of Hollywood. Not even movies people aren't seeing but movies people have never even heard of, movies that barely even exist. Content being pumped out into a flood with no destination is everywhere and nowhere at once. These works might as well be AI generated because for all the effort it is making the same impact on the audience as someone who pumps a random joke video out online. No one is seeing anything anymore, and that isn't going to change.

And the question of why that might be is an interesting one. The younger generations are not watching movies or TV anymore. The only thing that makes money is old IP (which means it is primarily Gen X, Y, and Millennials, watching what is put out) and nothing new is being created or built up. There is no younger audience being cultivated which means the industry is destined for the grave. Much like comic books and the music industry before it, the old ways are not attracting new faces anymore. The only people keeping the old crumbling machinery operating are the nostalgic who still consume the old IP hoping for some of that old forgotten magic to return again. Some even tell themselves that it's just as good as it's ever been. This isn't a formula for growth, creativity, or anything new being done, it's just stagnation.

While this is going on in the foreground of the industry for all to see, behind the scenes hides an even bigger disaster.

At this point, it's all just fighting over scraps. Whatever idea that creativity was ever a part of the formula has long since been lost to cynicism and grifting the next couple of bucks out of the nearest mark. This is the only idea anyone in charge has left. There is nothing being built in these formerly big spaces, it's all in decay.

The older generations only want nostalgia and the younger generations want nothing. Nobody wants a future, so one is not coming. In a few generations these industries will be gone, dead, and buried, with the geriatric Gen Y kids who couldn't let that IP die . . . well now they can then be buried with it. So in the end they get what they want.

Though there are plenty of younger people interested in old artforms, none are actually interested in the current state of any of these industries. No one wants to be a movie star or a director, they want to watch Charles Bronson or see David Lynch's filmography. No one wants to go to the theatre, they'll watch an old movie on streaming or (increasingly) DVD and Blu-ray instead. No one wants to rent from Blockbuster, but they want to know how the rental industry worked. In essence, it's more interesting as a myth than as it currently stands, like walking by the ruins of an old civilization and barely remembering it was there not that long ago.

The above example of the video store is actually the subject of a brand new game released on Steam that appears to be gaining traction recently. Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is about running a rental store, specifically, in the early '90s when rental stores were at their peak. There is a good reason for that.

This is because despite appealing to that Gen Y nostalgia, it was also a unique time in modernity not likely to ever be repeated again, and this is really the only way to present it in a way that makes sense to modern sensibilities. There isn't any way to really explain to people who weren't there how these places operated or why they were a big deal.

But now they can have at least an idea.

One might be surprised at how interested younger folks actually are in these old mediums: movies, TV shows, music, video games, and comics. They are just, like everyone else, not interested in the current zombie versions of these things as they exist in in the void of Current Year. One can't blame them for that. They want something made for them, but their generation gets nothing but table scraps and cynical brain rot appealing to keywords and hashtags (the modern version of buzzwords) that exists only to pander and grift a few dollars out of their already slim wallets. No one is aiming for them because they have no idea who they are.

These industries are all fake, and they know it. However, that doesn't mean they don't still hunger for art and entertainment that means something to them. Everyone will always want that. They just know they won't find it in the modern world where everyone is out to get them, not speak to them. It's just a lost cause.

So what actually is the solution? How does one even talk to the younger generations when we don't even speak the same language anymore? Can it be done?

No, probably not.

The only solution is to create a society that values high trust, shared values, and community. It would have to be the opposite of today's hyper individualist (yet, paradoxically, highly conformative) society of backwards language, constant political agitation, and hatred of the past. As long as these divisions exist, there will never be any sort of world like that one that was lost. It will just be more division and less in common until we are little more than several billion little islands floating around detached from each other in the sea of modern society. It's a dead end.

Until then, well, this is what we're left with, and this is all we'll have. Better get used to it, because we'll eventually lose that too. That's just where we are now at this point in time.

I'll leave you with this bizarre (and oddly common) find on YouTube, before that, too, is also eventually swallowed by the void. Travel back to this strange mirror universe of 1991, back when you still had a shared culture and wonder where it all went.

Because it's not coming back again, and the younger generations seem to understand that a lot better than we do.

Thanks for reading! I'll see you all again soon enough.

In case you missed it, I have a recent entry in my "Fantasy Isn't Real" series up on the Patreon! This one is about Anti-Wonder!

Learing Lesons

Welcome back to the wasteland!

Been a crazy February, and March isn't looking to slow down. Here's hoping the weather does, at the very least. I'm still working slowly on various projects and dealing with some annoying real life things, but I'm also still thinking about topics to discuss with you all.

And today's is a good one, so let's get right to it.

Recently, one of the topics that has been running through my head (to the point it became a topic on my podcast), is the subject of Edutainment. It's more about how the definition of Edutainment has stayed the same over the years, but its perception since I was a kid has changed, and not for the better. What was once seen as a joke is now taken seriously, and it has made entertainment and art as a whole considerably worse and less inspiring. I don't think anyone can deny this with a straight face: Edutainment is lame, but now we insist it's not..

The reason for this change is still quite unclear to me, though it's undeniable that a shift exists, at least with those around my age and slightly younger. At some point we came under the delusion that Edutainment was not only extremely effective (it isn't), but it's also worth defending and reshaping entertainment around (it's not).

But there is no reason for this silly belief. Edutainment is a perversion of both entertainment and education, taking the worst parts of both without offering anything in return to make up for its deficiencies. An invention of the 20th century in an attempt to subvert the mass media landscape, all Edutainment has ever done is fail and leave no mark on the minds of its viewers beyond mockery and a neutering of both Entertainment and Education. It just doesn't work.

The reason for this is because both Entertainment and Education exist to do different things, and cannot be crossed over with the other in a satisfying way. Of course this does not mean you cannot be entertained while learning or learn something from entertainment, but that those are secondary to the primary reason said things exist in the first place. You can't prioritize both. It's simply impossible.

Entertainment exists to entertain, it is primarily for leisure. It is meant to allow the audience to relax and unwind, to allow the audience to rest in the place they have chosen to lay their head down. Art exists to allow the patron to appreciate a slice of reality from an angle they might not have expected. There is a sense of trust between the artist, the art, and patron, that involves both understanding and like-mindedness. They all come together to connect for a wider purpose for everyone involved.

No one engages in art and entertainment to be educated: they come to be enlightened. There is a very subtle, but important, difference here. Enlightening means to be shown a world apart and yet close to the one we live in and seeing a new side of it. It does not mean teaching or lecturing the audience about a specific subject. This difference is not as appreciated these days, but it's still reality, and one of the reasons the audience trusts the mainstream industry less and less.

We have lost the original point of what we're doing.

Education, on the other hand, exists to instruct and teach. It requires a very specific type of relationship between the two parties, one above the other. This cannot be an equal relationship where one gives and one takes: it involves one side deliberately speaking down to another party in order to educate them on the subject the student agreed on in order to be there in the first place. This is why so many kids don't learn much in school: they not only didn't agree to this relationship, they also aren't looking to learn in the first place. Education only works when the relationship is agreed upon and the student and instructor are engaged and on the same page. It cannot work otherwise.

This is the opposite of how art and entertainment works. One is done on even ground, the other is not. It's a fundamental difference which precludes any sort of mashup from working, and they clearly do not from any example we have seen over the past decade especially.

Edutainment dilutes entertainment by making its focus on that unequal partnership with the audience. It also dilutes education by masking it in a fog of entertainment and blunting any point that is supposed to have been gotten across through learning. In essence you're getting entertainment without the wonder and mystery, and you're getting education without the focus and clearcut language and relationship between a student and teacher. You are getting the worst version of both at the same time.

And everybody knows this.

This is why obvious propaganda like Captain Planet was a punchline among all the kids when it came out. Everyone knew what it was and it was terrible at doing what it wanted to do. The lessons were unsubtle and not very clever, and the entertainment value was stunted so that those kids wouldn't get the wrong impression of violence or adventure as anything but controlled and neutered. Neither of these approaches satiate childhood wonder.

It was much like how Peggy Charren and her ACT group forced educational content into kids shows and was never not a punchline in the schoolyard. Remember the GI Joe lessons at the end of episodes? The ones that had nothing to do with the show and were crammed in? That was because of her and her ilk. If you don't remember that then there is also the Sonic Sez segments in the Sonic cartoon which had marvelous lessons such as "Don't climb into the dryer" which is as ridiculous as it sounds. You can also find them on YouTube with a comment section filled with people laughing at them, some of which weren't even around when said shows aired.

This is how you know they failed at what they were doing.

All this aside, an other issue is that this lame moralizing occurs while at the same time executives and parent groups keep dictating what sorts of "lessons" shows should be taught to the kids, thereby affecting the creation of these series from people that had nothing to do with their creation. Again, all this was supposedly for kids but no kids liked them and they were always treated as lame punching bags, which is how they stayed for decades.

But recently that changed as the people now in charge of the entertainment industry have decided they want to lecture the customers in everything, because they see themselves as above those they are supposed to entertain. It doesn't matter what gets put out, if it has the correct message then it is considered a net good and anyone against what they are doing, for whatever reason, must be a Bad Person. There is simply no other explanation for this madness. This would be like if those parent councils browbeat all the kids back in the day who made fun of Captain Planet for being lame: Who cares if it's lame, it's right!

The thing is, it actually doesn't matter if it's right or not: it has failed as entertainment. It has focused on the lecturing first and left the entertainment a distant second in consideration, and the audience can tell. This approach is a dead end, and it's why no one in charge of these industries can produce anything of value that connects with a wider audience anymore. They can't do this because their priorities are backwards and they have no intention of being humble and realizing that.

This doesn't mean you can't "say something" in art and entertainment. It's more that what you say is meant to be baked in to the piece you're creating. The themes and meaning come from the story the artist has to tell. It comes from the music, the art, the creation, itself. This is how you sometimes get interpretations of pieces not originally intended by the creator. It isn't because either party is wrong but because they see reality from different angles and are able to come together over the piece and find new wrinkles in it together. Regardless, it is impossible to create art without meaning, but it is possible to miss the meaning in the creation process. This is because the primary importance is in the creation: not the intended meanings.

Another way to put it is that education is about learning what you can and can't do when learning about a subject; entertainment is about seeing all the subject has to offer. They are entirely different approaches that cannot mix together.

Edutainment is one of the worst and most embarrassing failures of the 20th century and it is one that has no business carrying over in the 21st. No one learns anything from it, and no one is entertained by it, and yet we pretend it is successful when both the least imaginative and most didactic people are the ones who push for it, thereby proving its failure right out of the gate. If this is the kind of people edutainment produces then it's clearly well past its expiration date.

Instead, let's strive to improve both the dismal state of modern education and create a new ecosystem for art and entertainment. They both need it instead of us constantly hiding behind a failed mutation that has no place in today's climate.

And maybe we can finally leave the failures of the past behind us. We can finally have those better ways we were promised long ago. We're well past due for a new golden age of art and entertainment. Let's make it, together!

That's all for this week! See you all next time!

Check out Cirsova's Winning Secrets campaign and help it reach 5 digits! It's close to crossing the line into a mega success!

Help Out An Author

This is a cross-post. Please read.

From Hans Shantz over on Substack:

Russell and Morgan Newquist have long been active members in the Based Book community. Through running Silver Empire press, and through their own novels, they set an example for us all how to create and promote Based Books.

Now, their daughter, Sera, is suffering from serious cardiac problems, and Russell and Morgon have had to travel hours away from home to ensure that Sera gets the care she needs.





They will need to be at a downtown hotel within walking distance of the hospital, and that can get pricey. Plus all the other expenses that come with a crisis of this magnitude. Let’s help them out

Russell and Morgon have made it clear that any money not used directly for the expenses of this event will be donated to the Children’s Hospital of Alabama because they treat everyone regardless of ability to pay.

You may donate directly via GoFundMe, and consider also picking up one of their excellent books.



War Demons: A Supernatural Thriller
When he came home, so did they...

Driven by vengeance, Michael Alexander enlisted in the Army the day after 9/11. Five years later, disillusioned and broken by the horrors he witnessed in Afghanistan, Michael returns home to Georgia seeking to begin a new life. But he didn’t come alone. Something evil followed him, and it’s leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

The police are powerless. The Army has written Michael off. Left to face down a malevolent creature first encountered in the mountains of Afghanistan, he’ll rely on his training, a homeless prophet, and estranged family members from a love lost...

But none of them expected the dragon.

Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden collides with Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International in this supernatural thriller that goes straight to Hell!

Hellgate (Neighborhood Watch Book 1)

Emilia King has made an art of bad choices. Just ask her mother, she’ll tell you every single thing she’s done wrong for years.

When her latest bad choice changes the locks to their apartment and leaves all her stuff on the doorstep, Emilia can’t bear to hear “I told you so” one more time. So she moves in with her grandfather. Then she can have some space to figure out who…and what she wants to be, without her mother breathing down her neck.

What she finds there is anything but peace. Her grandfather battles invisible creatures in the dark. Neighbors torn apart by wild beasts.

Not to mention the moody, gorgeous man across the street with the motorcycle. The kind of man that’s her kryponite.

But when her grandfather falls ill, his position of head of the Neighborhood Watch falls to her. And in this neighborhood, it’s more than measuring grass height or catching petty thefts.

Down the Dragon Hole:
A Tale of The School of Spells & War

Alis was a quiet librarian at the campus library of the School of Spells & Magic - that is, until the sword wielding buffoon Cahan had the audacity to battle a dragon in her library! Now she's following him off on some foolhardy adventure. As they try to save the university from the mysterious Formless, she fights an equally important battle - to maintain her self respect!

The School of Spells & War is an ongoing collection of old fashioned sword-and-sorcery adventure stories following a wizard and warrior duo as they galavant across the continent of Thillon. Good-humored, powerful warrior Cahan and intelligent, skilled wizard Alis work together to serve their university, the school of spells and war, by battling dragons, investigating plots against the king, hunting witches, and dealing with the ongoing threat of the ancient and mysterious Formless.


Here’s to a speedy and successful recovery for Sera, and thank you all for being part of the Based Book community.

Hans

Coming Soon: Winning Secrets!

Welcome back to the Wasteland!

I have a bit of a surprise to unveil for readers today. I don't usually post these sorts of things, except that one of the parties involved is Cirsova, the best NewPub publisher out there today, and one of the inspirations for getting me into the Pulp Revolution (as well as the man who wrote the foreword to The Last Fanatics), Jeffro Johnson.

As a consequence there is no way I could let this release go without highlighting and commenting a bit on it myself.

Jeffro and Cirsova's new work will be on Kickstarter next week, but you can look below for a preview of what to expect!

Longtime game blogger Jeffro Johnson earned Hugo nods for his in-depth analysis of AD&D’s Appendix N, in his book Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as for the work he did as the editor-in-chief for the Castalia House blog.

During the COVID shutdowns of 2020, Jeffro and a group of friends gathered to explore a unique objective: explore the early D&D rulesets as thoroughly as possible. This was the birth of the nascent BrOSR movement, an effort that would take the implied goal of the Old School Revival (OSR) seriously.

The BrOSR coalesced as a group of Christian men who, through hearty ribbing and memes, encouraged one another to become better at playing Dungeons & Dragons and produce a better experience at the table.

The group’s principles included playing the game Rules As Written, eschewing homebrewing or house ruling, in an attempt to uncover what the game was truly like when taking author Gary Gygax’s prescriptions seriously. The game contained in the rules contrasts starkly with the “folk game” that D&D had become. While the OSR movement had largely been a vibe-based focus on the aesthetics of the older games, sometimes trying to rebuild them from the ground up, the Bros took an approach that centered on gathering a deep understanding and mastery of the foundational games of the hobby.

Members of this group radically changed the online discussion surrounding D&D, with a focus on RAW, use of 1:1 time, and re-incorporation of David Wesely’s Braunstein as seen in D&D co-creator Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor Campaign. In to providing extensive public-facing campaign reports, the Bros created Brozer: Island of War and Winter (out now through Cirsova Publishing), a Braunstein adventure product designed to teach other groups how to incorporate these elements, and offered it for free digitally and at-cost in print, moving nearly 2000 copies.

Cirsova Publishing is proud to present Winning Secrets, by Jeffro Johnson, RuleOfThule, and Bdubs1776. Originally conceived as the follow-up to Jeffro’s monograph, “How to Win at D&D,” published by Pilum Press in 2023, Winning Secrets collects the receipts for the style of play that Jeffro and the BrOSR championed. The book chronicles the sessions of Jeffro’s Trollopulous campaign, the first campaign of the BrOSR, and contains essays and commentaries offering insightful examinations of the definitive pillars of BrOSR-style play as well as illuminating the guiding values they champion. 

In Winning Secrets, you will join the Bros in their journey, uncovering the brilliant lost secrets of great campaigns which gave birth to the D&D game rules. You will see the complete story play out of how this arcane lore was won through Jeffro’s paradigm-shattering Trollopulous campaign.

In this landmark work, you will find:

    • A persuasive case for why contemporary approaches to RPGs cannot deliver on the game that was promised by the early D&D rule sets.

    • A thorough breakdown of the four pillars of Real D&D, lore from the dawn of RPGs that will elevate the excitement and engagement at YOUR table!

    • A detailed history of how Jeffro discovered these secrets and how he and his friends developed solutions to the challenges offered by high level play.

    • An explanation of why only Christian brotherhood could break down the barriers that were preventing all of us from experiencing the RPG campaign of our dreams.

    • The recreation of a lost artform and an entire world of gaming knowhow that Jeffro pulled out of complete oblivion.

This book will change the way you think about D&D forever. More importantly, it will show you how the game was intended to be played.

Praise for Jeffro Johnson’s "How to Win at D&D":

"These 30 or so pages of text in this book are the most impactful and important 30 pages I have ever read when it comes to tabletop roleplaying games and wargaming. It has changed the wayIi approach these games. This book put everything into focus for me, why I wasn’t having fun and didn’t feel good about the games I was running and how to run better games. I've bought five or six copies and have given them to each of my players and I recommend it to anyone I know who plays or wants to play D&D." -- Jon Asharan

"For the scholarly reader interested in the history of RPGs, this book is indispensable. It is thoroughly researched and, in my academic opinion, convincing." -- Gabe Mamola

Praise for Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons:

"This book may be the most important thing to happen to science fiction, fantasy, and even horror in the past three decades" -- Jim Fear

"An absolute must-read for anyone wanting to rediscover the forgotten literary roots of fantasy in general, and role playing games in particular. I have already been blown away by some of the authors mentioned here, and look forward to a great deal more excitement as I progress." -- Sam Hart

Winning Secrets will be live on Kickstarter from February 25th through April 1st: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cirsova/winning-secrets

Cirsova Publishing:

www.cirsova.wordpress.com

X: x.com/@cirsova

Jeffro Johnson:

www.jeffro.wordpress.com

Loss & Game Over

Welcome back to the Wasteland! I hope you're having a lovely weekend on this very unimportant holiday. Today, I would like to cover a subject not quite touched on much these days. That would be the remainder of the 2000s.

Back at the end of the '90s, things were changing, the overall culture was becoming more connected. Windows 95, especially, broke open the dam that allowed people beyond the tech literate into computer ownership and then onto the internet. This was happening the same time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 consolidated the music industry, the ACT finally managed to whittle cartoons down to edutainment garbage and specialty channels, and the comic book industry was flatlining. In other words, the digital world was broadening at the same time the wider culture was shrinking in scope and in possibilities.

While this was happening, the younger generation was being raised on the only remaining wild west left: the early internet. This mysterious place allowed them to pretty much say and do anything they wanted after the rest of the culture had been slowly gutted to the point Bowling Alone no longer looked like a prophecy but the aim of those in charge.

Physical communities and spaces vanished, and new identities were being forged away from tradition, community, and art and creation. These new identities were formed online and they were centered on consuming corporate products.

If you're of a certain age, you might remember the explosion of "Geek Culture" in the early 2000s. This was an invention of megacorps created by feeding internet scenes their products and rewarding them with baubles and warm feelings. The era of the message board and community manager. Stop by the forums, wear your badge in your avatar or sig with pride, and endlessly talk about our Product. It is part of who you are, after all. This is what Geek Culture was, and why it would later be so easy to weaponize it against their customers when they changed their approach.

That this happened right after every offline entertainment sector was gutted by events like the above was not a victory of Pop Culture as a valid identity and goal, but that all those crippled industries could be now folded into one umbrella and make its users part of the Lifestyle Brand cult. You no longer like the Smashing Pumpkins and enjoy playing Quake III: you were now an "alternative rock fan" who was also a "gamer" and that was z very important part of your identity. What you enjoyed then became who you were.

As these identities grew, so did parodies and and mocking. The ever-hated Big Bang Theory TV show epitomized this new Geek Culture identity, and how good nerds all liked "nerdy" things and behaved and thought the same way about every topic and issue. The show was laughed at when it was on, but is it that much different when you visit a random Pop Culture livestream on YouTube in 2026? How different is it? Proudly antisocial, acceptable and safe political views, endlessly snarky and sarcastic like their teenage years ever ended, and still dressed and wearing the same pop culture shirts and showing off the same shelves they did decades ago, the stereotype the show presented wasn't made up: it was based on real behavior.

And that is what hurt the most.

All this preamble is to explain why the above video exists. For the Millennial Geek, G4 was a beacon of Geekdom and an important memory that defined their childhood. For anyone outside of that group, G4 was a cynical cash grab wrapped up in a made up corporate identity. Now, there is truth to both these views, but the full picture is that it was a network that made its mark appealing to a burgeoning socially acceptable Geek identity and it did that very well.

The cracks in what that identity was and how those who helped fashion it for that young generation are both in said above history of X-Play. At the heart of it is a level of seething hatred and anger for the audience that, while not everyone involved felt, is palpable in retrospect, especially in the atmosphere of today's dead pop culture institutions being constantly skin-suited for spare change. They've never really liked their audience, because they never knew them, and their idea of who their audience was never actually existed in the first place.

This attitude spins out into modern day. Why does it seem like there's so much contempt and hatred for the audience thinking the Wrong Things and why are they not falling in line like they once used to? Why shouldn't I be allowed to selfishly slaughter the works of Tolkien or even the creation of the Hasbro corporation whenever I want to? Why should I give the audience anything they want? Don't I matter most of all?

The fact of the matter is that there was never any real connection between us and them, it was always smoke and mirrors. The old adage that someone's always selling you something extends to TV networks: what exactly were they selling their audience? Not just products, but what was the deeper worldview they were selling? What was acceptable at the time was acceptable because those in charge deemed it so.

Just like a YouTuber who was throwing gamer words around in 2013 at the age of 27 pretending they were "ignorant" at how acceptable it was: it's all a pose. Back then it was simply a way of weaving through what was culturally acceptable to profit off of at the time . . . which is no different than how it works right now. There was never any "edge" it was all just selling an image, and now the image is no longer profitable. It was never real, it was always fake, and at no point was genuine connection the point of what was being done. That is why it is so easy for such people who do this to hate their customers: they never cared to begin with. And this is the hard lesson those who grew up with the fake Geek Culture back then had to learn.

The wild west days of the internet are gone, and there is no equivalent today. Younger generations are moving away from entertainment sectors into their own worlds, whether it be to short form internet videos, old entertainment detached from the modern complex, or creating their own spaces. There is no younger generation with any ties to the way things once were. There is no uniting aspect of culture today except that there is no culture.

All of this comes together to show why the relaunch of G4 was such a disaster: it had no place left and no one to connect with except to cynically reach out to the audience they "wish" they had, which is the same story with every failing part of every industry these days. Having to rely on an audience they never liked to begin with makes them bitter and resentful, wanting desperately to be seen as Good by the designated Good Guys, instead of fading away into irrelevance due to the complete lack of humility and gratitude that got them there in the first place.

I've seen it myself, too. I've personally had the creator of Twisted Metal and God of War tell me directly straight out how much he dislikes Gamers, the very audience who gave him a career. So seeing a host of a G4 series do the same is not surprising. The hatred of the ones who made them and the desire to appeal to those who hate them is a spiritual sickness that defines the back half of the 20th century so very well and why it lead to where we are now.

There is no future resurrecting these old crusty time capsules, because they aren't what we got out of them. They are always going to be what they wanted to be, first and foremost. The same goes for ancient IPs and companies. They're over and done, and they're not coming back, not even if you put the "right" person in charge. This is the last hurdle those older than Zoomers have to finally understand. We can't go back to that. It's finished.

So we should treat it as just that.

Anyway, here is a bonus video from the above creator on Loss, a meme from the same era which reveals much about that era in turn.

Have yourself a great weekend and I will see you soon.

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