Ten Years Gone

It's been a while, huh?

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. Trying to wrap up the Kickstarter campaign is taking a lot of writing and thinking time. However, we are rapidly reaching the finish line. I've sent out all the digital files, now I am busy formatting the physical editions and trying to get the author test copies out. I'll try to pick up activity more around here when that is finally done.

But that's not why we're here today.

I started Wasteland & Sky nearly a decade ago for a few reasons. The main one was that I thought I should have some sort of online presence if I wanted to write for an audience. You can't communicate with others through your work if you don't have a way to connect with them in the first place, after all. This blog you are currently reading is older than my twitter account or any other social media account I currently flirt with, and it remains my main base of operation. In other words, I do have a soft spot for this old place.

But one thing should be highlighted, and something I need to share, especially towards younger creatives who may be reading this, is how much has changed in the short time since I started this place up back then. It's a subject I've been pondering on a lot recently, because this year it has really struck me how much has shifted without any of us really noticing it.

Normally we speak on cultural events, or how the arts and entertainment scenes have devolved since the end of the 20th century, not really for nostalgia trumpeting, but to understand what it was we lost along the way. What I wanted to do was have a bit of a reflection on a different sort of thing--who we used to be and who we are becoming. That wasn't exactly how this site started, but its definitely what it became. No one could have foreseen the madness the 2010s was struck with, to the point that just about everything still alive at the start of it is on its last legs now. We might rightly call it the decade of death. The downhill slide we went through was enough to reclassify the slippery slope as reality instead of fallacy. Things changed that much.

But what exactly did we start out as back then? It is hard for younger people to really conceptualize the downward spiral culture really went through. To be fair, many in my own generation don't even seem to notice the destruction themselves, even though they live through its effects. The 2010s are over, and now it is time to survey the damage as we leave it behind.

I wanted to share this Substack post that went up a few days back. The subject of the previous decade is the main topic and it is a very sobering read. Yes, it is somewhat political in its reflections and conclusions, but look past that into the attitudes, expectations, and the entropy portrayed. All of that is real. It happened.

What needs to be highlighted is the change all the participants in the story go through from the time the decade started to where they are now. How their identity and purpose became rotted away and replaced with a bitter rage at the world and their former friends and peers who they now only seen as slapped together parts of an evolutionary stew to be tossed away as if spoiled by the wrong chef. If you are too young you might only see these broken people as they are now and not realize that they used to be someone else before the media and subversive cultural figures told them to be something different. The 2010s was when the TV generation finally became the social media generation, and all the damage that entails.

It was the logical end of a generation of people whose concept of identity is Hollywood movie clichés and whatever their favorite celebrity tells them their beliefs are. What this ends in, is what you see in the above post. It's a spiritually dead cohort lost to the wilds, and their own minds. Truly, a new lost generation.

I must admit, I felt a profound sadness reading that piece, seeing all the potential and zeal for life squandered for a mass cultural schizophrenia and obsession with the material life that has led so many to a life of pills, anti-psychotics, psychiatry, or death. That these same people grabbed the reins of the art and entertainment world and the institutions, such as OldPub and Hollywood, which are currently dying, was inevitable. They are already killing themselves.

And they do not want to stop.

The old world is gone, and they seem to want to disappear with it. This is a sick mentality, but its a very real one.

They're all gone. Now they're something worse . . .

One thing that is a good indication of not only how far things have fallen, but also where these people used to be, is the Gen Y property of Scott Pilgrim. I will not speak of its quality, but what it says as an IP and from an artist's perspective about the generation it represents. I'm sure many won't like what I have to say, but I will have to say it to make my point. Art is more than just its craft and tropes--it also shows what we have to say about ourselves, and what this piece says about us is profoundly depressing and the most obvious signs of the cultural dead end we are in now.

As a general concept, Scott Pilgrim represents the nadir of Gen Y thought and creativity. It is insular, selfish, and lives off a Frankenstein hodgepodge of others' creations in order to craft its shallow imagery and references for another (and far better, though its never acknowledged in story) time and place. The characters are 2000-era tropes of young urbanite hipsters that spout lazy pop culture references, warmed over '80s Gen X sarcasm, Homer Simpson '90s stupidity, and '00s urbanite hipster values on relationships (all failed and proven tremendously damaging), and has absolutely no interest in anything aside from itself or beyond this frame. Before any reader mistakes me or my intentions here, this is all done well. On a quality level, Scott Pilgrim is a well done series. This is how it was able to take off, at least in niche circles for niche audiences. The problem comes with its moral framework as a piece of art. It is busted. I do not mean the main character's moral framework--I mean the entire worldview of the story.

A while back I spoke of the film SLC Punk and how that movie details the concept of Gen X's search for identity and finds solace for it in meaningless cliques based on nonsense rules. It is about a generation stranded in a desert with no sign post out of it. Scott Pilgrim is a lot like that, except it pretends there are no groups--everyone is a mystery meat concoction of neuroses and appetites with tired sitcom quirks as a replacement for personality. It's actually shown how much worse things have gotten since the events portrayed in SLC Punk, and that's saying something.

If the characters in SLC Punk were trapped in the desert and raging about it, the character's of Scott Pilgrim are in the Library of Alexandria smirking as it burns down around them but somehow not even seeing the flames or noticing it catch fire at all. Things burning is just business as usual for them and isn't that quirky and weird? In fact, let's call the fire Fryguy, imagine it has a silly Rocky Balboa accent (remember Rocky?!), and let it go on its way. After all, its not hurting anyone--just old buildings. And who cares about old things? None of that matters at all.

As a consequence of this irreverent worldview, the moral underpinning of the story is very much tied to its place and time. The people who believe those things are no longer like that, if they're even still alive at all. That world is over, and we can never go back to it.

And sure enough, the creator has confirmed its upcoming Netflix adaption was being tweaked for modern sensibilities and the current spiritually ill zeitgeist. This is how fast that era is being overwritten by the same people who fell prey to it. Forget creating honest reflections of the 1990s from these people, you will not even get one for the 2010s. They cannot face the world as it exists now, never mind when it was a little bit brighter in their own lives.

Now, go back to the Substack post referenced above and compare it to the world of Scott Pilgrim. These are the same people. Just like we know the ending to SLC Punk and what became of the characters better than the people who made it did, we can also infer what happened to every character in Scott Pilgrim much the same way. And a lot of people instinctively know this, which is why the property exists in this vague nostalgic state for a terrible era that represents all its worst parts but is somehow above what it foretold for the people in portrays. Injecting reality into where this group ended up would make it dark rather quickly.

The truth is that every character in Scott Pilgrim would either be dead, fried out, or a mental patient today, and that is a hard circle to square for a generation that never wanted a higher purpose beyond political slogans and passing fashions, and just wanted to be left alone to consume sugar, alcohol, and pills, while the world spun on without them. All they ever wanted was to be left alone to die, and that is exactly what has happened.

There was never a future vision portrayed back in that era, and that is what is being lived out right now. It is no wonder this cohort looks back fondly on Scott Pilgrim instead of seeing it as a warped mirror of who they were and what they would eventually become. There is a reason the property never had more than niche appeal among one generation, after all. The movie had line around the blocks when it came out, but it was of a single group of hipsters--the actual flick bombed and bombed hard. It was never meant to connect to any wider culture. The property was just meant to be a special club, an irreverent in-joke, for a group that never wanted anything other than a reflection of themselves to smile at while that library continues to burn around them.

However, this also does explain the Current Year insistence of historically revising everything, including the overreaction to those using words that had been in use for decades before Gen Y decided they were taboo and anyone who uses them should have their lives destroyed. This just continues their streak of disrespect for those outside the clique--the difference is that the clique has become a vague political force that tells them how one has to act to be labeled Good and those who fall outside of it are Bad and no longer considered a human. Only the in-group matters, remember: the out-group is little more than cattle that can be slaughtered on a whim.

They simply can't handle that no paradise ever magically came and ever will, so it is their job to enforce political policies that they only know from one sentence pop culture jokes given to them by burnt out Hollywood writers and sex pest journalists. This is the way that people who run their bloated and tired brand cults and Geek™ leaders say the world should be run, so of course they're right. Who else are they going to listen to? Everyone else is stupid, after all. 

These people made Star War, after all! Star War! This means they're smarter than everyone else in the room, and you need to listen to them. Well, they didn't make it, but they bought it, and that makes them the new secular Pope. Don't you understand the ritual of our religion? They couldn't possibly make a bad movie, after all. It has Star War in the title! That means it is automatically a masterpiece without flaw, and everyone involved in it is a sage with important advice you need to consume or be cast to the out-group. Who are you to say otherwise? No one has made a Funko Pop of you.

With an attitude like that, it's easy to see how far things have devolved in one single decade, and why there is a whole generation of frothing mad people who refuse to put their pride aside for their own betterment or general well being. It is no wonder why a property from that time period like Scott Pilgrim would need to already have revision to be made today. We need to always be updated, after all. If your scripture isn't built on eternal truths, it must be the opposite--that truths change with the wind and you need to constantly update your programming accordingly. Now we know why suicide and pill popping has become a crutch for this cohort.

But maybe that's for the best, as remembering their old memories and failed dreams might be too much to bear for those who have succumbed to the social entropy of the times. We already have enough death, both spiritual and physical, going around. We don't need to revel in it any more than we already have. If anything, we need less bitterness and spite towards others, and those who have different ideals and beliefs, than we currently do. We won't get that worshiping the time before we collapsed.

Unfortunately, the road ahead doesn't look any less rocky. However, it is also the only way out of our current predicament.

This article can be found here. Even then they knew what was coming.

The hipster as an invention is pure Gen Y, a devolution of the Gen X coffee shop black turtleneck wearing intellectual who incessantly quoted George Carlin and the nu atheist cult. As they aged out themselves by the 2010s, they were replaced with a new group. Millennials became Culture Warriors, seeing the decline of everything and either thinking the solution came in going back or plowing forward, their rage and bitterness their hallmark. To be fair to them, regardless of their proposed solutions, at least they acknowledged there was a problem at all. Gen Y to this day has issues admitting even that. all they want to do is consume and let the corporate product tell them what to think and what slogans to repeat to other cult members. (For a better explanation of Generational Theory, I suggest reading the free Generation Y: The New Lost Generation)

It is no wonder their suicide rate are so high.

Gen Y is really the only group that could be hipsters. A generation raised on some of the best entertainment ever created, but no religion, they instead turned their worship towards postmodern irony and an inability to understand seriousness as their coping mechanism. As the world rotted away post-Cultural Ground Zero, so, too, did they, their gods turning out to be little more than half-thought out ideas and concepts they swiped from online message boards and news sites. This combined with their disinterest of anything that didn't provide a dose of the dopamine they were raised on to turn them into the broken pop culture founts they are today. Those hipsters, however, are all but gone now, replaced with something far worse, but it all started here--a sarcastic winking stereotype meant to shield them from reality. Until it failed.

As mentioned above, the harsh decline of the 2010s cannot be exaggerated. We talk about the arts and entertainment bottoming out then, but not of the great marker--how the people in it died a spiritual death and keep themselves alive with little more than prescribed (and sometimes not) medicine in an attempt to avoid seeing the truth of what has happened to them. How did the world get so bad? I don't know, how did you?

Of course this is not meant to put myself on a pedestal. I am still a Gen Y kid at heart, and I probably always will be. Materialism was a very real vice, and still one I am prone to, and it requires a lot of energy to keep the self-awareness going to keep me from falling down into bad habits again. My generation has many faults that I also suffer from. It is difficult to truly get over the habits learned in a world that no longer exists, but it must be done.

As an aside, I do remember a very strange epiphany I had a long time ago before the Scott Pilgrim movie even came out. It was as if someone had flicked a switch in my brain. The property wasn't really about anything, didn't have any sort of interest in connecting with the wider world (How was grandma supposed to understand a pointless River City Ransom coin reference? She wasn't, it wasn't meant for her), and was just slapping parts of things other generations did in an irreverent and shallow way to build a shrine to themselves out of. There was nothing there except chuckling over meaningless and worshiping unthinking hedonism--a product as intentionally disposable as life itself was to us back then. It is a product that could only have been made by my generation. This was the first real marker that told me something was very wrong here.

As for what hipsters have become today, you sadly already know. They have aged out into a different stereotype, one still carried by empty irony and values copy-pasted from the correct mainstream news sources where disagreement means dehumanization of the opponent is okay because they have been declared Bad. It is no wonder such people live with so many complexes. These are wear hipsters have ended up. Their simplistic worldview never expanded beyond dead pop culture and constantly updated morals spoon-fed into them by a media complex that doesn't care if they off themselves. They truly are the Pop Cult, and it is no wonder they were so easily funneled into the Death Cult.

Of course, I'm speaking of this:

The Nu-male/Soy Jack meme comes entirely out of Gen Y, sadly

Years ago the above sort of assertion would have been met with much sarcasm and masked anger from behind a keyboard. They would have to tell you how mad they truly aren't. However, the big difference is that no one is really joking about it anymore. It's not really funny, it's sad. This devolution is real, it's serious, and it is very depressing. It's the final stage of self-destruction brought about by the lives my generation has chosen to lead away from humanity. Stereotypes exist for a reason, and that is because certain people decide to live them.

Where we go from here, I can only speculate. It's not too late to turn it around. It never truly is. We already know there is a problem. We just need to finally address it.

When we were growing up, we were told a lot of lies. Every end of the world prediction was wrong, every campaign slogan turned out to be a grift, every classroom lied, every pop cult leader turned out to be be a shyster, and every cultural fad you were told to hype up ended up being full of hot air and faded away. This still happens now--even modern political organizations celebrated years ago as important by the news complex and social media activists are now getting guff for supporting uncouth positions and parties in Current Year. And still we are meant to ping-pong between them unthinkingly towards the next fad. We still do just that, unfortunately.

Back in the day, Captain Planet & the Planeteers was a punchline, and now there are people who unironically praise that sort of trash in modern projects because they agree with the propaganda, artistry be damned. All they care about is controlling thought, not communicating. Portraying a bad guy as a large orange guy with a big mouth is considered high art from a group who all repeat the same political points in lockstep and change their views, coincidentally, on a dime when someone they deem a leader tells them to do so. To paraphrase a hoary saying, this is not the future I was promised or signed up for. This is not a climate that fosters healthy art or thought, and it is poisoning those exposed to it. We are killing ourselves, physically and spiritually. It's been long enough that we can know this for sure, and we need to finally face it.

We need a big change, and I can only hope that as reality reasserts itself in the madness of modernity that my generation is forced to face it instead of hiding behind their clown mask of sarcasm and winking nihilism. I can only hope they will turn away before it is too late: before they end up another statistic of a new Lost Generation. My generation doesn't need any more dead before their time. We need builders, survivors.

We need to shed the skin we've long since outgrown. We need to be people, not living stereotypes cast aside when their expiration date is hit.

All I'm saying is that I hope in ten years that if, God willing, I'm still around, we can look back on all of this with a real laugh. How ridiculous were we back then? Haha, glad we moved on from that. Wouldn't it be nice? 

Hopefully by then this will all have been put behind us and we will have already been well on our way to building something new. Perhaps we can finally reach the potential we've so purposefully snuffed out in ourselves.

I can only hope that is the case. As already said, we can still turn it around. So let us finally do so. Better late than never.

The Gemini Man series is now complete! Superpowers, magic, heroes, hope, and two different worlds! The adventure is endless!