Weekend Lounge ~ The Death of Fairy Tales

Welcome to the weekend!

It's been quite the week, for many varied reasons, but lets put that to the side for today's post. Instead, lets discuss something else.

Today, I wanted to talk about storytelling, fairy tales, and the importance of wonder. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how it's been both deliberately and accidentally malformed over the course of the 20th century to be what it is today. No one is going to deny that things have changed, but there is also no one who will defend it as in a good place, either.

However, it isn't as if we can just discuss this subject without going into hysterics about either who is at fault or who deserves less of the blame. The truth of the matter is that finger pointing won't do much at this stage. Despite that, we also have to discuss uncomfortable truths and the unintended consequences of off-loading creativity and storytelling to out megacorp overlords. How did we get so far down the hill in a mere century?

It wasn't as straightforward a tumble as you might think.

A good place to start on this subject is this series by YouTuber Cartoon Aesthetics entitled "How Disney Stole Your Childhood" covering the beginning of the Disney Corporation's early days and ambitions up to where it is today and how it has affected how millions of people see the world along the way. It is a revelatory series that fills in a lot of gaps into how culture became pop culture before becoming the disposable trash it is today. Despite the potentially controversial title of the series, this is a story of how a simple co-opting of fairy tales to make a fledgling company's movie productions cheaper ended up replacing an entire cultural institution and warping the way generations of children see storytelling, wonder, and the meaning of their own lives. 

Sound heavy? That might be because the stories we tell ourselves has always been more important than you might believe, and the fact that we've spent nearly a century outsourcing creativity to an increasingly culturally detached corporation has done untold damage to the societal fabric. It's also why we can't seem to tell stories anymore.

It's not even to say that was Walt Disney's original goal to end up here. He almost certainly didn't think such a thing as the current Disney Corporation was possible back in the day, but many of his decisions would butterfly effect out to change the entire world of entertainment, destroy reading, feminize storytelling, and also "grow" with the audience into adulthood, eventually leading to the creation of Disney Adults as the punchline they are today.

How did all that happen? That is quite the question. To go into that is a long and convoluted tale, which is why I linked to Cartoon Aesthetics' series throughout this piece. Check out the first video above and you will see the seeds of a lot poison flowers that would spring up in the decades to come. Not that anyone could see them at the time, and perhaps there is no real villain in the story, at least not in the early parts of it, but that is almost beside the point: choices have consequences, seen and unseen, and we are living with the consequences of those choices today.

Why do we have Fairy Tales to begin with? This isn't a question asked much anymore, despite how obvious it once was. Fairy Tales exist to present the world of both the imagination and the concrete intertwined with each other, not only to show children the way the universe is but also to remind adults the full encompassing view of existence we might sometimes forget. In essence, they are the stories of what makes us what we are and point is to what we should become, and what to avoid. They remind us of what being human is.

Fairy stories aren't dumbed down "proper stories", they aren't meant to be infantile, and they aren't supposed to be "time wasters" as is commonly thought to be the purpose of such stories today. No, in many ways Fairy Tales are the basis to all stories, presenting the line where wonder blurs with the mundane to create a full view of reality both seen and unseen. Yes, they might teach lessons, but they also teach reminders, which is why they have a uniting universal aspect to them which makes such creations cultural touchstones and invaluable.

Which is why outsourcing them has turned out to be a disastrous idea that has ended up doing untold damage to the cultural fabric.

The video series covers this, but goes beyond it into much of the insipidness the 20th century did with creativity, including the embarrassing watering down of "Imagination" as some effeminate magical spell that makes you smarter and above the rubes. If you are old enough, you certainly remember how lame it was back in the day. Read a book, and you'll be smart! It just happens! You might remember Gen Y being told just that with the rise of The Kid Who Reads and lame ideas in retrospect like Reading Rainbow leading to the archetype we all know well by now.

Who decided to hand over art and entertainment to the lamest people imaginable and let them rule it with an iron grip? Is it any wonder these people have lead us to where we are today?

This character didn't fall out of the sky

Yes, throughout the 20th century we not only devalued Fairy Tales, but also turned reading itself into a lame hobby purely for anti-social nerds who believed themselves special and above everyone else, two disastrous mistakes that ended up having negative consequences on more than just corporate entertainment but also social dynamics and general maturity. How else can we explain why we not only have Disney Adults but Daily Show snark as the baseline for adult behavior only becoming more and more prominent since the dawn of the 21st century? That didn't come from nowhere.

Not only that, but it became more and more acceptable to be a cruel human being, as long as you were doing it for a "good" cause. Where else this kind of behavior lead if not to total dehumanization and an unearned sense of superiority? Where else does it end anywhere other than today's Current Year misery?

There was a push when I was a kid to never grow up. If you're old enough you certainly remember it. However, the intent was to make you "retain" that childlike wonder inside yourself that was common in youth. Now, while there might be something to that advice, the reason it was even thought of to begin with was because those teaching it to the youth operated in a materialistic dead end world where your monetary gain is what gave you value as a human being and that those who died with the most toys won. Won what? Who knows. The greater point is that the "adult" world was simply not enticing, and the "kid" one was quickly being co-opted by those same forces who knew it. Essentially, none of this came out of nowhere.

This movement created the weird situation we're in now, where even those sneering at Disney Adults talk like 1980s movie bully stereotypes, megachurch pastor parodies (crafted by people who hate them to begin with), or outdated Gen X cool guys (because sarcasm from thirty years ago is still cool, like punk music!). This isn't just a Disney problem, not by a long shot, and it would be good to remember all of this sprung about from a century where those in charge deliberately committed cultural suicide and left their broken offspring to pick up the pieces. The only problem is they don't know how to do this. How could they when this is all they know?

Much of today's emptiness is undoubtedly caused by the lack of cultural cohesion and the rot of the 20th century accelerating everything into the mess it is today.

For instance, as the above video shows, the biggest reason Walt Disney achieved his success was not in aiming at males or even kids, but specifically at mothers, showing them safe, respectable, and cute, stories their children could digest without fuss. Since these mothers were the ones taking the kids to the cinema, they were the ones he aimed his marketing at. And it worked. It worked so well it changed everything.

And it would only work if society were itself structured in a way that allowed someone with this approach that level of control to begin with, not to mention a climate the prioritized safety over adventure. It is no wonder arts and entertainment became so feminized over the 20th century: that's the only direction it could possibly go, and go there it did. It's hard to blame Walt Disney himself for finding this niche, as he did not know where it would end up, but at some point those who followed after him definitely knew, which is how it all became so easily weaponized against its own customer base. Today's culturally irrelevant Disney is a result of this hubris.

Before the fall, however, Disney was unstoppable. Their approach was how the "Disney Version" of everything not only became the default view of those stories, but also morality and wonder itself. Even those destructive groups such as PMRC or ACT were not looking for a definition of wholesome that aligned with Christianity but on Disney Safetyism, itself an ideology a lot of Christians hold to this day without even seeming to realize it. Much of the 1950s stereotypes held up as the ideal (or evil) are not even 1950s ideals: they are the Disney movie version of reality.

Not only that, but the subversive entertainment to become prominent by the end of the 20th century was not reacting to any sort of objective morality or overarching view of goodness: they were reacting to the Disney view as if it were the default. Look how many still portray knights as either savage hypocritical killing machines or ignorant rubes taken up by liars (maybe even both!) which is not an inversion of reality, but a cartoon version they grew up with. You have plenty of swearing and blood in your mature story because the Disney version didn't have it, because your version of mature is effectively just Not Disney. This is not mature, but when Disney is seen as the default, perception is skewed. It is skewed not only for proponents, but also detractors.

In other words, almost all of our modern conception of storytelling, good or bad, is built on a misunderstanding formed by one man's brand that originated from nearly a century ago. This is just one great mess of nonsense, so it's no wonder younger generations find it so confusing to parse how we got to where we are today.

This is the point where one realizes that we are what we consume, and we have not been consuming reality for a long time.

In Part 2 of the series, our host moves from Fairy Tales and how they were (mostly) unintentionally co-opted and into how it affected the younger generations at the time before they were then spread to the younger generations to come. In other words, it is how Disneyfication works and how it's changed since Walt Disney was alive. And make no mistake, it has absolutely changed.

By the 1990s, Disney had grown so fat and profitable that it ended up invading every medium, every space, and every corner of the culture. Any Gen Y kids alive today would surely remember the onslaught of Disney products and noise everywhere they looked back then. It was never actually considered "cool" for guys to be into it, but that didn't mean they weren't exposed to the Disney brand at every opportunity.

This paired with both the subversion obsession of the era (again, based on Disney's wholesomeness, not the real deal), the pussification of reading as seen for girls, geeks, and weirdos, and the ubiquitous presence of the Disney brand itself, you ended out the century with a generation raised on corporate product while detached from the cultural roots it came from, yet also fed a constant diet of anti-social messaging (simultaneously paired with multi-cultural We Are The World weirdness) finally creating a generation that would be a made into a good global citizen. This concentrated unreality pushed as the New Normal would fix everything.

By the time the 2000s rolled around and the 20th century passed, everything that made Disney what it was in the first place had been destroyed, paved over, and co-opted by either Disney themselves or subversives twisting itself on the Disney view. In essence, reality had been completely supplanted by this new unreality.

Even when 9/11 came around to shatter this Disney reality as unrealistic and impossible, we clung to it all the tighter. When the media told us the Bad Guys were doing Bad Things, we snarked at them and obediently believed we could fix it all by Being Good in the acceptable way. What were these definitions of good and bad built on? They were Disney forgeries, not necessarily created by Walt Disney, but formed by a co-opting of his simplistic formula and corniness to create a weird subset of Adults who weren't Adults, but Kids who proudly Never Grew Up. Unreality.

All of this destruction originated from the same place, the same attitude.

The phenomenon of Disney Adults today is frequently focused on in the most blatant and obvious manner. We think of the ones who go to to Disney theme parks and whine about everything while acting like brats or the ones who go online to stalk or obsessively tear down anyone who dares think different from the modern Disney Media Conglomerate. However, the mentality does not stop with those obsessed with Disney (or even Disney adjacent properties like Star Wars or Marvel which are no different) but also consumes the forgery of reality known as Geek Culture.

Geek Culture itself is a mutation, born out of the 2000s where the media companies attempted to sell a Geek image to build itself a sort of Disney-like acolyte out of. All Geeks love all Geeky Products! What are Geeky Products? Why, things you were made fun of by those icky normal types who are now trying to co-opt your hobbies to control for themselves out of the blue for some reason. Forget that all of the product and brands were originally sold to kids by the millions for a quarter of a century before: you're special and unique for liking an IP and defending it against the normals (or let's just stop beating around the bush: "normies") who are invading your hobbies because . . . well, they just decided to one day. How dare they? This space was made for you so you could be cordoned off from the world and live in your own reality away from them.

You are superior and above the normie, after all: it's in their name! They're "normal" and normal is inferior. You are not normal; you're better.

Forget that normal people have no ideological compulsion to invade spaces and change them, and forget that these spaces have always been swarming with normal people (you just either never noticed them or paid attention), but it also gives cover to actual subversives to come in because all they need to do is learn the secret codewords and jargon and they can to anything they want when they get in the door. This is also what did eventually happen to Disney before it happened to anything else. These aren't normal people: they're self-centered obsessives who want control, because they are special and above everyone else.

This happened because at a certain point we became aware at how effective mass media was at altering the way people think and behave. The existence of Disney Adults even being a category at all shows just that. By the time of the "Disney Renaissance" in the late 1980s, the people in the company knew what they had and became more aggressive at pushing out what they wanted using the Disney formula but wrapped in the growing irony and cynicism of the time period. It eventually did bottom out, but by that time Disney had seized so much cultural capital (and other studios like Pixar) that they were able to weather the storm and survive like a cockroach in nuclear fallout.

That is why those who think Disney was "taken over" by weirdos or subversives are kind of missing the point. They have a vision now, one obtained through unreality, and they will work to make it real. They are so blinded by this falsehood at this point that in their quest to finally acquire the male demographic with Star Wars and Marvel they absolutely feminized and gutted them without even the least bit of subtlety, and are now scrambling for a way to get males without them somehow. As if they have already forgotten what they did wrong to begin with. No one could behave this way without having been soaked in Unreality for too long.

In other words, they are now lost and spinning out. Disney's peak has passed and as their own works have finally begun to hit the public domain (ironic, isn't it?) and they are quickly learning that very truth. That era is over, and we now are seeing the mistakes for what they were.

This is what the third and final part of Cartoon Aesthetics' series shows. We can now see the end result of the Disney Corporation's conquest of the modern world and the conquest of Fairy Tales. We see the end result of where it ended up: a soulless and empty husk of safe morality and shiny words which ultimately mean nothing and added up to nothing of value, at the end of the day. We see what a post-Disney world is all about.

Not to say that Disney itself never had value or produced anything of worth, but where its philosophy and direction eventually lead to could never go anywhere else. They weren't even necessarily the source of all of this, but more of a spirit of the times finally reaching its end point. The spirit of the 20th century is what it is, and it's long past expired.

The end result of the all of this is in the atomized dead end world we now inhabit. There is no more Pop Culture, there is no more shared monoculture, and there are no more shared values. Just as third places, local community, and the concept of identity itself has been subverted and hollowed out by modernity, so too is the remainder of old empires like the Disney corporation a vapid husk of what it once was. Old IPs made by much more talented and inspired people being worn as a skinsuit by modern Disney Adults who have no higher aspiration than to be a Good Person dictated by whatever the Good Guys in charge of them tell them is Good. Thus their own works must be constantly subverted and "updated" with modern morality and acceptable verbiage. It never ends.

Go get drunk with your friends in Disney World as you celebrate your 35th birthday. That is clearly what Walt himself intended, right? What higher aspiration can you even imagine with a mentality like that.

Nothing truly eternal can be built on or even built in the first place. All that remains is a race to the bottom of lowering standards, tired tropes and aesthetics, and emptiness disguised with bright colors and loud noises. This is the post-Disney world.

We have since lost sight of the original Fairy Tales and their aim to show us the world as it is in multiple forms. Storytelling itself is meant to present wonder, excitement, fascination, and awe--not to lock it down to trope lists, acceptable corporate language, and a weapon against your very neighbors. We have completely inverted them and in the process, lost ourselves.

Until we work to reclaim it, nothing will improve. As the above series subtly states and ends with, unreality only leads to more unreality. People cannot live in proximity with those who do not share their reality: we have all of history to show what that eventually grows into becoming. One vision will have to prevail in the end: and the one less than a century old that itself has been rotted out from the inside is not going to do much other than lead people to pills, head doctors, and the bottle. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what has happened to us.

The only solution is to go back, to remember where those Fairy Tales came from in the first place, and to build off them once again. Dead end roads and failed experiments must eventually be seen for what they are and be abandoned. Truth is more important than lies, and the best stories cannot lie: they can only tell the truth.

Truth is older than trends, it means more than sentimentality, and it runs deeper than cute images and saccharine catchphrases. It has to be rediscovered and reclaimed before everything falls apart worse than it already has. Thankfully, it is not too late yet.

There is more to everything than what we see. It is about time our stories finally reflected that again, otherwise unreality is all we will ever know. We cannot live without truth, we can only exist, and that will never be enough, not when we were made for more than this.

This is what Fairy Tales are for, after all. Until our stories change, we will not, and they cannot change until our perspective does. Here's hoping we manage before it is too late.

A story of a lost soul and a radio station playing in his head! Read Lightning Jim in Mistcreek Tales out now!

Weekend Lounge ~ Relax!

Welcome to the weekend!

A very short and slow one this week. I just wanted to point you to this episode of a bunch of older YouTube guys from the old internet relaxing and messing around while talking about nothing important at all. That's right, today it's just something fun and breezy with nothing special going on. Enjoy yourselves!

The reason for this is mainly because so much nonsense has been going on recently, some of it way too heavy for this place, that I figured it would be better to take it easy just for today. Not everything has to be serious and intense all the time. Sometimes you can jut not think about anything at all. This is one of those times.

Besides, next week's post is going to be a lot more explosive, so I wanted to build up to it a little. In that one we're going to really dive into a subject that will ruffle a lot of feathers. Until then, let us actually use a weekend lounge for what it is for: lounging.

I'm not kidding about next week either. It's going to be kind of a big one, covering an issue that a lot of people might not be comfortable about. To give you a hint, it's about an old mouse that has seen better days, and will not be seeing better ones anytime soon.

And that's and all I'll say!

In other news, there is currently another Based Booksale this week, and I have once more put up the entire Gemini Man series for cheap. I chose it again because last time I heard reports that not everyone could get them all, so here is your chance to rectify that weird glitch in Amazon's system. You can find the sale here.

And that's all for this one. Very short piece this week, but again I think it's good to have lighter ones every once in a while. Just kick back as September finally rolls in to hopefully finally take this endless summer away.

Have yourself a good week!

See you next time for a big one.

Get the entire Gemini Man series for less than a cup of coffee here! Two guys get in over the head across worlds, on the open road, and the end of the world. Hurry up before time runs out!

Weekend Lounge ~ The Last Renting Space

Welcome to the weekend!

The end of August is finally here, and we're heading into the last third of the year! One last stretch to go and we'll have made it. Until then, let's have a little fun as we usually do on the weekends. Today will be a more straightforward one.

Considering recent topics, I wanted to go over one we've touched on a bit, but one that seems to be coming back with younger generations: the rental experience. What exactly do we miss about rental stores, and what can we get back?

For one, obviously the preference for a long time has been to own. When DVD first came in during the late '90s and became standard in the early '00s (almost two decades ago) it became a lot more common to buy what you wanted. Rental stores themselves (the chains, particularly, though some smaller ones did this too) cleared out old stock cheap, some even offering classic games that go for hundreds on the second hand market for peanuts. It made sense why that was popular, sometimes favorites disappeared and you would never find them again. You had to grab what you could.

That era passed quickly, however. and the '00s changed as they went. By the end, social media was standard, cheap DVDs were common, and this new thing called streaming and even YouTube had taken over by the late '00s. Blockbuster died, becoming a corporate monolith pumping Hollywood product at the expense of local scenes and lack of variety, showing that the customer could have more than the hobbled selection they were left with by the end of that behemoth.

I know there are younger people (particularly '00s kids, Millennials) that don't believe me, but Blockbuster was a corporatized monopoly that replaced local industry, no different than pretty much everything we complain about today. It choked out variety, (local stores had their own selections not mandated and supplied by Hollywood directly), local filmmakers who used to have incentive to share their wares at their local store, and turned the rental experience into a bland facsimile of what it once was. Everything you complain about today in regards to places like McDonalds, Walmart, and even the recent Cracker Barrell disaster, all started with Blockbuster. Make no mistake, if it was alive today, it would be just like them.

That said, Blockbuster was not without merit, even if a part of the decline of the industry itself. There is something missing in the entertainment space without renting around. In fact, there is something missing in the entertainment space in general, as we have finally accepted it all as throwaway and interchangeable, and as we've done so we've begun to crave that missing piece we've been missing. But what exactly was it?

As the above video shows, it's all the little things, the touches of humanity that have since been lost to interpersonal Consuming and hiding away from the world.

Just think of how much the medium of cinema has changed, for the worse since the 20th century. One can also throw television in here too, and even aspects of gaming (like multiplayer). It started as a public activity in a high trust society, and ended as a private affair in a low trust one. It doesn't matter whether you "hate people" or think your taste impeccable and beyond reproach, but an activity that once included sociality as an important factor which is now completely stripped away signals something important has indeed been entirely lost.

Some might say we cannot get that back, that "progress" is inevitable and time marches on so we must adapt. While the latter is true, the former does not understand that every single change that happens in life is not automatically "progress" and needs to be kept around. We now know that something behind "new" does not preclude its quality, a lesson we had to learn after that decade of disaster known as the 2000s and the rot to come of the 2010s.

There are things we lost, important things, and we need to bring them back. We cannot keep pretending we can go on as we currently are.

Streaming has its uses: online gatherings, meetings, and even video sites, have their place. What it cannot do is replace real life needs, like social interaction. For example, online multiplayer has never come close to replicating the feeling of playing in the same room with someone you can directly interact with. Even when the games were better, they never matched up due to missing that important feature earlier classics took for granted. The cinematic experience is the same.

It goes without saying that the solution isn't to bring Blockbuster back, or to get another company to replace what it did. The corporate era is over now, and it's clear we cannot bring it back. Much like how McDonalds hanging its awful modern design wouldn't change how choked out the fast food industry has been of fresh blood in decades, just putting up logos and chanting old sales pitches and advertising lingo won't repair the larger problem.

It has to start locally. It just does. There is no other option. If one really wants the rental experience to return, it is going to have to start there. It is going to have to start where it began, in small mom and pop shops serving the local community. People are going to have to drive out of their way, even from the next town over, to scope out your wares and spread the word. Just as it once was, this is the only way it can be.

That being said, it isn't like just offering rentals will change the social climate. Telling someone to just start a business to fix social problems is a recipe for disaster. But we have to start somewhere with an idea, and that is closer to the ballpark than wishing for the return of corporate control of an industry again. That is just plain never going to happen and not a path worth traveling down. We do not need another Netflix. We do not even need the current one, to be brutally honest.

So I'm not going to make this post anti-Blockbuster or anything of the like, because it really doesn't matter at this point. However, there is something to be gained from such a simple industry being lost purely for automated digital distribution.

The arts and entertainment in general have been losing their connection with society, with real people, and it isn't a new phenomenon. We've trumpeted anti-social "leaders" and artists for decades as the people whose example is worth following, and it's led us to where we are now. We can't go any farther in this direction as it it has done little but foster acceptable mental illness in the mainstream and confuse the abnormal with the normal. All standards have been lost.

To go forward at this point requires going back. It isn't a suggestion, it is simply reality. We've spent too far mindlessly plowing ahead and ignoring the road signs while plugging our ears and repeating "progress" like it's a religious mantra of some kind. Continuing to do that, despite its very clear failure will not just magically work now, because it never did to begin with.

This goes beyond just renting, but I think that much is apparent to anyone reading this, so I'll just stop right here. What is more important is that we're aware of past mistakes so that we don't make them again just in more ridiculous ways.

That's all for today, I hope you've had a good August and I will see you in September! Let's charge into fall in style.

Thanks again for all your support. 2025 has been a weird one, but there are still many of cool surprises ahead of us. I can't wait until I can show you what I've been working on.

Until next time, have yourself a good week.

I've started a second podcast on the Patreon, the Drifter Mindset, about my storytelling and works. I also just put out a new episode about the difference between normalcy and the status quo! Check it out and join today!

Weekend Lounge ~ Human Vs Robot

Welcome to the weekend!

We're back with another one of these, this time on a subject I know we're all thinking about. The question is in just how artificial is everything right now?

This week let us tackle some questions based on this well discussed subject. What exactly is artificiality in art? Where does it come from, what is the source of it, and how can we move past it? Lastly, why does it feel like everything around us is artificial even when we know it's made by real people? We can't answer them all today, but we can scratch the surface before we can even think to strike at the heart of all this craziness.

What is really going on?!?

We're all well aware nothing in the arts or entertainment sphere is "natural" anymore, in that the ideas being expressed aren't deeper than surface level and rarely do they go beyond cliche phrases and unambitious characters or plots meant to rehash Current Year dogma. What we also don't address is that we also reshape this in the form of digestible Content meant to satisfy all the bots and algorithms that allow us to see anything anymore.

In other words, not only do we deliberately talk down to others in order to satisfy social demands, we also morph our language and alter our approach to our robot overlords so they can even be seen by anyone in the first place. In effect, we aren't actually working for customers: we're working for robots and filtering our "Content" to get it past them

The idea of "Working for the robot" has already affected video makers on YouTube and heavily filtered what they want to produce. If you wonder why so many channels have videos with wildly different view counts on their videos, this is the reason for it. They simply aren't doing what the algorithm gods demand of them. What these means is that they tailor their videos and thumbnails and advertising to be deemed worthy for acceptance by the algorithm (be it YouTube or any social media site) in order to maybe have an audience to watch their videos.

The robots aren't on your side.

This also is why so many bigger creators now have multiple channels (some focusing on livestreams, for instance) because it will not negatively impact their original one. This is because they have to work around (and for) the robots who are their real employers.

Author David V. Stewart talks about the topic in the video above. Since he is a YouTuber going back many years, he has seen trends come and go, as well as channels and creators. Whatever worked back in the day no longer does, making it more of a hassle for viewers to find channels and for channels to get viewers. Essentially, much like everything else, it's been flipped on its head backwards from its original purpose and intent. Check out the video above to see how that is.

It is difficult to blame so many video makers on YouTube since, well, there isn't much choice, especially for those doing this for a living. However, it does not change the fact that their work is being changed specifically for an entity that does not care about them or their audience, and, in the end, will negatively impact the quality of what they do. It's a Catch 22 situation, and the only way to fight it is to risk angering the very gods you are meant to placate.

Basically, as they are, the customer is not the person engaging in what you do: it's the robot sentinel watching you overhead like a hawk and ready to blow you away like an armed satellite should you fail to meet its demands. Not exactly a healthy position to be in.

The only solution, as always, is to take a risk.

We're diving so deep into artificiality we no longer even remember the purpose of producing for people isn't to pump content out like industrialization taught us. It's not to make tons of money, either (though of course that's nice), but to create something that can reach people and show them something a little higher and leave them in a better position than where they started. We can't do that if we're too busy being distracted, terrorized, and ruled over, by things that simply don't matter.

And artificiality doesn't matter. This sort of "Content" will be forgotten. It will come and go and disappear as quickly as it came into the void with the rest of it. It doesn't matter how much the "Content" mimics the real thing--it has nothing to say that isn't surface level or has been repeated hundreds of times by people who have already said it better before. This artificial product can't aim higher or show anything new.

But we can.

Hopefully sometime in the future we can build a scene that has this focus of connection at the forefront. It sure would be nice. Until then, enjoy "Content" being pumped out into the pipes, because that's all we're going to get as long as we work for the robots.

Personally, I think we've all had enough of it. Audiences want something real, something they can believe in. That said, all we can do is wait for enough pushback on how things currently are in order to find another path out of here. Until that happens, we're simply stuck waiting and in neutral, hoping for a new way.

For a post-Cultural Ground Zero society, I'm pretty sure we're used to that by now. After nearly three decades of stagnation, what's another couple years? Hopefully we won't have to wait much longer.

In other news, I recently introduced a new podcast series on the Patreon called the Drifter Mindset. This one is specifically about my writing and storytelling. I read a story, talk about where it came from, the meanings, and the themes, and what it meant to me as a writer. The usual podcast will continue on as always, but this one will be another bonus for anyone who wants to join. It's going to be as in depth as I can get it to be, so the episodes will be longer than a usual episode of Letters from the Wasteland. I have been publishing for nearly a decade, after all.

All that aside, I hope things are going well for you all out there, and I'll see you next time!

Have yourself a good end of August.

Read a story of mysterious radio broadcast in the middle of nowhere from a young man stuck in the '00s! What is waiting out there? Find out in  "Lightning Jim" in the brand new Mistcreek Tales!

Weekend Lounge ~ The Gen Y Experiment is Over

Welcome to the weekend!

We've talked about the lonely generations reaching middle age and what we can do about it, but how about going back a little and seeing where it first became visible? Today I have visual evidence of the originating point for an entire generation, the one most well known for being trapped in their memories and nostalgia. I'm, of course, talking about Gen Y. An entire generation that came of age during the eye of the hurricane that cracked during Cultural Ground Zero and bottomed out during their early adult years in the '00s.

We all know how that story went in that first quarter block of the 21st century. But what was it like being Gen Y before everything collapsed? Well, I can actually give you an example of what my generation was like right this very second!

The above video details the rise and fall of Generation Y centered on one figure who was infamous in the early popular era of the internet. This was the early '00s back when social media was just getting off the ground and Gen Y was learning how to use YouTube to express themselves. In case you haven't realized it yet, the subject is about the Spoony One himself, one of the early wave of those internet reviewers. While it might seem odd to bring up this one figure and his downfall, and you might even consider him an outlier to that generation, there is a very good reason that his rise and fall endures as a cautionary tale despite the countless internet figures that come and go everyday. No one is waiting for the Gamedude to return, for example.

It's been nearly two decades and yet still people think of Spoony. Why is that? Why of all those figures is he the one that elicits the most nostalgia for that specific time and place that is gone now, more than others from the time? Even the above video maker, being a younger figure, was a member of his audience who looked to him to learn about certain things. Even now he still thinks Spoony has something the others didn't. Let us look into why so many think so, and ponder if that is truly the case or just wishful thinking.

The Angry Video Game Nerd is still popular. He's still working at it. It is the same with the Nostalgia Critic. James Rolfe and Doug Walker are the names everyone in these circles knows. These two are still among the biggest in their niches despite the passage of decades since their early beginnings. Most of the others have disappeared, some have imploded, some have even died (RIP Armake21), but despite it all, there is one critic that so many await a return for to this day to resume his career as if nothing has happened. That is Spoony. If you know anything about the era, you are even probably nodding your head along with that, even if you might not understand why. Why is it that nostalgia for Spoony remain over all the others?

The logo you might remember

Unfortunately, there is a realization here, and one his audience all knows deep down. He cannot really return, and we will get to why that is soon. I promise, we will discuss it soon enough! First let us discuss his initial popularity to set it up.

The early era of internet critics back in those early days of YouTube and social media were mostly just AVGN rip-offs. We all know it now, but we also all knew it at the time. There was a demand for over the top deconstructions of childhood favorites, and boy oh boy were many Gen Ys ready to fill that niche. There were almost as many angry reviewers as there were stars in the sky, and none of them really lasted beyond that initial year or two.

Most of these figures are watched for nostalgia's sake today, ironically, though they are an interesting window into an era of the internet and culture long gone today. Despite that, however, there were a few that stood out in the crowd. Aside from the above big dogs like James and Doug, the one that almost reached their level, and many would say even now was their equal, was Spoony of the Spoony Experiment. But he wasn't just an angry reviewer. Unlike the others, he wasn't a character, he wasn't overblown or cartoony, he was just himself and really excitable and personable about what he covered. Spoony loved cool things, movies, games, TV shows, wrestling, whatever, it didn't matter. His excitement was palpable, whether he liked something or not and it was always fun to hear him talk about what he enjoyed.

In those days, it was like meeting a friend and talking about things you both had in common, and it was refreshing. For Gen Y guys, we all knew someone like him, or had a bit of him inside us, or understood where he was coming from even when we didn't agree. For younger audiences he was like an older brother showing them obscure and wild entertainment from the fringes you might never have seen otherwise. Even now in the modern corporate and "professional" YouTube world there isn't really anyone else like him. The world to Gen Y was exciting, there were cool things to be found everywhere, and those things were going to be good in the end.

And then they weren't. This is where we get to those days of the later '00s where the bleakness started to take hold of the generation. Spoony was not only not an exception to this: in many ways he was the posterchild for it all. Those were rough times.

Spoony's downfall was a tough one to watch, even at the time. Though he became an internet punchline, unlike many other early internet figures that crashed and burned, Spoony's was different. Even as he faded away, to this day a not-insignificant amount of people await his return. There is a good reason for that, despite everything that happened, many still wait for him. It will probably never happen, and it should be discussed why.

As mentioned before, check out the above video for details on what exactly happened. In retrospect, his "controversies" are actually quite tame (and water under the bridge at this point), but one part sticks out more than all of those. There is a moment in Spoony's rant at the end of his Ultima series, the last large project he did before he flamed out, that tips his hand. One can feel his despair over everything he loved turning to shit, getting worse, and imploding, and that there was nothing he could do about it. This was clearly meant to cap the video off with a gag, but his clear disappointment over his precious memories being destroyed and being forgotten by the passage of time and corporate avarice, and how nothing will ever be good again, ended up reflecting the feelings of much of his audience at the time. The elephant in the room is that we all knew it was true, and we all knew we lacked the power to save anything at the time. It was the source of Gen Y's despair at the time.

That rant is a good example of that era of Gen Y existence when the warmth of youth has finally faded and left us in the empty cold of the late '00s/early '10s, a hopeless era where loneliness and alienation became common, and it did not feel like any light was coming. The realization was that everything we thought we loved was purposefully being destroyed (and it was), and that without it our generation did not think we had meaning otherwise.

Infamous, but not the low point.

This is why Spoony will not return. Not because he cannot get past that despair, he can, (we very much all can) but that the realization is that those products are not what made those times great. It wasn't the IPs, the logos, or the carboard boxes and jewel cases. Those could be cool, but they weren't the source of enjoyment. When the nostalgia fades, what remains are the ideas, the spirit, the connection, and the sense of higher purpose al the best art and entertainment points toward. At this point, Gen Y is not reveling in the past: they are moving forward using the past as a way to shine a light into newer unexplored territory of the like we never imagined back then.

The reason Spoony can't come back is because there's no more nostalgia for him to mine, and he doesn't need to do that anymore. It's been recorded and shared with the world. His part in that Experiment is over. So now what? If Spoony wanted to come back, it would have to be to move forward in the same way his cohort is starting to. He wouldn't be able to do the same thing anymore.

Were Spoony to return, not only would his demons have to be beaten, but he would have to be in a better place to show those waiting for him a better way out of the pit not only he, but his entire generation, had been trapped in. Some are still there, too. In essence, they may think they want Spoony to taken them back to the past, but what they actually want is to be brought to the future, and they still think he has the ability to that. Maybe he does.

Does the above sound strange? Are members of Gen Y, or his younger watchers in the Millennials, really still waiting for a reviewer who stopped reviewing years ago? They are waiting for something, and probably more than they think they are. Well, the audience waiting for him is waiting for him because he reminds them of themselves. Spoony has always been a reflection of who the audience thought they were, wanted to be, or knew someone like. They live in the same fallen world as he does and wish desperately for the parts of them left behind in that nostalgic haze to also be saved with the rest of them. If he can make it, they all can, essentially.

In the '00s we were told everything old sucked, was useless, and had no value. Now, in the '20s, a quarter of a century removed, we realize how wrong that was. If it had no value we wouldn't have been able to connect with any of it, we wouldn't have huddled around YouTube comments on videos and pages (until those were removed) had countless response videos, or taken to forums and social media to talk amongst ourselves over it. We ad it all in a cloak or sarcasm and irony to detach ourselves, but we all knew it mattered. That is why when it disappeared, a level of despair fell over us all. We didn't realize what we had until it was gone. It was the connection itself that mattered, and that is why we still talk about these things even so many years removed from them.

The old days were good, not perfect, but good. We salvaged what we could from them to bring what mattered forward, but those days are gone and over with now. We can't just marvel at and swim in the past. We need new ways to look forward. We don't need dead IPs, franchises, or corporations, to rule our future. We need to be able to look ahead to something better than what we grew up with. Spoony himself is a relic of that era, but he's also a person. He's a human being who can't live there any more than we can. You can visit the past anytime, but no one else is there anymore.

It is the same when a new multiplayer FPS comes out and people hope against hope for it to be a draw for multiplayer. They want desperately to return to the good times. They want the "community" to return, be it Call of Duty, Overwatch, or even Unreal. They all know it won't happen, it can't happen, but they desperately desire that lost connection again.

But what was the essence of that connection? Playing with strangers? No, it was a variation of an earlier phenomenon.

When one looks at old photos of LAN parties over two decades ago you just realize none of these new games will ever compare, and they don't. Part of the appeal has always been friends, acquaintances, and neighbors, getting together to have fun over the same thing. We all desired that connection. We don't have those anymore, though. There are no communities, no one has the time, and everyone is off in their own little spaces, which means there will never be anything that lives up to the way it once was. That's just the blunt truth.

Waiting for Spoony to return is a lot like waiting for those local communities to return. They're gone and not coming back. You can go back to the past but, again, no one else is there anymore. One can build something different, perhaps something better, but it will only come from taking in what came before and applying it to the future. That is what Gen Y's job will be: to be the preservers and the ones carrying the memories forward to apply in new situations. Our job is to not linger and drown: the hour is much, much too late for that.

At this time, I think most of us have figured this out. We are building, working, and striving for something better. The age for lingering and pining is over and done. That's a good thing: we can always improve and grow.

If Spoony does come back I would hope he's a completely different person, like the rest of us, finished with living in the past and hopeful for a better future. I would hope he could escape those demons of those darker years and build something new. They are over for the rest of us now, but it doesn't mean we have to leave everything behind. We just have to understand where we are now, and what we can offer that no one else can.

Gen Y's worst days are behind us. It won't be perfect going forward, there will be a lot of rough waters and tough times, but we're finally moving out of the pit of the past and ready to carry ourselves forward. It's about due, but we finally know what we can do now. We don't need permission, we don't need to bend the knee to people who hate us, and we don't need to fade away. We won't be defeated. In fact, we will win.

You can just do things, you know.

It's pretty great.

Check out my new story "Lightning Jim" in Mistcreek Tales! The paperback version is out now, and even includes some spiffy art! Check it out here!

Weekend Lounge ~ Lonely Days and Nights

Welcome to the weekend!

As we head into August and the later days of summer (where hopefully the heat finally begins to taper off), lets take one look back at the loneliness epidemic plaguing the modern world. We've discussed it plenty of times before on this blog and elsewhere, and have gone through plenty of examples both in the arts and in general where it remains prominent, but I don't believe we have ever compiled it in one easy to digest source like the above documentary from ColdFusion has. Where did it come from, and where is it going? And how do we escape?

Suffice to say, everyone is aware of the overall problem on some level and many even realize the cause, but attacking the source is a whole other ballgame that is going to take some time. It's not going to vanish overnight. It's not country exclusive either, as it has roots in not only the West, but also other areas like Japan, China, Korea, and is even starting to grow in places like Africa. Alienation and atomization is quickly becoming the legacy of the 20th century, and it's not one we should be proud of.

At the same time, there has been a vibe shift in the overall culture. This goes beyond politics and voting habits, though those have obviously changed as well, and moves more into the space of the intangible. As someone who was around in the nadir of materialistic nihilism (the '00s) it is very easy to see the change in the way the average person sees meaning and the purpose in their lives. The snark and the irony poisoning is finally falling to sincerity and hope, something we have all needed desperately since the pit that was 2001. Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better, after all.

Part of admiring the past today comes from hating the present, but it should never be forgotten that said era is also what lead us here to where we are now. We cannot mindlessly ape it, but take what we need to move forward and understand the context for it all.

It's over and gone.

It's been said before that the middle is disappearing, but outside of the context of the middle class it also refers to the neutral ground on the purpose of your existence. Lines are forming everywhere that we had once deliberately blurred. You either believe your life has meaning and that we can fix things, or you don't believe it does and will fight to destroy everything while fooling yourself into thinking you're helping. The two attitudes are very different, one straightforward and one backwards, but the latter is dying as materialism has been exposed to be a dead end ideology. Only by realizing what we lost can we hope to make it better.

I don't tend to talk politics here because I don't have much to say on the topic. There are too many talking heads, grifters, and opportunists to count, most of which share and don't share aspects of my views. However, the default in that segment of modernity has changed so much that I think it is worth mentioning at least a little in regards to this topic. It's also another area where neutrality has disappeared which is probably a good thing because no one caring about the overt self-destruction of everyone and everything is how the problem outlined in Bowling Alone went unaddressed for over a quarter of a century. We all saw it coming, but we did nothing.

This piece by Dave Greene, also known as the Distributist, outlines in detail how the default thought of the 20th century, materialist progressivism died. I'm not going to go into it here as it is very long and in depth, but as someone who came from that place and knows others still there, he goes over where the ideology is, why it's dead, and why the sooner we finally give up on it the sooner we can finally build something better. Institutions like Hollywood, big business and big tech, and those with skin in the game are also starting to realize it, but they are behind on everything. This is the big reason why independent creators and artists have seized control of the arts and entertainment so abruptly: they see the writing on the wall. It's just up to the people in charge to finally process it.

Of course I'm not claiming to know all the answers, but as someone who has been blogging for over a decade now I can tell you things are most definitely not where they were back what I started. It's been a long time coming and the shift is very subtle, but the small things always add up. Within the next decade we will finally escape the grasp of 20th century materialism and despair and build something better. It's inevitable now, it's just a question of how much you're willing to let go of to make it happen. People like you are already helping with that right now simply by supporting NewPub, independent, and smaller artists, writers, creators, and entertainers, and contributing to the undeniable vibe shift currently occurring in the culture. Again, you might not have noticed it but the change is real. We just have to be engaged in it. Soon enough we will be able to form new connections and leave this present behind for better things.

It's only a matter of time.

In other news, I recently did a podcast on the series Cobra Kai and looked at just why it resonated where just about every other cash grab reboot and remake failed, and the answer turned out to be quite interesting. It might also be a sign of change, just not in the way anyone might think. We all realize what a waste the early years of the 21st century are and now we need to make up for it with something more than we had.

That is what the reason anthologies like Rock and Roll Mercenaries exist for: they highlight part of the 20th century we loved that is currently fading away. Those days are gone, so we must take what we learned, celebrate them, and move on into the new times ahead. We need the past to move into the future, but we also cannot live there, not forever. The last 25 years spent clinging to the previous century has told us that much.

I was also on the Scifi4Me podcast about a week ago with some of the guys in the above anthology. We talk about writing and stories in it! It's well worth the watch though we only show up in hour two the whole thing is worth it. Watch it here!

Like I said, there's a big change coming. Nothing will be the same again.

So what comes next? I guess we're about to see.

Check out Mistcreek Tales featuring my story "Lightning Jim"! 14 stories of weirdness highlighting what makes the world so full of wonder.

Based Books For Male Readers Sale

Find it Here!

July might be ending, but that doesn't mean there are no surprises to be had! For instance, here is a new book sale created for male readers. Looking for a good read for a guy in your life? Here is the chance to join in on something really fun!

Running from Wednesday, July 30th (today!) to Tuesday, August 5th, you will have your pick of exciting books made for a male audience. Find the sale over here!

Books on the sale page will be rotated among the selections every day, so new books will be at the top of the page as it goes. Therefore, if you missed something there's always a chance it will be more visible on another day. So be sure to keep checking. We're going to need more male readers going forward if we want to create a better industry, after all.

My book, Brutal Dreams, is a part of this sale!

A Living Nightmare 

After awakening in the woods, Christopher Archer finds himself trapped in a world outside of time. Fog monsters, armed gangsters, and a legendary spear, all await his arrival. But what about the fiancé who disappeared months ago?

As Archer explores this eternal midnight, he can only wonder—is this all just a dream, or is there something more hidden in the dark, watching his every move?

There is one choice. He must traverse the nightmare and learn the truth.

In other news, as mentioned earlier I am currently serializing my next non-fiction work, Fantasy Isn't Real, on the Patreon, as I work out the details on a few other projects. If you enjoyed my previous works in this style, you're going to want to read this one. It's going to be very much in the style of those controversial ones.

There's more to come but since this summer has been way too hectic and unpredictable it'll be some time before I can shake out exactly what is coming next. Regardless, if you want a preview, the Patreon is the place to be. I also have nearly 30 podcast episodes and two exclusive complete serials up on it with more to come. Joining definitely helps with production in these crazy times. You are also free to join in on the comments and offer feedback yourself. There's quite a lot there.

That's all for this short update post. Thanks for a wild July and I'll see you again in August!

Summer's not quite done yet!

Mistcreek Tales is out next week with my new story, Lightning Jim! Check out the complete story list below!

Weekend Lounge ~ What Happened to the Internet?

Welcome to the weekend!

It's been a strange week with a surprising amount of celebrity deaths, and the heat has yet to calm itself down even a little, but at least it's done. August isn't that far away. With that out of the way, lets get into it!

I know you're probably wondering, if you're over a certain age, when the internet stopped being a fun place to visit with a lot to see and do. If you're under a certain age you might even be resentful over why so many people spend so much time in a place as boring as the internet. These two views are obviously opposites, but they are also both correct. The answer is that the internet was once a much different place than it is today, and what it is today is a far cry of what it once was.

Of course we have discussed the phenomenon of Dead Internet Theory (which is no longer a theory) before, but what we haven't really talked about is the deliberate moves made to get us to this place. We all made the choice to be here, after all. Where the internet was once the last frontier, the wild west of open spaces and the unknown, decades ago, it has now been tamed and razed, leaving little left but the same lame corpo jargon as every place else outside of it. Chances are you only go online now for a small handful of things these days, no longer is it to explore and find new things. Not that you could anymore if you wanted to.

Without even getting to the growing glut of AI generated nonsense, the untold truth is that the internet had already been heading in this direction before we got to that point. Just like in the arts and entertainment, the goal became to automate a constant flow of Content out into the world and into our overstimulated brains, quality be damned as long as it has certain expected Tropes and aesthetics, and that's exactly what it does now. No longer is the internet about exploring or seeing or creating new things: it's about consuming Content.

It's also flooded the world with noise. Yes, even the offline world.

We're overstimulated and obsessed with both blending into the crowd and sticking out from it, our identities as concocted as the formula we desire in the Content we Consume. All this, once again, before the AI issue is even a speck on the horizon. The AI is just the most straightforward way we learned of making it easy to do.

What to be an artist? Generate an image. Want to be a songwriter? Generate a song. Want to be an author? Generate a story. Now you can get any identity you want with the push of button. That's the heart of the whole issue. It is to keep the old Baby Boomer lie alive that "You can do anything you put your mind to" which is very obviously untrue, but as the post-9/11 world has shown: reality is the enemy. It isn't about the art or the people, it's about the self. The atomized and abandoned individual struggling to find a place in a flooded world of noise with no connections to others. This is what the internet is about today, and it's where it was always going to go once social media came into existence nearly two decades ago.

We aren't connecting anymore; we're turning inward and making sure everyone sees us as we do. It's very contradictory, obviously, but that's the nature of where we are.

This is obviously reflected in everywhere else in our modern world, but the internet was once the last escape. It was once the last vestige of freedom from the safetyism that had been strangling the rest of the outside world since the '90s turned into the birth of Safetyism. Now that online space has begun to fade just as the youngest generations have had enough of the artificiality and wish to blow it all up. They will eventually succeed, regardless of what you believe the "good" or "bad" faction in all this is. It's been a long time coming.

One can always bring up how trends come and go and how times will always change, which is true, however this is different from just a trend or a fad. It's different because the internet has reshaped the way day to day life is performed and the expectations around it. It's changed how people react to one another. It's changed how we see every aspect of the world and raised our tolerance for unreality in everyday life while also diminishing our sense of whimsy and fun. Turns out the real Fantasy is what the Cyberpunk dystopia ended up being. Unreality in every day life, constantly pumped into your brain through ever-present screens.

And even as the digital world implodes, it's still making strides into invading the physical. Constant monitoring, constant pressure to be "on", and the constant elbowing in on strangers' personal spaces continues unabated. It isn't getting any better.

And, once again, this is before we get into the flood of AI Content, mass censorship, or the slow death of social media platforms at the same time as local communities have all but vanished. Everybody is sick of the state of things, but they're going to stick around where they hate to be as long as they can, because there's nowhere else to go.

The truth is that all this is happening because we don't really care anymore. The despair of the '00s lead to the madness of the '10s, which lead to the cracking and breaking that is the '20s. At the rate we're going, the internet will not last into the '30s, an amazing feat for something that was once taught to be eternal. Now it probably won't outlive any of us, at least not in any kind of useable state.

So why do we refuse to reassess our situation? Why do we continue to live in a world that no one seems to want? Why do we refuse to admit the mistakes we made that lead us to this very position we are in today and look for a better course forward? Perhaps it might be that no one has an answer, but it seems more likely that we all know what to do but we are unable to make the move to do it. It's mainly that no one believes they have anywhere else to go. Bowling Alone became real, as it was destined to, and the only way to reverse it is with a lot of effort to rebuild local communities and actually offer something better, something we once had and squandered.

Until then, enjoy the slop future of the internet. There isn't any other place it can go as long as we live our everyday lives virtually and our virtual lives as if they are our everyday ones. Whatever comes next after that is a mystery for the ages, but it won't be this.

What can we do but hope for something better? At some point we have to want more than constant Fantasy. Here's hoping we don't take too long to figure it out.

In other news, I have a story in the upcoming Mistcreek Tales called "Lightning Jim". The only thing I will say is that if you enjoyed Y Signal, you might want to check this one out. It's the first in a new series of shorts I'm working on, and these are going to be really out there. I'll talk more about it when the new anthology drops on August 4th.

I also started a new non-fiction book over on the Patreon called Fantasy Isn't Real, so if you enjoyed The Pulp Mindset and The Last Fanatics, I recommend checking that one out. While the other two are more focused on the present and the past respectively, this one is aiming towards the future. See what I mean by signing up for the Patreon today!

That's all for this week. Have yourself a good one until next we meet!

Preorder Mistcreek Tales here!

Weekend Lounge ~ Destroying Silo Culture

Welcome to the weekend!

One of the things audiences of art and entertainment have been craving for a number of years has been an art scene that doesn't beat its audience over the head with what it's doing. Few seem to understand that this has been a problem that existed much longer than the current woes in every media-adjacent industry has. In fact, we have a blueprint for how such an industry was shaped.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s a "Christian" Industry for different forms of media arose. There was a "Christian" space for music, movies, books, and everything else you could imagine. What that ended up doing was creating a cargo cult mentality around it, creating its own language and code of conduct to separate it from the mainstream. Instead of trying to adapt to or communicate with the mainstream, it divorced from it and left everyone outside the bubble to their own devices.

This ended up being a mistake, as both the "Christian" industry and the mainstream would eventually implode into a pile of tired tropes and expected ideas, never to come to together again.

The reason this doesn't work is that Christianity is meant to face the mainstream head-on, not ignore it or talk around it. It's about the destiny of man in the face of the Perfect Man, after all. And art, as we've discussed many times, is meant to connect us and find meaning together. We're meant to have art poke and prod and point us in the right direction while showing us more we might not have considered. If you truly believe in the Savior of the Universe, then you should not hold that belief to yourself. Unfortunately, that is more or less what the "Christian" media complex evolved into being in record time. It's now just another industry with a particular image slapped on top to make it seem different while it sells pale imitations of what the already poor mainstream offers.

However, there are a lot of believers out there who don't want to be part of such an isolated island. There are plenty that want to connect and reach out to others, and find a Higher Meaning to it all.

The above video shows a list of authors who did just that. While being Christian and believers of the One True God, they never forgot their vision was also to reach people who either might not believe or might not even know what the author is talking about in the first place. They released the point of connecting means going outside yourself and doing more than preaching to the choir, and as a consequence their work is much more enduring than you'd figure it would be.

What happened in the 20th century was the siloing of ideas and interactions, backed up by corporations to give the illusion of community based on perceived tastes, at the same moment local community was falling apart around us. We're currently in the last days of such a system as both the internet works to destroy itself, and the old companies struggle to make a profit without turning something into a formulaic franchise or digging up corpses to put in modern skinsuits to attempt the same thing. The climate is changing, and it's a necessary change, but it's going to hurt when it does. It's happening right now in certain places.

What we need now are people who not only believe in a better possibility for what is to come, but also aren't afraid to reach others with their ideas. The old battle lines are faded now, slipping away with both the passage of time and new generations questioning if they were ever really there to begin with. When can we finally work together again to build a better future? It has to happen at some point. It's inevitable.

I know plenty of creators working out there to make a change, and I know many audience members doing the same. We all know it has to change. Eventually, these efforts will cause a shift and the old paradigm will be just a memory. Until then, we can't stop pushing.

In other news, I just put up a new episode of the podcast on the Patreon (Can you believe it's been a year now?) talking about what from the 1990s is worth salvaging. We usually talk the opposite so it was interesting looking it what actually worked. It's a long episode so I made the preview a bit longer to compensate, so if you want to listen you can find it here.

I'm also starting a new post series that may or may not lead into another book in the vein of The Pulp Mindset and The Last Fanatics. Join now and you'll get to see it as its written and see how it shapes up. I can only do this because of the readers, after all.

There is a lot to look forward to. Don't despair over the future because of the dilapidated state of the mainstream: that is temporary. What is to come in the future will offer a much different world, one where all of this falls away. You always gotta have hope, after all.

As the old saying goes, keep your eyes on the prize. Just don't make the mistake of the 20th century and forgetting what that even is to begin with. There's much more than we can even imagine.

Less than two weeks to go on Ken Lizzi's Cesar the Bravo kickstarter by Cirsova! A collection of 5 sword and sorcery short stories packed with a brand new novel of incredible adventure. Back today and help it hit the goal!