Loss & Game Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is what hurt the most.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we should treat it as just that.

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

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

Check out this crowdfund from Pilum Press and support some of the best writers in NewPub today!

Weekend Lounge ~ Fanime!

Welcome to the weekend!

We're finally in the autumn season, the season of change, so let's look back at a past that has long since been left behind.

I apologize for the lack of a post last week. Things merely got out of hand. Hopefully it'll happen less and less as we get out of the warmer season. I can only hope.

Today's subject is particularly niche, so I don't blame you if you find it hard to understand. That said, it is quite an interesting topic to look over, especially with the passage of time.

Anime's explosion in the West was a strange one. First slipping into the fringe underground in the '80s before becoming a part of alternative culture in the '90s, and then finally achieving mainstream recognition in the '00s, it was a bizarre series of events to get it to its current worldwide dominance that would arrive in the decades to come. No one would have imagined its gigantic size way back when passing around old badly subtitled episodes of Dragon Ball Z in class and school clubs. It was a much different world.

Speaking of a much different world, I wanted to highlight exactly one that sprang out of this subculture. During that odd transition between underground alternative culture to mainstream in the '90s and '00s came this odd era of the '00s when young audiences tried their own hand at actually making anime. Yes, we are talking about the strange world of Fanime that you have missed entirely. It was a niche of a niche, so it's very possible you never encountered it.

This short era, in retrospect, is an interesting glimpse into how a niche subculture affects a generation growing up entirely on the internet increasingly separated from the mainstream. At the same time, one can see which tropes, styles, and ideas resonated with younger audiences of the time period. Interestingly enough, most of these projects were made by girls, not guys, giving a very different idea of one might expect from such a thing. Few of them were also ever completed, which, again, in retrospect is not all that surprising for the generation in question.

The kids who grew up in this time related more to this foreign art form than they did anything in their own, and it's obvious why they connected to it more at the same time the artificial Geek Culture was at its cultural high. This stuff was simply more honest. It's also why anime would eventually overtake culture entirely. Everything else at the time was dying.

Looking back on it, where we are today was the obvious endpoint of that time, and those raging against it simply aren't trying to understand how it came about. We can't wish away reality, it simply is what it is. And this is how we got to where we are today.

The above video goes much more in depth showing many of these projects, what happened to them and their creators, and the sorts of things that would come out of it later on. Fanime still exists and still gets made, but the priority of the creators is much different in the scene than it once was. In fact, it wasn't long after the initial growth period that it would change entirely. It is funny however to see this scene contrasted with the fanfiction one from the same era. The Fanime one clearly contained those with more creative drive and potential, yet its the fanfiction one that spilled into the professional writing industry and helped drive it into the current ditch its in.

That aside, the entire subculture is much smaller than it was back in the day, splintering like every subculture has over the last two decades into a niche of a niche, but it's still an interesting subject to look over. It's something that could only have happened at one point in time in one age demographic, and it did. We will never see something similar arise again.

In a sense, Fanime still exists beyond its niche, it has just moved into other spaces. The amount of independent creators who work in other mediums from comics to animation inspired by anime only grows by the day and does not seem to be stopping anytime soon. You can see it everywhere, especially considering how anemic the mainstream western industry became pandering to fangirl shipping and trends from angry urbanites who hate their audiences, the alternative would always be much more appealing.

So take a look for yourself and see just what it was all about, and what this time period was like. Maybe you'll even be a little inspired yourself. Who knows? Things aren't always as simple as we might think they are, and this subject is one such topic.

Inspiration can strike anywhere at anytime, and it ways you might never expect. Let's just hope the next bout lasts a little longer and finally shifts this culture into better directions, and hopefully finally brings us back together again.

The last thing we need is to keep drifting.

Cirsova's Wild Stars Kickstarter has passed the halfway mark! Jump in for some space opera action and help fund future projects at the same time!

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 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 ~ 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 ~ Internet Implosion

Welcome to the weekend! We're back!

We've been talking about the Dead Internet for awhile, and now we can perceive the form of our destructor. The end of the internet is in view. It might not be tomorrow, but it is coming, and probably sooner than you might think.

Today's subject is a multipart series to show exactly what is happening. ClownfishTV usually spends their time speaking of pop culture news and whatnot, but some of their videos have also been focusing on the growing trend of megacorps slowly strangling the digital space while everyone is busy focusing their time on other issues. The above video focuses on the largest 20 year old video website that basically defined the era of modern media we live in. We are, of course, talking about YouTube. The company that helped create an alternative to dying mass media is now attempting to dismantle it and run roughshod over what made the internet what it was to begin with.

They have become what the once claimed to offer an alternative to.

As is well documented, from the time YouTube was created, it quickly became the site that defined how the video medium would be presented for generations to come. Before the '00s were over, Blockbuster and Cable TV were already on the way out, soon to replaced on the site itself by a slew of different styles from documentaries to original songs to political debates to, eventually, even livestreams, and news. The old paradigm had been completely destroyed. By the 2020s, videos were defined by YouTube's format, and no one would argue with that.

But those dying news corpos, movie and TV studios, Hollywood, and just about every big party in the old media space has hated how instrumental sites like YouTube were in weaning the public off of the mainstream that had detested them for decades, and have been dying to squash alternatives and become top dog again. And as the video above has shown, they are working overtime to do just that. They want the terrible old paradigm back, and the  owners of the new spaces are letting it happen. These shambling dinosaurs (somehow) have lots of money behind them, after all.

It is not just YouTube, either. Make no mistake, they want the entire internet crippled, which will eventually destroy it. They are well on their way to getting it, too.

The second video I wanted to present is what is going on with Google, the world's largest search engine. But make no mistake, it is not just about Google. Every search engine is currently compromised and being demolished as you are reading this.

It did not start with YouTube! This is an issue that has been going on for some time, and does not appear to be stopping anytime soon.

Google Search was first casualty of their play, in the process breaking just about every search engine out there from selling your information to deliberately hobbling certain search terms. It has gone from being highly accurate two decades ago to being unusable today. This is the fate of what was once seen as the immortal internet.

The fall of Google and YouTube has been long documented, but what is gearing up to replace them? That is the main question. What is the purpose in all of this? If it was to gain control of the levers of power in the former Wild West space it is being done in the most incompetent way possible, and will eventually lead to the destruction of the very websites that form a large portion of how the online space worked. It's all going to be decimated.

While bots and studio plants have been a problem for a while, the advent of AI learning has made the issue explode all over in a more dramatic fashion. If anything, this has only accelerated the end of the internet that is obviously on the way.

But of course, it doesn't stop there. It has also spread to areas meant for discussion. Yes, even those have been neutered and rendered even more artificial.

For the final piece we are taking a look at, this one is on the meltdown of the last real news aggregate forum, Reddit, and how it has been infested with bots and glowies (unironically) in a last bid to finally break the system down. Reddit has always been a negative influence on online discussion and it has been made considerably worse.

This mirrors how many old BBS message boards would eventually get so flooded with spam that they would simply not be able to operate at all. The difference in the two is now they've learned to weaponize AI in a way that is trained on human behavior to blend it in better. The AI is now trained on the very behavior of the people they hope to fool.

In other words, the more you act like an NPC the more you become indistinguishable from the very bots themselves. Considering the climate of discussion we currently already have on social media sites, this makes them a prime tool to push for engagement. It is only going to make these site worse and more useless.

If you've used any social media in the past year, and you almost certainly have, you have seen this decline in usability first hand. It is not going to get better, and as the internet is flooded with more and more junk, and the human junk becomes just is as unrecognizable as the AI algorithm junk, people are going to begin turning away from the entire mess, simply because there is no other choice. Eventually there won't be any way to engage with humanity at all. We're nearing the end of the road for this once eternal space.

The internet is winding down, and it is a strange site to see. It is unknown how much time remains, it could even be longer than one might think even based on the above information, but it is definitely going to happen in our lifetimes. The internet is not forever, like was thought to be common knowledge even five years ago. The wild west we once marveled at is tamed and currently being broken in. The digital space is very much heading towards that cliff and its speed is only picking up, oblivious of what is coming ahead.

So what does all this mean? Not much, in the long run. It doesn't change what has to be done with what time we have left. Create, share, converse, and do it for the Good, for as long as you can. We have to break through Cultural Ground Zero before the rotting zombie of the 20th century attempts to drag us back into the grave once again.

The internet isn't forever, but that shouldn't stop us from doing what we need to do. We have to use every opportunity we have for as long as we have it. Do what you've have to do, same as always! Just be aware of what is lurking on the path ahead.

That's it for this week, and I will see you again soon. I've got some projects to get to. I promise they will be worth the wait!

Check out the summer issue of Cirsova! Out today!

Weekend Lounge ~ Times Change

Welcome to the weekend! We're a mere ten days away from Christmas!

As we get ready to head towards the halfway point of the '20s, and as the internet begins closing in and breaking down, now is probably the time to take a good look at just how wild it was back then. Remind yourself on just how different it was. What better way to do that than with this look back at the figure who probably best represents the way it was in the old days, the ever-controversial, and very Gen Y, Mister Metokur AKA The Internet Aristocrat AKA . . . a lot of names!

This might be harder for younger folks to understand in an age where the internet is overrun by insane schoolmarms with loopy rules and puritans for the lame status quo of Current Year, but as infamous as the man called Jim might be for those who know him, he was actually a pretty common personality for those who grew up Gen Y and spent their late teens and early adulthood engaged in the early days of mass internet adoption. That was back when the internet was still a wild frontier yet to be conquered by the most boring people imaginable.

How was it different? In many ways.

Basically, everyone knew the internet was not real. It still isn't real, but we used to know that more deeply. You went on to blow off steam, find some cool corner of the internet that showed you things you didn't know, hang out with other like minded fellows, then you disconnected. It wasn't your life, it was more like a hobby to engage in when going out or calling friends just wasn't feasible. This was in fact how it was throughout the '00s. Gen Y, still under the yolk of the soon too be fractured Geek Culture, got together and shared their favorite products and events, and even messed with each other like guys used to do once upon a time. Things are different now, though, unfortunately, not in a better way.

What you should see in the above video of Mister Metokur's rise and . . . well, not fall--he's still around and still popular in certain circles, is someone who sees the digital world for what it is. It's a playground with endless possibilities where you can find anything. You might not disagree with how he spends his time on it, but it's clear that his approach was one we once understood long ago before we started following Influencers with Platforms, thought leaders on social media, and nauseating artificiality like that. Back before buzzword culture, we were just having fun.

And now the internet is on the way out. It probably won't even have proper recordings of how things really were before it went off the rails, so be sure to remember for yourself. It's only through building on what worked that we can build something better. And we're going to be building a lot in the years to come. We're going to have to.

Also, if you can, please send prayers his way. Jim has a sickness that has sidelined him heavily over the past few years, putting him on his deathbed more than a few times, though it's miraculously dulled none of his humor. That is a trait we would do well to imitate. Gen Y might be having a rough go at it, but I believe we are just now hitting our prime years on this Earth. Pray that we might all not only make it, but thrive and show the world just what we are capable of.

There is no limit to what we can do, a lesson that early internet should have taught us before we fell in line with those wanting to destroy it for clout and a couple of bucks. Let's finally go anywhere and do what we need to do. We've still got a decade to salvage.

That's all this week, and I'll see you next time!

My story, Mirage Carousal, is in the Fall issue of Cirsova! Bullets, hidden casinos, motorcycles, mist-covered towns, and monsters! Check it out today!

A Tale of Two Deaths

Sometimes when I see the current state of things and our reaction to how it's going I ask myself a question. How used to change are we, really?

When you are so used to stagnation, especially decades of it, it is hard to notice real change, especially when it's happening right under your nose. I've highlighted a bit of the change around here in recent times, but I think today's topic should really make it clear how things have shifted recently more than the latest events might lead you to think they have. Old institutions are failing like they are more than overdue to, but the new ones taking their places aren't from where you might expect them to come from. We're heading into uncharted waters and no one really seems to notice.

I think I can safely declare that Cultural Ground Zero is over, even if it hasn't been supplanted yet. There is just no room or momentum left from that old era. Whatever remained from that period of pure stagnation is currently on the way out, if not already gone.

Here is my declaration. By the end of the '20s, I posit everything that finally should have died off with Cultural Ground Zero decades ago will finally do so, and leave us with a more clear path forward into the uncertain future that is the 2030s. It's daunting to think about such a thing, but it's becoming more and more obvious everyday that this is what is awaiting us on the road ahead.

I know I said I wouldn't be able to write much this month due to many ongoing projects, one of which is very close to being revealed, and I'm standing by that. However, recent events have caused me to ruminate on a specific topic that has come up every now and then in recent times--the importance of artists themselves in the grand scheme of things. Much has gotten warped over the years since Cultural Ground Zero closed off the past and future to current modernist insanity, but few things have been as deliberately as the purpose for creation itself.

It's no secret that I am very much not in line with the current zeitgeist's obsession with brand over all else, and yet two recent passings in the wider culture have made me take pause and reconsider a bit about where we currently are. These deaths both mark the opposite ends of the modern spectrum of entertainment appreciation, and yet both are responsible for much influence that stems from the early days of Cultural Ground Zero entertainment that would follow their success. One of these, however, was a much bigger news story than the other. If you've kept up with recent trends then you probably know which one I am referring to.

The first of the two deaths to bring up is the unfortunate early passing of manga legend Akira Toriyama. For those unaware, and I would be very surprised if anyone younger than a Baby Boomer didn't know, Akira Toriyama was the creator of Dragon Ball, one of the most influential IPs of the past forty years. In many ways, it invented battle shonen, one of the keystones of the industry's success in the decades to come, inspiring future megahits like One Piece, Naruto, and My Hero Academia, among many others. DB is also heavily responsible for helping to crack the international market. Without Toriyama, none of this is possible.

It wasn't just Dragon Ball, his other megahit series, Dr. Slump was also hugely influential, including inspiring people such as Shigeru Miyamoto on the art motif and run animation in Super Mario Bros. 3, which is one of the highest selling and most influential video games of all time. The short works he made after finally penning the conclusion to Dragon Ball in the mid-1990s were also very popular, one of which, Sand Land, has both a video game and an animated adaption on the way shortly. Even if that was all he put out it would be enough to cement his fame.

However, on top of all that, Toriyama was involved in the video game world, being instrumental in the success of many projects over the decades, but particularly two incredibly influential franchises in Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, video games whose influence spread even outside of the medium to creators all over the world. If you're of a certain age, you've taken in at least some entertainment that has the influence of these two in it.

And if even all that was not enough, Toriyama's Dragon Ball anime franchise, though he was not involved in the actual production itself, was instrumental in allowing the medium of anime to explode internationally as well as develop many new animation tricks and techniques still used in the industry today. So he was actually highly important in influencing three different mediums throughout his entire career, and his influence definitely goes far beyond even that to the point that we will probably never really know where it ends. The writer of this very post you are currently reading was heavily influenced by Dragon Ball, as well.

If there is a Mount Rushmore specifically for manga creators, Akira Toriyama is definitely on it. One would have a very easy case for his inclusion.

It was only at the moment of his death that so many realized just how big of a mark this one man made on so many lives, and the tributes and celebrations of his life were just about inescapable online. If you're reading this and didn't know about the news I would be very surprised. It was everywhere, and just about everyone had something to say about it.

It was also nice to see the creator, not the production company or the IP, get the credit for his own incredible accomplishments. For once, finally, it felt like the Brand didn't take precedence over the creator. Which is, of course, the way it used to be.

The original manga ran in Shonen Jump from 1984-1995.

Just before this news broke, however, there was a different sort of news being spoken about in its place. A different sort of death, this time it was about a company that had been around for two decades--one of the most influential in the early days of the internet media explosion. For those who haven't yet heard, I'm referring to Rooster Teeth.

Running since about 2003 after being formed by a small group of friends, Rooster Teeth was emblematic of the old internet. It was one of the first "geek culture" groups focused on popular things of the time like video games, machinima, podcasts, and all that went around the "pop culture landscape" during that period. This was the era when we were beginning to make the concept of "Pop Culture" a shrine to ourselves. It was a different era, one that is very quickly wrapping up.

For some perspective on age, Rooster Teeth started in the early days of webcomics with the likes of Penny Arcade, 8-Bit Theater, CTRL+Alt+Delete, Bob & George, VG Cats, Captain SNES, and Megatokyo, and even predated G4's Attack of the Show rebranding era. That is how ancient RT was in the lifespan of the internet and the mutation of Geek Culture that came out of the post 9/11 landscape. You might even remember some of the creations spun out of the company, like Red Vs. Blue, RWBY, or Achievement Hunter, which is what they were most known for. It's been around a long, long time.

In fact, Rooster Teeth represents that bizarre moment of the Angry Video Game Nerd/Retro Junk era of pop cult between when entertainment was appreciated for being as good as it was at the time into being a lifestyle brand of its own to base your identity off of. That transformation would come very shortly, though. Rooster Teeth was there at the beginning of that change, and was instrumental in helping create it.

For younger people, you might not have any idea about this, but things were truly different in the pre-9/11 era. Entertainment was not treated the same way it has been ever since Geek Culture was tortured into existence in order to represent the good guys/consumers against the bad guys/normies who oppressed them via movie clichés invented by the likes of Revenge of the Nerds. The '00s was a whole different beast than what came before, and it is what led to the rampant consumerism as identity problem in the '10s that would make the 1980s blush with envy.

The '00s was the era where quips and references, tropes over art, and snark over sincerity solidified and consumed everything from commentary to the creation of entertainment itself. Essentially, it's the era where Geek Culture began in earnest, as referenced here. The '00s was where we appreciated the paint on the hood more than the engine underneath it, mistaking that sheen for the reason the car even runs at all. Rooster Teeth was one of the forerunners to this cultural shift, and stayed that way for decades, mutating with the times and the zeitgeist, showing both its highs and its lows. There are few companies that represent that entire time period better than they do.

So one might think that because of its longevity and obvious importance to the cultural landscape of how things are that it, much like Toriyama, would at least engender some sadness and reflection upon its passing, right? As stated above, Rooster Teeth was unarguably influential, they were popular, and it even created a few IPs people enjoyed a good deal. So surely the company would be celebrated with the news of its demise. If not on the same level as then maybe at least a fraction of what Toriyama received. Surely it would have something.

Well, no. That isn't what happened at all. In fact, just the opposite happened, a complete contrast to Akira Toriyama's unfortunate passing.

Most people were celebrating Rooster Teeth's overdue end, lamentations over lost jobs aside. The ones that weren't celebrating were more upset at what the company had become and were sad that it died instead of fixing course long ago. The news of Rooster Teeth's death was practically the opposite of Toriyama's with most people shrugging their shoulders or spitting on their grave, hoping they never rise from the ashes like so many dead relics like G4 had attempted to do in recent years. People, oddly enough, have no reverence to these "Geek Culture" institutions that were so influential on them, preferring them to stay dead and never to rise again.

This then leads to the main question of today: what in the world could account for this difference in attitudes between the two deaths? Again, besides the fact that one is a human being and the other is a company. We well know that the wider culture does not seem to distinguish a difference between the two anymore. The confused worship of the Space Battle brand shows that much in how whoever buys something owns its soul for eternity and can pump any product out it wants.

So, then, what is the real difference here?

The original Red Vs. Blue ran 100 shorts from 2003-2007.

There are many factors in why Rooster Teeth's and Toriyama's death are not treated the same (the life of a man and the life of a company being different notwithstanding), but the main reason for that would be the most obvious thing: Toriyama was in control of every single one of his creations until the day he died. He ran them all, made every decision, good or bad, with them, and was the one to decide if a project should even exist at all in the first place. He treated his own creations with care and respect to the people who enjoyed them.

In other words, he was from the generation where the creator mattered more than the creation. This was the time where the IP was just one tool and, once a series ended, that was it unless both the creator and audience both demanded otherwise. It is hard to say how, but Toriyama was very good about knowing when enough of something was enough, ending the original manga at what ended up being the perfect point in the long run. That isn't so common anymore.

In contrast, not a single one of Rooster Teeth's creations were ever continued on by the original creative team from beginning to end. Not a single one. On top of that, every single one decayed and fell apart as they went on, inevitably chasing the audience away. This is because the creator did not matter to them as much as the creation did. This example is one of the most common in the Cultural Ground Zero era of Brand Worship. You would buy product because of the packaging, not for what is contained in said packaging.

Over the years, as the company grew, the group changed from a bunch of frat boy late Gen Xers and early Ys making edgy internet content of the time, into a full-on company staffed by safe peddlers of corporate pap. That mean as they grew and got more corporate, friendships were broken and strained, relationships were thrown under the bus, and people were allegedly ripped off right, left, and center. The Rooster Teeth left over two decades from its beginning was a shell of what it started as, and the people there from the beginning were no longer those same passionate young guys hungry for success. It was just another corporate job. Everything was done to keep the gravy train going, not to create or sustain anything.

Of course, we all grow and change as we get older, but when your very lifeblood is staked on building upon the audience you have cultivated and the creations you all built together, it is paramount that you never forget who you were and build on that person. And, unfortunately, they didn't. It doesn't matter what property of theirs you liked, you were almost certainly chased away by how they conducted themselves as they got older and decided what really mattered to them. Their fall is like a crash course study on how not to grow.

And I haven't even talked about Gen:Lock! (And I won't because you can learn all about that disaster in the link.)

One should also mention that all of this also goes for easily their most popular IP, RWBY, created by the late Monty Oum. For those unaware, Monty Oum was a Gen Y kid, first coming to prominence with early online video game fight videos in the early '00s like Haloid, a mashup of Halo and Metroid, as well as Dead Fantasy, a combination of Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy. Though such a thing is common today, it certainly was not back when he was first doing it. He was hired to work on Red Vs. Blue for Rooster Teeth before getting the chance to make an original series of his own, which ended up being the surprisingly popular RWBY.

Contrary to what some might tell you now, RWBY was never meant to be anything mind-blowing or original. Much like RvB existed for goofy Looney tunes-like comedy shorts, RWBY was supposed to be a showcase for cool fight scenes, much like Oum's earlier work was, and that's what it was for the first couple of seasons. That is until he died via extreme allergic reaction in 2015. A sad early end to a creator that had a style all of his own.

And this is where the series went off the rails.

No, it didn't end. It was too popular to do that. Corporate decided to push on without him. And it was a disaster.

To be clear, Rooster Teeth did help Oum make RWBY, but the series was really his creation. It was a creator-driven project, not a corporate one. Once he died, so did it. There was nothing more to be said. The series was his idea, it was his creation, and it was his passion put behind it to make it stand out from what was being made online at the time. The company in the one who turned it into the punchline it has been for ages now.

So what happened? Well, instead of respecting the creator and wrapping up his creation with his death, Rooster Teeth decided the IP could still make money. What they then did was grab a bunch of random writers and threw things at the wall, none of which stuck, in order to keep the gravy train going, because that is the sort of company they now were. The result? Well, if you know RWBY for anything beyond Oum's early work it is almost certainly for the memes insulting how bad it has gotten. That should tell you everything about how well his property was respected after his death.

Instead of a Toriyama-like appreciation for Oum and what he did for them, his creation was warped beyond recognition by the company looking to pander and milk anything to get a few extra bucks out of the popular property and the consumers attached to the Brand image. And, of course, because this was the era of Cultural Ground Zero, a hyper-specific and quickly dwindling slice of the viewers didn't care. The chipping paint was enough to keep them on the company's side. The creators no longer mattered to fanatics, it was the IP that mattered to the Geek Culture generation weened on corporate creations first and foremost. Nothing can ever end, it must always be pumped for more money to be consumed forever--no one person matters or should get in the way of that.

And, it should be restated here, every other property Rooster Teeth had control of over the years more or less went through this very thing, even if the creator didn't die like Oum unfortunately had. Most of them were chased out regardless, and a large chunk of the consoomers the company courted didn't care. They just wanted the product, not the creation.

This is the sort of comment that can only be made when a faceless corporate entity matters more than people:

No, the above statement is wrong. A company is not bigger than any person's life or their creations that allow it to live in the first place. Every person who works there is more important than the company. The company exists to serve the person's life so that they can create and put said creation out there to as many people as possible. It does not exist to wipe the creator from the process. People are bigger than a company can ever be, because they make it what it is.

This is the legacy of early 2000s Geek Culture and why we are where we are today. So it seems a bit strange to me that despite all this madness and backwards thinking that when both a person and an entity dies that we suddenly remember which one is more important than the other. It is Toriyama that got all the tributes. Rooster Teeth only got memes thrown their way.

Perhaps this all exists as a reminder to appreciate the time you have left and the people you have with you along the way, because you never quite know what'll happen or where you will end up. We have other people in our lives to both be helped and to help us. Just remember to never forget that which made you what you are. Otherwise, not only will you will lose it all--but so too will everyone lose you. At least leave behind the best of you, not the worst.

What else can we hope to leave behind than that?

As I said, this post was just meant to be a shorter one ruminating on recent events. It grew quite a bit from that because it looks like there is more going on here than I originally thought. The 2020s have been a decade of change so far, with many holdover elements from Cultural Ground Zero finally falling to the wayside and ending. I'm not sure you could have predicted any of this happening even a few years ago, and yet here we are.

The 2000s were the nadir of culture, a time of moral vapidity and self-destruction, and the 2010s were a holding pattern of that very time period, with interior change sprinkled about in the few final years. It's only now after a worldwide pandemic has simultaneously shaken so many people's trust, had them face their own mortality, and allowed them to push forward into new arenas that you are starting to see real replacements for those old dinosaur institutions and modern failings we've had to deal with for far too long. As has been said, things do not stay the same forever. By the time we get there, the 2030s will be something to behold.

You're here to pass the baton on to whoever comes after you. Make sure that baton is something you can really be proud to hand off.

Hopefully, this time we won't fumble the toss.

A futuristic shoot 'em up and a mythic hack n slash await you for a mere $0.99!

Weekend Lounge ~ The New Internet is Dead

In contrast to last week's post, let us now take a look as to where the internet is today. It should not surprise anyone to see that it is a far different place. Not only that, but it is slowly on the way out as a valuable ecosystem, being strangled to death faster than any we've ever dealt with before in all of human history.

The Golden Age of the Internet, is over.

In a mere quarter century, the internet went from an outlandish wild west to being a ghost town of corporate bots and automatic processes repeating itself into a void. Yes, we've talked about Dead Internet Theory before, but that's only because it's self-evidently real to anyone who has been here since the internet became ubiquitous in the late 90s--kids and teenagers who grew up where people could be found everywhere, subcultures all had their own spaces where you could find and discover new things. Independent works were as discoverable as corporate ones, and everyone was willing to show it off to everyone else. It was one of the few things that didn't collapse when the 20th century hit, but actually grew larger.

This was what made the internet a bright spot at a time in Cultural Ground Zero when everything else was dying. Perhaps this explains why so few folk over the years have seemed to take notice of the West as it has faded. They could instead distract themselves with the internet as it grew. But now that it is also dying, all of that nonsense once overlooked is harder to ignore than ever before.

For those unware of Dead Internet Theory, here is a short description from Wikipedia:

"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. These intelligent bots are assumed to have been made, in part, to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers."

I couldn't tell you why so many are still trying to frame this as conspiracy theory, but like many such conspiracy theories recently, it has turned out very true. Perhaps not in the way it was originally described, but the Dead Internet is a very obvious reality to anyone who has used the internet for any extended period of time. It is dead and very much over.

Take a look at how it once was contrasted with how it began:

Those days are gone.

There is no conspiracy here. The above is exactly what has happened to the internet. You can also tell its real because journos (who are fast being replaced by said AI and will be in the coming years) have attacked it as false, even as they screech about AI threatening their employment opportunities. So much of the internet is artificial, and it is only becoming more so as the years pass and eggheads attempt to patch over what they already irreparably broke in their bid for control. But once you deliberately and deeply fracture the base it will not take too much time for the whole house to cave-in on itself.

It is the same everywhere online. Surely you have noticed this, too. This is an unavoidable reality.

Being a writer, I have had to try and understand some of these algorithms myself and can tell you that it is impossible to do so--because they are broken. They are broken because those in charge have spent so much time tweaking them for their own gain that they busted them and have no idea how to repair it again. It's completely borked.

Not only that, but the recent explosion of AI in arts and in chat bots has shown how fast this technology has come along. So much of it is fake, and almost all of it is 100% artificial.

What is incorrect about the original Dead Internet Theory is the idea that anyone actually controls any of this. No, it's very much the opposite. The original push was an attempt to do such a thing, but their attempt was absolutely fumbled until those in control lost the plot not unlike so many post-apocalyptic plots from cyberpunk currently authors salivating over government control. No, it is another human failure that led to problems for everyone else.

As is usually the case. Self-proclaimed experts pining for control always end up eaten by their own monsters.

So what you end up having here is a former wild west as open and free as the real one being taken over by its own iron fisted government to pave the land over. Except in this case, they had no idea what they were doing in the slightest and instead broke it completely. The Dead Internet is a result of a failed takeover of wannabe kings which led to a flood of broken bots and artificial pages and sites that will soon overwhelm everything else.

Essentially, this happened from turning the internet into what it was never meant to be in the first place. It was never meant to be controlled by anyone--it was meant to be a communication gateway. And this result is what happened when Silicon Valley egghead types tried to do just that and crown themselves Lord Emperor of the digital world.

They essentially destroyed their own wonderland in an attempt to make themselves kings. Certainly not a story humanity has not played out before, nor will it be the last, but it definitely is the best example of one we've had in a long time. Sin really does make you stupid.

The internet is dead, and it has no future ahead of it.

But you can still remember the good times, and remember what it was all meant for. Once again, humanity's own hubris will be its undoing in something else that could have been far greater than it ended up being.

And who knows exactly what will come up next? Perhaps it will be better than what came before. We might not even screw this one up this time! There is always a chance, no matter how hard that might seem at times.

Who can tell what we might have to look forward to? No one could have predicted just what the internet was, after all.

Nonetheless, like last time, it is the weekend! Have a good rest and keep looking ahead. Perhaps the internet will hold together enough for communication like this to survive for longer than the destroyed and converged parts of it will. You never really know what the future might hold. Only time will tell on that one.

I know I have a lot I'm still looking forward to sharing with you, so I hope you have the same. We are what made the internet what is was, not corpos, eggheads, or politicians, and we will continue on despite their continued interference to destroy what has been made.

Let us show them what it means what they forgot. Let us remind them just what it means to be human, to be alive!

Gemini Warrior is back out again! Book 2 is out in August!