Culture

Und Fic

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Culture

Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) / X

I agree with Kat that this dumbass take that “writing about something is condoning and endorsing it” is not exclusive to liberals, but it has become far more prominent among them over the past decade or more. Gen Z seems incapable of understanding fiction at all, and believes that anything written about no matter the context must 100% match the feelings and desires of the author.

Art is doomed with this attitude. I cannot understand why this absurdly clownish belief became culturally mainstream, but it is now. And the world and art is vastly worse because of it.

Files

Chill Culture

The X-Files Has Made Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Experienced.

I experienced that world, and many things were in fact better.

Gender relations were much smoother; men and women did not loathe one another as they seem to do now. Everyone was much more optimistic. We thought we’d solve all our problems and build a better future. And no, it wasn’t just young people. Everyone believed that. Now we know that we certainly will not solve nor fix anything. And what a difference those two divergent weltanschauungs make.

This reminds me, I’m generally sick of clowns writing about the 1990s when they didn’t experience it. If you weren’t there, you don’t know. And no, being three years old in 1999 does not count (though many of those doofs think it does).

Even some of the linked essay (which I like, as it does not presume to know about something they did not experience) is wrong, but this part is 100% correct.

Technology went from functional in the 90s, to fun in the 2000s, and is now – somehow – neither.

In the 1990s we were attempting to give people more freedom. Now we’re making every effort to take all that away and put the information genie back in the lamp. That is the crucial difference.

This next part isn’t quite correct, though.

It’s been said too many times, but I will repeat it at the risk of sounding decades older than I am – television like this simply isn’t made anymore, I believe in large part due to the rise of digital cameras over film.

Cinematography is much worse now, but that is not mainly due to digital cameras. The real explanation is that it makes production cheaper to use neutral, even lighting. And that’s for two reasons. The first is that it’s just more economical not to have those complex lighting setups like The X-Files used. And the second is that it’s far easier to alter something in post with the au courant bland, even lighting.

The next bit is the strongest part of the essay, and all correct; the social milieu was vastly different then. Vastly, vastly different.

Drop by a friend’s place, chat to a stranger, uncover a government conspiracy relating to alien-human hybrids… well, maybe not that last one – but live in a way that almost resembles the human condition! Our brains are made for living in a village, not isolating ourselves behind glowing blue squares. We can pretend that pixels on a screen are equivalent to sharing an impromptu coffee with a friend, but we are kidding ourselves. Normal human life was left in the nineties, and I never got a chance to experience it. The X-Files has shown me that working, thinking, and socialising were not the same then as they are now, and may never be again.

Just dropping by — which was common then — is absolutely verboten now. What a different world that was, and anyone who claims anything else is almost always just too young to actually remember it.

Deva

Chill Culture, Evil

alexandriabrown (@alexthechick) / X

This is a terrible trend. Even my anti-social ass used to love to go to the arcade when I got the rare opportunity to do so as a kid. That we’ve just collectively decided to sit at home and scroll on phones is so, so evil.

Censor Sensor

Chill Culture, Evil

And a decade prior to that — in 2006 — it was even freer. That was the heyday of blogs. By 2015 the internet was already quite censored compared to 2003-2006. It is indeed far worse now, though.

The gatekeepers are returning, in a way. Admittedly they are stupider, less conscientious and far more venal than before. But as I’ve said in the past, the huge project being undertaken now is the elite striving very, very hard to get the information genie back in the bottle again. And they will not stop until that is accomplished.

Switchboard

Chill Culture, Politics

A few days ago, I was discussing with my partner that the left has largely become what used to be called “conservative,” especially economically, with the right having taken up in many areas what used to be called “progressive.”

Weird to see, and to experience in a single lifetime. And almost no one else notices it or will admit it if they do happen to catch sight of this heretical idea out of the corner of their eye.

Slip Slap

Chill Culture

“Child’s Play,” by Sam Kriss

I don’t even agree with a lot of the article, but this writing slaps.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did. A few blocks away, I saw a billboard that read: no one cares about your product. make them. unify: transform growth into a science. A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. He was, I noticed, holding an alarmingly large baby-pink pocketknife. Passersby in sight of the billboard that read wearable tech shareable insights did not seem piqued by the prospect of having their metrics constantly analyzed. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to prompt it. then push it. After spending slightly too long in the city, I found that the various forms of nonsense all started to bleed into one another. The motionless people drooling on the sidewalk, the Waymos whooshing around with no one inside. A kind of pervasive mindlessness. Had I seen a billboard or a madman preaching about “a CRM so smart, it updates itself”? Was it a person in rags muttering about how all his movements were being controlled by shadowy powers working out of a data center somewhere, or was it a car?

The article is actually completely wrong about AI progress, though. It’s improving just as rapidly as it was, if not more so.

Minaj

Chill Annoying, Culture

(2) Cartoons Hate Her! (@CartoonsHateHer) / X

I miss the days when everything was not taken as some political position. When it was ok to not like an artist because their music just didn’t do anything for you.

It really did not improve anything — not politics, not art — to drag everything into the political realm. Sometimes not liking Rush is just not liking Rush.

Against History

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Culture

Related to the below post, much of the left believes that all humans are basically interchangeable widgets with no important differences between them. It’s a very neoliberalized view of human diversity and individuality.

And, like what most of the left believes, of course it is wrong.

Humans are not in fact interchangeable widgets. Culture is extremely strong and not something that just alters with the direction of the wind. People are not all the same. Neither are sociocultural practices or their results. Why the left believes that — or at least pretends to — makes no sense as all the evidence of human history is against this conclusion.

But, somehow, they do.

Delu

Chill Culture

Why does relationship in the U.S. feel so harsh compared to back home?

The US has the worst relationship culture and by far the most abysmal gender relations of any Western country. Also, the worst, most entitled women and nearly the worst men1 overall.

Dating will be hell for anyone who is not accustomed to gender relations being outright unrestricted warfare.

  1. A few Western countries have worse.

Open

Chill Culture

(1) wanye (@xwanyex) / X

NYC and other places used to have tons more open 24/7 or very late before the pandemic, even more in the 1980s and 1990s, and absolutely boatlods of stuff open (particularly in NYC) 24/7 from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Not sure what caused the continual decline of this, but was also true for other large cities to a lesser extent. And I wish it’d all come back; I’d strongly prefer most things to be open most of the time.

1995

Chill Culture, Music

This line from Molly Nilsson’s “1995” is probably the single best encapsulation of what it felt like to live then: “Back in ’95, we thought we were standing on the threshold to the end of time.”

Nailed it in one line. I wish I had Molly’s succinctness, but that is as close as one can get in words to the feeling of living in the era after the Berlin Wall fell and before the Oklahoma City Bombing, before 9/11, before the world turned.

Yes, we were wrong and in retrospect delusional that it was the end of history. That there was a brighter future in store. That we’d solve racism and hatred and blood feuds and war. But it sure as fuck felt like that. That optimism perfused everything. Those who claim it did not were too young to remember or are just lying. Most of them have some agenda, as well.

But I was there. I know what happened and what it was like.

S-VHS

Chill Culture

What’s your white whale – something you’ve been looking for for years but never found?

Not quite what the OP is asking, but I had a lot of music videos recorded on Super-VHS from MTV and other sources, some of which are not available on YouTube or any other service. I had a couple dozen of these tapes back in the 1990s, all two hours long.

Those tapes were thrown away or sold for drugs, not sure which.

Some of those videos will probably never be seen by anyone again. I doubt there are any master copies extant at the studios, and if no one can unearth a copy on VHS, they are gone forever.