Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
I kinda feel like I'm getting to be a crumudgeon. Like movies suck now, videogames suck now, new tech trends are scary, and I can't tell what the young people are talking about throwing around words like "Skibidi", and "Gyatt". I have enough self awarness to go "well of course this is all just the typical survivership bias right"? After all, we only remember the good stuff of history and tend to let the bad stuff fall into obscurity. But like... is that really it? Ok so good movies and videogames are still coming out. I enjoyed Wicked a hell of a lot more than I expected, and Baldur's Gate 3 is definately a modern classic. But like, when I was a kid, we didn't have to worry about movies like the MCU films that exist primarily to advertise other films and tv shows. Like, of course we had sequels and franchises, but 20th Century Fox didn't make Fantastic 4 so people would get excited for X-Men: The Last Stand. Hell, they didn't even make X2 so people would get excited for X-Men: The Last Stand. They made those movies for their own sake as their own profit venture... ok and to sell merchandise... never mind that, right now I'm busy yelling at clouds.
Oh and videogames don't get me started... ok please get me started. First off they don't even release them finished anymore. No seriously, if you're not aware, the version of a videogame that ships is rarely in a fully playable state, and in semi-rare cases is missing large swaths of content. They add that stuff in as well as fixes for bugs and glitches in a free day one patch. What's the problem with that? The patch is free after all. Well, what happens if, say 20 years down the line, someone like me, who likes playing two decade old games, wants to play this game. They buy a console, the console manufacturers online services are long since gone, but meh, it'll still be able to play physical copies of games. So they buy a physical copy of the game, pop it in the console, boot it up and... the game is and unfinished buggy mess that that contains only a brief tutorial level. This isn't even an exaggeration. The 2015 release Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is known to have shipped with only the tutorial on disk. The entire rest of the game was in a day one patch. When I got a game as a kid, the game you bought was the game you got. The developers had no way of guaranteeing that the player would be able to apply a patch. So if a game was broken at launch... it was broken at launch... there was no way to fix it and you had essentially wasted your money. And the slang people use? Yeah, it's not like us millienials can really throw stones. We have "yeet" "on fleek" and "stan" that are just as dumb and nonsensical.
So, the more things change the more they stay the same I guess. Right? I don't know. Especially those tech trends. We have generative AI that burns so much energy its causing tangible environmental harm while also not achieving much more than automating plaigerism. It's not just new tech trends that scare me. Social media, which has been around longer than I have regularly used the internet, scares me. The way it's engineered to encourage confrontation and negativity, and take control of what a user sees away from the user. Thats why I'm here; trying to recreate a past internet culture I never experianced, or perhaps trying in vain to proselytize a new DIY internet culture. Movies? The problem there is that there are more ludicrously expensive blockbusters now than there used to be. They are getting more expensive to produce, with shorter production times, which means lower quality, and greater worker exploitations. The videogame industry has the same problem. Ballooning budgets, crunched dev times, and exploited workers.
This post wasn't supposed to be all doom and gloom, but it is kinda tough to be optimistic right now. But the tools for making art have never been more accessible, it's easier than ever to access art and information from all across history, and it's easier to communicate and organize than it has ever been. These are the tools to build a better future. It's not easy, and I worry that people have gotten too used to being spoonfed everything by those in power and not "listening down" to those without. However, it is possible, and I do believe people are broadly smarter and more empathetic than the mob appears. I'll keep talking and maybe more people than my immediate friends will listen.
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com