I remember those days; a very different time and social mores.
Culture
Focus People
I hate to criticize people’s sincere and earnest efforts. But this video shows what it looks like when you have someone trying their best and not just being good at filmmaking. And not knowing what they are doing. The lighting is terrible and unflattering. The color grading is atrocious and also unflattering. The pacing is all wrong and the shots are alternately too static and too rushed, and not variable enough. The editing is also amateurish. There’s a million things they could done to make this better even with the footage they already have. Other than fixing the color grading as it’s really fuckin’ bad, if I could have shot this with roughly their budget and at that location, I’d have started with a very close, still shot of the woman’s eyes and gradually, very slowly, pulled back until you could see her whole face as she sings.
Then, as the song picks up the pace I would’ve pulled back a bit more quickly and started interspersing shots of the snake, the moss, the waterfall. Then at the the bridge of the song I would’ve had a shot of the camera racing down the stream until it reaches the woman banging on the drum (half-body shot here) and done a focus pull from the drum to her face again as the faster part kicks in.
To end the video, I’d done a long follow shot with her actually going down to the rocks and laying down, then shot her directly from above, zooming in again (to close the loop) right on her eyes.
The end. And my version would’ve been way better and more compelling.
I mean, it takes a real lack of skill to take an extremely beautiful woman with gorgeous red hair and make her look cadaverous and unappealing while making a bad video at the same time. But they managed it.
Mowen
I’m much, much more comfortable around women partially (but not wholly) because I am extremely, almost comically, terrible at intra-male standard competition rituals and ways of relating.
Anything to do with that I both do not understand and am horrific at so being around other men is difficult for me. Being a paratrooper was ok, though (mostly men), as there’s a lot less of having to prove yourself as compared to men with no accomplishments. Funny that.
Bound
What exactly is the difference between being controlling and having boundaries?
My unpopular answer is that most people’s boundaries are designed to control others. And sometimes, it’s to control one’s self. And by that I mean having all those boundaries is a way to cop out on living life. That can be seen in Gen Z and their extreme prudishness and lack of social skills. Their “boundaries” are just fear and trepidation in another mask.
It’s not that boundaries aren’t good, in many cases. Rather, it’s just that “boundaries” became like content warnings: another way to avoid dealing with the world as it is. And to avoid a better one, as there could be risk there. But you know what they say about risk….
Causal Agents
The culture of the future should be a billion-year-long quest to conquer the galaxy and defeat death.
Anything that doesn’t violate the laws of physics we can do, given time1. Let’s get the fuck started.
Types of Stereo
Women often feel that they are reduced to a sex object where only their surface matters. Men often feel that they are seen only as an emotionless wallet for which any deviation from stoicism is a gross violation.
Both are correct.
Brainrot
Social media is poison and since women use social media a lot more than men, women are more poisoned by it. QED.
It doesn’t have a thing to do with the (non-existent) inherent terribleness of women, just the demographics of who has experienced more of the most mind-rotting “innovation” of the past few decades.
Not Content With the Content
I think I finally understand content warnings now. They aren’t effective at what they’re actually supposed to do. Studies show that pretty clearly.
Therefore, why they exist is, like many human things, for the purpose of signaling. Content and trigger warnings are used to convey that you are courteous enough to be concerned with the viewer’s sensitivities about something. They also communicate that you are embedded enough in a particular culture to know what its triggers and concerns in fact are.
Thus, they are used both for courtesy and to express status (these two are always closely related) and make a lot more sense to me from that sociological angle.
Zip
What About Pizza Hut Are You The Most Nostalgic For?
That it was a treat, mainly. Something special. My immediate family was poor; we did not go to restaurants pretty much ever. Pizza Hut was something that was affordable and pretty good for a small town. It was one of the rare times I had food I actually enjoyed rather than just tolerated. When I knew I was going to get to go to Pizza Hut, I looked forward to it all week.
Their restaurants also used to be vastly better; they had salad bars, higher-quality food and better service.
And I personally always liked that they were very dimly-lit compared to other places. Made them feel kind of mysterious inside.
Days
Green Day’s SoFi Stadium show proves it’s officially a classic rock band now.
I never really cared for Green Day. I bought their second album, Kerplunk, sometime in 19921 and only listened to it once or twice. I believe I gave it to a friend a few weeks later. But the band has certainly stuck around, which befits our era of constantly-recycled and remixed nostalgia combined with culture becoming static.
It’s funny that Green Day’s first really popular song was about being bored, which is such a 1990s thing to do a song about. That’s what I mean exactly when I say that even the 1990s “pessimistic” songs seem optimistic in hindsight. “Oh, you’re so bored, all you can do is masturbate and lounge around all day, boohoo, so very sad.”
Seems like comedy now in retrospect.
Sent
An artist retrospective: Montreal-born Jill Ciment’s memoir asks ‘Me Too?’ after the fact.
This is a better and more perceptive review than I was expecting it to be. I have not read (and probably will not read) Ciment’s book, but I like how Maltz Bovy does not go for the easy bien-pensant head-nodding along with current harmful strictures of how relationships “should” work.
It gets trickier once you factor in the newer, more questionable quasi-taboos. #MeToo has long since stopped being the of-the-moment fixation, but it has left its mark. Relationships between what would have once been deemed consenting adults now get picked apart for imperceptible or theoretical power imbalances. It’s squicky to meet someone at school or at work, even absent any supervisory capacities, because (supposedly) women find it threatening to be hit on, even by men who take no for an answer.
Facilitated by the existence of dating apps—that is, by the possibility of meeting someone only after vetting their willingness—we now have a generation increasingly convinced it’s weird and problematic to flirt with someone your own age, with whom there is no power imbalance, in a public space. A woman should be allowed to go to the supermarket without some man talking to her! (Never mind that most women will at some points in their lives want this sort of thing, or initiate it, even.) Age-gap discourse is not, in its current incarnation, particularly concerned with what would legally constitute statutory rape. Rather, it’s all about whether it’s a violation (of what? of whom?) for a 30-year-old to date a 50-year-old. #MeToo’s legacy is, in part, this proliferation of relationship categories that are a bit hmm, one that will soon enough encompass all potential love affairs.
What a great couple of paragraphs. In not that many words, she really shows how absolutely absurd the accepted discourse and conclusions are now. #MeToo, though it began for noble ends, caused and continues to cause quite a lot of harm to women. Like incels, many women have torpedoed their chances of happiness and then blamed others for their self-gestated problems.
I don’t want to detract from the work with my ranting. I’ll have more to say in other posts. But it is a good one; read it.
Spillover
To be perfectly clear, the problem with feminism’s implicit contention that women should be treated like children when it benefits them and not when that treatment does not help them is that a child is a child at all times; once you’ve declared yourself to be in need of protection even from yourself, there is no longer any choosing where that applies.
Feminism must allow women to be fully mature. There is no second choice.
Good Again
I liked Gone Girl too, but the “Cool Girl” discussions ended up being another way for women to self-infantilize, to claim all the boons of feminism while accepting none of the accountability or responsibility that increased power and respect entails.
Welcome to life: if you want something to be a certain way, you have to make it, take it, or shake it till it gets that way. Eventually I think feminism will get good again as it embraces women actually being fully-responsible members of the political and social community, but right now feminism is mostly about attempting to pretend to be agency-free children when it benefits women and then complaining when they are actually treated like a child in other realms too.
And that’ll only go so far. Those contradictory leanings have probably reached about the end of their practical shelf lives, but all this will take another decade or so to play out, as these things always do.
Let’s Talk About
The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity.
This was written in 2021, so the sex-negative trend had already been firmly in place by that time. But she is still correct. And she (as I do) thinks it’s going to get worse. Much, much worse.
If there’s one drum I’ve been beating for a minute now, it’s that I believe the pendulum with sexuality is going to swing, big time. And seriously, if you guys remember me for anything, have it be this.
Mark my words: Next financial crisis, we’re diving headlong into something that’s been simmering in the background since 2013-2014… sex negativity.
Younger millennials and Gen Z are already extremely sex-negative, even a lot of the men and boys. I also think she’s gotten closer to the core of the real problem with this than anyone else; I’ve been having similar thoughts.
This will be as much a rebellion against the pod as it is anything else. People do not want to be atomized. They do not want to be neutered. Sex dolls are unsustainable. Nobody wants this dystopia. It WILL be painted as anti-tech but it is not necessarily “about” tech. THIS IS THE REAL CULTURE WAR.
I disagree with her about sex work and that her overall tone suggests that, like many women, she sees women as just larger children a bit but I believe she’s got the gist of what is happening and what is about to happen.
The only good part of this mess is that I expect tattoos to get much, much less popular as a result. That won’t make up for this insanity, but even the worst things have some benefits.
Churn
Obviously not everyone in the younger generations has embraced extreme prudishness and non-sensuality. The people in the below videos have not abandoned all that makes life good, obviously, and they are all in their 20s. But it is the dominant strain now.
So I do wonder what was it that happened to cause this enormous change in so many to make it a generation-defining social alteration? Was it social media? The internet? Just natural churn and change, explained by nothing (I don’t believe this, but offering it as a hypothesis)? Reduction in social mobility? What?
Whatever the cause, it’s horrible to see; I feel like people are becoming puritan hikikomori because they cannot imagine anything else. Perhaps it’s all simply because they make better, more pliant consumers that way.