Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
Yes
Absolutely not.
We live in a time of so much entertainment, that there is simultaneously more bad and more good content being produced.
There are also full Afred Hitchcock movies you can watch for free on YouTube, presumably since they are now out of copywrite. Sometimes when people lament the state of modern entertainment in a “born in the wrong generation” way, they are forgetting that media from other decades are more available than they’ve ever been.
Or indeed that if they actually looked at everything produced in the past, they’d see roughly the same garbage to gems ratio we have now.
The entertainment is still pretty good but the entertainment business is sure fucked up. The most brazen, spit in your face moment for me was, “It - Chapter 1” on one streaming service and “It - Chapter 2” on another one. They’re not even trying to hide their fuckery anymore. Go Community Theatre!
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
You lost me here. This is where you start to sound like a boomer. The annoying thing about 67 isn’t that it doesn’t have any sense behind it, it’s the sheer ubiquity that kids say it. Which, unless you have kids or work with kids you probably really aren’t seeing. Look at old MLG montage parody videos. Why was that guy saying “wow” and winking funny? There’s no reason. It is just something we laughed at. 67 is the same.
A lot of everything else you say I resonate with. Ads are getting more intense and ubiquitous. My country is going mask off with fascism and disappearing citizens. There’s a lot to be upset about. I don’t think much of it is related though, you know? Ads just suck because they want more money and that just means showing more ads.
This is some serious advice. Find things to be thankful for, no matter how small, and focus on them. Your perception is your reality. What you fill your mind with is what you see. I know it sort of sounds obvious but, if you’re thinking about miserable things all day you’ll be miserable. If you think about things that make you happy, you’ll be happy. I’m not saying to ignore the bad things or to give up, but you can’t fight back if you’re miserable. It is okay to take a break. It is okay to want to be happy.
If you’re in the northern hemisphere we’re in the time of year that gets dark super duper early. Seasonal affective disorder is real. The older I get the more I realize it. I’m not saying blame your thoughts on it being less sunny, but just be aware it can be a component.
I hope you can find some joy. 💜
Old man yelling.
As we age, we tend to lose our connection to what’s new and hip. So instead all we see is lame pop culture stuff. I think back to my teen years; my parents were only really aware of the non-pop stuff because I exposed them to it, from music to movies.
I still find plenty of new and interesting media it just takes more effort. It all came naturally back when we had plenty of young friends but now we’re old with old friends and legacy media connections.
I got around to watching The Amazing Digital Circus last night. Pretty good!
Last month I listened to Sophie, because I enjoyed some hyperpop and wanted to hear more. She’s not my style, but it certainly is different.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was, and now what I am isnt it, and what is it is weird and scary to me.
And it will happen to you.
TADC is something I could see 20 year old me being completely obsessed with. 35 year old me just thinks it’s neat
Sophie died 4 years ago though she was great
Until the pandemic the answer to this question was always you are getting older.
Not since though. Entertainment is fucking dogshit now. Good TV shows are few and far between. Most movies are utter dogshit.
Influences and micro content is just fucking terrible. I swear to god all of it is just PG Porn. Oh look a channel about a couple sailing around the world. Every shot is at her ass level in a bikini as they film the content.
I feel like there are still plenty of good tv shows getting made.
People shit on it but I enjoyed the rings of power. It: welcome to derry was phenomenal. I think dmv is pretty funny. Righteous gemstones is hillarious. Foundation is great. I loved alien: earth. South Park is going strong.
I am really enjoying landman too. Billy bob thornton makes the show, but watching him going around being a rich cantankerous old fuck is great.
There’s good shit out there anyway. IMO.
What TV shows do you like?
Entertainment is getting worse and you’re getting old. The media landscape has fractured, and there are no dominant cultural touchstones anymore. You’re looking for media in all the ways you used to, but everything is different now. There is still plenty of amazing long form content on YouTube, and lots of great movies. You have to do more seeking now, though, where before you could just open up YouTube or turn on the TV
The loss of widely shared cultural touchstones in media has messed with my perception of time. But also, I’m getting old.
My favorite part to that is to discover something for the first time, fall in love with it, think it’s the most amazing thing ever … then realize that it’s ten years old and everyone got excited about it a long time ago.
But it also means I don’t give a shit anymore and I just enjoy watching things that make me happy and interest me, instead of trying to chase after the latest fad.
I too am old. I loved YouTube for the lack of prescribed format until it became prescribed format by becoming enslaved to and hopelessly manipulated by an algorithm.
The random free form was lovely and enjoyable. Was.
There was one point in which I stumbled into “beige” culture, then found myself watching a vid, long form, of a millennial discussing decor. Not my thing. I’m there for comedy, instruction, and journalistic documentary forms. Watching millennial man discuss decor, the psychosocial of it hit me. Here’s this personable fellow talking right to me (the camera) about nonsensical daily crap, on a subject you might engage in a work breakroom. Living space decor is pretty light fare.
For people who are fairly devoid of random, natural socialization that is not stressful for them, of course this is popular. It conveys a false sense of human interaction and agreement. Dopamine hit success without talking to anyone real.
Explains reaction vid popularity, for sure. I find them to be the most obnoxious waste of time, worse than ads, but they are popular. And probably for the lack of socialization and need for that type of dopamine hit reason.
If you have people, and get genuine reaction in regular conversation, why would you want this?
Also, the restrictions of their medium have largely been removed. Time was a tv show had to fit into 42 minutes. And you needed to make enough episodes for syndication.
So you’d have an A plot which is something simple and a B plot which has the season arc plot and it would be short cuts and a lot of exposition.
Now you can make episodes almost as long as you want, and there’s no need for any consideration of syndication. So you get long establishing shots and not much actually happening in an episode.
The scifi television renaissance was fantastic, while it lasted. Says the
Star Wars generationgenx media consumer.Things like McNally, fast/fancy/clean woodworking snippets, and cat vids are great short form, in moderation, sure. But short form domination feels like the room time of the main character on the second episode of Black Mirror, “Fifteen Million Merits”.
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
For what it’s worth, I recently learned you can turn off the gooner porn bait visual novels in the store without turning off incidental sexual content games like BG3. They have gradations of sexual content.
(This doesn’t solve the other categories, but I suspect you can tailor your store experience to limit those as well.)
I’m tired of the Honeypop slander - it’s a perfectly respectable series of puzzle games
So I’ve heard! I just don’t want to see it on my store page. 🤣
This sounds like a perfect opportunity to start reading books.
Society changes Book is book
Media changes Book is book
Trends change Book is book
Government changes Book is book
Games get outdated Book is book
Servers get shutdown Book is book
Book will always be there in its original format, no ads, no change, no tracking, no brainrot, no trends, no algorithmic content creation.
Book is book
You are deluding yourself if you think that books are immune to AI slop.
Enshittification is coming for all things. It’ll take a lot of careful human curation to keep finding the value among the deluge of crap.
To be fair, there has always been crap. Sure, llms automate the process of slop creation, but you always had to rely on curation and often pure luck to find decent books.
The solution is to have a backlog and read books years after publication. Thankfully plenty of good stuff has been written over hundreds of years, no need to jump on fresh books.
Books are getting worse too. Publishers seem to be perfectly happy to publish books with no solid plot that have no proper ending because the writer couldn’t think of one.
I’ve already read ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and ‘American Psycho’, thanks.
Sounds like me but unpublished lol
The reason why I’m not writing a book is because I have a vague idea but I won’t be able to tie it all up fairly neatly and make sure everything makes at least some sense (ergo: why did x do y?). But apparently that’s not necessary anymore.
Check and see if those books are published versions of webnovels. I find most (though not all) webnovel series have this problem, and I’ve seen a rise in web novels being converted to full books and audiobooks. I’m willing to bet it’s less prevalent outside of webnovels due to normally needing to submit a manuscript to an editor first.
Book is book.
Fool of a Book.
Frodo Bookings!
The world remains largely unchanged according to ducks
I volunteer in wildlife rescue. I can tell you ducks have had a rough 2 years.
Why?
Where I’m located the main culprits are bird flu, virulent newcastle disease, fowlpox and decreasing water quality due to things like algae and botulism.
Hmmmm
There still are a lot of shitty books out there, and literature is not immune to trends, whether they are mainstream or limited to specific subcultures. And as long as there is at least one existing copy avaible for streaming/download, any piece of media lasts forever.
That needs to be on a t-shirt or something!
Book will always be there in its original format, no ads, no change, no tracking, no brainrot, no trends, no algorithmic content creation.
Until someone figures out how to generate books written by AI that will ultilize algorithms, curate them to include ads and trends, and that will have unavoidable AI brainrot. For now books are safe.
Think about it. Today we say that AI will never write a good book. But 3 years ago we were saying that AI will never generate a realistic footage after that “Will Smith eating pasta” video. Today AI-video is getting harder to distinguish. Same with music. Not a lot of time has passed.
Radio and TV always sucked. That’s not a new thing. The only time I see ads is during sports.
You have less free time as you age. Happens to us all.
This is where social media shines. Go to any forum that’s focused on one of your favorite entertainments and ask the users what their top 10 things of late are. Check out the most mentioned. Fuck it’s December. There’s likely year-end lists all over the place.
You already have a shared passion with those folks so it’s likely you’ll have similar tastes.
Try listening to one of the records they recommend on your commute instead of the podcast that agrees with you.
Sure that show seems stupid but it’s 22 minutes and I can put it on while I make dinner. …and since when do I hate stupid?
When you were younger you prided yourself in ignoring the spoon-fed bullshit you referenced. It takes a little bit more effort at our age. You obviously care about it.
Cheers.
The trouble I’ve found with most communities is they are waaaaay more into anything than I am. People get stupid over unimportant details and become annoying pedants that are difficult to talk to because they are more concerned with correcting you than just embracing a shared enjoyment of something.
Still a great idea for some people and media though.
You just cant rely on algorithms to show you anything good, they might but dont expect them to. You have to search for content yourself and also try blocking the shitcontent so you might find anything decent more easy. In a way, internet is kind of like post apocalypse wasteland now. You might find something, or even communities that have a lot of stuff, but a lot of it is just crap.
Maybe try archiving some of the things you like best in case it disappears one day. Also try connecting with other people and communities you find that are nice, we have only eachother against the corporations that just want to show us brainrot content.
Go to book stores and retro game stores. And the library. Some libraries have movies, music, and videogames in addition to books.
He could just download books and retro games for free from the comfort of his home.
So since you are telling OP to get vintage games the answer is yes.
That is because new game stores don’t exist as everything gaming-related is online.
Everything else they mentioned do still exist and get new media all the time.
Yes, it was better.
Now its still good but you need to go underground to find it
Join small clubs. Ditch corpo net and go on the small web. Leave social media walled garden bot farms. Have blockers on all devices.
And shut off the internet/phone on weekends if you can. Makes life better. Go play that ps1!
There’s merit to this. One of the beautiful things about this era is it’s cheap as fuck (compared to other eras of history) to make and put out cool shit. Hell, we had a kid in town a few years back make a feature-length horror film with their phone that got screened at the indie theatre here. But you’ve got to dig and deal with the Sturgeon’s Law factor to find gems among all the cruft out there.
Also noted that folks may want the mainstream entertainment of old, but real talk - once you’re a certain age/level of experience, there’s a good chance you’re not part of the mainstream audience. Large groups don’t make the stuff you like because you’re not the target audience anymore, and four-quadrant approaches are dealing with a very different audience than they used to.
Been thinking about this quote from Terrence McKenna a lot recently (might seem a little quaint in the face of today’s media landscape, but I take away a good message):
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.
This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
Thats very interesting and accurate.
I think a lot of people, including myself, sometimes have the urge to give up creativity because we are seeing 3 billion other people online doing everything better than us.
Then you realize, no one cares, do what you want.
If in doubt, raid the local used bookstore. Yeah, and do use uBlock Origin, Freetube as your YT front end, and maybe sail the high seas. Curate your entertainment.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
I’m using Bluesky mainly as a newsfeed.
So go to a used book store. Don’t get the new books, get the old ones.
Why would you do that? Survivorship bias?
I don’t know ask the OP…
Ads are destroying everything. IDK how much of any industry’s budget goes to ads, but whatever it is, the consumer is paying for it in multiple ways even if you don’t want the thing being advertised. It’s baked in to the cost of the product or service. It’s shoved in your face driving down the highway or listening to music, or even on your refrigerator. And they do their best to handcuff you by withholding some facet of your product or service unless you watch the ad or at least permit it to be displayed even if you already paid for the thing you get the ad on. Youtube is utter garbage with everyone filling space in their videos with maddeningly useless fluff and shallow chatter (like and subscribe!) to increase the adspace available do so their videos get pushed to the top.
Entertainment? IDK, it feels like people haven’t had an original thought in decades. It’s rehashing or reviving old ideas in worse ways. Music is lyrically and musically shallow (yeah, pop music has always been mostly like this) but it seems like it’s overrun with low-effort junk. We have almost no artists who can actually weave a story into a listenable and desirable form. Maybe some indy stuff is good, but some people seem to think that different and obscure suckiness is good because it’s not mainstream suckiness.
Even books are shit a lot of the time. It’s like every author has to dumb down the book and write it as close to movie format as possible so they can hopefully get just that - get a movie deal. NYT bestsellers are emotionally manipulating triumphs, failures, Lifetime TV crap designed to be consumed on airplanes after your third vodka tonic makes it seem deep and meaningful while you’re stuck in that middle seat.
I rarely watch any TV at all. No broadcast or cable channels at all. Some streaming. I might try out a dozen books before I find anything that sticks.
Entertainment has been fully consumed in a desperate churn to be the next short-lived viral “thing.” There are too few who take the time and effort to actually create material instead of being the 150th person to make a reaction video to some clip. So yeah, I think you’re right. Things have become incredibly shallow and short-lived as desperate people fight for their viral hook and ad money.
