Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.
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It’s hard as hell to be excited about stuff, and no, it’s not just because of my depression acting up yet again. I think.
Every other store that I liked to go to, especially the ones where I could take my mom, is getting bought out & shut down by shady investment firms. Not even mail order companies are safe, since apparently 90% of the smaller yarn companies/shops that I’ve been following over the past few years are now under the umbrella of “Craft Americana Group”, and damn if that doesn’t have the same stink as the same vultures that killed Joann. Movies just don’t interest me anymore, and I don’t know how much of it is realizing that I had grown tired of the theater environment or nothing being offered looking all that appealing or what. Even stuff that I used to like, such as Rifftrax Live, gets nothing but an “eh, I’ll just wait” reaction.
Television is its whole own mess, and I include streaming in that because they’re functionally the same thing. To give a recent example of this problem, let’s say that there’s a new show that you want to watch - in my case, that “visit a restaurant & eat everything on the menu” thing with Braun Stroman. Food, travelogue, & a wrestler - that’s my exact kind of relaxation viewing. So I look up where it might be streaming, and it’s on NOTHING that I already have. It’s either cable TV (which was already too expensive for me thanks to equipment/sports carriage fees) or another service that I’ve never heard of until looking up where USA Channel originals stream. I double-checked the ones I do receive just in case, but nope, if you want USA, it’s either cable or Fubo. This search was the very first time I had ever heard of Fubo.
Heck, let’s look at wrestling and what you need to do if you don’t have cable (or even if you do). You wanna follow the bigger companies? Well… if you have cable, you should be okay with AEW and some of WWE, but you’ll still need Netflix for Raw. If you don’t have cable, you’ll need HBO Max for AEW (which is practically one of the few things I’d consider as a “pro” for the service, since they’ve purged nearly everything else that appeals to me or offer it via a cheaper avenue), and among other services, you can watch NXT & Smackdown via Hulu. And this is assuming that you won’t care about either company’s PPVs (again, AEW’s being included with Max is a rare win for the service, especially compared to the THIRTY DOLLAR A MONTH service WWE is going with now) or the Saturday Night Main Event specials (which I believe are still Peacock exclusive). And if you wanna follow smaller companies like TNA or RoH? They’re on their own paywalled services. If you have a local indie or two you like or want to watch some puro from Japan, you’ll have to pay for Triller, and even then, you’ll have to pay per event on top of that. So much like being able to visit theme parks, wrestling has become one of those things that’s pricing itself out of the reach of many people who’d otherwise be actively watching & enjoying. And that’s before you make the mistake of looking up how much ticket prices can go for sometimes…
Even with the stuff that I do have access to watch, it just keeps getting cancelled. I am someone whose relaxation viewing is usually either animal-related or cooking-related shows. I love shows about veterinarians, shows that are food-based travelogues, shows about cooking competitions, you get the idea. Yet, even those are getting axed at random now. I have no idea if Critter Fixers is ever gonna come back, since Disney is trimming away anything from NatGeo that’s actually interesting (my mother is still mad about Wicked Tuna). Food Network keeps quietly cancelling some of the baking competitions that I enjoy or even just regular shows like The Kitchen, with it seemingly being done so we can have yet another show with Bobby Flay (a dude I’ve never found all that interesting). And again, you get to deal with the super fun experience of trying & often failing to remember your logins for different streaming services, which will just decide “nah, we don’t wanna carry that anymore” at random.
Really, is it any wonder that I tend to default to YouTube when I go to watch TV? I’m bound to find something I’ll like, even if it’s History Channel airing their episodes of Modern Marvels from back when they were watchable. I use FrndlyTV as a distant second, but that’s largely a repository for digital subchannels that cable wouldn’t carry in my area anyway (also, so I can watch a lot of the classic cartoons that HBO Max purged for more [as] garbage & Friends reruns). That has some stuff like a whole channel about crafting that I wouldn’t have found otherwise, but even then, its stations are prone to “we’re taking this show you like off the schedule at random”.
I don’t know if it’s depression kicking in again, or if it’s because nothing seems worth the time/energy/complications that are required to engage with it, but it just feels hard to get excited about stuff. There’s stuff I’m enjoying & looking forward to - be it the next Pendog update or the H-B revamp comics from Dynamite or MGRP Restart getting animated or just getting more time to read Umineko - but they’re getting fewer & fewer. Even making my own stuff has hit a wall, be it my original works or a fanwork of some kind. It’s hard to break through writer’s block, especially when you’re tired out from work & life. (And do NOT ask how many knitting or crochet WIPs I have. I will cry.) It’s just a tricky time, and I don’t know how to kick myself out of it.
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It’s so, SO refreshing to stumble across a professional writer that shares my belief that turning every creative work into a therapy exercise/morality tale for the staff & the audience does a disservice to literally everyone & everything involved with art.
Leaving these nice & big so they’re readable.
I do think that a lot of the insistence that everything be a Very Special Episode or have a tidy, overly obvious moral repeatedly stated throughout isn’t just intellectual laziness. If the “lesson” in something is one that the people pushing for this just don’t want to hear, they’ll be furious. They don’t want to think about something after it’s done; they just want works that go “you’re the most correct & ethical being that ever existed and your priorities are truly the most important in the world” to proverbially pat them on the head.
And as usual, no, it’s not just conservatives upset about seeing POC or queer people in works. In fact, the loudest & proudest about “it’s not that deep/the curtains are just red” tend to be more left-leaning. The desire to be spoon-fed confirmation of your worldview knows no one “side”.
It almost makes me long for the days when everyone laughed at someone trying to SINCERELY do the whole Very Special Episode thing, like Judd Winnick got for years. Turns out he was just a decade too early, and even then, he’d probably get yelled at for doing stuff like making an anti-smoking theme in an Exiles subplot too subtle. Or not having the characters read the DSM-IV entry on addiction, because only by treating character psychology as a lesson in such can they possibly recognize it, instead of… y’know… picking it up from the actions & such.
It just feels like we've had two generations that can't handle creative works that aren't morality tales, textbooks, or a combo of both. And that a lot of the stuff that makes me want to scream in modern media (but especially "geek" media) is being made by & for that mindset. When you live in a world where people think Tom "Don't ask what I was doing with the CIA" King is deep & insightful just because of his weirdly fetishistic handling of suicide, you start to wonder what is the point of trying to be even slightly nuanced or even just trying. Really, it's no wonder that listing the TV Tropes cliches instead of actually summarizing the plot on a book jacket has become de rigueur.
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This week’s video recommendation is a look at internet history, when Something Awful fired the first shot in what would become an all-out war on eBaum’s World and their casual theft of other people’s work.
I genuinely expected it to be about Goatse from the thumbnail.
So much of internet history is just… lost. Which sucks, because internet history never ceases to be the most petty and the most engrossing nonsense you’ll ever see. This one, however, was pretty damn justified. It was common knowledge that eBaum’s World not only stole stuff without permission or credit, not only slapped their own site’s watermark on things (usually over the original watermark/signature), but also would refuse to remove anything if the original creators requested as such. So naturally people would have beef with them. Like so many internet things, it starts simple - forum Goons choking the limited bandwidth of the day, spamming the rival forums, a sassy cartoon set to a catchy little Neil Cicierega/Lemon Demon ditty… and then it spiraled as it spread to other sites that were sick of eBaum’s antics. And now? Now folks like Crunchybagels have to dig & dig & dig to find any proof it ever happened.
You don’t really get this in the days of social media and centralized platforms. The closest that’s happened since was 4Chan versus Tumblr, and damn if that isn’t a “no matter who wins, we lose” situation, I don’t know what is. Attacks become far more individual, far more vicious & inescapable & petty. People will come at anyone for anything, from something justified (plagiarism, being a creep, that kind of thing) to… not liking a TV show, which is treated as being on par with religious blasphemy. As petty and “edgyboi” as these old internet beefs can look in hindsight, they have infinitely less of that “self-righteous gaggle of high school bullies” energy that defines modern beefs.
I might not be nostalgic for the technological limitations, but the less… strident days of the old web still make me a little wistful.
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Lighting-squared round! Cuz yep, we’re still doing this.
Watching someone ELSE go down the gooner brain slide, to the point that they’re ignoring any Ace Week stuff that isn’t built around “we can still (insert allo nonsense thing here) like ~normal~” rhetoric, is really making me wonder if this is just part of site culture for Bluesky. Also, so far their stuff tends to skew het-passing, so part of me also feels like they’re just feeding into the whole “you’re just spicy straight” thing. So it’s a double-decker eye roller. Just another reason to leave, really, since I don’t need yet another place to push compulsory allosexuality on me.
Gonna deactivate my Bluesky account at the end of the year. I’ll miss some stuff (notably some of the retro gaming stuff & updates on my old moot’s pets), but it’s not worth slogging through the rest of the nonsense to find that. Hopefully, this means that my username won’t be steal-able in the future & will function like a locked account. We’ll see.
I did find this lovely aroace crocheted butterfly by rrhiza on there, so I think that’s worth sharing with people who don’t wanna slog through the nonsense. Props to her for making those colors look good.
I really appreciate how rrhiza made the colors work and not be too bright like some aroace flag stuff I’ve seen.
“Tony Khan give a coherent answer instead of babbling in vaguely positive generalities that don't explain a single damn thing” challenge remains completely impossible.
There's something so dispiriting about how many people think taking a concept that's all about something imaginative & fantastic and deciding to make it “about something” by applying DIY therapy-speak to it is the height of intelligence & cleverness. It's so… stunted. Go read some depressing autobio comics from the 90s instead.
Ex-wrestling moot: “I am proud to be antiracist and a supportive ally! That's why I only watch AEW!” Same person: “Aw, I want the pseudo-progressive cowboy to burn down another POC's house to show how angry he is!” Say what you will about any late-stage WCW fans, at least they didn't try to paint their brand preference as an inherently moral & righteous choice. Especially not with this much “it's okay when WE do it” energy.
YouTube tweaked its in-video and ellipses-based interfaces ever so slightly, and even though it’s a bit easier for my increasingly aged eyes to read, it’s also just different enough to be mildly annoying.
Ever just see a group of people who have been unfairly targeted just decide to be their absolute worst selves and find yourself wondering if it’s not just blind bigotry that's led to them being targeted but also people who just got sick of their constant shit? Not elaborating but boy howdy am I seeing that. And yes, there is plenty of braying about their particularly online, one-directional type of “empathy” that everyone but them is expected to show.
Had to frog 4 rounds on a crocheted square for one of my kits because I added too many stitches and turned the square into a quasi-hexagon. As such, the tension level on the corrected rows is set at “pissed off”.
Gee, AEW fans, why don’t you just dox the ex-employee criticizing yet another try-hard wanna-be hardcore match and act like you’re fighting a terrorist? That’s what you usually do when anyone doesn’t praise your comfort brand, especially if they’re a woman.
Have this weird urge to revisit & rewrite one of the very very earliest fan works I ever wrote, and I need everyone to convince me NOT to do that, please. Especially since it’s from over 20 years ago & depending on the name I used and/or the site still being up, I feel like I’ll be accused of plagiarizing my teenage self instead of rewriting my old crap.
Was really enjoying a video… until the host started equating “being a kid hero in a fantasy setting” with “inevitably having horrible PTSD because that is Smart & Insightful” near the end as a way to sell people on watching a series they liked. Teaching Zillennials & Zoomers the skeleton definitions of psychological disorders has been the 2nd biggest factor in their complete lack of media literacy, right behind TV Tropes dissecting every possible micro-element of fiction into glib little boxes with no wiggle room.
Oddly both the last comment and the one about “take something whimsical and make it ~Important~ by turning it into animated therapy sessions” are referring to the same animated series. As per usual, I am NOT elaborating. But I gotta say, it’s never the kids that are the supposed target audience that praise shows for this; it’s always college students & fans-turned-pros that do this, and there’s a fair bit of “diagnosed by Dr. Buzzfeed-Quiz” involved, too. It’s like they’re by & for people who cannot imagine humanity being expressed without it being attached to the DSM-V code of something that they only vaguely understand, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s a factor in actual kids drifting away from animation.
Glad my folks recorded Braun Stroman's show for me to watch, cuz I really enjoyed it. Even if their one dog kept barking at the wrestling clips.
Today I learned that there are people who never encountered Oolong the Pancake-Balancing Rabbit in their online experiences, and I pity how much light will never reach their worlds because of that.
Oh hey, speaking of Goatse... this history of it & of shock videos in general is pretty great. I especially like some of the "accidental Goatse" examples. Disney should've run that one by at least one terminally online X-ennial.
Closing out with some birthday wishes for my favorite active wrestler and bane of Wrestlesky, CM Punk. Dude deserves a whole cake to himself.
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Not much this week, but after spilling like a water main break in a dead mall last week, I think that’s allowed.
This week’s cat picture is a two-fer squared, since it’s two photos AND each doubles as a project photo.
The center part of my Midnight Mosaic afghan kit, minus its last 2 rounds in black and plus one cat that didn’t want to remove himself from atop the project bag.
A large square for my Happy Days blanket kit, with lots of twisty overlapping stitches and a cat who is too enchanted watching birds to notice.
See you next time, cyberspace cowboys.
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