#capitalism is bad for media actually

[alpaca-clouds]

The "Get Woke, Go Broke" Crowd is so funny to me

Watched another video of another take down of one of those guys who whine about "wokeness in media", with the usual "get woke, go broke" stuff. Which is even more timely, given the entire shitshow with Variety over the last week. And honestly... I used to get so angry about these people, but by now I mostly just find them funny. Because other than most marginalized folks, they do not seem to understand one central thing: Companies do not care about marginalized folks. They never did. The one and only reason why they invest in media that is "woke" (aka diverse) is, that the guys at the top decided, that it is what will make them most money on the long haul.

There is not gay people in so much media right now, because the big studios want to be "politically correct". There is gay people, because the gay shit is what is making them money.

No, not all diverse media succeeds. Because predicting audience response is not easy. But guess what, there is a lot more failing projects about straight, cishet, white dudes, than about queer folks or non-white folks. (Just so we are clear: Because still a majority of media is about this group - so just statistically it will more likely fail.)

The people managing the companies, who create this stuff do not care about either artistic vision OR marginalized people. Their decisions are fully and entirely based on often a very superficial understanding of what audiences like. And, well, numbers say, that audiences do like the diverse shit more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[the-meme-monarch]

oh ok fun fact for me. tumblr will literally not let me edit my header? the text disappears when I try to on my ipad and it says it’ll destroy my coding if I try on my phone. i think bc i have a link in there

[tofixtheshadows]

As someone who cries very easily and feels things very deeply, I can feel absolutely gutted by a tragic plot twist or character death, but I still experience catharsis from a well-crafted story. Too often I come across people absolutely in tatters over a character death in some kind of media, and it’s not because of the sympathetic bond of human experience but because their special little meow meow died, and they’re too entitled to take anything from it but betrayal and have infantilized the craft of storytelling so much that they think only a hack writer would kill off a character or leave them with a miserable/ambiguous end instead of letting everyone live happily ever after with sunshine and rainbows. And it’s so fucking annoying.

[pebblezone]

Living life yay huzzah yay

[sophaeros]

why is it that every time theres a post like "hey guys tumblr is literally haemorrhaging money i know we hate capitalism and it sucks that shit costs money but it does we should probably actually give them money so we can keep using this godforsaken site" all the replies are like "btw op is a transphobe and supports this right wing group" "capitalism is bad" "they literally keep making this site worse we shouldnt reward them for that" OK SO WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE WE DO BROTHER

[torgawl]

zlibrary is down??? this is my villain origin story

[girlvinland]

Does anyone else feel just completely overwhelmed sometimes bc of just. How much information we take in every day? Like esp on the internet and having so much access to phone/computer/etc. Recently I feel like it’s just been so much it makes me feel extremely stressed out just, there’s so much social media where people are talking 24/7 and getting enraged and having discourse and then there’s so much news and most of it’s negative and just so much so much of everything I feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes.

[prophecystation]

i feel like discourse about hockey (and sport in general) would really improve a lot if more people realized that spectator sport is a form of narrativized media and applied their literacy skills accordingly

[songtwo]

one of the coolest parts about magazines were the specials they would make for certain occasions like nme every Christmas would get a set of artists and they'd pick another artist to dress up as which was so cool and everyone just had a good time and they'd create something somewhat memorable that fans would also love

[barbiedreamdyke]

not to be an academic intellectual but if someone says they hate “modern art” (ie contemporary art they don’t understand) and makes fun of it, that’s a red flag that this person has had their brain rotted by marvel movies and Harry Potter.

[izzymalec]

i started making gifs for tumblr dot org 8 years ago, now i'm a socialist working for an advertising agency as a media designer. get a real hobby kids.

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

[alpaca-clouds]

Why the media CEOs will always learn the wrong lessons

Yesterday a friend and I talked about how the entire (AAA) game industrie looked at BG3 being as popular as it is and going: "Oh, we need to produce 100+ hour games, I guess! Those sell!" Which... obviously is not why it is popular. The game is not popular because it has 100+ hours of gameplay, but because it has engaging characters, that are well-acted and that work as good hooks for the players. Like, let's face it: The reason why I so far have sunken 160 hours into this game is, because I wanna spend time with these characters - and because I wanna give them their happy endings.

But the same has happened too, just a bit earlier this year, right? When Barbie broke the 1 billion and every Hollywood CEO went: "Oh, so the people want movies based on toy franchises! Got it!" To which the internet at large replied: "... How is that the lesson you learned from this?"

Well, let me explain to you, why this is the lesson they learn: It is because the CEOs and the boards of directors at large are not artists or even engaged with the medium they produce. They mostly are economists. And their dry little hearts do not understand stuff more complex than numbers and spread sheets.

That sounds evil, I know, but... It is sadly the truth. When they look at a successful movie/series/game/book/comic, they look at it as a product, not a piece of art or narrative. It is just a product that has very clear metrics.

To them Barbie is not a movie with interesting stylistic choices that stand out from the majority of high budget action blockbusters. It is a toy movie with mildly feminist themes.

Or Oppenheimer is not a movie to them with a strong visual language and good acting direction. No, it is a historical blockbuster.

And this is true for basically every form of media. I mean, books are actually a fairly good example. In my life I do remember the big book fads that happened. When Harry Potter was a success, there was at least a dozen other "magical school" book series being released. When Twilight was a big success there was suddenly an endless number of "teen girl falls in love with bad boy, who is [magical creature]" YA. When the Hunger Games was a success, there were hundreds of "YA dystopia" books. Meanwhile in adult reading, we had the big "next Game of Throne" fad.

Of course, the irony is, that within each of those fads there might have been one or two somewhat successful series - but never even one that came even close to whatever started the fad.

Or with movies, we have seen it, too. When Avengers broke the 1 billion (which up to this point only few movies did) the studios went: "Ooooooh, so we need shared universe film series" - and then all went to try and fail to create their own cinematic universe.

Because the people, who call the shots, are just immensely desinterested in the thing they are selling. They do not really care about the content. All they care about is having a supposedly easy avenue of selling it. Just as they do not care about the consumer. All they care about is that the consumer buys it. Why he buys it... Well, they do not care. They could not care less, in fact.

So, yeah, get ready for a 20 overproduced games with a bloated 100+ hours of empty gameplay, but without the engaging characters. And for like at least 15 more moves based on some toy franchise, that nobody actually cares about.

And then get ready for all the CEOs to do the surprised Pikachu face, when all of that ends up not financially successful.

Really, I read some interviews yesterday from some AAA-studio CEOs and their blatant shock and missing understanding on why BG3 works for so many people.

Because, yeah... capitalism does not appreciate art. Capitalism does not understand art. It only understands spread sheets.

[moltengoldveins]

ok but I have Thoughts about the way Minecraft usernames translate to actual names, both irl and in fanfic. They’re definitely ‘obsessed with structure and grumpy at inconsistency flavor autism’ thoughts but still. I find it weird how we cut and paste the media we’re given to fit what we view as functional worldbuilding, and how that gets screwy when translating online names.

like, you’re working with several categories here. The person’s actual real name, their irl nickname, their gamer tag, a name possibly contained by or possibly the entirety of that gamer tag, and any extra pieces or symbols in the gamer tag. And you have the weird situation where those categories might not easily translate to a ‘First Name Last Name’ structure. For an example, we’ve got Phil Watson, who’s gamer tag is ‘Ph1LzA,’ and is called Philza Minecraft or Philza. The ‘Minecraft last name’ is a…. Bit? A joke? A reference to a bit of lore? It’s unclear. The ‘Za’ bit was put there for flair and is now an integral part of his name. Sometimes it’s his last name. Sometimes his real last name is chucked in there. the 1 in his actual username is literally never referenced in nicknames or fic it’s like it’s not even there. But that’s a simple one. What about Tubbo_? because we call him Tubbo Underscore. Like. We say the ‘_’ aloud. Why do we do that. What has possessed us to make that decision? What about FitMC? I’ve usually heard it said ‘Fit Emsee.’ Why say that, and not say ‘Minecraft? That’s not even really a last name, it’s just like…. His full first name. Fit is used more like a shortened nickname. BadBoyHalo. Like. ‘Bad boy’ is a slang term, not a name. It would make the most sense to call him Halo, that’s the distinct noun in the name, the term the ‘bad boy’ bit is referring to. Like ‘GoodTimesWithScar’ but noooo. Bad. Halo is usually a last name, if it’s there at all. Skeppy on the other hand is… just his name. No last name ever. Technoblade is also weird. Technoblade is his full name. We call him that. We ALSO call him ‘Techno,’ and use Blade as a last name. We also use Blade as a title. What the heck. GeminiTay. We call her Gem. We use Tay as a last name sometimes. Her name is a Zodiac constellation. Literally nowhere I’m have I seen that affect her naming conventions. IJevin. We just… remove the I. For everything. This wouldn’t bother me except we don’t do it with everyone and I’m starting to get annoyed by the inconsistency. GoodTimesWithScar. Ok. This one also bugs me. Like, most fics call him Scar Goodtimes when they need a name. I’m not gonna dig into it but that’s…. Why? Why that? Grian never gets a last name. Ranboo sometimes gets chopped into Ran and Boo but usually he’s an Underscore or he’s last nameless. Wilbur Soot functions wonderfully (until the get involved shhhh) but it’s too close to his real name it gets very confusing.

anyway, all of this sucks, I hate it all, we’re a terrible fandom /hj

all that nonsense aside, yknow who has a functional Firstname Lastname username? It’s even got a space, and proper capitals: Mumbo Jumbo. That’s who. Look at that. It’s perfect. Everyone should be more like Mumbo Jumbo. Thank you and good night.

.

Edit: I know about Ranboo Beloved and Grian Dreamslayer and the various other characters whose names I didn’t mention perfectly in this post. This was no piece of journalism, this was an old man shouts at cloud meme personified. I was very overstimulated and this was what happened to catch my autistic ire. I’m not upset, just figured I’d clarify, a lot of people seem distressed at my not mentioning Beloved. Hope y’all are having a lovely day 💜

[fuzzyhairedfreak]

Just went on. Such an emotional journey. Oh my god. You ever experience the epic highs and lows of remembering something you’ve been trying to remember for years just to be foiled by multistep logins for websites.

[lakesbian]

worm cape names really do rock though because the book captures the sheer randomness and at times ridiculousness that cape names would realistically have in a world where there are thousands of capes and everyone has to have their own name. the early capes took all the really good and straightforward superman-esque names like "hero" or "legend," so the later generations have to pick out shit that's actually relevant to their powers for a shot at being unique. one of the most relevant villains in the united states of america is called "skitter," which isn't bad, but also, like, she didn't even pick it, the cops did because she was indecisive. also, while the cops were picking it, they unsuccessfully checked to see if like 5 other different bug-related names were free first. sorry, that username cape name is already taken. and then you have capes with really cool names that would, in any other cape media, be an indicator that they're a super important character. but in worm they're just getting murked left and right, or are at the very least extremely irrelevant. perdition is without question the funniest example of this--sounds like he should be a work's ultimate villain in the same vein as darkseid, actually is a loser teenager who gets sold to one direction. "eleventh hour" is a background cape that gets mentioned one (1) time and has an extremely lame power, but "gray boy" is a Big Fucking Deal. sometimes capes have names that are, unfortunately for them, extremely mockable, and characters in the story do in fact capitalize realistically on this. condolences to renowned superhero Glory Hole! as for the media/pr angle, calling a villain "bitch" isn't very pg-13, so you've got a cape running around calling herself something entirely different than the censored name the cops & media gave her. it's good. It's a good book.