Alastor being aroace makes his dynamic with Vox like 100% funnier. It's a villain rivalry, you immediately know people will look at these two and think "they crave each other carnally", except only one of them has the capacity for it. Which is the perfect set up for a ridiculous one-sided obsession, but then Alastor is shown to be acting way more unbothered by Vox than he actually is. Dude is walking the streets of Hell menacingly staring into cameras and doesn't even have the excuse of homosexuality. Both of these fuckers are goofy as hell.
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Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it
Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.
Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback...
Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.
Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™
Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.
Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.
Specifically, the look is Memphis Milano, self-named by the Italian design house Memphis Group. Starting in the early to mid 80s, they made all sorts of furniture, fabrics and sculptures that were like a Piet Mondrian grid painting under heavy radiation. Their whole deal was defying the standards of existing industrial design up to that point on purpose. Chairs had weird arches, bookcases would be in strange alien colors, unusual materials like plastic or elastic were used in place of metal or wood, that sorta thing.
Memphis quickly became the signature look for the decade. You can tell something’s influenced by Memphis design from it’s telltale trademarks:
Clashing, neon colors.
Use of diametric shapes.
Contrasting patterns like zebra print stripes, confetti squiggles and checkerboards.
It wasn’t long before Memphis Milano-inspired design was everywhere in 80s pop culture:
It was a special time, yes.
I was a kindergartener at the tail end of the 80s, so I knew Memphis mostly through the lens of kids media. Toys, clothes, games, tv shows used it like candy colored catnip. Cable channel Nickelodeon more or less adopted the Memphis aesthetic as their signature in-house style and practically built a monument to it at a Florida theme park:
I think this is why folks mistake what decade Memphis is representative of - 90s staples like Nick, Saved By The Bell, Fresh Prince - they all stayed around much longer than the design trend’s expiration date.
Couple that notion with the fact that companies are slow followers to design trends. Something gets popular and they want to get on the bandwagon? Gotta wait for the ink to dry, gotta wait for the production molds to be made. It would take a few years for them to completely work Memphis outta their system.
Now, this is not to say Memphis is bad! Personally I’m a fan of the aesthetic, if my neon-drenched artwork wasn’t a tip-off already. But it is a trend, and trends never last forever.
So what took the Memphis Milano look down for good? This part’s up for debate, but I personally think it had something to do with this dude:
It’s that grunge music from Seattle that’s so popular with the kids these days dontchaknow.
Once Smells Like Teen Spirit hit in 1991, the Nirvana tone drove the rest of the decade. Clean geometry became weathered, grainy and organic. Bright neon pastels became more bold. Bubblegum pop music sounded fake and manufactured. Attitude and apathy was authentic. Whatever.
Things got grungy. Things got grimy. Olestra was invented.
I think the best way to visualize this transition is how Cherry Coke entered the decade and how it left it:
1992 Memphis on the left, 1998 grunge junkie on the right. Fitting that the 90s would end with a design that looked like Darth Maul’s lungs.
Okay, so what should 90s retro design look like?
Continue on to PART TWO! Spoilers: No VHS filters or vaporwave needed, but maybe bring an antacid.
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One of the reasons why I love Steddie is how sweet Eddie was with Steve in the forest scene. That’s what got me into this ship. It was nice to see someone being patient and kind to Steve like that and it coming from someone like Eddie who viewed Steve so differently means a lot.
I loved how he told him how much Dustin looks up to him, making Steve smile and even after that wanting to joke around a little to make Steve laugh as well.
It was such a nice change, because all the other scenes we just see him bickering with someone or people making him seem stupid when he asks questions. Eddie didn’t make fun of him for not knowing Ozzy like he probably would have prior to things and instead let it be and called Steve cool. I love them.
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guys, i think the hermits are going to accidentally start a prank war again. because just like last time, a game of telephone has begun.
first, false made iskall's build into ''false beans,'' her shop from the previous season. however, to give herself plausible deniability, she signs it with "love, Joel. x" due to his username, smallishbeans.
next, iskall sees this, and completely believes it. he thinks it was joel who pranked him, and as he says to pearl while showing off the sign, which he kept even after tearing the prank down, "joel gave me a kiss." in his most recent video, he pranks joel by sending him loads of anonymous messages in order to completely spam and fill his inbox, preventing him from getting any more mail, with notes such as "thinking about you. x"
of course, joel is going to have absolutely no context for this, because he didn't make the initial prank. so who is joel going to assume sent him all those messages while he was away on holiday? well, i have a guess.
etho.
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