Weekend Lounge ~ Are You Smiling?

Welcome to the weekend!

It's the last weekend of the year, and boy has it been quite the 2025. I'll talk about that in one last post on New Year's Eve to close off the year, but not right now. Today I wanted to focus on one last straggling topic I've wanted to cover but could never quite figure out how to. As you can tell I wanted to talk about a more recent phenomenon.

Today's topic is simple: Why is Smiling Friends popular? This might seem like a silly topic but it's one that's been at the back of my mind for a while now. This random show has seemingly taken the internet by storm in a way we haven't seen since probably Rick & Morty's initial explosion, and that was a while back now. Where did this show come from?

Now in case you don't know what Smiling Friends is, I'll try to go a bit into the background of it. The first thing to know is that this is a cartoon they debuted on Adult Swim with a pilot way back in 2020. Season 1 premiered in late 2021 with 8 eleven minute episodes (and one special), season 2 in 2024, and season 3 just this year, with two more seasons to come. The show was created by Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel, animators with a past on Newgrounds and YouTube, and an understanding of older internet culture and humor divorced from current trends. As a consequence, its comedy and animation style has managed to connect with not only older audiences but younger adults as well. Smiling Friends has a strangely universal appeal despite its very niche existence.

The series itself is about a pair of friends named Charlie and Pim who work for the titular company. Their job is to do what the title implies and bring joy to their client's lives no matter what it takes. The universe is a sort of a Roger Rabbit-like one where both people and weird animated races live side by side, and all the chaos that would unfurl from such a place. As a consequence the show also experiments a bit with character designs and animation styles, making its visual style very dynamic and adding to the unpredictability of the series itself.

You never really know what each episode will bring.

[Counterclockwise from Top: Mr. Boss, Alan, Charlie, Pim, and Glep]

All of these factors help contribute to what it is that makes Smiling Friends such a success. Its budget is also miniscule, an entire season purportedly being less than a single episode of Family Guy or The Simpsons, and its odd tone and sense of humor also sets it apart from the tidal wave of Adult Animation that we've been inundated with since the 1990s. That being that it has a truly original sense of style and execution the industry has been lacking for ages.

To understand how this is, I should explain with a comparison. Let me give you an example using a recent animated film I saw.

Back during the summer I viewed Genndy Tartakovsky's Fixed, an animated film about a dog that was about to get fixed by his owners for, well, being a dog. The film is animated extremely well in 2D, some great designs and shots, and some scenes (the one with the cats in the alley, specifically) are extremely well done. All in all, it has all the makings to be a good cartoon.

That said, I didn't quite enjoy the movie. The reason? Oddly enough, it's entirely centered on the writing. The writing was been there done that and dated '90s shock humor I've seen a million times with no new wrinkles. It's hard to be shocking when you've been outdone by things the writer himself did (A Simpsons writer from the classic era wrote this movie, by the way) a quarter of a century ago. As a result, the film is hard to recommend unless you literally don't care about seeing the same thing you've seen a million times just animated really well this time.

That is my controversial opinion on this controversial movie, and that's that there isn't anything here controversial. It's just tired. I guessed everything that was going to happen before it did, because I've seen it before. Even the "moral" is straight out of the 1990s. Good animation can't save boring execution, and this movie is boring.

The problem is that western animation is still stuck in the 1990s irony-poisoned cynical and depressive mode its been since that time. Something like Fixed compared to Smiling Friends reminds us that Fritz the Cat wasn't well received for being shocking, but because it was literally doing things in animation we hadn't seen before. It is nice seeing an animated show with a unique identity trying to aim for something actually interesting for once. No therapy writing or pointless nihilism as a punchline, no reliance on shocking through tired gags to get by, but an identity that is uniquely built for the series itself.

The above video describes it more in depth, but what makes animation such a great medium is the expressiveness in drawings you can't get with other mediums. We've spent so long watering down what makes every medium what it was for the past 30 years we've gotten to the point that being the medium itself is considered criticism (see the terms "videogamey" and "overanimated" that did not exist back in the 1990s) because something dares to do what the medium does best and was always built to do. It's all backwards.

It's as if we've been taught that abandoning the medium itself for some kind of blob of non-identity, of generic Content, the kind that fills the corners of modern corporate slop, is the highest aspiration. How long can a medium keep itself locked into a time that is a quarter of a century old without dying? That's the question. And I think we have our answer via the current stagnant state of things.

And it's part of why the creators of Smiling Friends created their own studio. ZAM Studios was made in order to combat what the founders deem a stagnancy in the medium and in the industry itself. They are hoping to bring back some of the spark the industry has been lacking for some time. You can read the linked article to learn more.

Here is the work they did on the Billy Idol song from his recent documentary:

So what comes next? Well, it seems like underground animation has been making a lot of strides over the past few years. Perhaps the medium will soon dislodge itself from this stuck rut its been in for much too long and start delivering uniqueness again. We can only hope.

Until then, we have at least two more seasons of Smiling Friends to look forward to (probably more than that, honestly) and hopefully a new direction for the western industry that tries to take after its success. It would be nice to have an actual good trend spring up for the first time in ages. I sure hope it happens.

Animation is a greatly unique medium that deserves its respect. Not in the sense of making it "mature" or "serious" or whatever warped perception we have of art divorced from reality, but in the sense that it offers a way to communicate differently than any other one, and that is one that should be cherished and cultivated. We do not need anymore subversions or inversions of what makes the medium what it is: we just need to want to have it at its best. No more Peggy Charrens or endless subversions of her disastrous work as the be-all end-all of the medium.

We need to build, not tear down. And to do that, we need a new perspective on how we got here in the first place, and how to move on from it.

That's also what art is supposed to be: a celebration of life, of being alive, and what we're all capable of doing and being. We don't need crusty, dated 20th century principles and subversion to guide us anymore. We can finally aim for something better than that dead era.

And we can also have fun along the way.

Some examples of the show in action

For documentation on another medium that was subverted and gutted, check out the eternally controversial The Last Fanatics!

Merry Christmas!

The Y Signal gang from L to R: Danny, George, Ray, Andrew

Merry Christmas!

I wanted to thank you all for another great year here. The longer I'm around the longer I'm thankful I even have the chance to do it at all, even if it's not much. It's been a very chaotic year behind the scenes here, as many of you know, but at least I will be leaving it in the dust soon enough with more to look forward to ahead.

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of Cultural Ground Zero, a sign that much has changed in ways we didn't even imagine as little as five years ago. To celebrate both this milestone and the holiday season, I've done a read through of the second part of Y Signal, "Snow Out", on the Patreon. For those who don't know, this is my secondary podcast called The Drifter Mindset dedicated to both reading my own stories and talking about them in a conversational style. This is also the longest episode so far at two hours(!) long, so tune in if you want something relaxing to listen to on this sacred day of celebration.

"Snow Out" is the middle of Y Signal which itself takes place on the Christmas of 1995, making it the 30th anniversary of that in-story event. Check it out for yourself (as well as 40 other podcast episodes and various serializations and written pieces) by signing up for the Patreon. I'm going to be stuffing it with a lot of good stuff in the year ahead.

On top of it, Cannon Cruisers has put out our usual Christmas Special episode this year! We decided to cover the 50 year old horror classic (Yeah, it's that old now), Black Christmas! Check it out for yourself and see if this film holds up. We most definitely do.

That's it for this short update! See you soon for one more Weekend Lounge post to close out the year before one last update on New Years. Thanks for the support, and have yourself a great Christmas season!

Check out Y Signal, a story of what really happened in 1995 when nobody was looking!

Weekend Lounge ~ The End of Fanfiction

Welcome to the weekend!

The year's almost over, so let's settle in with a good topic today. It can't decide if it wasn't to be snowy or cold where I am, so hopefully it's been steadier for you. Regardless, we've got less than a week until Christmas and less than two until the end of this very strange year. Let's get into it with a topic we've touched on before.

We're going back to the well again with the topic of fanfiction. Particularly we're going to discuss the fanfic mindset and what it has led to doing to creativity. The recent above video by The Second Story on topic blew up, as it usually does with this channel, because it hit on an industry taboo that has been choking the scene for over a quarter of a century at this point. Some of the backlash has been expected, but the larger point needs to be addressed: how did we get to where we are? It didn't fall out of the sky, and one of the sources of fanfic brain comes from the idea that nothing new can really ever be made, which explains a lot about today's climate.

So while we all know the weaknesses of fanfic (and even fanfic writers themselves know it), we still insist on dragging it into everything creative we do as if we need to. Why is that? Why do we insist on fanfic brain over using creative muscles to make something new? Why do we even glorify our inability to fashion originality? It is strange.

And why do we continually reward the lowest common denominator while we also admit it is also the lowest common denominator? This seems obviously destructive, and yet we persist in insisting it is the way it needs to be.

Part of this is due to the IP-heavy way we think about creativity and storytelling. We think about storytelling like children think about toy boxes. "I will have my own Star War", "My MC is just like Goku", "my setting is similar to Asimov but with a twist", and so on. It's "toyboxing": insisting on playing in someone else's world while simultaneously seizing control of it for your own gain. It's using someone else's work as a crutch while also trying to turn it into a strength at the same time. Fanfic brain at this stage has become terminal.

Essentially, we want to make "our own" versions of something else more than we want to make something original or say anything new. In essence, we want to endlessly replicate the feelings we experienced when we were kids experiencing this New Thing for the first time, and while there is nothing wrong with that on a surface level, there is a certain mentality that comes along with it that has very much become harmful. We would rather keep toyboxing than actually create or build anything at all.

As has been said relentlessly, there is no such thing as anything truly original, just reiterations on old ideas. This is true. It is the main reason modern genre checkbox obsession has become so limiting and heavily outdated, because we've been expected to rehash the same corporate IP ideas for over half a century at this point.

However, when one is inspired by something, it is usually because it means they have something they themselves wish to express influenced by that original source. To be honest, this is how we get all the best art and entertainment. This chain of influence is what makes it all so fascinating and all so human at the same time. This is what creation is.

Fanfic is the opposite of this. It is the equivalent of playing toys with your action figures to invent new scenarios alone in your room. The thing is, this is supposed to be done as a child when the imagination is still in development, when you still don't know what it is that speaks to you about these things. At the same time, fanfic is this process but with writing. It is a launching pad for younger people to help understand what it is that truly matters about what they love and either move on from it as they get tired of it, or move into writing original works inspired by what they love and contribute to the culture they grew in. The point is that this stuff is a starting point, not an end point.

"Toyboxing" 

But that isn't how it works anymore in our industries.

Now the mainstream is filled with people who see storytelling as little more than toyboxing and writing rooms as little more than fanfic factories to push their own head canon onto an audience that either must except it or go away. They don't really want to create: they want to usurp and become that thing that first inspired them in the first place by wearing its skin and commanding respect. They don't actually want anything new, they don't truly want to express anything, and they aren't at all looking to entertain. They just want their immature selfish desires validated, their fanfiction to be the new canon, and the obvious worship that follows.

It is a poisoning of the relationship between not only art and artist but between audience and artist. It is twisting the good to be purely in the service of selfish consumption. Everybody is an island, after all! Either get on mine, or get out. That's just where we are.

The issue isn't that any of this fanfic process exists at all, after all it pretty much always has and always will. The problem is that this is almost the entirety of not only the mainstream entertainment industry and a large portion of the independent one to. It's the baseline instead of a fringe, like it once was. Which medium is this description referring to specifically? That's the fun part: it's every single one of them. This is everything now.

Musicians wanting to be Led Zeppelin is nothing new, but they used to discover their own original sound along the way to becoming their own band. That doesn't happen anymore. Being inspired by the Simpsons meant something when it was the wittiest show on television, but not when it equates to being another clone with nothing to add to the conversation except cruder jokes and dumber dads with evens stiffer animation. What is the point of such a show, and what does it add to the conversation? Then there is the recent process of taking an old IP you might not have even grown up on and "updating" it for Modern Audiences while gutting it of everything that gave it that character in the first place. Toyboxing at the expense of the audience? That's just cultural vandalism, the obvious endpoint of fanfic brain. None of this aspires to grow anything, leaving the culture stagnant.

It doesn't aspire to be anything except either a thumb in the eye to enemies or a pat on the back from allies. That isn't art. It's junk. And it's the climate we operate in now.

The entire point of creating is to put something of your own out there into the world, to make your mark while simultaneously honoring what came before. The current way it is done of perverting the past while spitting on it and sneering at those you are meant to be communicating with is completely backwards. That is why it does not resonate. That is why the divide between audiences and artists and entertainers only seems to widen.

Until we move on from mocking while stealing from those who came before, the fissure will only widen. Not to say all fanfiction does this, but those with fanfiction brain definitely do lean in this direction in how they worship one part of the whole. It isn't everyone who writes fanfic, but the seed of the mentality is still very dangerous to where it should not be as widely spread as it has been over the past few decades. It cannot be the majority of art and entertainment, because when it is it becomes today's climate.

Nobody wants that, not even those currently in charge of these industries and doing this exact thing right now. It's all just a big mess of half-formed ideas couched with relationship drama that doesn't ever lead anywhere. No one can seem to write a happy ending anymore if they can't ever actually put their toys away for good.

So we must move on from this mentality into better things. It is the only way we can finally leave the mistakes of the past century behind. What else can we do but move on, and try for something a bit more satisfying than that which lead us to where we are?

Let's just hope that next time we remember what it's all for, and it's not ourselves and our own ego. There is more to existence than playing with our toybox while forcing others to watch, and we need to start showing it once more. We need to tell stories again.

And we will. The era of fanfiction is over. What comes next is to be seen. We still have to build it, after all.

Speaking of new, the latest issue of Cirsova just dropped! Check it out for some new stories of thrilling adventure and daring suspense!

Weekend Lounge ~ How to Read!

Welcome to the weekend!

I hope you're doing well. It's getting cold fast around here, and boy am I tired of the weather already. It's only December too! We still got a whole season ahead of us.

Not much of a post this week with the holidays swinging around soon, but I wanted to put this one out regardless. Given that books are ostensibly the main subject of the blog, or at least very adjacent to it, I wanted to take them on in today's post. It's also been a fairly consistent topic in a lot of circles recently, so it's probably time to focus at least a little on them.

What makes reading so important? You've almost certainly heard it was at some stage in your life, and it's almost just as certain that whatever reason you were given chased you away from reading instead of towards it. Why is that? We should consider that.

We have a lot of questions to ask before we can get answers.

Why you should read classics? What even is a classic? Do they exist? Why do they matter? All of these are important queries to ponder, though they are rarely asked even by those in charge. These are valuable questions that don't tend to get answered these days, or if they do they tend to be stock unsatisfying ones that have led to the current widespread literacy problems we've been suffering since the end of the 20th century.

I've made plenty of jokes about how when I grew up the Boomers in charge made reading seem very unappealing or lame, epitomized in the infamous "Chicken Lover" episode of South Park with the bookmobile guy. If you're old enough, you remember that stereotype he embodied. That joke character is the exact stereotype that turned reading from a hobby into being a social issue and punchline, and one that made it lacking in all excitement and masculinity. This is the key reason males of my generation and younger drifted away from the medium.

Of course it didn't start there: Golden Age Siffy Fandom hated masculinity, as you can see reading literally any article on the subject from the time, but it was a logical conclusion to make. The "Chicken Lover" character is no different from the pencil neck degenerate who hated Edgar Rice Burroughs and seethed over Ray Bradbury getting attention for writing the wrong stories. In fat, they are basically the same character. 

The parting with masculinity and males was a long time coming, and even when the industry had a lifeline with books like Goosebumps or Harry Potter that actually did appeal to males, the publishers went out of their way to shake that potential base as soon as they could. In the process, the audience has fled and to this day has no interest in coming back. As a result, OldPub has labeled itself as anti-male, in that males deliberately keep their distance from it. You can argue with the verbiage or their intentions if you want, but it is clear that they did it to themselves by choice.

That aside, reading has been dying for a good while. Something must be done to stop the hemorrhaging. However, that is only half the problem.

The other side of it is the question of how we bring people back to reading? That is what we must ponder. It's not a simple task and it requires a lot of work to answer. One thing that won't work, however, is finger wagging and making mandatory book lists of the sort that chased the wider masses out in the first place. The primary goal should be to make reading exciting and engaging, and that means finding and highlighting exciting and engaging books that do more than check boxes. In NewPub, there is no shortage of work being published that does this. The issue is more in finding it in the typhoon of books out there. In OldPub, the problem is backwards: there is much uninteresting material being pumped out, and it is extremely easy to find. Getting that straightened out should help the confusion and help the space grow.

The above video on learning what a classic book actually is and what it should entail is a good way to understand how to read in a world where reading is frowned upon. Well, unless we are discussing fanfic (and that will be for a future post), and the like. The fact is that there are a lot of reasons to read, and the classics can give you all of them at once. This is why they are classics and why they should be seen as the goal of the medium, something to aspire to beyond the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, the way they've been taught has not only damaged their reputation, but also the process of reading altogether. And what this hatred of reading has lead to a society that simply can't and doesn't want to read or process entire segments of knowledge that were once common not that long ago. This bad way of teaching is responsible for the destruction currently plaguing not only the entirety of the arts and entertainment sectors, but all of society itself.

As can be seen here:

This wider problem is not improving, and it will not until true value is placed on literacy again. This is because it turns out that reading is important, but not for lame and embarrassing Baby Boomer reasons like "magic" or "imagination" (though you don't hear those hoary tropes anymore, as if they meant nothing to those in charge to begin with), but because it is actually important to form us as people and a society. Literacy is a non-negotiable, as we're quickly rediscovering.

Reading is important to process the world around and above us, the universe inside and outside, the long gone past and the upcoming future, and each other. If we cannot do that anymore, then we are destined to implode inside ourselves. The world we inherited will lose everything we were supposed to carry on and leave us barren. If that happens, then all of this we have gained from our ancestors will have been for nothing. We're already losing important parts of ourselves for no good reason, and at this rate the next generations having nothing to start with will only make it more difficult for them to build on anything or succeed.

Current ways are simply not working.

Of course none of it is hopeless, but the amount of time being wasted clinging to dead industries and mechanisms that no longer (and probably never did) work, is holding up any real change in a direction we need. Instead we linger in talks about endless IPs, meaningless trope checklists, and how to wring more money out of dwindling audiences. None of these address the issue, and we all know it, but for whatever reason the conversation keeps circling around to them over and over.

True change starts from the bottom up. The base is what has to be build upon. Why is this hobby, this art, and this medium, important in the first place? What makes it so valuable, and why do we need to treat it more seriously? Why does all of this matter in the first place? We need to figure that out before we lose even more of our reason to create at all.

We're ready now. It's no longer the '90s and cynicism and overbearing sarcasm is finally dying, as is the irony poisoned sincerity that was big in the '00s. We have a path forward out of this pit at the bottom of this endless cycle we have been trapped in for so long.

Now to take it.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I'll see you soon.

Mysterious radio waves... Alien civilizations... Monsters in the Old West... Dark sorcery... 14 Tales of Wonder!

Weekend Lounge ~ Epistemic Journalism

Welcome to the weekend!

I don't know about you, but the sudden winter weather has been quite the pain to deal with. Was hoping for things to ease in a little more, however it doesn't seem like it's going to let up. We're just going straight into cold weather, it seems. What a pain.

That aside, let's get to it.

Today's topic is less about the contents of the above video in question (though not entirely) and about the great message included inside of it. Today we will discuss what truth in storytelling is supposed to amount to and how it can be used to dishonestly divert attention or focus by those who engage in it honestly. This is hard to describe so I'll try to e straightforward about it. Essentially, storytelling is truth telling, it is meant to impart reality on the audience... which is why it can be used to lie about reality instead. And there are countless examples of just that out there, especially today.

In essence, stories are powerful and are meant to present truth to both the teller and the audience, and it takes a special kind of deceiver to weaponize that against the people who are meant to be the audience. And deceiving is almost expected these days.

To sum it up: stories might not be obviously true on a surface level but they are always meant to be epistemically true. When your audience sits down to listen to you at the campfire, they are expecting a true story. If they're not it's only because they've been lied to so much they are skeptical by default. This is not how it's meant to be, but storytellers over the past century have deliberately soured the relationship with their audience due to the antisocial crowd in charge of the large industries. And now stories are seen as completely disposable and throwaway.

So what does it mean to be epistemically true and how did the subversive crowd lie about it? That is a bit complicated, but the long and short of it is that they didn't just outright lie to audiences: they told the true . . . to a point. They used the truth to wedge themselves in to present lies as truth. The way this is done is quite interesting. This process means that storytellers can focus on part of the bigger picture that is True while ignoring the whole, thereby lying by omission and manipulating those they see as beneath them. The thumbnail topic in the above video about the "Satanic Panic" is one such issue that is still bandied about today.

Before anyone rolls their eyes and starts smugly typing their expert opinion, it might be wise to ask why this is being brought up at all in today's topic. The reason is that the "Satanic Panic" is a media buzzword used to distract from the epistemic truth in order to frame a different lie as reality instead. Let's get into how that works.

For example, when one tells a story about how crazy it is to think of Dungeons and Dragons or metal records are satanic, they deliberately ignore the real issues of the time period to frame the entire thing as one large canard about the former subjects instead. This why you were taught to hear the phrase "Satanic Panic" and dismiss everything related to the subject. You won't learn who Ralph Underwager, Gary Caradori, or Marc Dutroux are, or why they matter, but still consider yourself an expert on the subject because your silly out of touch grandma took away your Pokémon cards a quarter of a century ago. You don't know what the Franklin Scandal is or why the Finders not being a one-off project is significant, but it doesn't matter because Tom Hanks was in a silly Dungeons and Dragons is Evil movie back in the 1980s. This is how an audience can be manipulated.

And it still carries on today.

This process of lying by omission is an appeal to emotion using massaged facts in order to avoid considering a larger truth. But this is only part of it. This whole mechanism prevents a sort of epistemic investigation of the larger project, a form of propaganda made to stunt thinking. In fact, it's the most effective kind of propaganda there is, because it it isn't straight out lying: it is using a piece of truth to cover the bigger picture. It is the worst kind of manipulation there is.

Let me explain further, using a similar example we still hear plenty about today. This isn't meant to be directly political, but since it involves political decisions that changed an entire industry, it's unavoidable.

Why does no one ask why Bill Clinton's Telecommunication Act of 1996 enabling Clear Channel to rise and Al Gore's wife persecuting an entire industry then lead those same people who had their careers directly harmed and industries gutted led to those same people to vote for them and enabled their destruction. How does one support those who directly harmed them without even a second thought or doubt? Where does that attitude come from? As we've seen, it did not fall out of the sky: it was constructed.

Why do supposed anti-censorship crowds today still obsess over the above "Satanic Panic" half truths while ignoring the existence of entire organizations like the ACT and people like Peggy Charren who broke the back of the animation industry in the west and eventually allowed Japan to eat their lunch? It's because they were told half a story and never investigated further, because it seemed truth enough, even though it wasn't actually so when one looks into it. The woman who gutted the animation industry and children's programming was awarded the presidential medal of freedom for doing so, and once again no anti-censorship soldier ever speaks on it.

Isn't that amazing? It really shows how effective half-truths are to outright lies, and it's why this has been the way it's been for so long. It's a winning tactic for subversives.

This is the larger point being made. These are all half truths meant to obscure a larger and more important Full Truth, and to this day there is a whole generation that consider themselves experts on all the above subjects despite not knowing half the story. This is by design. It's very diabolical when you think about how it's done. In fact, it's the sort of thing people increasingly hate journalists for today, because they only investigate half truths that look at a small piece of the picture due to being taught the larger one doesn't actually exist at all. Only their pet causes matter, not what led to said causes existing or what supporting them might lead to in the future. What are causes and consequences? They don't matter aside from the one narrow subject. After all, it's about Your Truth, not The Truth, and that makes all the difference. The Self comes before all else.

The largest issue with the 20th century was exactly this obsession with fragments at the expense of the whole. Investigation for the cause of half truths, not epistemic ones, and this lack of care for the whole is what lead to the alienated culture we live in today, and the loss of a high trust society and shared language and customs. We are currently living in the late stages of this way of thinking, and still repeating old half truths constantly to keep us locked there.

How do we get out of this? There isn't an easy answer to that. Much of this is simply decay and entropy not being fought against. Much like the so-called "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec, it's just a fancy name for moral laziness and lack of care for the wider picture. Unless decay is actively fought against and reversed, the state of things will not get better, and everyone knows it. Whether they accept this Full Truth or not is another story. However, it will change. Much like how the younger generations now think the status quo from the past quarter century is lame.

Here are some examples of this happening right now:

Whether you agree with the language or specific examples in the above is not quite the point. It's more that the younger generations are not as satisfied with half truths as ours were taught to believe wholeheartedly since the 20th century established its new reality as default. The younger generations know something is wrong on a deeper level and that the answer is to not shut up and do what those in charge say to do. Whether that is due to generations of broken promises and dead end thinking is to be seen, but the status quo will not continue on this way.

They want to keep digging for a better truth than the ones they were told to accept. This is going to lead to something quite different than the 20th century we've left behind.

If anything, this should all be an encouraging sign. Whatever we think is coming is probably not what is actually on the way, but it hardly matters since Truth always eventually wins in the end. Half truths and lies eventually fall away to the mists of time even if we don't care to discover them for ourselves. It just Is.

And after that? Well, that's when the real building begins.

Until then, keep your chin up and eyes forward. December is almost here and so is the cold pushing in. Let's get through it same as we always do, and see what lies ahead.

Have yourself a good week and I'll see you soon!

What happened in 1995? Learn it in Y Signal!

Weekend Lounge ~ Why Films Don't Look like Films

Welcome to the weekend!

It's a bit late this week, but at least today's post is here. November is (thankfully) almost over, and with it this bizarre year.

I thought I would use the moment to state that the problem I was dealing with behind the scenes for the last month seems to be resolved. There is no longer a larger issue threatening me. That said, it will still lead to another related decision on my end, so the nonsense I went through wasn't all for naught. I apologize for the vagueness, but it's because of how convoluted this entire thing has been. I'll try to explain it later. Regardless, I want to thank everyone for their support and their prayers throughout all of this. It truly means a lot to me.

That said, let's get to today's topic! We have other things to talk about here at the Wasteland beyond personal nonsense. That being: aesthetic. We've talked a bit about this topic before, but never using examples from a medium in decline itself.

A lot has been said about the above video on what is missing from films today. You've probably seen it yourself. However, it's pretty undeniable that despite having more tech and more money to throw at movies than we did in the past, they do not look any better than they did half a century ago. In some cases they actually look substantially worse than what came before. There is a certain something missing from them that only ever seems to be captured in independent fare if they're recaptured at all, for the most part. It's a loss of the connection to reality.

That important connection has been lost sight of.

This chestnut has been getting a lot of use recently.

When we talk about "reality" in regards to art, we are speaking of more than whatever loose definition of "realism" we've been increasingly obsessed with since the 2000s. It's not quite the same thing, and I think that gets lost in a lot of these discussions.

This isn't referring to real world locations (or even sets, as one of the examples in the video shows) but in the strange lack of care about reality itself. Cinema is a visual art that requires more than "looking good" to be actually good. It requires immersing the audience into the presented world and the lives of the character, as if we are there with them living out the story alongside our lead. This is because we are. Their reality is just like ours in the way that matters: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings, are all as important to them as they are to us.

Cinema as a medium requires the audience to experience them all tangibly through the screen. It's different from a book that is entirely through the imagination: in a movie the audience is a passive visitor to the world. Therefore the world should be as inviting to the viewer as possible, and all the heavy lifting is on those behind the scenes. It is why cinema has always required the biggest investment to get into.

 

All of this is to say that art is reality, not fiction. At least, not in a certain sense. The story comes from the imagination regardless of how factual the events might be in the end, and it is the job of the artist to convey it to their audience using all the senses they can. It's a shared experience, a way for us all to experience reality together from a new angle we might not have considered before. That is the magic of art and the wonder that comes from the Unknown. This is not missing (or even rare) today, but it is missing from the mainstream due to the remnants of the monoculture steering itself into an iceberg. If you don't look for it, you won't find it.

To be honest, this tangible relation to the world is the reason the controversial Avatar movies do so well. It is not for the story or the characters, but in the visuals and how the films easily inject the audience into this alien world they would not otherwise not be able to see. These movies make money purely for this, and the people behind them should get credit for knowing how to achieve this feeling even without having real life locations or sets on hand. The people behind them understand the the injection into the world is paramount above all else, and it clearly works.

Granted it comes at a high price (a cost that is probably not to be paid by the majority of other filmmakers), but it is still entirely used in trying to connect the audience to the world. They know what they're doing, and they do it better than any of the big dogs in Hollywood right now.

It also helps in that case that the world in that movie was meant to be a highly detailed alien world different from our own. Were it used to simply recreate Earth, audiences would be puzzled and asking themselves why not just use real location shots? Why is reality being deliberately obfuscated? At that point the tangible connection to reality is lost and the viewer knows its a movie meant to invoke emotions and feelings in them and they will detach subconsciously, or even consciously. The obvious end stage of producing content for mass consumption instead of art meant to invoke and engage. It's just passive consuming, and that's all it'll ever amount to being.

Thankfully there are plenty of others that have not abandoned or forgotten that important rule of engaging the audience. In fact, the ones who do it the best today are typically those with the lowest budgets and means to get their story across.

It's not really any different for cinema as it is for other forms right now, however the higher barrier to entry (the cost) is probably going to see them shrink in number in relation to other forms of art in the near future. That said, when it comes back, and it almost certainly will some day, creators will have learned most everything Hollywood has forgotten.

Much like NewPub taking over from OldPub's failures, there are new generations of creators willing to step up, just like always. When they do they will be a force to be reckoned with. It's just going to be a while before it happens on a wider scale.

Until then, keep digging! You'll never know what gems you'll find out there. And believe you me, there are plenty.

Have a good week and I will see you next time!

Check out my story "Void Railway", currently in Cirsova #22! What lies waiting in the void of space to threaten our heroic enforcers as they guide a merchant to safety on the closest planet? The answer might surprise you!

Weekend Lounge ~ Tumbling Down

Welcome to the weekend!

Hope you're all doing well. I haven't had a lot of time to do what I usually do recently due to a (rather serious) real life situation currently going on, so I apologize ahead of time. Things will probably be light around here until the end of the year until it is dealt with. Hopefully I can explain the situation all in the future better than this, but it is what it is right now.

So instead lets talk about other things.

Today I just wanted to highlight this video from David V Stewart as a bit of a companion to his recent one about NewPub's Content Flood and discovery problem. This time the subject is about how OldPub is using the aforementioned conveyor belt production techniques to pump out soulless product while charging a premium for it at the same time. In essence, any problem you might have with NewPub remains far worse in the old system. This isn't newly discovered information, but it is rare that you get such a clear example of it thrown in your face.

This event continues the trend of mass-produced product pumped out into the void for easy profit and to be instantly forgotten. The Content Mill era is still alive and strong.

We're still in the grifting stage of collapse where most people involved in it are merely looking for the quickest way to wring the audience dry before the system totally falls apart under the strain. OldPub, being so much worse off than any of us even realize, has been in this stage so long that the project referenced in the above video would have been shocking as little as a decade ago is now considered par for the course and not surprising at all. In fact now you will even get consumers defending this practice because Rules Were Followed (that no one agreed with). Any excuse for OldPub's behavior is just another sign of accepting decline.

The fact of the matter is that someone wanted a quick buck for less effort and they were willing to excuse obvious fraud to the audience in order to continue the grift. It was either that or they were simply unaware and unwilling to look into any of this because they just don't care. Regardless of what it is, the end result is the same. It is contempt for the audience.

While one could say this is good for NewPub and independent creators, in actuality is probably not good for anyone. Those disgusted who walk away will probably just never come back, and those who accept it will just encourage further decline. At this point, it feels more like the two separate systems have nothing to do with each other and what one does with not affect the other in any appreciable way. Whether you consider that bad or good is up to you, but it definitely seems to be the case that they no longer influence the other at all anymore.

This decay of OldPub has gotten to the point where, if you can slough through similar projects to the above cropping up all over, you are more likely to find something worth your time by avoiding the older industries. This is because, as the video shows, these companies don't really care what gets produced in any capacity. They only care if it's cheap and if they make big bank on whatever is tossed out with minimal effort. Such a mindset will not produce anything great. It can't.

This has been an increasing problem for decades and it's not going to stop anytime soon. There is a reason the older industries are fading. All this is to say it's why NewPub should not be looking to repeat the same errors as the dead industry we are watching break down before us. Pumping out product should not be a goal, not even if the product is "good" because art isn't product in the first place. It can be sold as one, but that is not the core of what it is and treating it like that has not made anything better. This is not a highfalutin way of referring just to "good" art either. No, all art is valuable beyond its monetary value and how much is exchanged to access it.

You can disagree with that assessment, but this old way of thinking about entertainment as disposable and replaceable is the exact reason those ancient industries are dying. They did not decide to randomly produce bad material--they realized their job was to pump out maximum product for maximum return and for minimal cost and effort. When this is the core of what you do, it's only natural that the thing itself was eventually going to be the last thing considered.

And lo and behold, that's exactly where we are. Turning NewPub and all the newer alternative spaces cropping up into this same state will eventually lead to the same result. There is no pause feature on Mr. Bones' Wild Ride. We already know all this.

Entropy doesn't take a day off. If you fight for the same failing processes and systems that lead us here, just in an "indie" coating, you will still end up in the same place you started in. And what good does that do anyone? Why would we want this to happen again?

Why wouldn't we want an alternative industry to actually be an alternative?

Fortunately, it looks as if most creators in the NewPub and adjoining spaces are a lot more ambitious than those in OldPub are now, and more creative in how they use their tools and ideas. But that does not mean we shouldn't keep on our toes that we don't fall into the same traps as the above. It's very easy when one loses sight of what this is all for.

That last thing we want is the same disaster to befall us again.

Anyway, that's all for this week. Thank you for all your support this year. It's been a strange one, and it's still about to get stranger (for me, at least). I'll try to get more interesting topics in the future, but for now that is it for now. 

Have yourself a good November and I'll see you soon!

In case you missed it, my story Void Railway is in Cirsova #22! I hope you like space cops in a space railway battling invisible monsters in the dark as the crushing abyss warps around them! Because that's what it's about!

Weekend Lounge ~ Choose Your Future

Welcome to the weekend! We made it to November!

I hope you're all doing well as we stumble into the colder months of the year. Now that we're heading towards the end of this very, very, very, strange year, we can finally talk about a bit more of a generalized subject not relating to said weirdness. Today, we're talking about what we really want in a story: what we really want out of art and entertainment.

Blog favorite YouTube channel, The Second Story, has been on quite the streak for some time now, digging into not just the writing industry, but also the tropes and ideas that have let it spin out into the gutter over time into what it is today. No one agree it's in a good spot now, but we also don't agree on how to fix what's wrong. So it is nice to see a place offering a real analysis that goes beyond catchphrases and cliches into one that bigger issues might be. However, this analysis is not for nothing or even really click-baiting, but in actual real attempting to steer discussion on topics no one was considering before: ones that need discussing.

Today's video subject is no different. In fact, it has more to do with a lot of The Discourse today than we might think at first.

The question of heroism in this video centers on what exactly a hero is. Mainly, it centers on how what a hero is and how it depends on the health of the very populace said stories are made for (as well as who is writing them). Whether the audience wants to read about white hats succeeding and protagonists to look up to, or whether they want to look down at the hero to give themselves a boost in their own life, all depends on the era and the times the stories are written in. In other words, "Anti-heroes" in a sense don't really exist: it's all perspective of the times and those living in them.

Stories are not propaganda, despite what some will say. Stories are a window into the times they are written, showing what the people thought and believed, and how they behaved. What they are is a time capsule of an era and place that cannot be replicated (hence why revival movements never stay still too long) or explained otherwise without context. When you read a book you are looking into a world beyond just the plot and the characters. You are connecting with a whole other space beyond even that. This is what makes writing (and all art, honestly) so fascinating.

There is more to life and art than repeating mottos for the mob of your betters in order to nod together over and be tossed approving glances. We always need to aim for more than that bare minimum. But the times we live don't want their artists to aim high. They want them to fall in line with entropy and slowly fade away.

Writing aims high. The industry? Not so much . . .

Not to say any of this is new. Of course it isn't, there is plenty of bad art and entertainment out there, and there is much that come across as horribly dated simply for being filled with copy-pasted buzzwords, tropes, and acceptable topics of the time period it was writing. What is missing is that such art was looked down upon even at the time. All the more reason not to do it today. It didn't work then, it won't work now.

However, there did used to be alternative scenes and industries. Those have all gone away, but there is still a nostalgia for them. It has given us the illusion of more choice in a sense (as far as the mainstream goes, it was objectively better in selection and variety before), but when one looks into what the gatekeepers were trying to do it back then shows the decay over time into what it is today. We just didn't see it at the time because most of us were young or not plugged in.

It's one of the reasons so much 1980s and 1990s era art has remained so popular, even with younger generations not alive for it: people are desperate to see into a more exciting world, and the one we have now is simply not adventurous, ambitious, or hopeful. The audience want it to be but the industry will not provide that to them. Their inability to live in the present or look to the future means the only place left to dive into is the past. The loss of a monoculture and that a shared wider understanding of reality is still desired, and I'm sorry to say that they cannot get that in modern art regardless of how good it is. You can still get attention saying Lord of the Rings sucks; you won't get any saying King Leper is amazing. They want to feel part of a larger conversation before anything else, including engaging in art. That's just the way it goes.

When this era is looked back on in the future it is almost certainly going to be one of confusion, like a minefield that has expended all its explosives. Why is there so much good art that was barely touched on while crusty corporate swill that expired decades previously got all the cultural discussion will certainly be a big topic. That is due to the lack of cultural cohesion of these times, and it cannot be avoided. However, it will certainly not stay this way forever. It never does.

The 2020s are half over and we still have not quite gotten a defined identity or style to set us apart, and without a monoculture we probably will not, but what we can still do is seek Truth above all and find connections that way. Through the desire for more and higher places we can come together in a more natural way, a way that can allow true flourishing in the arts. This post- Cultural Ground Zero era will probably be defined as a Dark Age of some kind, where treasures will have to be unearthed long after the fact. As it is now, it's merely a mess that cannot be cleaned up.

Then the question becomes in how one can form a defined identity to connect with audiences in this era without having any shared Truth or traits beyond surface level. It is not impossible, nothing is, but how can we even begin looking for the answers? The preview of what this will look like is reflected in the above video's discussion on anti-heroes. So much of what shapes us is dependent on the era and also shared understanding of who we are. That doesn't go away even if there is no wider culture to connect us together. As can be seen by the way we behave even in these times of atomization, we still desire that safety net. We always will.

So without such a thing being enforced from the top down or without those old peer groups that don't really exist or care about each other anymore, where would it then be formed today? Where would it even come from, and is there a way out?

There is, but it's not an easy or satisfying answer. In fact, it's kind of a cliche one to suggest, not that we'll hold that against it. Sometimes the truth is really that obvious.

Standards like this benefit no one.

There is something to be said about not worrying too hard about the outside world when writing or creating. After all, there is not much you can change or effect, so why worry about it? All you can do is what you can do, and not much else.

This is true. What you can do is limited, and you should never forget that. We all have things we want to do, and ambitions above us, however we need to remember we're a part of this, not above or beyond it. We're not Futurians: we don't have to mutate and die.

However, we still live in this world. We are still affected by it, we still react to it, we try to understand it, and we try to see where it's all going. All of that is unavoidable when creating art, even if the piece is deliberately ignoring all those questions in order to reject the discussion. This isn't political, social, or religious: it's just how art itself works. Art is all those things, and none of them, at once. To pick the process apart further is how you get propaganda, and how you lose audiences. All we want is to find a way this all comes together in a way that makes sense relative to the era we live in.

This isn't a call to tell anyone how to create, because that makes no sense. Part of what makes art so great is seeing how others approach certain subjects and ideas with their own angle or thoughts on the subject. Anyone who insists on rules around the creative process itself, or on what can and cannot be addressed in the creation, does not care about art itself.

Despite that, we also aren't in the 20th century anymore. It must be repeated until it finally sinks in. Wholesale rehashing of ideas and tropes from over a quarter of a century ago in an attempt to ignore the way things are now only works if you have something to add to the conversation of the world we live in. This is why old IPs are dying: their time and place has passed and their relevance cannot be replicated, especially when the creators themselves are either gone or uninterested in anything beyond their checkbook. There is nothing there anymore, and no matter who gives their "interpretation" of said properties to make them "relevant" to today, it can't change that reality. Those days are gone, and they cannot be replicated or relived. We have to find new paths.

But you already know that. We all know that. The path now is in choosing what future we will have next. What kind of hero are we going to be? What will we see as the anti-hero in this new era? Exciting times are ahead of us, and we still have yet to finally reach them.

It'll only happen when we finally choose a future worth having. That is going to happen sooner than we might think, but it's not something we should ever stop aiming for regardless of the end result. We're always going to want more. Hopefully this time it's the right kind of more we decide to aim for. We're about due!

The 2026 lineup for Cirsova as been announced, and I will be a part of it with my story Infinite Alley! Come see the full lineup here!