Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
I am definitely guilty of bingeing shows that I get into. Even the aforementioned DS9, I watched the 180 episodes or so over the span of probably 6 months. It was great. Though building off the previous comment that you made, DS9 is serialized rather than episodic. The show came out before streaming, but I didn’t watch it until after streaming because of how unapproachable serialized shows are on standard scheduled TV.
That said, I can still appreciate episodic shows. Comedies (including sitcoms) do really well with this format. And interestingly, I would even put sports into this category. There is continuity across a season via record and standings, but each game itself is largely self-contained. You can miss a game, or even a bunch of games, and just jump back into watching whenever. Regarding baseball’s long season of 162 games, I’ve seen someone refer to it as a friend who is always there for you.
I hadn’t thought about sports in that way before. That’s interesting. And you’re right that serialised shows didn’t work so well in broadcast, which is probably partially why I’m so prejudiced against them - they slightly remind me of the daytime soaps I suffered through when I was home sick as a kid. I’ll cop to that.
But as an adult, the reason I still go to bat so hard for episodic as a format is because it imposes a creative constraint on the writer that makes it immediately clear whether the script has succeeded in telling a compelling story. And if it’s a short episode, say ten minutes like with Adventure Time, and it still manages to tell an emotionally compelling episodic story in that time, that’s amazingly impressive.
I liken serialisation to gravity. It sets in eventually no matter how hard you try. But for me, it’s more fun to watch the plane actually fly than to watch it taxi around on the runway. Just a series of events. When everyone’s clapping for that, I’m the one sitting with my arms crossed muttering “no, fuck this pilot, spill the passengers’ drinks! Do a back flip in the sky!”
Another malformed rant. Thank you for being so tolerant.