The way I understand it is that live service gaming has changed significantly to chasing whales. Whales buy cosmetics. MMOs are more or less played to gain better items that a) help you become more powerful and b) look cool/give players perceived social proofing (showing off).
Since MMOs can’t sell those top end items to whales for obvious reasons the business model of chasing whales doesn’t really work for them and therefore no one’s bothering to make new MMOs.
To me, everything is about culture and counter-culture. Films and TV have this exact thing you’re talking about (I think you’re describing overall culture and not movies). All of it feels that way because of mass marketing, in my opinion. At that time, there were few outlets to see what was going on in the world, and marketers used that advantage to create homogeneity. The counter-culture played in reverse but it was still a very similar thing (think grunge in the 90s, which was not widely adopted but still considered almost a mainstream thing for a lot of people).
It’s like a house style. If I didn’t know what the program was, I could probably go back from the 60s to today and tell you what channel just about any network TV show aired on because of that. I can look at many movies and guess within 2 years of when it came out, across nearly every era of cinema. I haven’t done these tests today for stuff over the last 20 years, but a lot of it still applies.
I doubt this is true at all. Fashion still very much travels across generations and skinny jeans were a real thing over the last decade. The problem is that a lot of the younger generations have become interested in the nostalgia of various decades (current fave seems to be the 80s), like how a lot of people who became adults in the early 90s romanticized the 70s, so you’re seeing a lot of their fashion and cultural ideals coming from different eras than their own. Again, marketing plays a big role in all of that, in my opinion. People are told what they should like and many people then like that. It’s just a big difference between having 3 major TV stations you could watch stuff on vs. my last point
The reason a lot of the cultural homogeneity has been washed away is because of access and spread out choices. You can use movies, music, and TV as great examples of this. Up until the mid-2000s, you couldn’t really get movies, music, or TV made/released to a wide audience without being backed by a major studio/label. By the late-2000s, YouTube made it possible for anyone to create anything as did camera phones. Then cable channels began doing whatever they wanted, and independent film began to flourish. Then came the streamers. Now there are 10s of thousands of titles anyone can watch at any time that don’t have any curation at all. Everything is so spread out that everyone can just be inside their own niche liking whatever. This is a reality the network TV channels have still not come to grips with, as their model basically collapsed in the last 5 years or so. Record labels have certainly come to terms with it, now knowing they shouldn’t enforce copyright violations but capitalize on them to try to gain any additional eyeballs they can. Some artists are still very shortsighted on this, but that’s okay, too. One place where this has not at all become accepted is for TV or movies.
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I created a YouTube channel last year that wouldn’t have even existed probably 7 years ago due to the ‘idea’ of copyright violations on it. I believe I’m not exactly doing copyright violations, but I’m not quite falling under fair use because what I’m doing in theory could replace the original product if adopted widely, due to the significant theoretically better transformation I’m doing of the material (replacement is something nearly impossible to happen, unless it’s something that is new and/or hasn’t reached a wide audience). I don’t fight any copyright claims I get, but nearly everything I’ve done for this channel has had a copyright claim slapped on it with zero impact to my channel.
The channel is close to being able to be monetized but I’m not sure if I will be allowed to monetize the channel because of the copyright claims. If the channel is monetized, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the copyright owners claim half or more of the revenue the channel generates and I’m fine with that.
It just goes to show what a different landscape we’re in from roughly 2000 onward that makes thinking no shifting hasn’t continued to go on as rather simplistic thinking. It’s all just way more spread out and niche, which is how life really should be in anyway, in my opinion. Different strokes for different folks and I like that everyone is able to be represented somewhere when that wasn’t even considered to be a thing 20 years ago.
World of Warcraft just has no business lasting this long, it’s absurd.
Gaming seems like a bad example of cultural stagnation. Who could have predicted in 200x that every release now would be a cozy farming simulator with fairies?
The biggest generation gap right now and problem everyone has is ownership of media.
People under 25 might not own any DVDs, CDs, video games physically.
The 70s in a nutshell
Finally getting through this Albert Brooks documentary. On the barest pretext, Neil Degrasse Tyson is in this. Feels like he will show up for anything.
This has so many layers.
I don’t know John Denver well, but it seems like music for people who find Simon and Garfunkel too Jewish.
You didn’t tell me this was a crying movie!!!
I would describe this as The Curse, but as a movie with a happy ending and more jokes along the way. I mean there’s simply no other way to describe a movie where the repeating plot points are his increasingly violent and absurdly failed attempts to end his life.
A bunch of stuff you just didn’t know would have made this more obvious to my taste. Thomas Newman is one of my favorite composers. Marc Forster also made two of my favorite movies of all time: Stranger Than Fiction and Finding Neverland.
Including a trans character is a nice touch. Was that in the original as well? Of course then they lost a point for having a gender reveal party sigh lol
Even worse, I went to the theater going, “This is a terrible mistake. I might start outright blubbering in public.” I mean, I knew what the book did to me in the privacy of my own home. And I was welling up super early in my theater viewing and just trying to keep it together. For those who haven’t seen the movie and are reading these posts: regardless of this crying talk, it’s a very positive and life-affirming movie. It’s far from “depress the shit out of you and then roll credits.”
I believe the Malcolm character in the book was gay but not trans, and honestly I can’t recall if Malcolm was his name, but the character definitely existed in much the same capacity: outcast by others for his identity, but adopted as found family by Ove (Otto). I haven’t seen the foreign-language film adaptation that came first, so I’m not sure of differences between that adaptation and this one aside from the spoken language. That scene I linked earlier connected to one of the things that Malcolm really unlocked: a further demonstration of just how deeply Otto loved his wife. He mentions that Otto’s wife had a big heart for him, and Otto completely melts and is ready to do anything for this kid, despite trying to keep up a tough facade.
If you haven’t read any Fredrik Backman novels, I really recommend trying his stuff. If not A Man Called Ove, the Beartown trilogy is really strong (about an insular, hockey-obsessed small community in…Denmark, I believe).
I didn’t know this until after I watched the movie, but young Otto from the flashback sequences was played by a Tom Hanks nepo-baby, another son of his that I was unaware of. Honestly didn’t realize he had a son outside of Colin and the much weirder and unhinged Chet.
I thought the woman who played Marisol absolutely killed it. Even though as a viewer you never really dislike Otto (or at least I don’t think most people would), you definitely appreciate having a character who is having absolutely zero of his shit. And at times she was something of an audience avatar; seeing her react to Otto’s bus story really brings home the emotion of the scene.
You didn’t explicitly say it, but I gather you liked it? It’s a stretch, but the one thing I was thinking was a tell that you might like it was your love for As Good as It Gets. I mean they’re really different movies, but it at least told me that you could appreciate an entry from the “grumpy asshole’s heart grows three sizes” subgenre of film.
Ahem… Thomas Newman wrote the incredible score to The Man With One Red Shoe, also starring Tom Hanks.
I liked it quite a bit. I wouldn’t put it as high as StF or FN only because it doesn’t have the magical realism element. I like just a dash of something extra. Otherwise the dynamics are what I look for in stories and it’s no coincidence the director has made several of my favorite movies. Very life affirming.
I appreciate you recommending a movie that means so much to you. I will look at the book to see also what translated so well for you.
I have two videos you might like.
First is Jim Hanks, who does the voice of Woody everywhere else but the Toy Story movies. Some great stories.
Second is kinda rabbit hole-y, but it’s got the same life affirming vibes and made me love the Doc Brown and Marty McFly friendship in a new way.
What the. “No, it’s my brother, Jim.” Being related to Tom Hanks is even more rewarding than you would expect.
This is certainly fair. We should be mindful that what we see on network TV and listen to on corporate radio, etc. isn’t the entirety of a decade’s culture. I guess I’d hope that some of the evolutions in subcultures could bleed into a seemingly stagnant state of what I’ll call the dominant culture, but perhaps that is too much to ask. Or do you see as much bleeding into the dominant culture in ways I’m not seeing? Would you say that LGBTQ+ cultural changes (granting that LGBTQ+ “culture” is not a monolithic thing and that gay male issues may be out of sync from trans issues, and feel free to speak about where you have the most visibility) right now are accelerating or decelerating relative to 2010 (even if decelerating LGBTQ+ culture may still be changing faster than the dominant and most visible cultural factors)? Do you credit the increased cultural output to greater acceptance by the dominant culture, or perhaps to a Trumpian push back against LGBTQ+ acceptance, or to something else?
I think most subcultures do eventually mix with the larger culture to some degree. For example, a show like Ru Paul’s Drag Race took drag mainstream (to the point where Drag Queens are popping up in libraries) and exposed lots of straight women to certain lingo and fashion that they wouldn’t have otherwise heard.
As another example, greater cultural acceptance allows what was once subtext to become text. Until fairly recently, a lot of gay/lesbian musicians had to sing about lovers in a non gender specific way (even if everyone sort of knew they were talking about a same sex romance). Now that it’s more acceptable to put a pronoun on it, I think that the songs can potentially be deeper, more specific, and probably better.
I think you have seen interesting dynamics when gay artists challenge notions of sex/gender. For example, the Industry Baby video is fascinating to me not just because Lil Nas X can be openly sexual, but also because Jack Harlow was willing to go along with the video concept. Sure, his lyrics and visuals go to some lengths to portray Harlow as straight, but if this were 15 years ago, I think someone like Harlow would have been reluctant to pop up in that video just because of what else was happening in it.
As far as accelerating/decelerating, from my personal perspective, the evolution of a sort of pure lesbian culture feels like it’s slowing down a bit (perhaps we all got a bit calmer after same sex marriage was legalized), but the interraction/tension between “lesbian culture” and trans folks feels very dynamic. Many younger people identify as queer rather than lesbian, and there seem to be more non binary or trans folks among that age cohort as well. Even many of the people I met in my 20’s now identify as non-binary or ftm trans, and I have noticed that led to some changes in the media they consumed and the way in which places like bars have evolved to meet the needs of a evolving clientelle.
Interesting points all around. A couple of my favorites:
I remember seeing Ru Paul on, like Hollywood Squares and a handful of other places on TV when I was growing up, and that certainly seemed like an oddity to me, but since everyone on TV seemed to be just rolling with it, I figured it had to be normal enough. I sorta figured at the time drag was just a Ru Paul thing rather than something that a lot of people did, though.
Yeah, I knew a person who, as a teenager way back when, seemed to me to be growing up as a still-closeted lesbian, but who then came out as a trans man. He might not have taken that same path 20 years earlier.
RuPaul was a minor celeb throughout the 90s, but I don’t think there’s any way you could have had a whole show dedicated to taking drag racing seriously the way we do now.
Attention movieheads itt:
Werner Herzog’s memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All is spectacular. A life story at times more interesting than his movies, and a deep dive director’s commentary on every film he’s done. I got the audiobook because his speaking voice is enthralling. Highly recommended.
