Stonehenge by Moonlight (David Cox, 1783 - 1859)

recorded sighting of bigfoot mogus spotted in the wild

its important to do this every time a museum or school thinks this is a good idea

Like how can X-Play have sat apart from gaming culture when it was the only show of its kind in a pre-Youtube media environment. Whatever X-Play was was gaming culture, whether by making it or having to play into it to get them to watch. It was, in parts, smarter and funnier than your average gaming magazine or website but what weird revisionism it is to posit it was trying to steer gaming culture for the better

Setting aside anything else, Adam Sessler apparently believes he was, like, a moderating force on gamers who tried to speak to their better natures? When the conversation for the past couple years has been about how him and his show played into all the ugliest parts of 2000s gaming tirades. Man who went on weird racist tirades to talk about how he hated all JRPGs was actually trying to make gamers less racist, actually,

Setting aside anything else, Adam Sessler apparently believes he was, like, a moderating force on gamers who tried to speak to their better natures? When the conversation for the past couple years has been about how him and his show played into all the ugliest parts of 2000s gaming tirades. Man who went on weird racist tirades to talk about how he hated all JRPGs was actually trying to make gamers less racist, actually,

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Peter Ferguson (Canadian, 1968) - Homecoming (n.d.)

my favorite genre of alien picture is little grey aliens just naked in the woods like why the fuck are you here. you have a spaceship. why did you come to earth to just stand in the woods and look at us with no clothes

I have one of those robot vacuums but there's a mirror in the house low enough to the ground that the lidar scanner can see a nonexistent room in the reflection so on the navigation map it's generated I have a room that doesn't exist that I have to forbid the vacuum from entering.

CREATURE????

you know what really gets my goat?

View on the Space Museum grounds on Kowloon, Hong Kong, early 1990s.

Scan

I like how M. Night Shyamalan makes a movie just about every year nowadays but every time it's hyped up as M. Night Shyamalan's return. Return from what. The beach that makes you old

It's good that Tumblr hides people's follower counts but also there's an XKit tweak that will hide your follower count from you. The only time you'll have to see it is when you go to block spambots, which is also a good way to see how follower counts don't matter, on account of all those spambots

What's the worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years, and what's the worst thing about fandom that's always been true of it?

The worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years has been the incentivizing of fandom-as-conflict: not merely as a field in broader culture wars but as the field for endless intra-group battles.

This manifests in many ways: as seven hour videos complaining about The Last Jedi, as Twitter backlash campaigns, but also as stans defending their faves from any and all criticism real or imagined, as the endless boom-and-backlash cycle to any fandom meme or joke you see on Reddit, and as the drive for people to look for evidence other people discussing a thing they like are hysterical illiterate dolts, before anything else.

Or, in other words: a lot of fandoms are full of assholes these days, whose main interaction with fandom is using it as a reason to be an asshole, and to defend being an asshole. The actual “fandom” part of fandom no longer really exists for them. The discourse more or less is their fandom; someone whose main fandom activity is sharing videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) isn’t in the Steven Universe fandom, they’re in the videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) fandom. I mean, the chief fandom for many people is their side in the fandom war. What type of fanfic you write is secondary to what your affiliations are vis-a-vis battles over fanfiction

(One trend I've noticed is people who aren't at the stage where they only talk about what they hate and not what they love, but are at the stage where they can only talk about what they love in relation to what they hate. "I love this movie...and it proves this other movie is bullshit made by a hack". No ability to say just "I love this movie", period, end of sentence. This is how like two-thirds of Film Twitter talks about film, the remainder are all the grindhouse people going "man you've GOT to see Wrong Turn 5")

Another one, that I think is related, is that fandom’s become...more transitory, maybe? There’s Big Fandoms that are inescapable and then everything else feels like it’s here for a weekend and then it’s gone. And we’ve always had fandoms that endure and fandoms that vanish quickly, when the show runs short or turns out to be bad/boring, but we did use to have a lot of enduring if small fandoms for Okay shows most people hadn’t heard of and now you don’t really. Or they burn themselves out fast.

So we’ve reached this stage where fandoms are either so big they have seven hour long discourse videos, or they’re a smattering of fanart over the course of two weeks last August. But that isn’t really the fault of fans so much as modern media release schedules.

A lot of fandom activities of old are just...impossible now, with many shows? The slow build of speculation and fan works and in-jokes and theorizing and analysis simply can’t exist in a world where the premiere comes out the same day as the finale, and you can’t talk about the finale because you have no way of knowing if the person you’re talking to binged it all in one weekend or is still on episode four. That was the kind of thing that sustained the fandom of something that wasn’t a big hit, or even something that was. My fave fandom experience ever was watching the online Lost fandom wildly theorizing for all six years of Lost, and we’d never get “and what if the Smoke Monster is a dinosaur but only the head?” under a Netflix release model. Now at a base level, we either have shows nobody can discuss because nobody’s sure who’s seen or what, or shows where everyone just discusses the finale right away, and where you get One Week of Show and then a massive hiatus, which either kills all momentum or...drives fandom in the direction of hyper-analyzing everything and fighting because, well, what else is there to do? And that plus the outrage cycles of social media plus the fact that “man who yells at Star Wars” is now a viable career choice result in, well. *gestures upwards* All that

(Really, shout out to Cartoon Network for engineering the Steven Universe fandom to Be Like That through their inscrutable strategy of dropping episodes during one random week every five months or whatever)

As for something that's always been with it...cliques and a certain fannish elitism, like, that sees engaging with media in a fandom sense as more creative or analytical or intelligent than your average person. You see it now in the form of, like, people holding up fanfic above published fiction as more representative or authentic (I’ve seen more than one post on here strongly implying queer rep doesn’t exist in mainstream non-fic storytelling???), or going “well, we think about shows, unlike those normies watching sports”. But that was probably way more pronounced a thing in the past, in the 40-50s sci-fi fans were calling non-fans "mundanes" and calling themselves "slans" as an in-group signifier (a reference to a book with superintelligent psychic mutants known as slans). Like at the very least we should be happy no one’s calling non-fans “muggles” anymore. In the evolution from “mundane” to “muggle” to “normie” normie’s probably the least bad one