The Quandaries of Current Year
I went to a wedding this weekend. It was not a grandiose affair: the parties involved were both salt of the earth types, honest, loving people with the good fortune to come together in the right time and place that they bonded strongly. I would wish them good fortune but I know that they will not need it.
Chatting with old friends, I got the question: what are you up to nowadays? And I did not know. I had absolutely no answer for them. Nothing they would understand anyway. Because who can understand anything of what's happening to society now?
For most of my life I was a "gamer," though what's left for me at this point? Every last major developer or publisher has made it manifestly evident that they have nothing but contempt for me or what I want out of a game. Blizzard will ban you for making the "OK" sign or expressing support for democracy; Bethesda has turned from nurturing the modding community that built them to atomizing and monetizing the most gormless amongst them and crushing the rest, while doubling down on the most hated project they ever embarked on, Fallout 76. The faint promise of a Baldur's Gate III hangs in the distant future, but it is a slim and distant hope. EA I have always despised with every bone in my body, Ubisoft equally so out of solidarity with aggrieved PC gaming comrades, and Fortnite I hold to be the embodiment of everything wrong with gaming.
I've watched helplessly as the Bohemian community of the internet that I'd come to know and love during the early 2000s became completely unhinged and demented, and been banned from one community after another for reasons more asinine than the last, whether copyright violations for using the music from one game in another game, or triggering people with the notion that there are two genders, biologically speaking.
I've been dabbling in crypto, but at even this I am cursed. I've known about bitcoin since the early 2010s but wasted most of that decade being a skeptic, and only emerged from that retardation when I realized that if I had spent basically nothing on BTC the first time I'd heard of it, I'd be able to put a down payment on a house by now. Which of course means I started buying in just in time for a bear market to begin, insuring all my initial investments were at the peak of the last bull.
What movies have I seen, then? Good question. I can't even remember the last movie I went to see for its own sake - was it "Zombieland" in 2009? Tron in 2010? And those only because some friends wanted to see it? Besides that it's always been for Rifftrax live shows - and Rifftrax is predicated almost entirely predicated on mockery of bad film. I saw "Infinity War" - a year after the fact, through dubious methods, and found it to be mediocre at best. The memes it spawned ultimately were of greater cultural value than the movie itself, and Avengers as a franchise succeeds, like medieval Islam, simply because there is nothing else at the time worth investing any time or effort into.
So what have I been doing? I have to think long and hard about it, far longer than I'd have allotted in wedding reception small talk. I've been collecting PC hardware - Model M keyboards, 4:3 monitors, spinning disk storage, tower cases with slots for optical drives. Basically everything despised by what's conventionally popular amongst PC enthusiasts presently, who are themselves already considered fringe and eccentric by normies and casuals that consider the iPhone ingenious and innovative. Hoarding mp4s and DVDs of whatever I can get on my hands on, because I have come to fundamentally distrust streaming and cable-cutting. Very few of them are from anything released after 2010. I adopted a cat, so I at least have that tenuous link to mainstream human experience going for me. And that was basically the only thing I could tell them.
I have to wonder, though - is it just me feeling so profoundly alienated, disassociated, and frustrated? If not, to what can we possibly turn, in a time when it seems as if every traditional and alternative institution alike wants nothing more than to see me crushed into nothingness.