For many years, I've kept a toe in the water by being subscribed to a number of pop culture commentators on Youtube. Geeks & Gamers, Ryan Kinel, Overlord DVD, Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, and a few others. For months now, I only kind of skim over what they're posting. I made the hard decision today to let it all go and unsubscribe from all of them. I simply don't care anymore about pop culture. I don't care to see more details of "go woke go broke" and the commentators who have little more to say than that. (And if they're repetitive and offer little, you should see what the comments say.) The reason that I hung on to them for so long was because I still had a complicated break-up going on with pop culture, I think. I'd said before that my relationship to Star Wars, Marvel, Disney and more had all turned to apathy, and while that's largely true, I was still resentful of them for what they'd done, so there was a thin thread of non-apathetic emotional ties to the industry. I still loved some of the older content, and I still held on to some kind of hope that it would be restored. Or maybe I didn't hope that anymore, and I just was angry enough to enjoy watching it burn.
But as I've had a harder and harder time over the last several months engaging with this type of Youtube content, I've had to accept that I really truly have reached peak apathy. I don't ever care to watch it burn. I'm content knowing that it did, and then not thinking about them anymore.
My connection to Star Wars is maintained because I own all of the older movies that I'd care to watch again, although to be fair, I don't do that nearly as frequently as I used to. It's been years since I watched any of them, especially the prequel trilogy. I never even got around to watching the "new" season of the Clone Wars, and I don't care about anything else happening in Star Wars, with the exception of The Old Republic, which I'm still coming back to from time to time, including (obviously) now.
My relationship with Marvel is a bit different; I spent a few years as a buyer of comic books, but that honestly was in the late 80s. The Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri X-Men, for instance, and a few other books from that same era (New Mutants, X-Factor, Avengers, Thor and Iron Man. The last three, especially the last two, weren't really super popular at the time, so that was an outlier for me with the market overall.) Previous to that, I'd really liked a lot of superhero cartoons, especially Spider-man and Hulk themed ones, when I was a younger kid. So, I'd always been a Marvel superhero fan (and I watched Batman and Superfriends too, but I was mostly a Marvel guy), but I was a fringe fan, not a hardcore fan who was really into the collecting, or even reading the comics, honestly. I also bought a few trade paperback collections of some more recent stuff, like the Ultimate Spider-man for a while, but I'm still the kind of guy who was never super into it. I enjoyed the brief high profile mainstream popularity of Marvel characters in the movies, and was especially gratified to see Thor and Iron Man come into their own, since I'd liked them way back in the later 80s, but letting go of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is pretty easy, because I only have a somewhat tenuous connection to the older content anyway, really.
For Disney, my relationship is even more complicated. I grew up trusting Disney as a family entertainment company, like everyone of my generation, but I've also been aware of their subversive nature for a long time. But I wasn't ever a huge fan of anything Disney. My wife is a huge fan of Disney, and I let her drag me many times to the parks, to the movies, etc. I think she's disappointed that I've deferred from Disney, but honestly, I wasn't ever that much of a fan anyway; I mostly did it for her.
There's little else going on in Hollywood that I care about. Our pop culture has become completely moribund. And honestly, the corporatization of that is as much a problem there as the wokeness. Pop culture hasn't had a chance in many years. Brian Neimeier, who I don't really read anymore, but who is a good commenter on pop culture stuff, describes how almost all of pop culture went bad in 1997. Long before wokeness was a term (although proto-wokeness was certainly still a thing with many of the same ideals, just not yet metastasized into full on craziness.) It's a good read, and even then it's several years old. https://brianniemeier.com/2018/01/ground-zero/
I admit that it feels a little strange to be disconnected from almost all pop culture except for old stuff and some occasional indie stuff, but honestly, I already was. I was just holding on to something because of memories of a good time, like an ex girlfriend that you can't quite let go of.
But not long ago, as I mentioned, I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland. My oldest son and his wife watched it with me. That's still a great movie that still entertains, and it's over 80 years old (released 1938.) This weekend we'll be watching Rebecca from 1940 with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine (which was her step-father's last name; she's actually Joan de Haviland and was Olivia's little sister.) Although I suggested it, it's really "presented" by my wife and daughter. On my reading list recently was some equally aged planetary romance from Otis Adelbert Kline, and some cheeky noir/fantasy by Simon R. Green from the very earliest 90s (Hawk & Fisher)
I find that reading old stuff from the age of my teenage years or older is still fun. They were fun in the 80s, and even in the 80s I liked old movies, because my dad played them a lot for us. Errol Flynn swashbucklers like Robin Hood and Captain Blood have always been among my favorite movies. Sometimes things don't get better with age, but sometimes timeless stuff is still timeless, and progress isn't a given. Pop culture hasn't had progress since the 80s-90s. It had a major drop-off following the hippy revolution, climbed back up to another peak in the 80s and maybe early 90s, and then has had a fairly steady degradation and decay since then. Today, pop culture only produces something of value almost on accident, unless it comes out of an indie scene with someone who isn't beholden to corporate interests and still understands what made timeless stuff so timeless to begin with.
And maybe that's not so bad. After all, until recently, it was normal for people to look at a much broader spread of pop culture. My generation read stuff like David Eddings, Terry Brooks and Weiss & Hickman, of course, but they also routinely read Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock. I hardly knew a D&D fan in the 80s—and we were junior high kids—who hadn't read "the classics" at least as much if not more than the modern authors. Older movies were still broadcast on TV and as VCRs and home media rental became a new business during that decade, older movies were certainly a huge part of it. I used to work in a VHS rental store as a teenager; I remember quite well what rented. Sure, new releases were (of course) the biggest renters, but older stuff had a steady stream of rentals. Later, when stuff became cheaper, archive older movies were popular. Older books were routinely brought back into print, a process that continues through Kindle and vanity/indie presses even today.
It's a brave new world out there, folks. I'm finally addressing that head-on by decoupling myself from my last routine and regular attachment to mainstream pop culture, even if that last regular attachment was just the critics mocking its failure.
Just to add some visual interest to an otherwise banal and boring post, here's a few new screenshots of Luukke in his "Frontier Gambler" mien. The main gist of the outfit is courtesy of Vitnir, who did one very similar in his unique smuggler outfits video series. The head, torso and leggings, as well as the dye module are courtesy of him. I also used his boots and gloves and belt originally, but then decided that I wanted them to be different after all.
Honestly, those matter a lot less than the torso, head and legs, and the dye module, if present.
Oh, and I always do my own thing with weapons.
And you may notice that there are no shadows. I noticed that the shadows don't line up with the ground very well, and make the floatiness even more obvious sometimes, but even when they don't they cause lag on my rig, which doesn't have a graphics card. I've mentioned before, I had a graphics card, but for some reason it always made the rig crash when my brother was building it, so we decided not to put it in, since the processer was fast enough that I'd be able to play older games just fine without one, mostly. The shadows on this game are one concession to that.
It still lags a bit on really busy environments, like Mek-Sha and Dantooine. Although I remember that people even with super hotrod rigs complained about lag on Dantooine, especially during the pirate event, so I don't think that that's my computer's issue.
I should go check it out, though. The pirate event is ongoing right now, and they did migrate to cloud servers some time ago since I last played.
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