Bits and Bobs

Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.

- The actors walk off at the end of June if the studios don’t sit down with the writers

- Rumor is directors will follow. This will grind everything to a halt.

- Nobody is asking for a boycott. Neil Gaiman has pointed out that making Good Omens S2 a huge hit actually puts more pressure on Amazon to negotiate with the writers

- This implies it’s okay to catch up on old streaming content without breaking the line too

- This is a screenwriter strike; books will keep coming out.

- Movies already made will keep coming out for months. Again, actors have not called for a boycott; you aren’t breaking the line if you go see a movie.

- I don’t know where this puts podcasts but none of them have studio funding or platforms so they’ll probably keep going.

- Substack/Tumblr book club are all public domain works and will keep going. In addition to Dracula Daily there’s Whale Weekly, Dickens Daily, My Dear Wormwood (The Screwtape Letters), Letters from Watson (Sherlock Holmes) and more.

The problem with this is that what makes organized action effective is that it's decisive, specific, and clearly bounded. That's because it has to be extremely legible to the targeted institutions that the losses taking place directly correspond to the demands of the workers. When workers are striking, and some people are boycotting, and starting and stopping on different days, that's not expanding the impact of the strike. It's making the contours of the effects of the strike blurry, and therefore debatable. At the negotiating table, the bosses will interpret that blurriness as favorably for themselves as possible. This functionally diminishes the power of the strike.

The "organized" part of organized action is essential. 21st century corporations are designed to absorb the impacts of disorganized action against them. This is why "voting with your dollar" doesn't work: the market is not a democracy. In order for conscious consumer behavior to matter, it has to be sudden and dramatic.

Keep going to movies. Keep watching shows. Keep your streaming subscription. Keep proving that you want the content that they're refusing to pay for.

The Millennium will always be Not That Long Ago. Everything since the Millennium will always be, in some sense, ‘new’.

You can listen to a Top 40 station now and hear a song from 10 years ago easily, even songs from the 80s or 90s on special occasions (which might just be the Nineties at Noon or whatever every single day).

A Top 40 station in the 80s? Played the current fucking Top 40 and that was it. You were lucky if you heard a song that was one year old, definitely never ten. I was born in 1979 and heard almost no music from before I was born until high school or college. If you wanted to hear anything older than a year, you had to listen to a classic rock (late 60s to 70s) or oldies (50s to early 60s) station. There was nothing earlier than that on the radio.

A restaurant was playing What a Feeling, from 1983. 28 years before my son was born. That’s the equivalent of hearing a song from 1951 in the late 80s, which just did not happen. Even for an oldies station, it was hard to find anything that old.

VCRs were just getting big in the mid-80s, but there was a limited selection of videos you could buy (or even rent) for them. Most video rental stores didn’t bother to stock TV shows, it just wasn’t worth it. (Few shows were even released on VHS.)

So you could generally watch recent movies and “classics” but if you were looking for some random movie from the mid-70s - that’s only ten years previous - you were mostly out of luck. Imagine looking for a movie from 2006 right now, and you can find maybe the top-grossing ones and a few that won Oscars, but Night at the Museum? The Devil Wears Prada? You’re shit outta luck. That’s what it would have been like looking for movies from 1976 in 1989.

So for those of us who grew up in the 80s and early 90s, pop culture had a hard limit of about a decade, if that. By the late 90s, the internet was good enough that music was starting to stretch that, but you still couldn’t really get video through the internet and DVDs were still catching up in terms of what was available. You didn’t really get entire seasons of TV on DVD until the early 00s - the first season of The Simpsons, which aired in 1989, wasn’t released on DVD until 2001.

Bat door knocker.

The beginning:

Greta’s reply (that at the moment of my post has 2.9million likes, making it the 22nd most liked tweet ever):

A few hours after this, Tate replies with a cringe video where you can see pizza boxes. These pizza boxes are from a Romanian pizza chain, which was used by the Romanian anti-organized crime agency DIICOT to confirm that he and his brother was in the country so they could raid his house and arrest them on charges of human trafficking.

In short: he picked a twitter-fight with a 19yo, got ratioed into oblivion, posted cringe, doxxed himself and got arrested. Amazing stuff.

You’re not asking the right questions. You have to wake up. Wake up. I know what I’ve seen. I’m not crazy! Wake up.