part of the reason I find Waco so fascinating is the symbolism of it all.
the cult leader who claimed to be christ, shot in the side and the hand.
the predictions and prophecies of an end-times battle with the government that came to pass much as he predicted.
the rain of burning bible pages in the fire.
the singed textbook about the fourth amendment found in the rubble.
the recordings of rabbits being slaughtered, played for days before 25 children died in the fire.
the ATF operation was code named “showtime”
like, this would all be kind of on the nose if it was a movie, but it was a real thing that actually happened. it’s interesting when there’s that much synchronicity. Jung argued that synchronicities are the way that unconscious material is brought to conscious awareness, such as an archetype being expressed.
Proposed: was the “slacker” early end of the 90s about Gen X charting a new life course where your 20s were kind of a wash before the real stuff started?
(And might millennial me have some hope things kick off for us in our 40s?)
This being a difference from Boomers who had roles to slot into right out of their teens?
This could add some texture to the “oh boo hoo, 90s movies are about how much it sucks to have a reliable white collar job” criticism – Office Space (1999) understood as a complaint about a white collar sector whose entry levels no longer offered any agency – no influence on actual business operations (“what would you say you do here?”) but preparing TPS reports as basically Spreadsheet Operators, clerks serving up inputs to an unappreciative executive cohort that doesn’t have anything more to offer but another decade of age
Help! I’m trapped in Peter Gabriel’s award-winning 1986 music video for Sledgehammer!
This is possibly the most influential short film of the last 40 years.
Not in terms of its aesthetic or techniques, but how in moving the music video beyond “live concert performance” or even “the band directly acts out the lyrical themes”, it was upstream of basically every one – which through the 90s represented an unprecedented period where short films were a culturally central form of art – since
What position was Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor in on Home Improvement that he was the host of his own TV show but just lived in an average-ass house and neighborhood (at least as the presumed outer suburban audience would see) over the fence from Literally Just Some Guy?
Tumblr got me listening to Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair recently, I’m too far gone
Is she perverted like me!? Would she go down on you in a theater!? Does she speak eloquently? And would she have your baby? I’m sure she’d make a really excellent mother! CauseTheLoveThatYouGaveThatWeMadeWasn'tAbleToMakeItEnoughForYouToBeOpenWideNoAndEveryTimeYouSpeakHerNameDoesSheKnowHowYouToldMeYou'dHoldMeUntilYouDied? Until You Died!? But You’re Still Alive!
Like, John Daly was the drunk redneck shitkicker of otherwise upper class-marked professional golf, but he could really wail a ball, really the significant thing about Tiger Woods in the late ‘90s was he could hit a ball as far as John Daly but with the control of everyone else
Was Happy Gilmore based on him or something? Because I read that description and damn.
Well, I can say it would have been fuckin’ weird to make a 1996 professional golf culture-clash movie while remaining unaware of that '91 rookie.
Daly had an Upper South blue-collar background that fits in with that demographic’s early-90s incorporation into the national mainstream (what, you thought evangelical Christianity, post-Billy Ray Cyrus country music and the NASCAR boom just… happened?), and that same inclusionary moment for the Long Island Jewish kid who’s a troublemaker but loves his bubbe was kind of what Sandler was about, the transposition makes sense
TVTropes is such a weird website because the language (and I guess the ‘culture’) of the site was codified in an extremely specific era of internet use (mid to late aughties), and by members of an extremely specific and insular subgroup (nerds) that it codified all the tropes in what is effectively a dead language. No one talks like that anymore and yet because there’s no renaming or updating, and in the 2000s we thought the future was forever babyyyy etc, it all continues to chug along as part of a world where self-respecting adults use words like “woobie”. It’s remarkable to me because its not a relic or preserved in amber (an online Pompeii like an abandoned geocities page), people are actively using it! Like finding an island where everyone speaks English in the style of Chaucer. I would be just as surprised if a man on the street greeted me “Hail and well met” as if someone in casual conversation deployed the phrase “crowning moment of awesome”.
its just so weird how this post diagnoses the problem without mentioning the actual cause: it wasn’t just nerds it was specifically joss whedon fan nerds particularly centered around Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
the tvtropes people talked/wrote weird compared to general internet users, or even fandom types specifically in 2005 as it started, let alone as it continued to accrete users. expansion brought in wider use of general internet/fandom writing but the core of people really really into buffy in particular and joss whedon in general kept it somewhat discordant against popular usage.
oh man! that explains so much! it sorta follows his lead in many ways; the ideal TVT writer is a fan of the tropes despite believing (sometimes correctly, sometimes Very Not) that they see through them and can identify all the strings being pulled; chauvinistic about Nerd Dialect that was off-putting in its vintage year and anachronistic now; bought-in on the whole “nerd culture” phenom lock stock and barrel, with all the weird reading and writing priorities that come with that; and way, way less progressive than they seem to believe they are. in other words: Joss Whedon.
TVTropes is a monumental temple built to a god that failed, which is beautiful in the abstract and repugnant in the particular. I think that’s where I’ve landed
