I wonder how close the closest universe is where cis gay men are the signature LGBT group most hated by radfems. Presumably this would be a universe where fujoshi had less cultural impact and the media trope of the straight woman who's sad her love interest turned out to be gay metastasized instead of falling out of favor.
I think it would have to do with how much of the ‘90s culture was telling women they’d made it, and how much of that was really gay men holding themselves up as models for straight women to follow in order to do it right.
Like, the Sex and the City writing staff was largely gay men (cis, natch), and when you look back at it you realize how much the girlfriends were really being plotted and written as gay men about women’s topics – or not even that, about relationships with men
Reevaluation of the ‘90s Aerosmith-starring gun game Revolution X, on the premise that the New Order Nation’s beef with the boys relates to the fact that from their groupie-tastic '70s origins to their Alica Silverstone/Liv Tyler (Steven’s daughter!) video '90s, their brand has always revolved around fucking teenage girls
What with bucket hats, bare midriffs, and flared jeans having been resurrected by some irresponsible necromancer with frosted tips, I figure there’s no better time to resurrect some of my favorite Y2K fonts. I typically only see the same three or four pop up in discussions on the subject, so maybe this will be helpful to nostalgic designers. Click though for links.
Honorable mention to Yeoman Jack, an excellent free modern face by Iconian that looks more like it’s from the early 2000s than many of their actually 20 year old fonts. I tried to stick to fonts that I was pretty sure were not based on an existing typeface. I only left out Typodermic because Ray Larabie’s work is already so popular and well known, but Neuropol is obviously a classic. Check out his stuff if you’re nor familiar.
Thinking about how Witchblade was a really horny ‘90s comic about a hot chick and her shapeshifting demonic symbiont, but the horny part was just that the symbiont would make itself look like a really slutty bikini
as someone with a bachelor’s degree in english, i am inexpressibly tired of people telling me to get highly specific jobs that often require highly specific degrees. “just go write for a magazine!” you need a journalism degree for that. “just teach!” you need a teaching certificate, and also fuck you. “just go work at a tutoring place!” tutoring children with learning disabilities, which make up the majority of the clientele at those places, requires not only a teaching certificate but a specialized master’s degree. “just go work at a library!” you need a master’s degree in library science to be a librarian. it is actually a highly skilled and extremely competitive field. you don’t just “go work at a library,” you train for years in the vain hope that you will get one of handful of available jobs. “just go work at a library.” the nerve. the unmitigated gall. “just go work at a library.” ugh.
You don’t need a degree to write for a magazine, you need a portfolio and a professional network, which university journalism programs are entirely oriented around helping you get. I know people who dropped out of journalism school the instant they had these two things because at that point it was a waste of time and money and distracting from their career.
Many states and school districts have programs to let you earn a license while you teach (though often in a particular subject that may not be English). This is in response to a teacher shortage driven by bad pay, lousy work conditions, and an extremely hostile political climate, but you would encounter those things even if you went back to school first.
As someone who has stared down the beast that is the public library job hunt, and was the first to blink: the absolute majority of jobs in libraries do not carry the title “librarian” and do not require an advanced degree. In fact, librarian jobs are being eliminated in many places in a process called “paraprofessionalisation,” in which the job duties of lower-ranking and lower-paid employees are expanded in favor of replacing retired librarians. Anyway, most of my classmates in library school already worked in libraries and were getting the credential to angle for a promotion.
The brutal truth of higher education (particularly in the liberal arts) is that there is no amount of it you can submit to, no credential you can ever gain, that will get you to a point where people are going to reflexively defer to your elite status and just hand you the job you have “earned.” This is the promise of college, and it’s a lie; the only time it was ever credible was when scarce university education was a thinly veiled excuse to reserve jobs for the children of the wealthy and well-connected who were going to get them anyway.
I’m glad for both of the degrees I got and would happily go back and get them again, but if you let malaise push you back into school you’re going to come out of it just as unhappy and significantly deeper in debt. The way to feel adequately compensated and respected by your job is to join a union.
The “drag queen story time” thing emerging in libraries pushed by librarians trying to establish themselves as a graduate-educated lawyer/doctor/minister(/accountant/realtor/teacher?)-type profession with a guild consciousness in response to elite overproduction is one of the funnier subplots going
This also makes me think about how as “Counselor Troi” was being a thing on TNG our (“favored quarter” suburban) schools had “guidance counselors” who weren’t a college-application thing but rather some kinda below-a-psychotherapist-above-a-modern-“therapist” (para/)professional role
So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?
Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there
It’s like that old Steve Jackson “Illuminati!” card game where you’d have the Boy Scouts team up with the International Workers of the World in an attempt to destroy the Mafia and control the TV News Media
When we think of TV during the heyday of Friends, we usually think about scores of other sitcoms about white twentysomethings, because that’s what most of the wannabes were. There are some notable examples that did more, however, and I’m offering you this clip from the 1995-1996 Fox sitcom The Crew as an example of it doing classic sitcom mix-em-ups but with a more diverse cast. It’s the episode we’re coving on this week’s installment of my LGBTQ TV podcast, Gayest Episode Ever.
This show was not conceived of as an anti-Friends, but it really works as a response to Friends, because it does some things Friends never really tried to. Two of the five sexy young people in the opening credits are black, one of those black characters is the lead character, and one of the white characters is queer. Which is a lot more than you’d see on The Single Guys, Caroline in the City or Suddenly Susan.
It’s a very Fox take on this sort of show, and even if it only lasted a season, I think the people who made it deserve a little respect for bothering to make a show that looks a little more like real life than what was reflected elsewhere on mid-90s TV. Also, this particular episode has an explicitly bi character, which don’t come along often in this era.
This is the kind of stuff I love covering on Gayest Episode Ever, because sometimes there’s actually a lot to be said about the TV that’s less remembered today.
Me: you know, I’m starting go get a sense we’re in for a *psychedelic* comeback in the next decade
Also Me: oh?
Me: Yeah, the Oregon shamanic lodges initiative, this microdosing stuff – it would just be odd for it to stop there.
Also Me: Hm
Me: In the 90s there was ecstasy, and I guess shrooms and acid were _around_, then it was mail-order “research chemicals”, but nothing that really *broke through*, you know
Also Me: so how does this track with your observation that country-raised Taylor Swift closely tracks the zeitgeist to put into her work?
Me: holy SHIT, the psychedelic album will be AMAZING
I guess ketamine was also kind of a 90s rave thing, though that was really a dissociative. Wonder when’s the last time someone called it “Special K” in earnest
The internet is amazing for sociological research in that it is the ultimate double-edged sword. All self-writings are performative to some degree, in fact things like historical ‘journals’ were often literary fads or writing projects that would envision public release. But still, in comparison the internet is an absolute explosion of written, documented text (& images and film!) about what people care about, spend their time on, etc, but all of it has been ruthlessly pruned by optimization metrics to be content to be consumed by others. Its all half real, half brand.
I will often, to study how people view a media property, watch all the different youtube videos or read the reddit posts on it, but (particularly with the youtube) you can’t actually take naively that the opinion being stated is the creator’s opinion; instead its the narrative they would be interesting to make as a video. They probably believe that narrative after making the video, that work changes you, but that chronology matters, and you can only view that process from the edges of those polished works.
So someone linked an upload of some really early anime websites that got loaded on CDs… from amagazine? That would include as a bonus to subscribers?? Archived versions of fansites on the CDs??? Which is just, amazing on so many levels, but is a real bonus for us. One of the linked early fan sites is Fredart.com, Megatokyo author Fred Gallagher’s pre-webcomic site on anime news and his personal art. (Really having a lot of Megatokyo Baader-Meinhoff these days)
First off it’s adorable, the art in particular is great and it has all of these details on like forum website drama at the time, precious info. Check it out if you want.
What draws my eye most is something it shares with its contemporary peers, the utter *lack* of optimization its text has gone through to engage its audience. Everything is just filled with asides, personal details, life stories; now you know this fan-art outfit was inspired by shopping with Fred’s then-girlfriend Sarah at the mall, on Saturday, at Hudsons!
Or how Sarah’s Origami page tells us she picked it up as a seduction technique to get into weeb-master Fred’s good graces on its literal intro, which is the cutest and she should be immensely proud of this even 24 years later, I hope she is:
No one (on average ofc ofc exceptions exist) does this posting fan art these days, you add like a quippy one-liner or a tag & title, because people want the art, you have optimized the content for that. Its not like Fred & others weren’t trying to make their website entertaining, though; they just didn’t get feedback on how, there were no engagements and very few metrics. “Talking normal about themselves” was as good a way as any. So you get very high levels of just authentic, actual real-life information. I know more about Fred in 1998, how he actually lived, from this website than I do from 99% of the people I follow on Tumblr (or worse, Twitter).
Though I think there is an added factor to this one - in 1998 on the internet you would expect people to care about this more. The reason fan artist #8367 phrases every non-art tweet as a joke or politics rant is because they know you won’t care otherwise, you have ten thousand fan artists to choose from so you gotta make it interesting (note, if you are thinking of counterexamples: are they hot?). You only matter for your content; existing is useless. But on the early internet, running a website? You were important *by default*. You got points just for showing up. Numbers were low, content was sparse, finding peers was take-what-you-can get. As such, you did care about the person, inherently, as they were there, and that makes them worth caring about. Its like default celebrity status. Visiting these websites - personally made by small groups - was like a digital housecall. People very quickly became no-qualifiers-needed-friends in that environment.
Now that you pick and choose from a list of hundreds of thousands, we have all been trained to look for different things. Which means we write different things to match. How we communicate has been transformed by our digital architecture (Other factors at play of course, generational conditioning, social media site design, etc; one at a time…)
Oh and here is Ruri in a Summer Dress, in case you were curious; the jacket is great, love the curved hem and the piping.
Huh, that really is very different from the modern web. My first impression was “teenager” (when we also tend to experiment with different forms of social presentation and see what works), but Gallagher was 30 when he wrote it.
