I am strong. I am invincible. I AM MAN. Alas, I am no match for a company wily enough to sell Star Wars Le Creuset roasting pans for $450 (HOLY LIVING FUCK) and somehow make it work. How does W-S do it year after year?

I just finished It Came from SomethingAwful and I'm still processing it. One of the big points the author makes is that the '90s counterculture was about complaining about being marketed to, the '00s counterculture was about nihilism and an absurdist denial of marketing, while the '10s counterculture was about using politics to demand better marketing.

this article annoyed me a little but this is the second or third time I've linked to it so clearly it had an impact. Somewhere in there he makes the point that there are no cultural phenomena available to kids these days that didn't originate with that which was marketed to their parents when they were kids. Which is a major turnabout - turn of the century it was acknowledged that marketing to kids was the biggest, most successful thing you could do. Vice exists because it was a magazine that taught marketers how to market to teenagers. Full stop. Now? Now you just reheat whatever was served to you and dish it up to your kids.

On the one hand I'm stoked that CBS now has Danger Mouse reruns. On the other hand, it's fucking bleak that a major media conglomerate can't do better than serve up a British parody from the '80s that was intended as a British parody of the early '60s.

The most annoying thing about the '80s was the mawkish, patronizing conviction by all the fucking 'boomers that the 50s were the greatest fucking thing on earth - and it was a marketer's '50s, all Chevy Bel Airs and poodle skirts. But at least that gave us Back to the Future. And rap was rapidly emerging to redefine music. Now? Now I'm supposed to celebrate Rise of Skywalker as if Star Wars weren't a massive 40-year pause on popular culture.