When I first heard about this play I wondered if it had anything to do with Liz Phair, who has a song with the same name. Then I heard a very brief description of the show and thought “oh, not related at all.” Then the pre-show music started, and there was Liz Phair. Then I read the credits for the show, and no mention of Liz Phair for the music (it’s a musical). Then the show started and the link became clear. Lots of mental whiplash.
The show has some great stuff, but I struggled with a couple of things that made it less enjoyable for me.
Thing one: Stories about writers struggling to write rarely work for me, and that’s a central focus of the show. It helps that the musical he’s struggling to write is supposed to be the one we’re watching (and that it makes fun of that).
Thing two: I’m old. Specifically, my ears are old. If music isn’t mixed just right for my ears, I miss a lot of lyrics. That’s fine when it’s a song on the radio, but not great when the lyrics are giving important story beats. I’m sure I missed at least a quarter of the words in most songs. It’s an easy fix: just custom tune every musical production specifically to my ears.
James Faysboch, I. N. Stagram, Arthur Tique-Toque, and Thomas Witter at the first iteration of World Internet Control (August 1966).
A day or two ago I saw a post where someone was complaining about being in “Instagram Jail.” At the end of the post they wrote “it’s frightening how much power they have.” And it is, but the really frightening part is that we gave it to them.
Warning: Old Man About To Yell At Cloud
This biased and inaccurately remembered ramble goes somewhere, eventually.
Decades ago, I put up my first website. It was a single page hosted on my CSUN account. Here’s the oldest version I can find on the Wayback Machine, but the original version was much simpler. I wrote out the tiny bit of HTML in a text editor, made some graphics in some freeware image editor, and used FTP to post it. The only way to find it was to get the address from me (or someone else who somehow stumbled onto it). It was poorly coded, terribly designed, full of stuff that most of the world had no interest in, and no one else had a site quite like it. That’s not a brag about how clever and valuable the site was; every site was like that. Good ones, bad ones, hideous or beautiful, pointless or useful: all unique. I found other, similarly weird people and made friends.
And my site evolved. I started using web page editors. Remember when Netscape Navigator had a built-in editor? Remember when Netscape Navigator existed? I purchased a web domain (here’s the oldest version I can find of this site). Search engines started doing a fairly decent job of indexing the web, and people started to find me on their own. I was never huge, but I was in the d-tier of internet fame. It was actually pretty easy to hit that level when sites were still pretty rare.
Then social media sites started growing, and the World Wide Wild West settled down. People who would have struggled to make their own sites in the past realized it was easier to customize a page on MySpace, and you had the bonus of having a community built right in.
Now we’ve moved beyond even that tiny bit of customization. Everyone posts on sites where every post is formatted the same way, algorithms try to decide what generic content will make you stay on sites the longest, and you can get locked out of a site (and even lose decades of your work) almost at random. We traded control & creativity for convenience. Yes, me too.
One Weird Trick to Fix the Internet
So, now we’re all on the same three or four websites, everything looks the same, and the punishment for daring to look at a cat video is being fed endless cat videos. What can you do?
A few things. None of these will magically fix the internet, but they’ll make the stuff that shown to you closer to the things you want to see. Some of these are easier than others.
Use an adblocker
Websites don’t need to know everything about you. Find an adblocker and use it. As of February 2024 I’m using uBlock Origin, but that could change.
Stop liking & sharing garbage
Your friend posted a video of his cats? Cool! Like and share that thing!
Your friend found a useful or entertaining channel of original cat videos? Cool! Like and share that thing!
Your friend posted a random video of a funny cat he found online, or a website full of “collected “curated” (AKA “stolen”) random cat videos? Don’t like it, don’t share it, don’t even watch it. It’s a content farm gathering data about you.
Your friend reposts a Facebook post that asks a simple question like “What’s something you wish was still around?” Block the original site. Don’t like it, don’t share it, don’t respond to it. It’s a content farm gathering data about you.
Use a social network that doesn’t track you
This one’s hard. I’ve found a couple Mastodon servers that I enjoy, but it takes work to find ones that work for you, and getting set up can be confusing.
Create your own site!
This one is a lot easier than it used to be, but it’s still work, and you’ll spend a lot of time feeling like you’re shouting into the void. Will anyone ever read this? Probably not. But I control it and it won’t go anywhere unless I want it to. Squarespace, Wix, WordPress… there are lots of options. You might even go crazy and learn how to actually code a page!
Did anyone get this far?
Probably not. If you did, thanks for plowing through my rant. Next time, maybe I’ll complain about AI-generated images!
Come to the United States of America, where we celebrate the birth of our nation by having real estate agents plant low quality flags by the curb near our trash cans!
I was trying to remember how I did a fake sketch effect in Photoshop, and I remembered that somewhere along the way I had written up a tutorial and put it on this site. So I did what any disorganized person would do: searched for “fake sketch ga2so” on Google. I found the link, but I also found a link to a reddit post that led to an essay on YouTube about David Manning.
You probably have a couple of questions, like “Who is David Manning?” and “What does that have to do with you?”
Well, about twenty years ago, Sony made up a fake reviewer named David Manning and used his quotes in their ad campaigns. I thought it was hilarious, so I fired up Paint Shop Pro and a bootleg copy of Dreamweaver and made David Manning- The Last Honst Critic. Then last year Brickwall Pictures decided to do a video detailing the history of David Manning. He ended up spending almost a third of the video trying to figure out why someone would go through all the trouble of making the site.
I’ll tell you why: I was a goofball with a very slightly popular personal web site at a time when people who wanted to share a goofy idea on the internet couldn’t just post it on a giant social network, and I thought it was funny. I have a vague memory of trying to get the buttons on the site to resemble Apple’s house look of the time taking more time than writing all of the terrible copy on the page.
Didn’t quite get it.
So I posted a comment on the video explaining who I was, why I made the page, and what I was doing now. I even mentioned that my recent Criterion Collection boxes were sort of a spiritual successor to David Manning. I also thanked him for making me feel like it was worth it to leave a dumb joke up for 20 years. I thought I’d either get some sort of “that explains it” response, or (more likely) no response at all. What I didn’t expect was that he’d delete not just my comment, but any comment anyone made referring to my page. Really odd. Maybe he’s planning a secret followup video and doesn’t want to give away the ending. Maybe he visited my Youtube channel and decided he didn’t like my goofy bike videos. Whatever. It’s his channel. He can do what he likes with it.
Me, I’m going to go watch David Manning’s “Best Film of 2022”: Morbius.
And I’ll be drinking Jared Leto’s Hard Kombucha the whole time.
UPDATE: He wasn’t deleting comments. It was Youtube’s spam filter going a little hard.
The Batcave I didn’t quite visit is actually Bronson Cave, and it’s been a popular site to film things for over a century. Besides being the Batcave from the 1966 series, it’s also been:
“How are we gonna put doors on THAT?”“Don’t add doors! They block the bubbles!”
Here’s a video that breaks down a bunch of things filmed at Bronson Cave.
I also make fun of two probably-perfectly-acceptable movies. I guess I should put their trailers in as well.
Wait- the family is crazy and fighting but in the end there’s a heartwarming moral? I don’t think that’s ever been done!
Wait- a saucer-eyed CGI character has a problem apparently solved by a mysterious object? The only thing that could make this more original is if it turns out she didn’t actually need it!
And now I hear you complaining that you don’t get the title of this post. Surely you haven’t forgotten Then Came Bronson, a series that ran for one season in 1969!
