See, that's what we need more of: short, punchy wordplay! Whether it's coherent or not is less the point than the fact we can do it in under 200 words. But that's been the pattern when I get talking about things I watch, reviewing movies and TV shows and such. I'd include more music and book reviews as well, but I'd have to be consuming some new versions of those to qualify and those aspects of my life, like a lot of middle aged people, have waned somewhat for a lot of reasons ranging from the cultural (how does anyone find new music these days anyway? Spotify as a cul-de-sac for taste and breadth is a whole post germinating for later reaping) to the biological (my stupid reading eyes have betrayed me). I can feel myself getting less and less culturally and intellectually interesting with each passing day, and this is someone who started out as a suburban cisgender straight white guy, so there wasn't that much of a plinth to stand on in the first place.
The irony is I can drone on and on about movies and TV, but I don't even watch that much of those anymore. I catch them when I can, especially legacy stuff. I'm watching The Mandalorian and The Bad Batch on Disney+ with my youngest, who still goes out of his way to come find me and let me feed him while we do a Star War or a Marvel. I'm watching the last season of Picard because those Star Trek brain worms were planted in the mid-late 1980s and still demand to occasionally be fed (I seem not to have transmitted those to my children). And I'll watch the last season of Succession when it starts in a few weeks. What I'm saying is I'm primarily motivated to consume less by compelling content and more by the presence of an existing intellectual property. If only I drank beer or needed erectile dysfunction drugs, I'd be the ideal American consumer. One of those I imagine I'll get up to sooner rather than later.
These days, weirdly, what I watch more than anything is YouTube. I didn't bother with it so much when I was younger and it was new. I wasn't quite too old for it when it showed up in the mid-Aughts and became its cultural self through the Teens, it was just a method of consumption I didn't invest any time in trying to acclimate to, besides the occasional link someone would send of a tranquilized bear falling out of a tree onto a trampoline. You know, the essentials for remaining culturally literate.
I didn't mind missing out on Snapchat nor do I currently feel compelled toward the cultural literacy now that is trending toward TikTok, but Chinese surveillance state spyware issues aside, the pace of it I find jarring and unsatisfying. Besides, the existing platforms have all been TikTok-ified (including YouTube and it's "shorts"), so I can get the same experience (if I wanted it) from social media that uses American corporate surveillance spyware and data gluttony. But that's not to arrest and harass me as a violation of my human and political rights (yet), that's to lovingly craft every click so every result in part displays an ad for something I didn't know I needed, way down in my soul, in an infinitely benevolent way, like only God and multinational corporations can be.
My drift into YouTube happened gradually over the course of a few years, partially led by my GenZ children who use it for all manner of information, from entertainment to education to political engagement. That last one can really go sideways, so you have to keep an eye on it, but so far it's pushing one of them Bernie-Sanders-leftward rather than tiki-torches-rightward. And the final solidification, now that I think of it, really happened during COVID lockdown, as the accompaniment of a voice of some kind--any kind--was a welcome distraction and a curiosity for the long days indoors.
Because it's not serialized like television, my intake of YouTube goes in waves, depending on what I'm curious about. What is interesting is that even though I'm watching it (a smack-dab mid-GenX-er) and I was introduced by GenZ offspring, it's overwhelming a Millennial medium. There are younger and older people on there, and certainly my experience might be a fluke of my tastes and interests, but these people now in their late 20s/early 30s have really found an outlet here, doing things that seem so ultimately inessential like setting up to let people watch them watch TV shows or play a video game, and have become real broadcasters, not just with the developed on-camera savvy and poise to maximize what they can out of their own charisma to make themselves watchable, but also as producers, sound engineers, lighting directors, editors, camera operators... The process of a new channel, with its trademark echoing sound, blown-out or missing lighting, probably shot in front of a closet door in a bedroom, with the awkward, mumbled, rushed delivery and too-many or too-few cuts, budding its way forward to eventually burst from the forest floor into a color-balanced high-def picture of well-enunciated information shot in a dedicated (but probably still homey) studio space is itself as much as part of what makes the viewing experience as compelling as the ostensible content. How or why any make it that far can be the result of any number of things (determination, desperation, ambition, narcissism, greed, naiveté, sheer bloody-mindedness...), but the process itself is almost always good television.
I've been the person asking the question "why would you watch someone else play a video game instead of just playing it yourself?" and I know the answers now: it varies. Sometimes it's just because I'm cheap and I want to know the story/game play without buying the game myself. That's how I got entirely spoiled on the story of The Last of Us a few years ago, when the gyms were all closed and I wanted something on in the background while I worked out at home. I would never play a horror game on my own and I watched it because a channel I like and trust was covering it. Thirty years ago, all this would have been impossible as no game company or studio would have tolerated its work being broadcast (even in part) for free. But at some point they realized a long-form commercial with tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of views that cost them nothing to produce, distribute or support was maybe an OK phenomenon to just let ride.
These days the rotation is guitar YouTube, always some food/cooking content, some gaming channels (preferred by the presenter, some by the game), some boxing content, some tabletop roleplaying game content, a few regular TV and movie reaction channels... Except the guitar stuff, where I'm actually trying to learn something (albeit in a mostly passive way), it's all comfort food, dopamine button-pushers that I used to have to use Minesweeper or Angry Birds for. And yes I know it's being fed to me by an algorithm, one owned and maintained by Google no less, but eh, so is Blogger and here I am plink-plink-plinking away on that. I suppose there is an "outside" of the grid if you really put your mind to it, but I guess I'm still in the stage where I'd prefer watching someone else build a crude hut in the wilderness than live in one myself. But even some of those guys bring high-def cameras with them.
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