Videos like this one are why this channel has become one of my favorites on the entire website. Great work and keep making more or don't if you don't want to and want to make me sad.
You mention Maynard, you mention Perfect Circle, then at 49:45 you basically start singing Disillusioned from Eat the Elephant. I was already a fan, no need to make the hard sell.
Was not expecting Mark Fisher to seap his way into my solo rpg time but cant say im mad. The collection of his blog K-Punk and his book ghosts of my life are two of my favorite books on my shelf
Only channel where I'll watch videos twice no matter how much waffling is included just to better internalize the message. Man Alone is built different.
Not sure if you've played it but this immediately came to mind during this talk: They call this kind of thoughts and ideas the "supra-" and "infra-culture" in Disco Elysium: "We're common, the herd, the music on the radio, the food in the chain restaurant -- those are all too *popular* for the girl in the old lady rags. She prefers a fantasy world -- an infraculture with it's own dress code and vernacular. It is an illusion, I'm afraid, there is no refuge from the supraculture ... Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique* capital end up *reinforcing* it instead...."
A hot take that i have is that Baby Boomers are still the dominant force in driving american culture. They were responsible for creating great original works in the 80s, when they were young (in their 20s and 30s) and then it was revived again in the early 2000s when they would introduce their children to it (my exposure), meaning we have a double rainbow of nostalgia that executive producers now want to bottle and resell because its easy and less risky, both creatively and financially.
Thank you for your channel and the content you produce. I look forward to every episode because I know I'm going to learn something important and/or be inspired.
For the music/clothes rant, I think, it's just harder to register new trends past a certain age. Or maybe it's easier to look backwards--i.e. remember what people wore as we were growing up and the previous generations we interacted with and either looked up to or derided for their inferior style... The new drip just looks stupid, because we're the old people noticing how stupid the trends of the youth tend to be, but aren't rose-tinted with nostalgia when observing them :P Same with the music. The 2010s trends of, say, mumble rap (and its evolutions) and the mewling soft pop songs are a thing, but I don't hear many 40+ yearolds notice these as vividly as they recall grunge or the various post-punk movements. We're just old >:P
I shall answers the creative call! And add that I think every creative person is suffering right now from a human desire to share their creations but a lack of any real community to share it with, so those creative people smash their heads against the social media wall in hopes of breaking through and reaching their supposed “community”.
If this is a specific game, I cannot find it because "one-shot dungeon" brings up many results about generic one-shot dungeons. Do you have a link to the game?
Video 76 of me liking and then commenting on every new upload to tell the viewers that the Man Alone Podcast is absolutely some of that sweet, unhinged audio/vocal-honey. Psssst. *I AM REPEATING THE SAME QUESTION FROM LAST EPISODE BECAUSE I LIKE IT AND NOBODY ANSWERED IT* Lets play a little RPG exercise. The RPG is completely based around the Player Character existing in a world driven by an insane SUBJECTIVE Morality. What would be the Subjective Morality your character might live by? Dive as deep into the answer as you’d like. My character would be driven by an absolute NEED to have the most exotic grass on the planet. They would spend their life researching grass. Learning how to cross-breed it. Learning how to change its colors. Learning how to implement it into other aspects of daily life. They would try to convert others around them to become members of the Grass Life Society, which is broken into multiple factions, such as: Children of the Dew, Purveyors of the Blade, etc.
I didn't even see this one! I love this question!! My character would never lie completely flat. He can recline, sit, lean, but NEVER completely flat. Until death. People try to push him to the ground ALL LE TIME
I’ve been thinking a lot about the motion from grimdark to noblebright fiction, and not trapping myself in nobledark (the rebellion). Star Trek is one thing I truly miss, and finding our way back to that kind of vision (not revisiting it) has been on my mind.
The suicide of the lead singer of Sparklehorse hit me too, Man Alone. I am just a few years older than you and am also tired of the pillaging of nostalgia. As I get older I have to fight so hard against the temptation of lusting after the hazy memories of bygone days. Creating something new is the best way to fight it.
BTw, you made me think of something that has been on my mind for quite a while now... my nostalgia for the 90s. I don't think the decade was objectively better than others, but I was coming of age in the early 90s, still relatively carefree/without many duties or obligations. That said, there was a clear sense of optimism about the future, and more specifically about technology, that has radically changed since then. Climate change was an issue but not an inevitability; there was hope that we'd somehow get our stuff together and find the way forward. Progress and material stuff was available, but not yet overwhelming and the sole purpose of life. We still believed in (some) institutions; people still believed in government and public life. There was some progress in terms of gender and racial equality, and although it may have been too little, too late, there was a perception that society was moving in the right direction. AI and technology had not yet come to replace most jobs and people's livelihoods. There was no social media like we have today; the internet was a still relatively anarchic territory, mostly a promise, free from the financial and ideological power that truly took hold in the early 2000s. Consumerism was not widespread around the world, as it is today. It was easier to consume and think about media and culture, something that is practically impossible today. And 9/11, which changed so much in the following decade, hadn't happened yet. I'm sure that I see the 90s through pink colored lenses, and I know my nostalgia comes from my own privileged life at the time. I'm also significantly older and have very different concerns and responsibilities today. But I miss not being so cynical and bitter about culture, politics, and society.
Farmhand #87 reporting for duty. These are my favourite videos when you touch on the meta themes. The message to create hopeful futures reminded me of the Thomas Flight's YT video "Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?" where he describes the metamodern perspective for creating movies, which is in short a constructive, positive postmodern take that doesn't just revel in deconstructing into oblivion, but into something positive that can be leaned on and built on.
2000s was post-grunge rock like Nickelback, Seether, Evanescence, etc. It was southern Hip-Hop like Ludacris and Lil Jon. Nu-Metal like Limp Bizkit and Korn. It was the rise of reality TV stars like Paris Hilton. The styles were like wallet chains and super baggy pants. Spiky blonde hair on men, crimped hair on women. The 2010s is harder to describe because of a phenomenon that i like to describe as 'culture moves on the 5's. "The 90s" culture as we know it was more 95-05. 80s was 85-95. So that makes the 2010s '15-'25. Though that one might be harder to tell because of 2020. Either way, i think it just takes a while for the "culture" of a time period to be sifted and sorted and all the major touchstones to rise to the top. The more time that passes, the more eras get simplified into caricatures. The reason we dont see that fully with the 2000s and 2010s is because not enough time has passed.
I actually wonder often enough whether the current trend to dread the future is just a part of a larger cycle (generations hopeful for the future followed by generations dreading it almost in spite or due to the inevitable disappointment imparted onto them from the previous generations' failed aspirations) or if the current human condition really *is* that bad, even compared to the perpetual ages of different kinds of horrible. That being said, I am not sure the mainstream movies are a valid litmus test for the society's views, since they're driven by marketing trends, which is a completely artificial set of rules only tangentially related to the actual humanity. It's more about how corporations determine what an average human approximate would think like. Personally, I hope this is just a part of the cycle, and we'll see a return to magical whimsy in the next couple decades :P
Based on what you grew up on, I’m guessing we are around the same age.. I agree with a lot of what you said. One of the coolest surprises I had was refunding my sense of wonder due to SpaceX. I know Elon is divisive, but you cannot watch the booster return to earth and get caught by the tower and not start thinking about what the future might be.
First of all, get out of my head :). I've been struggling with the same thing which is one of the many reasons I've shifted focus to solo RPGs. Because there I can 'create' what's important to me.
I feel like we must be a decade apart (I’m 34) because the “styles” of the 2000s specifically is my fondest and most potent memory of that time. Nu metal, trance, the matrix, all of that is burned into my brain. y2k is even an actual 'genre/theme' for the kids nowadays. I’m wondering if maybe it’s an age thing. When we are in our formative years, high school and then young adult, this stuff still sticks out to us and we are closer to the zeitgeist. But as we get older (at least in my experience) is really when time started to slow down for me. When all you have to time or energy to focus on is work, paying bills, and in some cases raising kids, you really start to just get stuck in your ways and next thing you know that cool new shirt you bought is now 10 years old. I haven’t thought too much about this comment yet, just rambling my gut reactions edit: to me it seems more like individuals have less runway to accept/view new subcultures rather than culture having less runway. but thats my naive 5 minutes of thought and i absolutely do NOT discredit all the thought that Mark Fisher put into his writing (i have also not read the book yet). This is not me debating, just philosophizing my internal thoughts. Great video so far!
im the same age and i agree, i can do the culture tracking thing until maybe 2012 then it becomes a blur as i became an adult and was too busy with my own life to try and pay attention to trends
I’m 37 and I remember back in the 90s thinking “the 80s had a distinctive style but the 90s doesn’t.” That attitude stuck with me, I don’t perceive any decade since as having a distinctive style.
A kind of got that 'breaking' moment when I read Eragon, and the new 'Eragon' movie came out. I was still a kid in Highschool then, and I finally 'realized' that *movies I wanted to be good, could be bad*. I literally walked up to the highest part of the theater's fire escape so that my friends couldn't hear me cry at how disappointed I was. Star Wars Episode 7 was kind of that "Oh, maybe things will get better and that spark returns", but then Episode 8 happened. Alita: Battle Angel came out and it made me open up again for that "Fun Action Movie" genre... then 2020 happened and then it all just crashed and frankly, it just felt like its been a frantic downward spiral of culture. Honestly in the TTRPG industry I really kind of feel it happening as well. Mostly anything based on PBTA or a game has a 'Playbook' just... it feels trite and corporately cookie cutter cause its like "Here's your character, you play 'our' story, you go through our story beats for 'our' image of how 'your' game go's." Obviously this is more of a 'me' problem. And I agree... I wanna play 'positive' worlds again, I wanna play refreshing scenarios.
Videos like this one are why this channel has become one of my favorites on the entire website. Great work and keep making more or don't if you don't want to and want to make me sad.
You mention Maynard, you mention Perfect Circle, then at 49:45 you basically start singing Disillusioned from Eat the Elephant. I was already a fan, no need to make the hard sell.
Was not expecting Mark Fisher to seap his way into my solo rpg time but cant say im mad. The collection of his blog K-Punk and his book ghosts of my life are two of my favorite books on my shelf
I didn't know that I needed this, that there was an explanation for how I have been feeling. Thank you for this Mr. Alone.
*_M I L L A J O V O V I C H_*
circa _1997_
has the *MULTIPASS*
to my *HEART*
...mltipass...mltipass...
Yes. Correct.
@@amanisalone No need to justify your crush on Milla. :)
Only channel where I'll watch videos twice no matter how much waffling is included just to better internalize the message. Man Alone is built different.
Not sure if you've played it but this immediately came to mind during this talk: They call this kind of thoughts and ideas the "supra-" and "infra-culture" in Disco Elysium: "We're common, the herd, the music on the radio, the food in the chain restaurant -- those are all too *popular* for the girl in the old lady rags. She prefers a fantasy world -- an infraculture with it's own dress code and vernacular. It is an illusion, I'm afraid, there is no refuge from the supraculture ... Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique* capital end up *reinforcing* it instead...."
A hot take that i have is that Baby Boomers are still the dominant force in driving american culture. They were responsible for creating great original works in the 80s, when they were young (in their 20s and 30s) and then it was revived again in the early 2000s when they would introduce their children to it (my exposure), meaning we have a double rainbow of nostalgia that executive producers now want to bottle and resell because its easy and less risky, both creatively and financially.
Thank you for your channel and the content you produce. I look forward to every episode because I know I'm going to learn something important and/or be inspired.
For the music/clothes rant,
I think, it's just harder to register new trends past a certain age. Or maybe it's easier to look backwards--i.e. remember what people wore as we were growing up and the previous generations we interacted with and either looked up to or derided for their inferior style... The new drip just looks stupid, because we're the old people noticing how stupid the trends of the youth tend to be, but aren't rose-tinted with nostalgia when observing them :P
Same with the music. The 2010s trends of, say, mumble rap (and its evolutions) and the mewling soft pop songs are a thing, but I don't hear many 40+ yearolds notice these as vividly as they recall grunge or the various post-punk movements. We're just old >:P
I shall answers the creative call! And add that I think every creative person is suffering right now from a human desire to share their creations but a lack of any real community to share it with, so those creative people smash their heads against the social media wall in hopes of breaking through and reaching their supposed “community”.
MARK FISHER MENTIONED
You need to try One-Shot Dungeon, it's super fun and super cheap, plus it only takes one hour or less to delve a dungeon then escape!
If this is a specific game, I cannot find it because "one-shot dungeon" brings up many results about generic one-shot dungeons. Do you have a link to the game?
@@anthonyhobday Took a crack at it, found it on Amazon for $5. Searching for the name there it should be the first result.
Thanks for introducing me to Mark Fisher, Man Alone.
8:52 That sounds like the way cults operate.
Video 76 of me liking and then commenting on every new upload to tell the viewers that the Man Alone Podcast is absolutely some of that sweet, unhinged audio/vocal-honey.
Psssst. *I AM REPEATING THE SAME QUESTION FROM LAST EPISODE BECAUSE I LIKE IT AND NOBODY ANSWERED IT*
Lets play a little RPG exercise. The RPG is completely based around the Player Character existing in a world driven by an insane SUBJECTIVE Morality. What would be the Subjective Morality your character might live by? Dive as deep into the answer as you’d like. My character would be driven by an absolute NEED to have the most exotic grass on the planet. They would spend their life researching grass. Learning how to cross-breed it. Learning how to change its colors. Learning how to implement it into other aspects of daily life. They would try to convert others around them to become members of the Grass Life Society, which is broken into multiple factions, such as: Children of the Dew, Purveyors of the Blade, etc.
I didn't even see this one! I love this question!! My character would never lie completely flat. He can recline, sit, lean, but NEVER completely flat. Until death. People try to push him to the ground ALL LE TIME
I’ve been thinking a lot about the motion from grimdark to noblebright fiction, and not trapping myself in nobledark (the rebellion).
Star Trek is one thing I truly miss, and finding our way back to that kind of vision (not revisiting it) has been on my mind.
The suicide of the lead singer of Sparklehorse hit me too, Man Alone. I am just a few years older than you and am also tired of the pillaging of nostalgia. As I get older I have to fight so hard against the temptation of lusting after the hazy memories of bygone days. Creating something new is the best way to fight it.
BTw, you made me think of something that has been on my mind for quite a while now... my nostalgia for the 90s. I don't think the decade was objectively better than others, but I was coming of age in the early 90s, still relatively carefree/without many duties or obligations. That said, there was a clear sense of optimism about the future, and more specifically about technology, that has radically changed since then. Climate change was an issue but not an inevitability; there was hope that we'd somehow get our stuff together and find the way forward. Progress and material stuff was available, but not yet overwhelming and the sole purpose of life. We still believed in (some) institutions; people still believed in government and public life. There was some progress in terms of gender and racial equality, and although it may have been too little, too late, there was a perception that society was moving in the right direction. AI and technology had not yet come to replace most jobs and people's livelihoods. There was no social media like we have today; the internet was a still relatively anarchic territory, mostly a promise, free from the financial and ideological power that truly took hold in the early 2000s. Consumerism was not widespread around the world, as it is today. It was easier to consume and think about media and culture, something that is practically impossible today. And 9/11, which changed so much in the following decade, hadn't happened yet.
I'm sure that I see the 90s through pink colored lenses, and I know my nostalgia comes from my own privileged life at the time. I'm also significantly older and have very different concerns and responsibilities today. But I miss not being so cynical and bitter about culture, politics, and society.
Farmhand #87 reporting for duty. These are my favourite videos when you touch on the meta themes. The message to create hopeful futures reminded me of the Thomas Flight's YT video "Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?" where he describes the metamodern perspective for creating movies, which is in short a constructive, positive postmodern take that doesn't just revel in deconstructing into oblivion, but into something positive that can be leaned on and built on.
2000s was post-grunge rock like Nickelback, Seether, Evanescence, etc. It was southern Hip-Hop like Ludacris and Lil Jon. Nu-Metal like Limp Bizkit and Korn.
It was the rise of reality TV stars like Paris Hilton.
The styles were like wallet chains and super baggy pants.
Spiky blonde hair on men, crimped hair on women.
The 2010s is harder to describe because of a phenomenon that i like to describe as 'culture moves on the 5's. "The 90s" culture as we know it was more 95-05. 80s was 85-95. So that makes the 2010s '15-'25. Though that one might be harder to tell because of 2020.
Either way, i think it just takes a while for the "culture" of a time period to be sifted and sorted and all the major touchstones to rise to the top. The more time that passes, the more eras get simplified into caricatures. The reason we dont see that fully with the 2000s and 2010s is because not enough time has passed.
1:40 oh yeah… I forgot I bought Carved by the Garden
I read Fisher in grad school. It was a depressing but brilliant experience.
When the Easter Eggs are the content.
Earthborne Rangers. It's a verdant future open world card game that plays like a solo rpg. It's been a nice antidote to dark future.
I actually wonder often enough whether the current trend to dread the future is just a part of a larger cycle (generations hopeful for the future followed by generations dreading it almost in spite or due to the inevitable disappointment imparted onto them from the previous generations' failed aspirations) or if the current human condition really *is* that bad, even compared to the perpetual ages of different kinds of horrible.
That being said, I am not sure the mainstream movies are a valid litmus test for the society's views, since they're driven by marketing trends, which is a completely artificial set of rules only tangentially related to the actual humanity. It's more about how corporations determine what an average human approximate would think like.
Personally, I hope this is just a part of the cycle, and we'll see a return to magical whimsy in the next couple decades :P
More guerilla gardening and Solarpunk ethos. Less corporatism and Cyberpunk ethos.
Good one Man!
Based on what you grew up on, I’m guessing we are around the same age.. I agree with a lot of what you said. One of the coolest surprises I had was refunding my sense of wonder due to SpaceX. I know Elon is divisive, but you cannot watch the booster return to earth and get caught by the tower and not start thinking about what the future might be.
First of all, get out of my head :). I've been struggling with the same thing which is one of the many reasons I've shifted focus to solo RPGs. Because there I can 'create' what's important to me.
I feel like we must be a decade apart (I’m 34) because the “styles” of the 2000s specifically is my fondest and most potent memory of that time. Nu metal, trance, the matrix, all of that is burned into my brain. y2k is even an actual 'genre/theme' for the kids nowadays.
I’m wondering if maybe it’s an age thing. When we are in our formative years, high school and then young adult, this stuff still sticks out to us and we are closer to the zeitgeist. But as we get older (at least in my experience) is really when time started to slow down for me. When all you have to time or energy to focus on is work, paying bills, and in some cases raising kids, you really start to just get stuck in your ways and next thing you know that cool new shirt you bought is now 10 years old.
I haven’t thought too much about this comment yet, just rambling my gut reactions
edit: to me it seems more like individuals have less runway to accept/view new subcultures rather than culture having less runway. but thats my naive 5 minutes of thought and i absolutely do NOT discredit all the thought that Mark Fisher put into his writing (i have also not read the book yet). This is not me debating, just philosophizing my internal thoughts. Great video so far!
im the same age and i agree, i can do the culture tracking thing until maybe 2012 then it becomes a blur as i became an adult and was too busy with my own life to try and pay attention to trends
I’m 37 and I remember back in the 90s thinking “the 80s had a distinctive style but the 90s doesn’t.” That attitude stuck with me, I don’t perceive any decade since as having a distinctive style.
To be honest, I never feel good about eating Cheetos puffy or otherwise.
White Box, w00t!
The Indiana Jones and Star Wars of the 2010’s is webcomics. Dunno about the 2020’s
Oh right, people are gonna do remakes of TTRPG content.
ngl kinda depressing.. you're not wrong but dang lol. a lot to think about now
A kind of got that 'breaking' moment when I read Eragon, and the new 'Eragon' movie came out. I was still a kid in Highschool then, and I finally 'realized' that *movies I wanted to be good, could be bad*. I literally walked up to the highest part of the theater's fire escape so that my friends couldn't hear me cry at how disappointed I was.
Star Wars Episode 7 was kind of that "Oh, maybe things will get better and that spark returns", but then Episode 8 happened.
Alita: Battle Angel came out and it made me open up again for that "Fun Action Movie" genre... then 2020 happened and then it all just crashed and frankly, it just felt like its been a frantic downward spiral of culture.
Honestly in the TTRPG industry I really kind of feel it happening as well. Mostly anything based on PBTA or a game has a 'Playbook' just... it feels trite and corporately cookie cutter cause its like "Here's your character, you play 'our' story, you go through our story beats for 'our' image of how 'your' game go's." Obviously this is more of a 'me' problem.
And I agree... I wanna play 'positive' worlds again, I wanna play refreshing scenarios.
So many actors were ruined for me on Twitter when they were afflicted with TDS.
Good video but extremely USA-centric. Which is fine, but usually your channel isn't, to quite this extent anyway.
English writers and French philosophers are too US centric?