Weekend Update! (8/7/23)

Yeah that's right, I'm ordering dates the correct UK way now, fight me on this (actually Y/M/D makes more sense to me but I have never lived in this world)

With all your incredible generosity over the last few weeks I felt inspired to start doing more of these regular updates -- I was actually just straight up planning on getting a video out today but I decided to whole-ass it maybe 30% more than previously planned and now I think it's going to be more of a Tuesday/Wednesday thing. Interested in what that thing is? This is the post for you.

I'm gonna be honest that I fell off Black Mirror pretty hard not too long after the Netflix purchase. There were a lot of factors going into it and I don't think it's some sudden drop-off in quality (every season bar the first had some obvious stinkers imo, and I've always been fond of episodes like Nosedive and Hang the DJ), but in general it started to feel a little repetitive and shock-driven, with a lot of shallow beats and incredibly on-the-nose dialogue (ok Nosedive and Hang the DJ also did this). Writing that really feels like it's trying to blow your mind with its cleverness always grates on me especially when characters just start announcing themes and morals, and especially when the actual content of the story doesn't seem nearly as well-thought-out as those themes would suggest -- I think Joan Is Awful is a recent example of this, which honestly sometimes felt more like an algorithm scrape of trending tech discourse than a coherent story. But! I've always had a kind of fondness for the ambition of the show and I can't deny Charlie Brooker has done a lot of things I enjoy, so a couple weeks ago I checked back in on the new season to see how it was going.

Then episode 2 was just about the Netflix Dahmer thing.

OK there was a little more going on but it really does feel like direct commentary on that whole controversy, a pretty explicit condemnation of corporate callousness with regard to the treatment of victims in tragedies and the families of those victims. And I was definitely not expecting it considering Black Mirror is, you know, a Netflix product. Surprisingly I've seen little discussion of this, which seems wild because honestly the premise of that sounds like something from either a webcomic parody or some kind of dystopian fiction. So I figured, for a lot of reasons, I was pretty primed to broach the subject.

I think there's a very muddy conversation to be had about the interaction between human interest and ethics, with true crime being a type of media and fandom that very often meddles in that grey area. Profit, for obvious reasons, is not especially guided by ethics especially in the streaming media context where controversy inevitably generates instant attention and engagement -- in a lot of ways, it's almost counter-intuitive to spend time and effort avoiding insensitivity or adding nuance to a particular work, and that's definitely something I've become well aware of in a social media context where drama content is so prevalent and often lucrative (this video was my best performing in months for several days, until people realised I wasn't actually doing callout content lol). It's a topic I've been thinking about a lot and I think this will be a good avenue to dive more into this, and a lot of other things related to corporate greed and hypocrisy.

So yeah! That's the weekend update. Like I say, I'm hoping to have it out by Wednesday at the latest. Also I think this will be my 100th video on the channel. Also this is probably my last video in the attic. Also it's Brit's birthday next week so say please say happy birthday to Brit 

Catch yall on the flipside

xoxoxo