I'm a Noah Antwiler and Linkara guy now.

I went from Steam Powered Giraffes to Homestuck to the expanded Nostalgia Critic Universe

Lindsay Ellis is too competent at what she does now and even was back then so there's less appeal for me.

There was something awful and dumb and beautiful and honest about the pre youtube dominance nerd review culture that was largely propelled by earnesty and a desire to connect. The Nostalgia critic wasnt an example of this but those who he worked with were.

The humor and attitude is 'cringe' now but these people wanted to engage with art and talk about it and were of an old nerd personality that we all effectively killed with our cocaine and omocat shirts.

No disrespect to Omocat of course, their work changed the game for a reason.

I never watched any of this shit back then and honestly the minutia that seperates the angry video game nerd's earnestness and the nostalgia critic's arrogance is fascinating. Doug walker is an amoral man and a terrible critic at best, but has a certain x factor charisma

And much like a daily show or a colbert report, the most successful of these critics (as do the podcast hosts and such of today) are selling a personality over a criticism. I will say there are exceptions, like modern lindsay ellis stuff.

She was one of the only 'real critics' of the bunch and I'm glad that her eschewing the nerd culture veneer has resulted in so much success for her.

I'm not trying to learn about any one thing but instead the pathos of the last era of real nerdery, which died by the early 2010s

These people are still alive and nersy of course, and often when i go to cons or something i much prefer going to their 11am sunday panels about rintaro than i do railing adderal in a hotel bathrooom

But i think that strain of nerdom has in large plateud and will die with them

Watching all these nerds yell about what they love and make awkward and cringy videos together and knowing at the time 10s of 1000s of people ate it up, no clout no cool just love, the content is bad but what drove it was a certain disappeared magic.

Of course the cringe stain is one thing, but all of this being spearheaded by Doug Walker and Channel Awesome, a man who didnt care and a notoriously bad entity to work with, makes reflecting on whatever good was in all this very difficult

This thread is for no one but me btw, needed to manifest a culmination of my instanity watching somewhere. i finished the sopranos and no tv show was gonna be better than that, what else was i gonna do with my pandemic than this?