Media that only really made sense to you during lockdown

Recently heard that Eddie Chacon is going to be playing near me in October.

It got me thinking about how much his 'Pleasure, Joy and Happiness' album got me through some of the more languid and fretful stretches of 2020.
I spent a lot of my time making playlists and mixes of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Felbm, Reuben Vaun Smith, a whole load of reflective Balearic-adjacent music that I might otherwise have not really listened to if I didn't need to spend an extraordinary amount of time by myself at home.

Likewise, I had a cathartic experience in the first weeks of lockdown playing the video game Death Stranding, where you walk solitarily across a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape delivering parcels to people living in bunkers. I won't be the first to make parallels between the moods and themes of the game with lockdown anxiety, and how spookily prophetic the designers seemed to have been.

I wonder how I'd feel about all this stuff if I had come across it at that specific time. Eddie's album is gorgeous but it's also so stripped back in every way - would I find it a bit hard work? Would I have been among the many who dismissed Death Stranding as a rather dull and disjointed "walking simulator" if I'd started playing it today?

Ted Lasso

Oooh, ooh, I'm also thinking about movies I watched during those interrimmy bits where I went to the cinema with a mask on, often by myself. One that sticks out is Memoria (2021) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul; an extremely slow-moving film (practically inert in some places), but contemplative and personal too. There was a tremendous sense of isolation in that movie that felt just-right in the context of lockdown

Wordle

Block Blast

hah, Wordle otm

remember Tiger King? nobody would give a fuck about that if it came on now

Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares

I remember being profoundly uninterested in The Mitchell and Webb Look. I completely avoided it! I caught "Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit", "Cheesoid", and "are we the baddies" on Youtube, and I thought they were funny - but even those three sketches have the same basic formula, and I had no desire to buy the show on DVD or watch any more of it.

And then of course lockdown happened and "stay indoors" had a terrible new relevance. I had a renewed respect for them. I remember thinking "well played".

I mean, obviously the sketches predated COVID by almost a decade, but still. Hundreds of years from now that minor quirk of timing won't matter.

ILX

https://images.cdn.prd.api.discomax.com/2024/02/08/a461c1fc-ced7-3b0d-9763-2e4ca83337ca.jpeg?f=jpg&q=75&w=1280&w=1200

i'm one of those stereotypical introvert homebodies for whom covid didn't change much it just made the rest of the world more like mine for a minute, so my media consumption habits didn't change at all. i started watching train cab videos during covid, but i could have discovered them at any point in the last 15 years tbh, and they're still my decadent wind-down after-dinner ritual.

Tiger King was the thing that blew up right during that first week everyone had to stay at home, it'll always be that

just thinking of the name "Carole Baskin" makes me think of placing online grocery orders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4

I watched "Dark" on Netflix over 2020-21, mostly on a small iPad in my living room while my one-year-old was napping, and the claustrophobia felt magnified by about a million billion. Unfortunately that din't stop the ending from being very silly.

music/movie reaction videos on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mBA9tNdolg

The SyFy adaptation of Brave New World which aired in 2020. Utterly trashy shit that I really don't think I would've watched all of in any other circumstances.

Ainori Love Wagon - a truly wonderful show but I don't think I have enough time to fully watch something with subtitles any more, I'm always watching shows while doing other stuff now

From Software games, tbh. Thank god for them! They made the lockdown fly by, for me

Has anybody else noticed that their memory of "things they watched during lockdown" is really hazy? Not in a "because I had COVID" way, but more like the weirdness of the experience just kinda had the brain in a state of 'half-record"?

we stayed very focused on our project of watching all 40 seasons of Survivor in 2020. we've remained fans (and i had been really into it back in the day, from 2000-2006), but the WAY of watching, binging a season almost weekly, is very distinct in my experience, and only made sense in that time. things generally were quite bleak, but in that one way, my partner and i made a sort of permanent rolling slumber party out of the year.

Watching musos I like do shaggy live performances in their basements on acoustic guitars every week. Lookin at u Bill Janowicz.

That’s real nice Doctor

Me and bf did watch every post-Season 8 Simpsons episode. Would recommend

Oh! Animal Crossing!

(tho tbf it was a game Ive played on and off for a long time anyway)

I didn’t see most of it, but I feel like the long ass Beatles thing was perfectly suited to the pandemic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film)

Mine was Sergei Bondarchuk’s 4-part “War & Peace” film series

That one where you could watch youtube with other people and comment, and anyone could change to a random channel...

Started a bit before lockdown but early days were Peak Bon Appetit, then it all blew up and I don't think I've watched five minutes of cooking-related content since the vaccines came out.