Is culture/fashion in a permanent holding pattern?

I was born in 1986, so I grew up through the 90's. A decade which had a distinct look and feel to it, through fashion and interior decor and a certain ethos in the music. Of course I also grew up watching stuff from the past, obviously you kinda just watched what was on TV back then, and you could tell pretty quickly approximately what era something was from just by how people were dressed, not to mention the music. 50s/60s/70s/80s period pieces were everywhere and quickly identifiable as such.

I think the 00's had its own vibe too - Malcolm in the Middle feels very authentic in how people actually dressed back then and what their houses looked like (at least, if you were lower-middle class). Alt-rock, emo, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, dance punk, Adult Swim-type humor, South Park and Family Guy...all that stuff was very pervasive. Obviously the internet was around but it was its own certain zone of humor. Things that went viral were spoken of as being "from the internet", for instance.

What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far. Certainly there are folks born in 2006 who may one day attend a "10s night" at a bar, but what exactly are the signifiers of that decade? Black Eyed Peas and LMFAO? "Blurred Lines"? It feels like we've entered an era where pop culture has truly started to eat itself, everything is a reference to something else, not that the 90's were innocent of this sort of thing but at least there was this sense that things were getting combined or recontextualized in new ways, now (as a big ILX thread says) it feels like so much of pop culture is just empty fan service, where "80's" isn't an influence but rather the entire exercise. It's been discussed many times over here but there seems to be so little new these days. What will people remember from this decade? Is there an actual "fashion" of the 20's that I'm not seeing? To me people dress the same as they did 20 years ago. Is there some graphic design trend I'm missing that's showing up on album covers that people will look back on and say, "that's so 20's"?

Is there an explanation for this? Did the limitations of technology dictate the look and style of things to a far larger degree than we may think? Did the internet kill the monoculture from which things like this would spring forth? Am I just getting old and not noticing the things happening right under my nose?

I read a book within the past few months that spent many pages making the same point...think it might have been Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses; that it's hard to look at a photo from the '90s forward and ID the decade, whereas that's pretty easy from the '20s through the '80s.

idk photo filters are a pretty specific 2020s aesthetic?

The album covers trend would probably be 'wordless'/just a striking image.

W. David Marx's Status and Culture gets into this.

(xxpost) He meant more the content of the photos--hair, the way people dressed, etc.

see I would argue that filters are in fact fashion, and part of the "way people dress"!

see also: the duck lip look

Cursed AI images are probably the mark of the '20s. Like there will be people in 2050 putting pictures of people with extra fingers on their album covers.

Not at home right now, but later tonight will try to find a quote from the book relevant to this thread.

https://snkrdunk.com/en/magazine/2024/06/21/why-so-many-people-are-wearing-crocs-now/

xxp like Eno says, the failings of today's technology becomes the aesthetic of the future

As far as general culture goes, young people in the 2020s seem waaaaaaaaaaay more politically aware than they were in the 90s. That may just be the ones I see though.

Yeah but this is all online stuff, "aesthetics" are a big thing (cottagecore etc)- but if you were to look at a photo or tv show from 20 years ago, there'd be very little you coild point to and say "Yes that is definitely 2005" unless they were wearing, I dunno, shutter shades and emo hair which only a handful of people did. It's not the same as even when I was at school in the eighties and nineties and my friends and I would giggle at 70s fashion with the bellbottoms and big hairstyles from only about 10 years before

Filters etc aren't that different from the quality of photos, like that saturated look you got from Polaroids back in the day. It's definitely an indicator of the time, but it's more an indicator of tech than a conscious aesthetic choice

xpost I dunno, the broccoli hairdos are probably not going to age well.

We must have had a thread or two to this effect ten or fifteen years ago, so maybe the answer is yes. Not to attack the thread.

I stand by my Crocs link ;)

specifically I'm thinking about The Office which is about as old now as Cheers was when I was watching re-runs of that - Cheers very much felt "of another era" in a way The Office doesn't - people still look and dress like that

I've been working at colleges for 20 years and I don't see much difference in the way the students dress over that time. If anything it's just more casual, or people dress like they're on the way to gym.

didn't help that all of the 32 year olds on Cheers looked 60

Just pulled the W. David Marx book off the shelf. He says that cultural stasis has to do with the reduced status value of contemporary cultural output, as the internet and global supply chains have reduced barriers to information and acquisition.

A few excerpts:

The inherent high speed of the internet ... disrupts traditional fashion cycles. Elite groups need time to be the sole adopters of an innovation for it to gain cachet. For most of the twentieth century, slow fashion cycles meant high-status innovations could elude media discovery for at least a few months, if not years. Early adopters took a while to figure out how to emulate, and manufacturers needed time to make copies for mass consumption. Fashion relied on social friction to slow down the diffusion process, which allowed elites to look sincere and authentic in adoption -- a gradual lifestyle upgrade rather than a flashy attempt at status distinction. This entire system is upturned by light-speed information flows on the internet.

In the twentieth century the use of culture in status struggles resulted in a constant stream of new artifacts, styles, and sensibilities -- all injected with cachet, which allowed them to influence mass culture. On the internet, there are more things, but fewer arrive with clear and stable status value. At an unconscious level, this affects our judgments of intrinsic quality: films, songs, and books without status value just aren't as rewarding as their predecessors. As part of our desire for status, we chase status value. And so if niche culture lacks status value, many have fled the long tail to return to the head.

To be very clear, this doom and gloom is not about the artistic quality of internet-era content. We live in a paradise of options, and the diminished power of gatekeepers has allowed more voices to flourish. The question is simply whether internet content can fulfill our basic human needs for status distinction. Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused. When a trend evaporates as a cultural fad, there may not be enough collective memory for it take on historical value, either.

In hindsight, retromania appears to have been a response to the plummeting cachet of contemporary culture. Between virality, a destruction of barriers to information and access, the celebration of simple nouveau riche aesthetics, and a rejection of taste, inventions haven't taken on as much status value as in the past. Meanwhile, we feel more pressure to be 'authentic,' which raises the bar for switching to new things. Before we consider adoption, new styles must prove they aren't fads -- and they're mostly fads. With contemporary status value on the wane, historical value rises to the fore. The reliable past is more useful for crafting personas than an ephemeral present.

I think it takes time to see what is outdated and emblematic about a past decade. I don't think anyone in the 1990s would have used La Croix packaging as a prime design example from that decade.

I've noted before that it's kinda weird that so many pop stars have been around for so long-- Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Drake--all on the charts now--debuted in the 00s. Plus so many 2010s artists like Kendrick, the Weeknd, Post Malone, Selena Gomez. Feels like there's not a lot of room for new breakthroughs.

Yeah, stuff crystallizes and is then considered to represent the era from a distance, with neither the view from the present nor from far away entirely accurate, probably. Also seems that the far away view of the past has some inherent societal need for everyone to agree on a few things. I guess cos easier than everyone actually forming an individual memory which would prevent collective discussion.

xpost

Cursed AI images are probably the mark of the '20s. Like there will be people in 2050 putting pictures of people with extra fingers on their album covers.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Tuesday, 1 April 2025 bookmarkflaglink

By 2050 we'll have an extra finger.

Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused.

It's hard for me to see this as a very negative effect in that it's hard to imagine actual harm to anyone arising from there being fewer fashion trends.

I'm not quite sure about those W. David Marx extracts: he seems to see all culture through the lens of "basic human needs for status distinction" and "status value". That feels a bit reductive and too simplistic.

Thanks for the reminder to read Status and Culture. Since it's an ebook on my laptop I kinda forgot about it.

It does seem like AI is only going to continue reinforcing the dominance of big legacy monoculture IP, everything being regurgitated endlessly.

the thing is AI can only barf out things from the past, if it's going to continue to produce an increasingly higher and higher percentage of content then culture can't really "evolve" beyond past trends

what about k-pop?

Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused.

This line does seem particularly ridiculous... It's like a mainstream economist, who is used to taking about benefits of the diffusion of innovation in the economy from new technologies and new products, suddenly moving onto covering fashion without thinking about what he is saying.

It was the Kurt Andersen book--came to mind as soon as I read the thread's original post. Was able to find a preview page online. "A fixed backward gaze"...

https://i.postimg.cc/K8Kb5J7p/kurt-1.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/8zqSXMtp/kurt-2.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/hj0RGwgv/kurt-3.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/brCXxtZj/kurt-4.jpg

Sorry if that's too large, but it won't be readable otherwise.

maybe Philip K. Dick was right and we are still living in the Roman Empire

k-pop feels like if the US had sent a Voyager-type probe to another continent in 1998 and filled it with the current hit records and then 20 years later we received an answer probe back filled with BTS and BLACKPINK songs

there's some great new pop music like that, stuff heavily influenced by say Seal and "Steal My Sunshine" and the brief era when Big Beat was cool, it doesn't feel nostalgic so much as it feels like a glimpse into an alternate present where a different set of trends carried on and were built upon

I think the 00's had its own vibe too...What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far.

No surprise--clearly related to age. Kurt Andersen is 70, I'm 63; frogs turns 49 sometime this year. I'm good through the '90s at differentiating; the '00s are indistinguishable for me from the '10s or '20s.

I'm exactly the same with music and film; everything this century blurs together, everything before I have a strong sense of each decade.

In search of a calculator...frogs turns 39 this year.

00s for me are freak folk, CDr releases, New Weird America, etc, but I can't really think of specific fashion, just a mishmash of the Arthur magazine/Eclipse Records catalog/Aquarius aesthetic I guess

Fashion def doesn't look like the '10s or '00s to me, but it feels more like anything goes now, there are trends but it's also like 'pick your era' and it works.

(I'm not super fashionable but I work with a lot of younger people)

xp

It's really had to see how much this is a real problem, because people have been complaining about it for so long. I take it the passage from W. David Marx (thanks for that! must investigate) is responding to Simon Reynolds. In an interesting roundtable about Retromania, Carl Wilson says,

But even just to deal with the music listener’s experience, it’s always been the case that if you look closely enough at any “new” music you can identify the constituent parts. And the older you are, the more prone you are to do so. Simon underestimates how all the skill and knowledge he’s built up (and possibly the aging brain’s decreasing circuits for novelty) might cause him to pick music apart almost involuntarily, and how that makes less and less sound new. No doubt there were people in the early 1970s who heard the Stooges and said, “Well, that’s just the Velvet Underground plus a little Doors and Eddie Cochran,” or what have you? But for punk that band was foundational.

As far as general culture goes, young people in the 2020s seem waaaaaaaaaaay more politically aware than they were in the 90s. That may just be the ones I see though.

i definitely see a 'look' among younger people fwiw. gap ad neutral colors, baggy fits (skinny jeans are way way out), crew socks, broccoli hair, mom jeans. i hate it and that's ok.

Thrifting has reached a pinnacle I haven’t seen in my lifetime - I work w a lot of young ppl too (as coworkers and students) and the cache of secondhand clothing surpasses almost anything new afaict. It helps that baggy fit is in bc nothing is going to fit perfectly from the thrift anyway (at least rarely)
DIY clothing too — this has always been cool imo but it’s more widely recognized as such currently afaict.

The popularity of sustainable clothing choices also ensures that old things will be put together in new ways.

Incidentally I’ve also seen two male students get perms! You thought that dies in the 80s and you were wrong!

Oops *died

!!

mullets are hip again too, I have observed this at egg punk shows

also?
one word: mustaches

i have never in my life -- not even in the actual 70s/80s -- seen so many mustaches on young people

i mean sure people make VIDEOS and PODCASTS about a lot of stuff but videos and podcasts don't matter sorry i don't make the rules

What is there to write about menswear?

I prefer writing about men not wearing anything myself.

From what I can tell the things that get written about are:

Taylor Swift
Female singers not quite as popular as Taylor Swift
Some actor who is handsome
Hollywood people who are suing each other or divorcing
A tv show that is hot right now
a movie that will come out in a year or two

Those are apparently the things that matter

don't forget about the "crisis of masculinity"

Has culture really been flattened by algorithms? Aside from being the usual overstatement based on one person's tiny window onto the arts, seems like blaming guns for shootings.

I certainly see how you can just sink into a specific interest and be fed endless content. My son is into Minecraft, and the algorithm gives him videos where people play Minecraft, make movies inside Minecraft, design the Stranger Things universe in Minecraft, etc. Plus all his friends are consuming and talking about the same content. Seems hard to break out of.

you get a second interest and the videos start showing up for that, too

back in my childhood you got one video game a year and had to make do

Posting here to avoid derailing the "Lola" thread -- "Celluloid Heroes" always reminds me of our current permanent cultural holding pattern when I think how it was written in 1972, only 25 or so yrs since the events described, but due to the pace of culture back then its obviously possible for it to sound like he's reaching back into the mists of a long-ago era. But with the current permanent holding pattern of culture that we're stuck in, it would sound absolutely insane to write that song with the same timeframe now: "Don't step on Tom Green / as you walk past TRL studios..."

I dunno about that! To start with "Celluloid Heroes" goes back to the silent era, Monroe I think the most recent actress mentioned and in that died young club that brings you into another sphere (no one would be surprised by a song namedropping Kurt Cobain, surely?).

TRL obviously lacks the cultural cachet old Hollywood had but for anyone younger than millenial it is probably as much of a foreign country: no smartphones, no social media, watching music videos on the television instead of youtube, hell, we were only transitioning to video games being on disc rather than cartridges. CD-Roms! CDs! No one even knew who Obama was yet, Beyonce was just a singer in a girl group.

I think it's always hard to disentangle the holding pattern hypothesis from just us getting old, but in this instance I do think that's the situation.

"1999" is a song by British singer Charli XCX and Australian singer Troye Sivan, released as the lead single from the former's third studio album Charli on 5 October 2018.[5] The single cover was inspired by the 1999 film The Matrix.[5]

"2002" is a song by English singer and songwriter Anne-Marie from her debut studio album Speak Your Mind (2018).[1] It was released on 20 April 2018, as the sixth single from the album, 7 days before the album's release. She co-wrote the song with fellow English singer Ed Sheeran, alongside Julia Michaels, Benny Blanco, and its sole producer, Steve Mac. Other people officially credited as co-writers are Andreas Carlsson, George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic, El and Randy DeBarge, Jay E, Ice-T, Etterlene Jordan, Kristian Lundin, Max Martin, Nelly, Alphonso Henderson, Jake Schulze, and City Spud, due to co-writing or being sampled on one of the songs referenced in the chorus.

And then we think of Prince 1999! The numbers are terrifying!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Year_2525

Shit, even in the past this has been a huge problem.

well "1999" is an interesting example! most of the references in that are to music. I can imagine a modern version of "Celluloid Heroes" with pop stars that would have the same gravitas - Cobain, Britney, etc, legends of the past that are currently revered. but in terms of film, its hard for me to think of stars from that era who are remembered with the same gravitas - it seems like its all people who are still currently famous or fully forgotten by under-40s. Like with the Matrix, Keanu is arguably more successful than he's ever been with the umpteen John Wick movies. I struggle to think of film stars back then who would work as equivalent references to invoking Bogart or Bette Davis in 1972. sure theres 90s/00s nostalgia now, but "Celluloid Heroes" is doing a different thing than just making pop culture references.

(idk "2002" but looking at the cowriters it seems like its a safe bet that the references are mostly music stuff)

Reading the lyrics to Celluloid Heroes, and most of the references are much older than 25 years. Rudolph Valentino died in 26, and I don't know if he was a household name in 72 either. It would be more people like River Phoenix / John Cazale today.

Also, Mickey Rourke was still a major star in 72. He got nominated for an Oscar in 80!

i mean i'm splitting hairs but Valentino and Garbo are the only ones that didnt work in the 50s iirc? (garbo by choice, RV not so much.) the locus of nostalgia seems focused on the 40s/50s to me, when Monroe, Davis, Rourke, & Sanders were either at their absolute peaks of fame or slightly past but still making films that were big parts of their respective legacies. i mean i get that its a stretch, i'm mostly having a laff at the sub-SNL premise of Celluloid Heroes with dumb 90s references but still

*rooney not rourke, Frederik you got me mixing up my Mickeys

Oh lol, I made that mistake once, noticed it, promptly made it again.

The switch from B&W to color was probably made stars of decades past feel more distant even in the 70s.

honestly i think that might be 100% what i'm grasping at, i forget all about what a massive break with the past that must have felt like

I don't think any era of American cinema had the level of iconicity of classic Hollywood (20's to 50's), it's the golden age for a reason - the star system, the studio system, this whole ecosphere that everybody was connected to. Even a song about New Hollywood with refs to De Niro, Hoffman, etc. wouldn't have the same charge, because they didn't exist within that kind of system (a song about 80's Hong Kong cinema, though, would be a perfect comparison point).

I used those two examples as a quick throwaway. But also having worked in a vintage shop around Halloween, the amount of men that want to look like Brad Pitt in fight club is astounding. The nostalgia is still there.

my daughter recently told me about an enraged fan on social media complaining about the current stage production of Legally Blonde because "it's a period movie"

Re iconicity

Let us also recall that old Hollywood happened when there were a lot fewer other entertainment options competing for people's attention (tv, internet etc.)

Imagine you're in a town with one movie theater and it plays one movie at a time, almost everyone in town will see that movie or hear about it; experiences more people hold in common become monoculture; scarcity causes more people to hold experiences in common.

Like how in the 15th century, everybody read the same books because there were fewer books, and fewer people could read.

A 50s BBC radio show featuring a ventriloquist's dummy (Archie Andrews) had 15 million listeners. A radio show, mind you; you couldn't see the puppet or the ventriloguist.

A similar phenomenon burnishes our memory of the tv shows we watched in the 70s - there were three stations so almost everyone watched what was on.

I often think about how back then if you didn't catch a movie in the theater, you probably never saw it again. I know rep theaters were always a thing in cities, but elsewhere, no. Definitely not where I grew up. Movies on regular TV, pre-HBO etc always felt old. I feel like anytime I read a story of someone in the 70s catching a movie on TV it's like 1930s/40s/50s. It's not from a couple years before.

Hammer films screenwriter Jimmy Sangster used to have this thing in interviews with Hammer scholars/nerds where they'd point out some plothole. He would ask if they noticed it on first viewing, answer was usually no. "Well" he'd then reply "we didn't expect anyone to see these movies twice".

Back then cinemas showed different films, though. You needed a print of a new film, and the distributors wouldn't make a print for every cinema. So if you lived in a town with one movie theater, chances are you'd only see the film you heard about on the radio/read about in the magazines, months later. At least, that's what I gather.

You could absolutely write a song about hugely important iconic 80s/90s actors, and how they are looked at very different today. Cosby, Spacey, Depp, etc. It's just a very different song...

I grew up in the 80s in a town that had one single screen cinema and a lot of movies would be shown a few weeks or months after they'd been released. There were exceptions and it was often a big deal. When 'Ghostbusters' came out in 1984 it was shown in our local cinema the same month and it seemed like most of the town were talking about going to see it. A similar thing happened later with 'Days Of Thunder' in 1990, it was like, oh wow a big movie that's not 3-4 months old. IIRC the cinema dropped the ball on showing 'Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves' and it was shown months after hype was over, even after the Bryan Adams single was no longer #1.

Majorairbro, a lot of us only saw old movies in televised form, so you had one shot a year at Wizard of Oz / Gone with the Wind / Casablanca / It's a Wonderful Life. If you missed it you missed it. Until next year.

And Gone with the Wind wasn't even shown on TV until 1976. Although that was a film that used to get regularly re-released to theaters. "Newer" films from the '60s and '70s would often take 6-7 years to get their broadcast TV debut, e.g. Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate weren't shown until 1973 (highly edited, of course).

maybe we've just gotten over hagiographic nostalgia bullshit

one of the thing that interests me... i've been digging into this archive of "w/o/c" recordings, people taping movies off tv. the stuff people taped back in the early days... the earliest one is a new year's eve broadcast of "it's a mad mad mad mad world" - not the only off-air recording of it from the 1970s! i have to think it must have been a much more popular film to show on TV. the way i remember my own past is, when i go back to primary sources, often much different from how it actually was. and yes, by the way, one of the _first_ things one discovers watching old recordings is that Bill Cosby is fucking _everywhere_.

god, i remember as a kid thinking the Garbage Pail Kids movie was a "banned" movie because it was only in theaters for one week... the truth of course being was that it was so terrible it was immediately out of there, but my friend, who'd seen it, was very much on the "THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH" train.

I love that. "The man is trying to suppress the truths being spoken by NEW WAVE DAVE and VILE KYLE!"

My wife recently watched something taped from MTV and said the experience was really jarring because our standards for what to watch / how to watch have shifted.

We're annoyed when we can't skip an ad on YouTube or whatever - we used to get 12 minutes an hour of unskippable advertising AND WE LIKED IT.

The Margo Robbie/Gondry/Chanel/Kylie ad came up on a few of my feeds, in spaces populated by credulous poptimists. I’d hold off on calling it a genuine vibe shift, but the overwhelming sentiment in the comments was along the lines of “SICK OF THIS FUCKING *WINK/NOD* REMAKE SHIT.”

i know what those individual words mean

Yeah, I used to watch Return of the Jedi over and over in the nineties on a taped vhs copy, the image quality was rubbish and it was interrupted by commercials. These days it's on Disney+ in a much better quality, but I won't watch it because they redid the Sarlacc.

i mean there's all kinds of shit i _could_ be watching but why bother? it'll still be there in the morning. i just watched the first eight minutes of "death promise" and i got bored and now i'm going to do nothing. i was talking to a friend who was upset about being left out of The Discourse, and i'm just like, what discourse? what's to _talk_ about? it's not like i go into the office and have a nice cup of coffee and talk with co-workers about what was on the teevee last night. i roll out of bed and say "oh god not this again". something happens and within two hours everybody on social media has "analyzed" it to death in 50 word chunks. plus, there's always new people discovering stuff, which is great except that you'll just sporadically have conversations break out about, say, the "locked tomb" series, and i have nothing new to say about it. i can just repeat the same stuff i said last time. the very idea of "newness", of something that's _collectively_ new, feels absurd. instead we have reaction videos of gen z people listening to "pet sounds". i'm very happy for them! who wants to see a video of a 50 year old lady listening to Angine de Poitrine for the first time? nobody, gen z people are, rightly, totally unconcerned about my aesthetic tastes, and most of our contemporaries...

"stuck in a permanent holding pattern", haha, i had a discussion with a friend yesterday about whether ea-nasir memes are "niche". if you're a certain kind of Online you might be invested in them, but it's not something i can have a _conversation_ about. i can't go into the local shop and say to the person at the counter "hey, you see the latest ea-nasir meme?" it's probably the most "mainstream" thing i can talk about, though!

My wife recently watched something taped from MTV and said the experience was really jarring because our standards for what to watch / how to watch have shifted.

We're annoyed when we can't skip an ad on YouTube or whatever - we used to get 12 minutes an hour of unskippable advertising AND WE LIKED IT.

Not only that, but they were so repetitive: when I watch episodes of MST3k ripped from original broadcast tapes, and I'll see the same commercials several times over the course of the 2 hour running time.

Should be pointed out "watch with ads" is getting popular again - Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Yeah, I used to watch Return of the Jedi over and over in the nineties on a taped vhs copy, the image quality was rubbish and it was interrupted by commercials.

Well us real heads watched the movies while taping, pausing so no commercial breaks would make it in. 8)

You can still have that experience on Tubi, where a two-hour movie will have four or five ad breaks, all featuring the exact same ads.

xp

Much easier to get through ad breaks now anyway now that we have our little distraction machines.

Well us real heads watched the movies while taping, pausing so no commercial breaks would make it in. 8)

lol i remember watching movies & my sibling would have the remote & be in charge of taping it, and i would get so annoyed if they didnt bother to pause for the commercials. like dont you understand that your decision about this tape will have ramifications for years to come???

I forget why, but my family wasn't at home any of the nights the trilogy was sent. My dad messed up the programming of the recording of A New Hope and recorded a Michael Jackson documentary instead. So I've seen A New Hope twice and the other two hundreds of times, probably. Physical media was crazy.

I'd love it if Tubi had a randomizer function or something to simulate the feeling of just turning the tv on for the background noise without having to make a decision about what to watch. Of course, there would also need to be some kind of filter so you weren't faced with having to watch fuckin' Dog The Bounty Hunter or something

you can do this on Pluto— there are actually music video channels that mimic MTV in a weird way. came home yesterday and was like “husband, why are you watching the video for Glass Tiger’s “Someday”?

Thanks! I'll check it out. I always forget about Pluto. I know they at least have "live" channels for particular shows, so if you really did want to binge on, I dunno, Matlock, you can