In Search Of Missing Time

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve mentioned before that there is a wild theory on youtube that we somehow stopped in… the early oughts. I think. Or maybe the nineties.

Look, I wasn’t paying attention, there were cats, and furthermore there probably are theories about every decade since the nineties.

The idea is crazy — though perhaps slightly less crazy than Phillip K. Dick’s idea that time stopped in the first century A.D. and we’ve been hallucinating everything this — but what they are seeing is true. It’s just not attributable to time effects, of course.

The reason they’re convinced this happened is that you can look at pictures of the last century, you can tell which decade it is… until around the 2000s.

Now all fashions blend, people dress however and they are incapable of telling what decade they’re in. Therefore, time must have stopped. Right?

Nonsense.

The entire “look” of the decades, the things that were popular in each, etc. etc., all that was a creation not of time but of mass media, a unified centralized means of communication, and, of course, the fashion industry.

What fracture was not time but the centralized, unified voice from above dictating what we must all now wear, believe, concentrate on.

In its place we have decentralized, individual decisions, views, looks, and of course, individual experiences reported by individuals. We have the ability to hear first hand accounts and decide for ourselves.

Sure, are there influencers, and fads? Social media mobs and general insanity?

Sure. Sure there are. But they’re not unified. And those who stick out, who have different opinions and who can back them up don’t have to feel isolated, alone, or like they are the last person who sees things differently.

I know it is tempting to imagine that the world was better when everyone was “unified.” And part of the feeling we have is because that unified world, by and large, was the world of our childhoods, before we became aware that we were being told lies, or that there were reasons to dissent. Of course as Odds we were perhaps always a little odd man out, but it was comforting having a unified something to rebel against.

And I know for a fact — because I’ve hit it — that having to decide everything for yourself can get overwhelming and you can get decision fatigue. I also know from observation (because of course I’m forever young) that as one gets older one wants some certainties to lean into and not to have to reevaluate things every day and every hour.

On the other hand, that was a false paradise, and it was always oppressive. No? Look how FDR managed to hold on to his image as a wonderful person who saved us from the depression, how it all filtered into the history books. Look how easy it was in the sixties for the media and a centralized intelligentsia to upend everything when it pleased them. And to — objectively — used that to defeat our own country’s military might by convincing people the war was lost.

It’s different now. If the media had had the control it once had — oh, even in the nineties — they’ve have managed to convince people that Obama really was that amazing, a genius for the ages, and probablyt hat he should have a third and fourth terms.

Heck, if the centralized media and opinion makers had the control they once had they wouldn’t have needed to throw everything they had at making people scared. They had to lock the entire nation up and fool most of the world in order to install… Biden. And then it all turned to ashes and dust in their mouths, because of course the world didn’t work the way they wanted it to, and they couldn’t keep their lies up once people started breaking free of the fear.

And for this they burned all their credibility and what remained of their power.

So now? No unified everything. Time is fine. It’s the fake unified vision that is gone.

And we have to make decisions and choose our own path by ourselves, amid differing social media spells, foreign trolls, falsely inflated influencers and all that.

On the other hand: we can make decisions. We can choose.

Places like this exist. Places like this blog exist, and I don’t know about you, but it kept me alive — I won’t say sane — through the mass-insanity of 2020.

And we can elect people that the elite despises (I might or might not have have spent a very cheering evening recently watching the media react to the election results in 2024. I never claimed to be nice.)

What’s a little disagreement or crazy people being afraid of time having stopped when you get to make up your mind and choose your own path. And most of all know you’re not alone.

The certainties of the past are gone. And it’s not going to be all beer and skittles. OTOH we have a chance at building the future.

Sursum corda. Be not afraid.

According To Hoyt Annual Fundraiser

This will be going on until the eighteenth of July.

This is the reason for doing a fundraiser. THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. Don’t hurt yourself.

If you read this blog a few times a week and feel like donating, I’m tremendously grateful.

If you read this blog and don’t feel like donating, that’s fine too.

If you wish you could donate but can’t, consider buying one of my books (hopefully a bunch coming out starting next month… Yeah, i am better) and if you like it leaving a review. If you’ve read my books and enjoyed them, consider leaving a review. If you can — and have something you know well — consider sending me a guest post to give me a “free day.” (No guarantees of acceptance, of course.)

I’d like to say I’m doing better and will be better at following through on rewards. But I still have them pending from other years, because the last four years have been a slow upward battle. I am better, but I’m not adding to that backlog. (Though I’ll continue trying to fulfill promises long overdue.)

For this year, I’ll (merely) give you ways to donate.

The Give Send Go is still active. Lately I’ve gotten more disenchanted with them, though. Not only have they hosted fundraisers for the kid who stabbed the track star through the heart, but there was some appearance of encouraging racialist bs. True or not? Don’t know. Haven’t looked that closely. Still, that and the fact they calculate how much of the raised money you actually get in some weird way makes them less than shiny.

So, what else is there? Well, there is paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)


So, here’s the paypal link.

While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:

Sarah A. Hoyt

Goldport Press

304 S Jones Blvd #6771

Las Vegas, NV  89107

(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out antoher place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)

Please, please, please do not send Indy a multi-tool. I realize this is probably futile pleading, but he’s enough trouble as it is. No, seriously. If you want me to have time to write, don’t send Indy a multitool.

And that’s it for now. A heartfelt thank you to anyone who contributes, thinks about contributing or (“merely”) leaves a nice review on one of my books.

Every little bit helps, said the old lady– wait…. ahem. … I wouldn’t do that in the ocean!

Seriously, every review, every book buy, every donation: it all helps keeping me doing what I do. So, thank you.

165 thoughts on “In Search Of Missing Time”

  1. Fun fact: À la recherche du temps perdu (which in English would be In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust, holds the Guinness world record for longest novel at 9,609,000 characters: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/longest-novel

    Other fun fact: the French word for what we call French toast is pain perdu, “lost bread”. French bread is meant to be eaten the day it’s baked: by a day or two after it’s baked, it gets hard as a rock and is pretty much inedible. Unless, that is, you dip it in a mixture of egg and milk and fry it lightly in the pan.

    Combining those two facts, I once joked that before Marcel Proust wrote his famous novel, he wrote a slightly less-famous novel in which he searched high and low through all of France for the French toast recipe that his grandmother used to serve him when he was five years old, and which was (in his opinion) the best French toast recipe in the entire world. He called that novel À la recherche du pain perdu.

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    1. We just got back from the restaurant, checking on a minor disaster involving an indoor rain shower. I’m not sure I have the energy to fling carp. But you deserve one.

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        1. It turns out if you leave the AC on 70 at night a line freezes, and then it rains. Fortunately the water came down on the floor rather than the furniture, mostly, and we still had dry tables. The morning regulars and the lady who came in for takeout didn’t care, so we got them taken care of. It could have been much worse. And we are hoping to break even this month. Every month we seem to get closer. The latest tweak was extending the hours and of course as soon as we did the later arrivals dried up. So we’ll see.

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          1. The condensate drains are NOT supposed to freeze. Definitely not both of them. There are 2, right, in case the main drain gets blocked? Check the evaporator coil for, um, buildup of foreign material.

            A few years ago my tenant called and complained that the AC wasn’t working. I found that there was barely any airflow. Took off the access panel and saw the evaporator coil was solid with ice.

            “Leave it off. I’ll be back in a couple of hours after the ice melts.”

            A few hours later I peeled off the 1/8″ thick mat of dog hair that covered the entire coil face.

            “Well there’s your problem.”

            “Eeeww!”

            I recommended that she move the dog bed away from the air return intake.

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            1. I was staying at a B&B, and working at the desk in the room when I got rained on. I sorted out where it was coming from, put down towels, and called the innkeeper. The condensate pan had failed to drain properly, and was overflowing. She thanked me profusely for protecting the antiques, and for not making a big deal of the drip from the vent.

              The city usually ran 5-10% humidity. It was 35%, which was sufficient to fill the pan since the outflow was partly blocked by a leaf that had been rammed into the attic during a wind storm two days before.

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            2. The builders of our house, in their infinite wisdom, decided to place the AC right next to the dryer vent. We have to place some sort of block between them to keep the AC from felting up.

              Of course, there was also the time the condenser line was blocked by slugs.

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      1. There are even longer ones. There’s an Avatar: the Last Airbender fanfic on AO3 with 5.6 million words currently, and it’s still ongoing (last updated July 4, 2025) so that total is likely to climb even higher before it’s done. But yes, the definition of “novel” that the Guinness World Records org is using would almost certainly exclude fanfic.

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        1. I should add that that’s not the longest fanfic on AO3 (there’s one that’s over 10 million words), just the longest one I might conceivably be interested in reading (the one that’s over 10 million is… well, just looking at the summary and the tags I can tell it’s going to be stupid).

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      2. The B5 Alt where the Minbari never surrendered at the line? Yeah, that thing is huge (and awesome).

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  4. I have sent alms! Should hit your Goldport Press mail drop in a few days.

    In other news, RazorFist has a new rant — Joe McCarthy: Martyred By Marxism. It’s almost 2 hours long, so be warned. You won’t want to stop. Declassified documents and KGB records reveal that the government was even lousier with commies and pinkos than poor Joe’s worst nightmares.

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      1. There was a scene in Lester’s version of The Three Musketeers showing a beggar in an alley:

        “Money for a blind man, money for a blind man.”

        (D’Artagnan and Co. rush through, almost trampling him).

        “Money for a cripple. Money for a cripple.”

        (Somewhere in there he receives a small coin and mutters, “One lousy sou,” implying he’s, ah, not visually challenged after all).

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Could have been a lousy denier.

          I found it odd, somehow, that French money pre-1700 (and a bit later) was essentially the same structure as English money: 12 deniers/pennies to a sol (sou after 1700-ish) and 20 sols/shillings to a livre/pound sterling/argent.

          Why do I know this, after all these years? My daughter and family want to drag me to a RenFaire in Canby next year. We used to do RPFN in the 60s (while still at Black Point near Novato) and 70s, and her family has taken it up. I decided I did not want to be dragged, but lead.

          So I have put together a role and garb suitable to my age (dignity is right out): a composite of Cesare Borgia, had he kept his red hat, and Cardinal Richelieu. And a Cardinal would distribute alms, occasionally. So I have a bunch of little red cloth bags which will contain shiny US pennies – deniers!

          Are pennies still US Currency? Could I legally overstrike them with a punch? If I overstrike them with something weather-related, could they become climate deniers?

          Research on the buying power of money and estimated wages per occupation and time period is quite rewarding, I think.

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          1. The problem with the RenFaire for us is that it’s every bloody weekend in June, it is ridiculously popular and makes us late for service until we finally remember that it’s the bloody renFaire, go a different way, and I’m frankly not thrilled with all the young girls pretending (or actually being) a whole rainbow of tarts (sans carts). Don’t need to give our young man ideas!

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Speaking for my younger self, no one needed to give my younger self ideas. The turbocarbonated hormones of TeenMe did just ducky.

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            1. Shiny copper-plated zinc is fine to throw to the (notional) poor/peasantry. And, cheaper than any ‘play money’ made of metal – so it throws and clinks.

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          3. Black Point was the *best* for a Ren Faire location. When it sold out from under them, I heard people complaining that they didn’t file the proper lease paperwork to keep it, but I suspect that the developers would have found a way to get the property regardless, given the cost of housing in the Bay Area and how pretty the location is. I’ve never made it down to Casa de Fruta to go to the current one, just too far to make a decent day trip.

            I did take a friend to it once when just after Black Point, when it was down by the lake area in Novato. I told her to bring cash because the ATMs often went down, so she did—in gold dollar coins. Brilliant.

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            1. IIRC they had it once or twice (or three times, I looked up) at the Nut Tree property in Vallejo; one of those was the last one my family went to. Too flat, not enough trees.

              I’ve used Sacagawea ‘gold’ coins before, but at current prices I’d need a porter and a chest to carry enough to buy anything at the Faire. And using ‘gold’ to pay for a tankard of ale would be pretty far out of period for the notional early 1600s.

              Worked well to tip the performers at the Oceano Melodrama!

              .999 silver rounds of an ounce are around $40+, so half-ounce should be about $20 and tenths should be around $4, but there’s a huge premium on the smaller sizes. I have some anyway, for the novelty value, and the “good heavens, did you know my dad had this …?!?” effect when it’s discovered in my safe.

              And of course, silver rounds are not currency, so a vendor would be correct to be skeptical and reluctant to take them.

              The US, in my opinion, could do with some $5 and $10 coins for general circulation. Brits do OK with £1 and £2 coins; I was surprised that there were no £1 notes when we were there in 2015, but those had been gone sine 1984.

              No, I don’t care that the cash-tray manufacturers would have to re-tool for the new coins; they’re already gaining back the penny slot in the near future.

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    2. McCarthy’s problem was never that he was wrong, but that he was far too theatrical and in love with hearing his own voice. The way he was broken was by letting him chew scenery, getting himself out on a limb, and then having Murrow and others tch and do the “calm concern” thing.

      Notably Nixon was an understudy, and his public persona took Joe’s excesses to heart.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Oh, the KGB side would have still gotten him, and would still have used their assets in media to do it, but they would have had to work harder, not just using what he handed them on a platter.

          And the other side learned as well – see the Watergate hearings a few decades later, or the Church Committee hearings going after the CIA. All the gotcha was behind the scenes, with the hearings grave and reserved and ministerial. Going back and comparing McCarthy’s running of the HUAC hearings, his look like an ep of Jerry Springer by comparison.

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          1. Senator Joe McCarthy was running the House Unamerican Activities Committee? I daresay you’re conflating at least two different things.

            To my knowledge, none of the hearings associated with McCarthy in pop culture were actually run by him.

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            1. Yep, you are of course correct, I made an error, McCarthy was a Senator and thus those hearings were in the Committee on Government Operations’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The constant whenging ever since the 1950s by Hollywood about HUAC got struck in my head.

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        1. He was their sharp-creased-pants creation, so of course they loved him.

          This is also why they hate DJT so incandescently – he defies them, showing how they are essentially irrelevant. The mainstream leftist commie press likes to blame other j-skool outlets like Fox News because that retains their “Most Holy Order of Journalists” worldview, just with some heretic high priests. Them allowing that the press no longer matters at would break them.

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    3. McCarthy was RIGHT. Unfortunately, too late and also not very smart, and his public demise ended up giving the commies a boogieman to hide behind for the next 70 years. (Also, Edward R. Murrow was admirable in so many ways, but his coverage that deep-sixed McCarthy was dead wrong.)

      The nightmare scenario for me right now is that none (or far too few) of Trump’s cuts and reforms are passed into law by Congress, no federal agencies are eliminated, and the next time a Democrat occupies the Oval Office, they’re angrier and more vindictive than ever. And with Trump’s precedent for asserting control over the agencies, they’ll have more room than ever to make government do what Democrats have always wanted to do to the rest of us.

      I’m not saying I think it will inevitably happen that way…just that having a more powerful president can cut both ways. In politics, you’ve always got to consider what would happen if your worst enemy got hold of whatever power or law you’re making, because at some point they WILL have it.

      Time and again, Republicans create some government tool to solve a specific problem, and then it’s weaponized by the Democrats. (Look at what CISA got up to under the Biden junta, for instance.) In this case, Trump is the first president to start exercising the kind of control over the agencies that the president actually ought to have — but if he doesn’t get Congress to remove or neuter a bunch of them, the next Democrat is going to use that power to do some truly evil things to all of us. So what’s happening right now is good but also potentially very dangerous.

      Trump needs to make sure that there’s much, much less government for future Democrats to get hold of. Of course there’s a lot of other things that could prevent the nightmare scenario, such as Democrats behaving so badly in the next couple-three years that voters repudiate them en masse. Or…who knows.

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      2. I haven’t gone into it in any depth, but I recall Milton Friedman saying, in one or another of his essays that McCarthy was generally right, but his target selection was a bit weak.

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        1. That was a serious problem* for me, eventually diagnosed as sleep apnea. CPAP for the snooze.

          (*) Darkened rooms and powerpoint meetings? Loads of fun.

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            1. Aye, I recalled that. Just wondering if JP is a fellow hosehead*, or, if he should be. Not including the other 1000 reasons for lousy sleep. Sigh.

              (*) :) :) :) :) :)

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                    3. You’re a writer – is it not a part of your usual practice to persuade readers to suspend disbelief? Practice believing in new saints – they are not all canonized yet.

                      Though the Red Queen does carry believing a teensy bit too far. :-)

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  7. “The entire “look” of the decades, the things that were popular in each, etc. etc., all that was a creation not of time but of mass media, a unified centralized means of communication, and, of course, the fashion industry.”

    I don’t think that’s quite right – you can track changes in fashion through history, decade by decade, starting centuries before mass media was invented. The weird stasis in clothing design since c. 2000 isn’t due to the fall of mass media; if it were I would expect fashions to splinter, with many local variations popping up all over the place, and that isn’t happening.

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    1. There are many local variations of fashion. They’re just not geographic. They are keyed to subcultures and various identities. You can differentiate Antifa from Proud Boys by mode of dress and grooming. There are many other subcultures within the whole that can be similarly recognized. It is all very fluid though.

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      1. My daughter is in a… not even sure what you’d call it, but they look like they got bits from ren faires. She’s discovered a lace-up bodice looks like a really nice vest, for example.

        They all have some sort of hair coloring, and if they have glasses there’s glass chains with cute preferably hand-crafted charms on them. Lots of emphasis on hand-crafted by themselves or friends.

        I go more jeans and geeky humor shirts.

        Husband’s office is black jeans, plain t-shirt, plaid flannel if it’s cool enough. (He’s a rebel, dresses like me. Today was BEST DAD IN THE UNIVERSE shirt. With Darth Vader. I’m wearing an emotional support wife, do not pet shirt.)

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    3. There’s also this to consider:

      https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1400-1409/

      In the first years of the war-torn fifteenth century, fashion was a battleground where rulers and courtiers lay claim to power with the display of luxury textiles, elaborate dagging and fanciful personal emblems. Throughout the decade, the fashions launched at the court of France influenced the rest of Europe. In England, Germany and Italy, sumptuary laws intent on preserving distinctions between nobles and commoners signal the wealth of the middle class and their increased ability to participate in fashion.

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      1. I’m seeing more moustaches than anything else. EVERYBODY is trying to grow one, even some guys my age who used to have beards. My 20-something nephews at the family reunion a few weeks ago all were mustachioed (looked pretty good in them, I have to say).

        And God help me, but I’ve actually been tempted to shave the middle out of my usual big goatee and turn it into a big ol’ fu manchu ‘stache.

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        3. Our best man, Gof rest his soul, had one of those. When Liam Nissan played Rhas ‘al Ghul, as soon as he appeared I got the chills. He was the living image of our best man, who had been dead for over a decade.

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  9. the biggest change, other than tatoos, is men wearing short trousers everywhere all the time. I do it myself, though not to church, I can’t wrap my head around that.

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  10. Just made my contribution to the fundraiser.

    I’m pretty absent minded, so while I’m thinking about it and I can afford it, I did it now so I don’t forget.

    I lurk quite a bit. You deal with interesting topics, and the posted commenters don’t sound like raving lunatics.

    I would encourage anyone who has read to this point to contribute, if they haven’t done so already.

    I want this place to continue. You’re worth it in the free market of ideas.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. It may not be only fashion that has declined into heat death. Has there been any real development in popular music in the past twenty or twenty-five years? I got pushed out of following music closely by grunge, so I’m not nearly a close enough student to be authoritative, but it mostly seems to be the same old things, with perhaps greater vulgarity as an increased dosage for the fix. This would, if true, be more indicative of a broader cultural decline, the kind of thing that non-young people have been grumbling about for generations, or longer.

    No, you don’t need to get off my lawn, but do turn it down. Some people are trying to sleep.

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    2. Symphonic rock, including historic symphonic rock like Sabaton. (Check all of Napalm Records.)

      Bardcore.

      Recreations of ancient music.

      Electronic swing.

      Fan-music, like The Automatic Singer, Tiran03, and CNG STUDIO Thailand.

      And, of course, Dan Vasc.

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          1. I think I’ve listened to this one about three times today already.

            I need to share it with our D&D DM who has imported a bunch of Warhammer 40K into our fantasy RPG.

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          3. Honestly I consider Ciaphas Cain a great inspiration for Odds.

            “What’s the plan?”

            “Okay, what’s the backup plan?”

            “The plan is working! …I have a bad feeling about this.”

            “Ah, right, there are the mutants I wasn’t looking for. Time to duck.”

            “The dirigible’s on fire, the Chimera’s going over the edge – hey! Not the hat!”

            AKA you just improvise and improvise and keep improvising, because Almost Certain Death beats Certain Death every time. And maybe you might even survive!

            (Also fake it, fake it, keep faking it until you’re out of sight of anyone who suspects you, then you can collapse with the shakes and a good bracing cup of tanna.)

            Liked by 1 person

              1. Oh, the discussion on Ciaiphas Cain!

                I have heard one where a woman thought that he had become the mask, that by the end of his career, he had become the hero after having been the coward and shirker when he started out.

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                1. That’s my read as well. First story chronologically (if I’m getting the timeline right), “Fight or Flight”, I tend to take him at his word that he would really have left Jurgen behind (who at that point was just another soldier he didn’t know) and run away, except that in the process of dodging the hive tyrant he ended up running back towards Jurgen. Later books, he puts his own life at risk to save Jurgen without giving it a second thought, because he really has become the hero he’s been pretending to be for so long.

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                2. Though he himself points out in books later in his career that by then he knew how to do extremely risky things with a larger margin of safety than most people… so he still considered himself a coward. Poor guy.

                  I always thought he had just a normal sense of self-preservation – which in his culture would be enough to be considered “cowardly!”

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          1. There’s also Trailer music (as in movie trailers), which evolved into Epic Music in the ‘teens, and is still around to some extent. Stuff like Immediate Music/Globus, Two Steps/Thomas Bergersen, etc. It is, admittedly, Classical-adjacent, or as I like to call it, “Heavy Classical”. There’s also a ton of background music labeled as “tavern” or “inn” music or various other fantasy themes; not exactly original, but if you need something that keeps you going without overly-distracting you, it can be quite nice.

            And on a related note, check out the music from Expedition 33. The project lead for the game found a composer through a message board. It was his first published work, and he also performs the male vocals for it.

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

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z_YQuExyss

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7SGn0MeP0

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnwD8zsGl2Y

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kMbTzomh94

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      10. Symphonic Rock, very much so, a lot of which includes elements of folk, opera, and other sorts of classical music.

        Not pop per sé, but modern classical (see Naxos Records) is going in some wonderful ways. And some, ahem, valiant efforts at experimentation, but also some lovely stuff.

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      11. Symphonic metal for the win! A genre innovation that really only hit its stride within the last 15 years or so, though a handful of people were starting to experiment with it back in the ’90s and early aughts. And nobody…and I mean NOBODY…does it better than Septicflesh. (If you want outstanding female vocals and no death growls, Nightwish is also a pretty amazing band; many different flavors of it you can go for.)

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              2. Trying something….

                K, it didn’t auto-embed for me, either; it let me use the + and insert, we’ll see if it displays… .it’s possible it has embedding disabled.

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          2. And you can find other awesome songs/singers by looking at who does covers of something you like, I ran into Amaranth via them covering Sabaton and my other videos including Log Horizon led me to find this AMV:

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        2. I have no idea where that Nightwish video came from. It’s a cool song, but NOT what I was listening to. I hadn’t gone anywhere near it. THIS is what you need to hear; the apotheosis of symphonic metal, as far as I’m concerned.

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          1. Okay, that was just WordPress being stupid. It was showing Stan’s video on MY post, and when the screen refreshed after I commented, it put all the videos in their proper places again. Weird…

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        2. I think I’ve heard it– the auto-play-lists that go through a zillion things so you can like ones that stick out are grand– via, of all things, a web comic.

          Behold, my white noise at various times:

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    3. I like chiptunes, nightcore, certain other filters, and the voice synthesis stuffs.

      Chip tunes are like midis.

      Night core is basically just a filter or frequency distortion.

      There are more consistent real time ways to make a man’s voice sound like a woman’s.

      Etc.

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    4. All right, that particular point is conceded. There is a lot of interesting music being created these days. But I have to ask a painful question: is it charting? Is it hitting Number One? Is it making these musicians famous, or rich? Is it making them a part of the overall culture, the way Approved Performers like Beyonce and Taylor Swift are?

      Something can make a big splash like a rock in a pond, but then like that rock it vanishes never to be seen again. “Rich Men North of Richmond” briefly topped the charts for Anthony Oliver, or Oliver Anthony (I can never remember the right order). He then scorned the big trend-chasing offers from companies who missed that he was inveighing against people just like them, and if he has managed a second hit, I have never heard about it.

      There’s very interesting stuff going on at the margins. It’s being kept there by the culture at large … led by people who make a very big deal about paying attention to the marginalized. It points to a sickness at the core, which ties back into the point Our Gracious Hostess was making, if not directly.

      Anyway, I think I’ve had my say. Now you can get off my lawn.

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      1. Oh, I think that my interests may be overly shaped by the academic music nonsense of being more interested in the theory of the stuff, than in the question of how wide an audience it appeals to, and of how well it appeals.

        IIRC, Floppotron is an interesting technical acheivement, as are the musical tesla coils, but that does not mean that many people want to personally experience such non-standard transducers for /all/ of their ordinary music consumption.

        The academic world can take too much pride in putting in a lot of work on stuff that is inaccessible or even which outright sucks.

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      2. No one is getting rich or famous via music any longer. There’s too much of it. And of course AI is taking over (see bruhaha about Velvet Sundown). Watch some Rick Beato videos on this subject if you want more.

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        1. Studio music was kind of notable for folks not getting famous for decades, now.

          They got famous, yeah, but they had to tour to get enough money to eat– even when they were among the top grossing artists for years on end.

          Folks now may not be getting “rich and famous,” but they’re making a living, which is a definite improvement.

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          2. Yup. Devin Townsend sure isn’t a household name, but he’s been publishing his own music for a couple of decades now and is known enough to tour—and since he isn’t owned by a recording label, he’s doing pretty decently. (Certainly well enough that his genre is “whatever I want to do” and we love it.)

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      3. But I have to ask a painful question: is it charting? Is it hitting Number One?

        The entire point of the blog post is that the captured, guided market is not normal.

        The entire “everyone everywhere is doing this one thing” is a distortion.

        You remove the distortion on the market, and then only look at what their previous monopoly output, and you’re not going to see the new stuff suddenly appearing in it. Because it’s still their output stream.

        And you even flatly recognized that stuff from outside of their pool will go in and make a splash.

        You have to go look at the over-all market to catch it more often than that, and honestly you wouldn’t recognize most of the indy-equivalent music. Because it is similar to what you would classify as normal.

        Same way that folks don’t even recognize how many indy books have gone mainstream, and then talk about how that never happens.

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        1. I’ve been listening to the classical channel on Sirius and I realized I can pretty well tell when it’s 20th or 21st century music. The new stuff….sounds random. There is often no unifying theme, just a number of pretty motifs. The exception is film music, which is probably because it has a unifying theme almost by definition.

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          1. Kind of like how if you want really epic art, you want to look at media tie-ins– final fantasy is notoriously gorgeous for music AND art.

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            1. Look at the Arcane (League of Legends tie-in) soundtrack. I honestly hadn’t realized that it’s pretty much created by one guy (that they originally hired for QC!) and that he writes the song before bringing in the person they want to sing it, and only then do they collaborate on the final product. It’s like discovering Yoko Kanno.

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      4. (Not on your lawn, shouting at you from the sidewalk) :D

        About the mainstream stuff, you’re absolutely right. None of what we’ve linked here is making anyone super rich or getting multiple-million streams on Spotify. Mainstream music — the stuff that gets big push from record labels and turns people into celebrities — has been the same boring, undifferentiated crap for two decades and counting now. But creativity is happening everywhere outside of it, and a lot of people are making a living at it, and vastly more people than ever before are making creative, innovative music and actually getting heard.

        Sadly, very few are making any money on metal; the fans are super dedicated, but widely dispersed and not so numerous as pop, rap/R&B, and country listeners, so most of the best bands you’ll ever hear are a combo of side hustle and passion project. Nightwish is far from a household name, but they’ve done very well for themselves; bands like them (or Kamelot or Starset or Sabaton or…), who have built enough of a following that they can play midsize venues in most places, do the summer festival circuit, and occasionally hit big venues in a few fandom hotspots are the most common model for success nowadays, in metal and elsewhere.

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      5. While you are (probably*) correct about the sickness at the core keeping the interesting stuff out of mainstream culture, I think it’s also important to point out that it doesn’t matter. Or, while it still might matter, it matters far less than it used to. The gatekeepers can keep their gates all they want, but there are breaches in the wall left and right of the gate, and people are streaming through them, ignoring the gatekeepers. The official music video for Yuve Yuve Yu by The HU has, as of when I checked today, 134 million views. Does anyone think the gatekeepers would approve of that song? Would that song have ever been able to reach over a million people** before the Internet democratized music access?

        Personally, I don’t give a flying fig what the gatekeepers want. I’m going to watch what I’m interested in, and listen to what I like. If only 150 other people are interested in that video I’m watching? Doesn’t lessen my enjoyment. And thanks to Youtube, I can find that specific niche I’m interested in (my current video series is watching someone play modded Factorio with complexity-adding mods). And even though almost nobody else wants to watch it, so there’s no way it would have made it past any profit-oriented gatekeepers back in the days of VCRs (if Factorio had been written back then), these days it’s available and I can watch it.

        And, thanks to software like yt-dlp (YouTube DownLoader Program), I can even download the video in .mp4 format, put it on my phone, and watch it on a long flight across the ocean where I wouldn’t normally be able to have Internet access. Google keeps trying to block Youtube downloaders, but I raise two fingers in their general direction. The right to use VCRs to time-shift television broadcasts (record it during supper and watch it after the kids are in bed, for example) has been long established by US courts, and a similar argument applies to being able to download videos ahead of time so that I can watch them in places where I don’t have Internet access. Youtube doesn’t provide ANY official way to do it, so I’m going to reach for unofficial means. As with other gatekeepers, I’m just going to ignore their wishes because frankly, Google, I don’t give a damn.

        * I have a lack of specific knowledge in this area, so “you’re probably right” is the best I can assert with certainty.

        ** 134 million views does not mean 134 million people watched it, as many people will have watched the video a dozen times or more. But it has 1.8 million thumbs-up, so if we assume a 5:1 ratio of viewers to thumbs-up (and I suspect it’s higher, like 10:1) then that’s at least 9 million individual viewers.

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        1. Forgot to mention another reason I like to use Youtube downloaders: so that Google will have a very hard time tracking what I watch and using it to compile an advertising profile on me. Because I hate, loathe, despise, and abhor advertising. It can, in theory, be done in a sane, ethical, and non-annoying way. The way it is currently done on Youtube and on the rest of the Internet is (in most cases) NOT sane, NOT ethical, and SUPREMELY annoying.

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  14. In a decade people will look back at photos and easily be able to tell the 2020’s.

    Early 2020 looks, masks and various outlandish PPEs. Random hair colors on both sexes.

    Starting in mid 2020s young ladies started wearing clown makeup (seriously, clown makeup) and random tattoos that look like coloring book outlines and various not natural hair colors. Young men start foregoing tattoos and start wearing beards and very short natural colored hair.

    People of earlier generations continue to wear pretty much the same sort of looks they sported as young adults with varying degrees of sucess. i.e. yoga pants are inexplicably popular with middle-aged women who should definitely know better.

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    1. The airbrushed spackle look for some women’s makeup, totally absent even from the heavily airbrushed photographs of prior eras, even in high post-production effort magazines, will definitely nail down photos of this era.

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    2. Agree. I live in an Appalachian county in central Pennsyvania. In my opinion the best dressed women by far are the Mennonite women. (Amish women? Not so much. No colors.) They look like they care about themselves. They have dignity. What about other women? Lately I have noticed that mothers are dressing their little girls in colorful dresses and skirts, while the moms are still in raggedy jeans, undersized yoga pants, faded T shirts, etc. What’s going on? And what about most men around here? Don’t get me started. They look like people out of a post-apocalyptic film. What does all this say about the state of our civilization? By way of contrast, you can find documentary footage on YouTube of ordinary folk on the streets of 1930s London. Amazing.

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      1. What about other women? Lately I have noticed that mothers are dressing their little girls in colorful dresses and skirts, while the moms are still in raggedy jeans, undersized yoga pants, faded T shirts, etc.

        You can get pretty clothing for little girls.

        Once you get up to adult sizes, they tend towards skank, expensive, or fit .05% of the female population, pick two. Most of them are not made for people who have to do everything.

        You can find some human-shaped and pretty stuff on Amazon, places like Scarlet Darkness and IDEALSANXUN, search for “elastic skirt maxi” with either term to get a good start.

        By way of contrast, you can find documentary footage on YouTube of ordinary folk on the streets of 1930s London.

        You could also find the documentary photographs of the folks who weren’t in town while filming, such as the kids in clothes I wouldn’t use to clean the dog’s house.

        Or the boys wearing “men’s clothing” but it was things their dad had worn down to nubbins first, and looked like it didn’t fit…because it didn’t.

        And you can’t smell the London streets, what with not having the resources to launder those clothes every day. (You know, the origins of collars and wrists on dress shirts.)

        A lot of the change in clothing is because it is cheaper to get “good enough”. The cost/benefit of going higher than “good enough” drops really quickly, because as much as folks say they wish everybody looked nicer, they scream like a stuck pig the second that it means anything inconvenient for them, like a woman being slowed down chasing a toddler, or a guy having to stop and take off his nice jacket before doing some heavy lifting.

        So folks go with easy to care for, comfortable, and allows them to do what they need to do, and then for what they like, not the aesthetic preferences of folks who look at photos of cities a century ago and swoon.

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        1. I just went shopping for a Sunday-summer shirt. Bombed, because it was either flimsy, not my style, or I got sticker shock.

          I did, however, take a photo of a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans, which cost $198, and had been liberally speckled with paint blobs at the factory. I told my beloved it turns out my work jeans are now high-fashion items. Who knew?

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        2. I end up in the “expensive but wears forever” end of the clothing spectrum. I have to pay more, and wait a little, for skirts and blouses and dresses I can teach in, run in, and clean up after sick kids in (washable). The last is not exactly part of my job title, but you do what ya gotta do.

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  15. last winter I saw a comment, likely here, encouraging me to send a letter to the Secretary of the Navy asking him to name a destroyer for Lt. Robert A. Heinlein. So,I did. The other day I got a nice response from him. No promises of course but I was left with the impression that it will be seriously considered. So, if you are a RAH fan send a letter.

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  16. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE PROBLEM MIGHT BE CORRECT. THE REASON ISN’T:  In Search Of Missing Time.

    2. Losing interest can mean all sorts of things. Such as — you don’t know how to write the next bit. Or, you made a mistake and need to fall back.

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  18. I wonder if the change in cameras contributed?

    Prior to around 2006, cameras were film, which changed over time as formulation a changed. I can usually tell when a photo or feel was taken just from the picture quality. And I can’t help but feel like older films and photos are physically decaying as well. Some do not look like I remember.

    But with digital photos, those stay largely the same from gen to get, and don’t degrade the way physical reels do.

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      1. You can restore a lot of it. The oldest photo I ever handled was an 1860s colored positive; I think to replicate how it looked we had to do a surface scan *and* a reversed negative scan and blended them. The end result looked pretty good.

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    2. Yes and no. The sensors absolutely do change—I made a comment about how modern sensors tend to flatten paler skin tones and got pushback from my sister, of all people, saying that was just “the style.” I had to reply that as someone who worked for a photography studio that just switched cameras and had done extensive comparison photos as part of that switch, YES, modern cameras tend to flatten paler skin tones. (Think of everybody wearing a layer of foundation makeup, very even. That’s what they do.) On the plus side, it’s a lot better response for darker skin tones.

      So technology can be an indicator to the trained eye. But the other caveat is that I was recently in Yosemite, looking at the Ansel Adams gallery, and damned if those photos aren’t clearer than anything before the last 10-15 years of digital. I mean, people are only now beginning to be able to replicate his level of clarity and contrast. (Also, he took an eclipse picture in Yosemite in 1937. Imagine how much planning he had to do to be able to get that totality shot right.)

      So… you can tell a lot of film by the quality (and the red shift of the cheap mid-20th century paper), but that’s also going to depend on the skill of the original photographer. And digital shifts and will keep shifting as the technology improves.

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