Embrace, Promote, and Defend What You Love. Support Your Friends’ Works and Others. It Can Pay Dividends

 

Support what you love.

Promote what you love.

Those seem like pretty basic concepts. They also seem like easy things to do. But if you spend any time at all on social media, you’ll see that a lot of people use their time “socializing” by doing things other than this. As a matter of fact, a lot of people- and I am guilty of this myself from time to time when it comes to the realm of politics –seem to spend as much time or more essentially promoting the examples of what they don’t like than they do promoting the things they like.

That really is something a lot of people should work on changing.

Slowly Watching the Monsters Die Off

I’m in my mid-forties. Among the various other things that this statement can represent, it means for this topic that I’m from the generation who was born into one of the biggest monster and paranormal mania explosions into pop culture of the last four or five decades. My elementary and junior high school libraries were stocked with “nonfiction” books about the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, ghosts, U.F.O.s, and the various compilation books looking at all the other “real” monsters and mysteries out there. Roughly a quarter or more of the selection of our school book fairs would be similar books to buy and own. Turn the TV on at any time of the day in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the odds were you’d channel surf into more than a few TV shows on cable and network television dealing with the paranormal and cryptozoology, and all of them treating the matters as if they had the scientific authenticity of a documentary on the making of the first atomic bomb.

Things got really weird when in the late 1980s and early 1990s we saw major network specials, some hosted by hosts from their news arms, covering the paranormal, cryptozoology, and U.F.O.s. It was a strange time when one looks back on it. It makes you sometimes wonder what was going on with the psyche of the population as a whole that so many absurd things were being embraced so willingly. In truth they still are in some circles, but not to the degree they once were. But the whole-scale media embrace of these things and their promotion as fact back then may have ultimately had the opposite effect of legitimizing them. As a result, we’ve spent the last two or three decades watching the monsters slowly die.

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Why Ghostbusters 2016 Went Bust

(Okay, a bit past its prime as a topic, but this was being written before the Dragon Con coverage on the site started. Besides, from conversations I heard at Dragon Con it’s still a topic of discussion in fandom.)

I think I’ve seen more post-mortems on this film than just about any other. Most of them blame the downfall of the film on its more militant critics, but I’m not sure about that. So what caused a film like this to go bust?

It’s Here…