Entertaining Mundanity

A place where you can chat about anything that isn't to do with games!
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XoPachi
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Joined: Thu May 03, 2012 8:01 pm

Entertaining Mundanity

Post by XoPachi »

A bit of an oxymoron I know.
I've come across a channel that I really like by the name of Any Austin. He has a number of video game series where he discusses skyboxes, "Odd and Unremarkable Places", things you never looked at, unemployment rates of video game towns (lmfao). And just general minutia of video game worlds/design. It's not critique or deep dive dissertation video essay stuff. And it's not over edited or over acted. He's pretty funny with dry but sparsely delivered humor kind of like Nerrel. Where the jokes write themselves and he just kind of rolls them out with no build up and usually no attention called to it.

https://youtu.be/dsDN2b1sjJc

It's interesting because usually I find gaming channels like this grating and insufferable. Just making any old video about any old thing to sate the gluttonous algorithms with Content™ so they can get their shillings and sheckles. But Austin is this really tasteful blend of things that makes his videos really weirdly entertaining despite the topic being objectively not exciting. There's a clearly genuine interest in these odd almost boring things. He presents them without being grotesquely showy, lacking confidence in his entertainment value. Reminds me of older channels when YouTube was new where people just innocently talked about things. And he doesn't waste time either. So many YouTubers waste so much fucking time now.

Anyway, this thread isn't about Austin. I feel I'd like more of this kind of stuff as long as it falls within something I'm familiar with. I feel like there's other examples beyond this channel.
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BryanM
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Re: Entertaining Mundanity

Post by BryanM »

There has been a lot more focus on environmental aspects of the world in the past few years. Liminal spaces, ASMR, music that recreates aspects of each.

I think it's like a detox from living in the world of TV: that fantasy world is almost completely stripped of everything that makes the real world real: the sound of wind, the sound of people breathing, the sound things make as friction and impacts happen between them. Everything is stripped away, except for words and gunfire for the most part.

Brains were designed to navigate two very different worlds: the natural environment, and the social structure of the tribe. Atlus has a couple of franchises that represent these two sides of life fairly well:

Shin Megami Tensei is very much about the liminal, the unspoken. A dungeon crawler with most of its attention put into game elemetns. What social elements there are, they're broad high level things about political philosophy. "Ought" questions, like "what should the world ought to be like".

While Persona is a friendship simulator with some spooky supernatural urban legend stuff tossed in as a garnish.

I think there's a lot left to be mined from the analog horror genre.
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GaijinPunch
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Location: San Fransicso

Re: Entertaining Mundanity

Post by GaijinPunch »

XoPachi wrote: It's interesting because usually I find gaming channels like this grating and insufferable. Just making any old video about any old thing to sate the gluttonous algorithms with Content™ so they can get their shillings and sheckles.
My phone keeps trying to get me to watch "Film/Music/Game reviewer checks out [insert name of something I've known about for 2 to 3 decades] for the first time". Yeah, it's awesome, dip shit - that's why it's been in my library since it came out.
RegalSin wrote:New PowerPuff Girls. They all have evil pornstart eyelashes.
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