Not to be like "it's poverty," but, I mean...It's poverty! (Jazz hands!)

New Mexico is highly unstable, economically. It leans so heavily on oil and gas that the fluctuations of gas prices (which happen fairly often) dramatically impact people's economic opportunities. When I was in school, new kids would come and go like the tides as the market shifted.

They've tried to supplement that with the entertainment industry, but Hollywood just goes where the tax credits are. So the incentives have to be ludicrous to draw them in, and the state ends up losing money on the deal. If you've ever heard of the way sports stadiums fuck over the locals, it's a similar story here. And so movies and shows get filmed in New Medico? So what? The big money people fly in. New jobs are created in the secondary support infrastructure, but those are mostly service industry and construction jobs that pay like shit no matter who's eating that burger you made. And the companies like Netflix are putting their offices out in newer suburbs, meaning that you have the classic problem of people not being able to afford to live where they work. Is spending all the state's tax money establishing a transient batch of gig and service work going to do anything about the fact that housing costs went up 56% in the last five years?

So, yeah, I don't think sending in the National Guard is gonna fix any problems here. Just an empty display of "toughness," probably so that the cowards at the federal government don't cut off funding to a highly subsidized state. Speaking of, wind and solar energy, two industries that actually could help replace the unstable oil business, we, Republicans hate those. Solar power isn't sending lobbyists with buckets full of money to their door. And the president has his ignorant anti-wind stance. So...yeah.

Oh, by the way, crime is down from last year, and they're still sending in more cops. As is the way. Such a childish approach.

Context: my kid's name for me is "Pops."

I don't often experience existential anxiety, but, I have to admit, when my toddler is sitting and quietly drawing, then turns to the cat and says: "Remember Pops?" like I'm not even there, I do worry a little bit that I am a ghost.

We (and by we I mean people who make things) aren't gonna make it out of this tariff thing if media enjoyers can't confront their addiction to Production Values.

Production Values Addiction is why we all have HD cameras in our pocket, yet our view of what constitutes a movie is two and a half hours of conveniently-non-union CG. Production Values Addiction is why TV went from season-long sitcoms (basically stage plays with more permanent sets) that could be a steady job for blue-collar workers to six-episode Long Movies starring A-listers.

Production Values Addiction took webcomics from looking like this:

To looking like this:

You look at the first example and think "Man, *I* could draw that." Which is kind of my whole point.

I'm thinking about this because of all of the Switch 2 news. In terms of internet content creators, I'm on the older side. You can tell because I'm writing blog-style on a social media site. I've been around for most of videogames. I've been around when buying a new system meant "holy crap, the games are in color now!" or "whoa, it can do 3D!" Even the Switch is like "whoa, a portable that can run those big open world games."

What is the Switch 2 offering? Those same games, but...more. Higher resolutions. Why is that so important? How much better would you feel, in your soul, if instead of buying a $500 new system and a couple $80 games, you bought, like, forty small games for the thing you already have?

Imagine how much you could save if you just freed yourself from Production Values Addiction. Have you played EVERY Switch 1 game? Do you have the unlikely combination of free time and disposable income that there's just...nothing left on the thing you own.

Have you played Alternate Jake Hunter: DAEDALUS The Awakening of Golden Jazz? Probably not, because almost nobody played it. It's a prequel to a long-running Japanese detective game series that was so low-budget they had to replace background art with, essentially, Google Maps.

I paid five dollars for it and had a good time. No regrets about spending some of my limited time on this earth playing it. Meanwhile, I enter my twentieth identical cave in Tears of the Kingdom to look for a Glowing Frog Ass that I can exchange for something or other and I feel like I'm wasting my life.

My point is, there's nothing for *us* in Production Value. Nothing that small teams of real people get out of upgrading for Production Value's sake. The technology has come far enough to democratize the creative process, and that terrifies the big corporations who want to control our attention spans. We don't need them, but they aren't going away. We just have to choose to spend our time and attention on each other rather than the rent seekers of the world. We can't just wait and hope they go away on their own. Instead, it'll take the self-discipline to resist marketing. It's tough. Marketing is designed to hook us on a scientific level, and it's more persuasive than the feeling of a moral victory.

It all wears off. The novelty of Big, New Graphics ends up being just the standard. The good feeling of supporting an indie creator wears off when you end up with something unpolished in a way that turns you off. These purchase-based emotions are all fleeting, in the end. We've all been disappointed by a big budget thing and underwhelmed by a low budget thing. It's risk either way. So we should probably bet on each other, rather than put our money, time, and faith into something that would never do the same in return.

I feel like if I'm this far in and the plot, as described in the summary, hasn't started yet, maybe...maybe it's a bad book? It's a bad book, friends. Three quarters of the way through, and a major character just now appeared. Also, this far into the story, my tolerance for "time-wasting kender bullshit" (readers of previous books in this setting will know what I mean) drops precipitously.

Man, I was excited, too. I loved the Dragonlance books as a youth. Seeing Weis and Hickman come back to the series got me curious. But that's the problem with revivals of long-running series. I was remembering the Weis and Hickman that wrote the first three books. Not the Weis and Hickman that wrote The War of Souls trilogy. 1,800 pages, and I remember not one thing that happened.

I only get exposed to commercials when I pirate basketball games (I pay the NBA $100 a year to be able to see *some* of the games in an arrangement that must make sense to someone). It feels, genuinely, like I am watching communications from a species that is poorly mimicing human behavior.

Celebrities use doorbell surveillance to remember their burrito order. Music biopic tropes are applied to an ostrich to sell insurance. People fail to use search engines in AI ads that literally depend on the notion that I am an idiot who cannot type or read.

I don't feel superior for this. My lack of exposure to this sort of thing is paid for by an utter lack of pop culture relevance. But they make me feel like I am going mad. Is that the point of these ads? To be so divorced from actual human needs and behavior that we feel like there must be something we're missing? Create demand through sheer bafflement? Why is Zach Braff here? That's an evergreen question, but nevertheless.