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the best time to consume media is like 5 years after its peak popularity

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Stalker [ArtFight2025] by Nycterixx

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Betsey Johnson - Fall 1995 RTW

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I feel like this would appeal to a few people on here

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i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave” 

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Norman Lindsay (c.1920)

The Audience

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If organized inceldom had originated on tumblr it never could have gotten traction because the grievances of those guys would be utterly mystifying to anyone else. "Women are unreasonable whores won't even look at you unless you're Thomas Cromwell". Puzzling and immediately dismissed, no indulgent NYT hear-them-out pleas

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~ The Correct Thing in Good Society, Florence Howe Hall, 1921

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2024/05/11

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i posit that the entirety of scooby doo takes place within the world of the worst kurt vonnegut novel, slapstick. the primary theme of both scooby doo and slapstick involves the effects of individual loneliness on society.

in slapstick a pair of twins are born with horrible physical disfigurements and psychic powers that render them as geniuses when in close proximity and average when apart. they spend their entire childhood feigning mental incompetence in order to protect their incestuous relationship, which they one day reveal to their mother (because they think it'll be funny). she immediately sends the girl to an asylum and the boy to a boarding school. the boy only sees his sister once more time in his life in a helicopter many years later and spends decades regretting that he didn't run away with her to keep doing incest.

eventually the boy becomes potus with a plan to end all loneliness in america forever by assigning everyone a government mandated family, which works a little but is ultimately unable to prevent the functional collapse of western civilization. the book ends with the main character, the last president of the united states, walking around the ruins of manhattan (now known as the isle of death) with a tiny band of young ignorant survivors, mourning the downfall of the nation and all the incest he didn't get to do. (the less-read second half of vonnegut's bibliography is wild).

why does scooby doo take place in this book?

the mystery machine gang are obviously a part of one or several of the massive, randomly-assigned artificial families described in the book; this is why fred has thousands upon thousands of uncles to call upon for lodging and why every loser with a batcave or a haunted taqueria or an exhibition basketball team is obligated to treat him like family and put him and his friends up for a few nights. teens like the gang frequently take advantage of this, especially in their teens/early 20s to travel around the united states not unlike how a lot of kids in the EU will travel around for a summer or two after or around finishing high school. (i think people would do this when older too, of course, since in slapstick's america one is legally obligated to be nice to their assigned families, but anybody doing this in their forties is generally treated a lot less cordially.) since they are already celebrities in their own right as mystery solvers that helps ease the sting of another state-enforced visit from your in-laws and their disgusting untrained 200 pound great dane that the stoner kid is letting drink directly from the horchata dispenser

sometimes the societal decay in scooby doo is exaggerated for comedic purposes; one popular creepypasta-esque reinterpretation suggests that the gang are traveling around the midst of a sweeping economic depression. this works intuitively (why else are 50% of middle-aged men in the midwest eagerly dressing up as swamp monsters to commit insurance fraud schemes for their failing pizza parlors/deserted mining towns/cowboy-themed road stop tourist traps? why else would four teenagers and a great dane sleep together in back of a rusty ford econoline every other night?) personally i don't think this goes far enough. scooby doo must take place in a world where society has effectively disintegrated; what we see is much closer to a slow apocalypse than a depression. in scooby doo when we meet a group of people it feels more like one has stumbled into yet another roving band of survivors. obviously there are centers of pseudo-civilization and at least a temporary peace (there's just enough stability to convince most people that the dollar still has some theoretical value and that they should exchange them to watch John Cena or play baseball-themed videogames) but these are small localized walled-off zones designed only for celebrities, the ultra-rich, and a tiny shrinking professional class that is allowed to exist there only because of aforementioned legal obligation or the services they provided (such as solving mysteries!). whereas the peasantry puts on glowing diving suits as a matter of economic desperation, in the upper-class enclaves where they watch wwf all day and go on cruise ships or climb everest they dress up as monsters only to sate boredom, for nothing else can excite them. 99% of the world has become a barren infinite gary indiana where the serfs wallow and the remaining percent lives in a castle and the lines of communication between everybody has broken down so much that rather than talk, they can only think to frighten away

scooby doo is not a real dog, he is shaggy's deformed incestuous twin and they have a psychic bond. fred's really suspicious of them, he's gone for walks at night and seen the van shaking a little when there's nobody but the two of them in the parked car. they both say they were just making five-foot sandwiches, fred nods (there aren't any crumbs but they always unhinge their entire jaw to the floor to swallow them whole, so that tracks) but in his heart he looks at the way shaggy bats his eyes at that mutt when he thinks nobody's looking and fred knows what's going on. should he say something? what if he's wrong? he knows he's not, him and velma have never spoken about it per se but they've shared looks at the right moments, hell she's so smart, she probably figured it out before him. but to say it, to actually make the accusation, he can't imagine a world where those words leave his mouth. so they all just live with it. it's awful. everybody jokes about how fred splits up the gang but the truth is he doesn't want to do it, he hates splitting them up, he'd never do that if it were up to him, not with monsters and crooks on the loose. but shaggy complains if he doesn't, so what is fred to do?

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[Takes a long drink of the cheap pisswater beer they serve here]

Yeah, sure, I like to live dangerously. On new moons, go out into the woods and offer bones to the blood god and blood to the bone god. They ain't caught me yet on account of them fightin' each other over sacrifices. You should try it sometime. Funniest shit you can imagine.

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Pozega-Slavonia, Croatia