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What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

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Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#31

Post by TeMPOraL »

darby_nine wrote: post #17
Zambyte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics). There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to conne…

> You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You can, of course. You're missing or ignoring the implication that one can have any kind of expectation about connecting with an arbitrary individual. Personally, I think this is for the positive: acknowledging that you can't expect to connect with everyone seems healthy.

To me it seems like walking back on all the moral progress we've achieved. Today you don't expect it's possible to connect with everyone, tomorrow you deny humanity to anyone you can't imagine yourself connecting to.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#32

Post by VancouverMan »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #14
tomjen3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones. 7 books late…

Why did Shakespeare remain popular in the age of the atom bomb? Wasn't every new reader in the 1960s just thinking "Hey, why doesn't Macbeth just nuke Macduff?"

I don't think that Shakespeare's works have been popular (in the sense of many people wanting to voluntarily consume them) for many generations.

Yes, most people even today are familiar with those works to some extent, but that's just an artifact of those people being forced to consume those works repeatedly in high school and possibly again in college or university.

When I was in high school in Canada decades ago, almost none of the students liked studying those works. To most people, they were generally incomprehensible, and the stories and characters were nearly impossible to relate to or to care about.

A couple of the English teachers I had back then openly admitted to not like those works, too, and only taught them because the curriculum forced them to be taught.

Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than any genuine appreciation for the works.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#33

Post by [deleted] »

chis wrote: post #3

Surprisingly great post. Works that last are often being championed by critics, gatekeepers, or the next generation of artists. On some level there's just too much great art in the world, and it's more fun to appreciate the same art as your peers instead of consuming only obscure pieces and having nobody to talk about them with.

[deleted]

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#34

Post by oceanplexian »

ineedaj0b wrote: post #4

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures. Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years. Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into…

Minecraft is over 13 years old and still the most popular PC game in the world by monthly active users. Not sure if there are many games that can beat that record.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#35

Post by rpdillon »

tomjen3 wrote: post #8
ineedaj0b wrote: post #4

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures. Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years. Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into…

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones. 7 books late…

As an aside from your core point about tech, I don't think Harry Potter's universe is particularly well-designed or thoughtful. I mean, I haven't actually read Harry Potter, but having watched the movies and talked to my son who has read the books a few times, the magic system seems entirely inconsistent and capricious, and is one of my bigger gripes with the story coming from more mature authors like Brandon Sanderson that build out much more consistent and believable fantasy worlds.

I have no idea whether this will affect the work's longevity, but it sure affects my desire to read it.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#36

Post by fredmcgubbins »

There's a good book called, "But What If We're Wrong?" by Chuck Klosterman that explores the concept of how things we consider the "best" or "worst" of contemporaneous common knowledge may change over time.

One of his examples was how there are only a handful of classical music pieces that folks remember and consider "great" after a 100+ years have passed and yet there were many composers who were popular at the time they were composing. His question was, "out of the the works of rock-n-roll in the 1900s and early 2000s, how many will be remembered in 200 years time?" Will it be "Louie-Louie"? Something by Elvis? The Beatles? Beyonce?, the viral song 'what does the fox say?', something that is contemporaneously unknown but is discovered some time in the future?

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#37

Post by mr_toad »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #14
tomjen3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones. 7 books late…

Why did Shakespeare remain popular in the age of the atom bomb? Wasn't every new reader in the 1960s just thinking "Hey, why doesn't Macbeth just nuke Macduff?"

Shakespeare’s reputation has grown over the centuries. While he was popular at the time he wasn’t regarded by critics as the greatest English playwright until at least a hundred years after his death.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#38

Post by rblatz »

morley wrote: post #29
ggm wrote: post #2

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy. "The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward. My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense…

Some comedy works have endured, like Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (though it is helped by its huge influence on To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis).

I’m in my 40s and have no idea what either of those things are.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#39

Post by [deleted] »

ggm wrote: post #2

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy. "The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward. My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense…

[deleted]

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#40

Post by vundercind »

ggm wrote: post #2

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy. "The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward. My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense…

Chaplin and Keaton (among others, like Lloyd) are still hilarious and their films technically impressive and full of movie-magic spectacle. I’ve watched a fair amount (certainly a ton more than most people) of silent film and IMO the comics are by far the most-accessible of the bunch to a modern audience, requiring minimal “education” on how to understand, appreciate, enjoy, or “read” them. They’re the only ones I’d unreservedly recommend to just about anyone who likes movies.

Very few dramatic silents are even close to as accessible—I’d say the ones that age second-best are those that lean art-film, but those are hindered by that entire genre being obscure and difficult to enjoy for most people, so while they may not be much more challenging to enjoy than a talkie art film and might deliver just as much quality as most of those can, that’s a fairly different bar to clear than enjoying a comedy or ordinary drama.

The comedies do seem to be surviving better, too, even if not as well as they deserve. The dramas survive in the public consciousness as a very-small number of well-known scenes or images (the rocket-in-the-moon’s-eye, the android from Metropolis) but reference most anything else from even those films, let alone other very-well-regarded but barely-watched-today movies, and nobody but a few film nerds will notice.

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