The article slop realism by Adam Aleksic (The Etymology Nerd) writes about the designations for various types of “slop”, pointing out how no matter how hard people try to retain the negative connotation of the word “slop”, it worms its way out until the purveyors have commodified the protest.

“If “slop” is the precipitate of optimization, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of slop. Suppose you want to make your interests undiscoverable, so you prioritize illegibility. Now you’ve incentivized me to produce ambiguityslop (which is arguably why the word “vibe” became a buzzword last year). Or perhaps you want to gatekeep your interests—now we’re back at tasteslop.

“Slop realism is the understanding that, like capitalism, “slop” is a Moloch—a structure we are forced to participate in, which worsens society. While there is still something to be said for actual authenticity, whimsy, and taste, even your personal preferences are being measured and targeted in a way that will only generate more slop with time.”

This reminded of On Advertisers and Marketing by Bill Hicks (Genius.com) from his 1997 album Arizona Bay.

Bill Hicks on 'Marketing' (YouTube)

By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.

(Kill yourself.)

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself.

Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.

Seriously.

No this is not a joke. You’re [going], “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself

Planting seeds.

I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.

“Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill’s very bright to do that.”

God, I’m just caught in a fucking web.

“Ooh, the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market – look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar…”

How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you?

“What didya do today, honey?”

“Oh, we made, … we made … arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight.” [snores] “Yeah we just said, you know, is your baby really too loud? You know?” [snores] “Yeah, you know the mums will love it.” [snores]

Sleep like fucking children, don’t ya. This is your world, isn’t it?

Bill Hicks at the Laff Stop in Austin, Texas, 1991

This isn’t exactly my musical style—metal is great but scream/growl metal has yet to grow on me—but I love the commitment in this video. Like, imagine they’re spitballing what the video’s going to be like and someone says,

“Let’s dub our song to what looks like an earnest but kinda lame, four-piece, mariachi-looking band.”

“Is that us? Is the band us?”

“Yeah, of course. Who else is gonna do it?”

“OK. Cool. But what if, and bear with me, aliens start abducting and replacing band members?”

“What if that’s us, too? Like, what if we’re all dressed up in green alien suits and we beat ourselves up as the song plays?”

“Yeah! And let’s also do some breakdance moves in our little green suits.”

“Suits can be whatever color you want, man. The video’s gonna be in black and white.”

“Yeah, sure, but they gotta be green. And we’ll end with,”

“It’s funny how dumb you are.”

Weirdmageddon (Official Music Video) by BONG KONG (YouTube)

And then they went out and filmed it. Like, they put on the suits, and pretended to be the lame band, then they put on alien suits and abducted themselves. And then they cut the video and still stuck to it. That is dedication to a shared vision. That is art.

It is the shared experience that matters, not the superficial experience itself. I was able to enjoy this on other levels than just the musical—though their enthusiasm makes the music grow on me, if I’m honest—because they pulled me into it with their own dedication to their vision, because they believe in it enough to put a lot of work and time into it.

If this were an AI-generated video, would it be the same?

Possibly. Until I learned that it was an AI-generated video. Then, the illusion is gone. All of the meta-levels collapse, disappear in a puff of smoke.

Then, there is nothing left of it but a moving image, a sound.

But that’s not what makes this video fun or great.

Without those human things to scaffold it, this is just a bunch of noise and nonsensical imagery.

We need a shared experience. We need consciousness.

If you can fake it well enough that I don’t notice? Fine. I didn’t notice but I enjoyed it. I was able to build my palace in the sky without any substance. Good for me! The experience is the experience.

But as soon as I notice, the illusion is gone and I’ll feel cheated. I might even get mad, for a minute. Am I mad at myself for having been scammed? Am I mad at the creator for playing with my emotions?

How will I respond? Will I stop trusting so much that I can no longer let myself enjoy anything for fear of looking stupid?

Maybe that’s the significance of the coda to the video.

“It’s funny how dumb you are.”

Avatar: Fire and AshI don’t trust the Critical Drinker (link below) that much, but his review for the second Avatar movie rings absolutely true, so I can imagine that there’s a good chance that it applies to this one as well. I can’t remember anything about Avatar 2. I can’t remember a single character’s name.

I would fail a quiz on the Avatar films with a 0/10. I’ve seen both Avatars. I might have seen the first one twice. I honestly can’t remember. My notes reveal that, even for the first one, which I saw in 2012 and should have been excited about, I wrote,

“[…] so many of the characters are two-dimensional […] The plot is pretty simplistic, the battle scenes are much too long (without adding suspense or additional pathos) but the graphics are stunning, even if some of the stuff is just too colorful and cutesy-looking for my taste.”

I saw the second one in 2023—which I only remembered was called “The Way of Water” just now—but I liked the second one more. I read a lot more into the second one, started that review with,

“James Cameron hates people and capitalism and plundering and piracy and globalism and hypernationalism and he probably hates the U.S. of A. more than a bit but, most of all, he hates colonialism. He fucking hates colonialism. He hates it so much that he’s made two giant blockbuster movies about it and he’s going to make three more just to drill the point home that there is nothing respectable about colonialism, that there is no justification for it, that it is always morally wrong, that it is always extractive, that it is about taking what you don’t think you have to pay for, about denigrating entire species and races and animals as fodder for your egocentric machine.”

Avatar 3 − Tired And Ass by The Critical Drinker (YouTube)

The Critical Drinker writes about the new Fire and Ice movie.

“Fire and [ice] is abusively long. Especially when you realize the plot could be easily condensed into like half that time. I’m not kidding. At least 50% of this movie is nothing but a wanky tech demo. Just endless landscape and wildlife shots that go on forever and accomplish absolutely nothing. A flamboyant $400 million screen-saver that adds nothing to the story or characters and bogs down what’s already a frustrating and repetitive narrative. I kid you not. Here, characters get captured and taken hostage and have to be rescued on like four different occasions.”

“Visually it looks fantastic and all that, but it does suffer from the same problem you always get with CGI. There’s basically no weight or impact to anything that happens because, you know, it was all just rendered on a computer. Also, the scenes with Spider do kind of make me laugh. One, because the actor’s so fucking wooden, you can make a log cabin out of him. And two, because he’s the only physically real thing on screen, it’s pretty obvious when everything else around him is fake. As for the other characters, they’re the usual one-note walking cliches you’d expect from these movies. Generic protagonist is still just a generic good guy trying to hold his family together and do the right thing. Evil fire lady is evil and likes fire because the movie needed another antagonist. I guess the kids are all a bunch of nothing-burgers to the point where I struggle to even remember who was who.”

“Here’s a fun little drinking game you can play at home, kids. Have a careful look at the human characters in Avatar. the brutal soldiers, the cruel whale hunters, the evil corporate types, all the people you’re supposed to hate, and take a shot every time you spot a non-white actor on screen, even in the backgrounds. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be stone cold sober by the end of the movie. Why? Because there’s none to be found here. And it’s strange because normally you can’t move for the on-screen diversity in Disney movies, which are determined to reflect the world we live in today. I wonder why they dropped the ball so suddenly with this particular film. I wonder why they chose to have this violent, destructive, expansionist, capitalist, militaristic dictatorship represented almost entirely by one ethnic group. Well, I couldn’t possibly solve this mystery. Can you?”

I dunno. My review of the first one lined up with this one. My review of the second one doesn’t. Maybe I need to waste three hours of my life and see what’s up with the third one.