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SHough610's avatar

I haven’t finished yet but I felt this intimately when I was applying to the USC MFA screenwriting program. Not to be a kissass, Vince, but I wanted to quote part of your Benjamin Button review (this part: "Lived forward, life seems and possibly is temporary and completely arbitrary.  But in looking at it backwards, retelling it as a story, it becomes such that it only could’ve happened in just this way. Those isolated, arbitrary moments suddenly become meaningful and permanent, necessary to making us what we are.  Write it down and it lasts forever."). There was just one problem: I couldn’t find it. Wasn’t on UPROXX. Eventually, because I was very serious about that essay, I went through the way back machine and found it.

But as someone who is a packrat about my own writing I would have blown a gasket if I was you.

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Elliot Clifford's avatar

RIP to my regular reads the past few years.

BirthMoviesDeath folded.

FilmDrunk obvs.

Gawker died, but then I found out about...

Mel, just in time for it too to die.

SomethingAwful articles are toast.

Jezebel went down, (but is coming back?)

Some Substacks are now replacing the above 'reads' but with obvious differences in the format/editorial structure that I really liked about Old Websites. And I still wanna *read* a lot, I don't want that media consumption itch to have to be entirely scratched by videos/YouTube. I just don't always want to *watch*, and everyone knows the labour involved in a video vs a written article would mean some articles/opinions/takes just wouldn't get published if the mandate was Everything Must Be Video.

Vince this post made me Google and find (took a while to fumble my way to it) your FilmDrunk piece 'The Title Is Concept Is The Trailer Is The Poster: Are Comedy Films Losing Dynamic Range?' thankfully it was still up. I work in film/TV in Australia and for my money that's one of the best modern examples of writing on film trends and have sent it on to other peeps in our industry over the years. (The high concept trend itself doesn't hugely apply to our Aussie industry - we just don't make comedy films. But working in the US is like a default aspiration for most of us.) It would be SO annoying for it not to be available online in the future to re-read/forward. So as of ten minutes ago it now it sits on the laptop in horribly formatted 'print as PDF' file.

I also did the same thing to Meaghan Garvey (Substack: SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE) and her post about Hipster Runoff, Indie Sleaze and change in internet/media culture. There's a line in it that I think is so insightful and needs to remain available so I can share with other people from now til thee end of times:

"The culture we consume no longer tells us where we fall on the spectrum of ‘mainstream’ to 'alt'; it tells us whether or not we're a good person, whether we deserve good things to come our way."

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