Brian Niemeier's Blog: Kairos - by Brian Niemeier, page 25

Comics’ Death of a Thousand Cuts

Yesterday’s post on the death of American comics elicited its fair share of comments. One reader who decided to offer his two cents ended up contributing gold when he turned out to be an industry veteran. Consider commercial sculptor William Paquet‘s insider account of the US comics industry’s collapse: Heads up: This isn’t the last time we’ll hear a firsthand account of Vertigo’s…

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Who Killed American Comics?

The recent post on who killed rock and roll attracted a lot of notice. It’s taken a while to gain traction, but it seems like every day more people are noticing Cultural Ground Zero. As this theory’s name implies, the destruction wasn’t limited to popular music. Every form of mass entertainment in the West from movies to television to comics suffered creative collapse circa 1997.

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Late-Night HypnoJourno Clowns

If you were of college age back in the aughts, it was impossible to miss the late-night news parody show craze. Once Comedy Central’s saucy puppet shows went off air for the day, the syncopated sounds of smug one-liners punctuated with mindless laughter would filter from dorm rooms, cheap apartments, and coffee bars across America. Come morning, you could count on your peers telling you all…

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Millennials’ Nonparticipation Trophy

The unemployable Millennial male has become a stock antagonist of Gen X managers and regime journos alike. While the former trade workplace horror stories of helpless yet self-entitled snowflakes who balk at face-to-face interaction, the latter whine about basement-dwelling incel NEETs failing to provide strong, independent women the lifestyle they deserve. A question too few stop to ask is why…

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Cassidy Faces Felony for Hating Evil

Back in December, veteran, former congressional candidate, and ardent Christian Michael Cassidy made national news for destroying a Satanic statue installed in the Iowa state capitol. Now, two months after ridding Iowa’s legislature of the demonic idol, Cassidy faces a felony charge. His crime? Hating evil. Related: Satanic Sacraments Left unexplained by prosecutors is how using…

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Preview: The Voyage of Egeria

My promise of a new short story set in my acclaimed Soul Cycle cosmos became a centerpiece of the sleeper hit campaign for my upcoming SC prelude novel The Burned Book. And while I put my hand to the plow in the word-fields and never looked back, today I must confess that I could not keep my promise of a new Soul Cycle short. Because my backers and patrons are getting a brand-new Soul Cycle…

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The Pop Cult’s Pyrrhic Victory

Something unprecedented happened in America in the years between 1991 and 1998. Christian religious affiliation fell from around 90 percent to 75 percent among young adults of ages 18-35. As frequent readers know, something noteworthy happened around the same time. If you take the average of people who were 18-35 in 1998, you get 26. That is core Generation X. Those same Gen Xers…

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Of Church Dogma and the Dogman

It hasn’t escaped consideration that two of our favored topics here – high strangeness and demonology – might incline those of a more secular Modernist bent to dismiss the whole blog as unserious. To them I’d point out that a worldview based on empirical positivism is hardly the default baseline of reality. In fact, scientism has its own peculiarities and relies on its own arbitrary assumptions.

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Bayou Bomber Contra Sam Hyde

Many of this blog’s readers will be aware of comedian Sam Hyde. He’s spent his career straddling the line between the rightward edge of the Overton window and the mainstream. He’s also something of a Jack of all trades, having crashed a TedX talk, had a now-cancelled show on Adult Swim, and emerged victorious from a pro boxing match. These days, Sam has joined the ranks of influencers offering…

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Of Hip-Hop and Corporate Pop

Yesterday, over at the Z Blog, the Z Man took up the thread of this blog’s posts on the death of rock music and Cultural Ground Zero. Approaching these related phenomena from an alternate angle, he gleaned some new insights. If you read my review of the classic John Hughes comedy Uncle Buck, you may recall that it’s noteworthy as one of the first Hollywood films to depict hip-hop as suburban…

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