Brian Niemeier's Blog: Kairos - by Brian Niemeier, page 3

Jack Conte and Neopatronage: A New Creative Economy

Unless you’ve been living in a cave on Mars, you’re aware that the entertainment industry is in flux. Disruptive tech innovations, corporate screwups, and the path of least resistance becoming a slippery slope have destroyed the old paradigm. Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, addressed this upheaval in his keynote speech at SXSW 2024. There, he offered a vision for how creators can thrive in a market…

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Sandersons’ Flaw: The Trouble With Constantly Dynamic Characters

Brandon Sanderson is widely respected as a meticulous world builder, an innovative storyteller, and a prolific writer. Over the past two decades he’s made his name as a crafter of ultra-refined magic systems and dynamic characters. But no methodology is flawless, and new writers can learn just as much from examining how Sanderson’s style falters as they can from his successes. “Wait…

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The Illusion of Choice and the Responsibility to Walk Away

A recent exchange online captured a recurring tension in the debate raging around entertainment and consumer culture. One side argues that people don’t actually want good products—they want easy products. Ease of access governs most consumer decisions, which is why streaming services, retail giants, and movie franchises dominate the market. The counter point is elite theory: The public gets…

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Why the Anime Industry Should Return to Hand-Drawn Cel Animation

A besetting misconception of Late Modern society has convinced most people that history only moves in one direction. Line always goes up, and you can never go back. Yet you need do nothing more than pull up Hulu, turn on your TV, or visit Barnes and Noble to see that somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong. A video posted on X by gallery manager Stefan Riekeles illustrated…

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It Came Through the Bathroom Mirror

Girls at sleepovers daring each other to repeat the name “Bloody Mary”, Southern mansions where they cover the looking glass as someone lies dying, myths of doom befalling those who stare too long at their own reflections … Some of the oldest grim legends involve the allure and mystery of mirrors. Today’s tale of high strangeness continues that tradition with one chilling difference: It features…

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Reviewbrah Discovers Food Ground Zero

For the past several years now, we’ve catalogued various cultural phenomena under the umbrella heading Ground Zero. Whether in movies, comic books, or anime, it’s well-documented that consumers could no longer expect new iterations of popular IPs to improve on their predecessors, starting in 1997. Nor did Ground Zero happen all at once; it was a decade-long process of sporadic decay that…

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Can the Mall Make a Comeback?

For decades, shopping malls were more than just commercial zones. They were social hubs, cultural hotbeds, and even fonts of information. Time was, if you wanted to know the next hot game’s release date or keep up with current trends, you headed down to the mall and marinated in the zeitgeist. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know we’ve discussed sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s concept…

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Should AAA Studios Revisit Retro Style Games?

The AAA video game industry stands at a turning point. Facing runaway development costs, dwindling consumer trust, and rising market instability, big studios must adapt to a rapidly changing market. Could the answer lie in the unlikeliest of places: reviving retro-style games? That idea may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. A growing body of evidence suggests it’s not only possible…

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Why A.I. Music Can’t Replicate the Human Touch

As we’ve explored on this blog, A.I. has made remarkable strides in fields from image generation to writing. But when it comes to creating music that really touches people, A.I. faces formidable obstacles. Because while A.I. music generators can churn out competent melodies, their output often feels hollow or disconnected from the uniquely human experience that defines music.

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Could Elon Musk Revolutionize Wizards of the Coast?

Back-to-back seismic shifts rocked the tabletop gaming world in 2024: the resignation of Wizards of the Coast president Cynthia Williams and speculation that Elon Musk might be eyeing Hasbro, WotC’s parent company. While Williams’ departure marks the end of a tumultuous era for Wizards, Musk’s potential interest hints at a radically different future for Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The…

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