Underrated classic.

(i'm zeebmork, i forgot my acc pw ages ago)

didn't know these were still being made, figured the scene died out back in like '08, so that's cool. feel like much more could be done w the format tho.

like, this is all from memory since i haven't watched any of this in ages, but iirc cicierega's stuff was very much of its time, web 1.0 fused with japanese pokemon music, pulling together all these vectors from outside into overload, schizophrenic-conspiratorial illuminati-mode plots/connections running through it all, the world has stopped being something we can make sense of because there's so much incomprehensible foreign information coming at us from so many different directions. nietzschean, in a way:

"A species originates, a type grows sturdy and strong, in the long struggle with essentially constant unfavorable conditions. Conversely, people know from the experience of breeders that species with overabundant diets and, in general, more than their share of protection and care, will immediately show a striking tendency towards variations of the type, and will be rich in wonders and monstrosities (including monstrous vices). ... Here there are none of the advantages, excesses, and protections that are favorable to variation. The species needs itself to be a species, to be something that, by virtue of its very hardness, uniformity, and simplicity of form, can succeed and make itself persevere in constant struggle with its neighbors or with the oppressed who are or threaten to become rebellious. A tremendous range of experiences teaches it which qualities are primarily responsible for the fact that, despite all gods and men, it still exists, it keeps prevailing. It calls these qualities virtues, and these are the only virtues it fosters. It does so with harshness; in fact, it desires harshness."

so, 80s to early 00s, resurgence of evangelical christianity with all its chick-tract excesses, d&d is satanic, daycare cult scares... and the cold war was on, and even in the era after khrushchev got ousted and sclerosis started to set in, no one was sure whether the world would survive, whether capitalism would survive, &c. nietzsche's long struggle with essentially constant unfavorable conditions, in a sense. (i've said before that the USA has always needed the USSR, similar to but not quite the batman/joker thing, but that's not directly relevant here so i'll elide past all that for now...)

then gorb happened, the USSR fell, the USA started flailing around looking for new enemies... but couldn't find any. even after 9/11, islamism was never really a credible threat. what happens then? back to nietzsche:

"The continuous struggle with constant unfavorable conditions is, as I have said, what causes a type to become sturdy and hard. But, eventually, a fortunate state will arise and the enormous tension will relax; perhaps none of the neighbors are enemies anymore, and the means of life, even of enjoying life, exist in abundance. With a single stroke, the bonds and constraints of the old discipline are torn: it does not seem to be necessary any more, to be a condition of existence, – if it wanted to continue, it could do so only as a form of luxury, as an archaic taste. Variation, whether as deviation (into something higher, finer, rarer) or as degeneration and monstrosity, suddenly comes onto the scene in the greatest abundance and splendor; the individual dares to be individual and different. At these turning points of history, a magnificent, diverse, jungle-like growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow will appear alongside (and often mixed up and tangled together with) an immense destruction and self-destruction."

everything blows up. ephemeral subcultures, the internet opening up a huge new way for the entrance of cultural vectors (memories of grabbing anime off irc channels, romanian pop music in 32kbps mp3 off p2p, goth music off geocities sites, photoshopped britney spears + george bush jpgs off this very bbs...), and cicierega shows up and pulls all this stuff together, both memes and technologies (internet, flash) into one thing. newgrounds itself was the same way: club a seal, teletubbies doing bong rips and so on, and while there was some precedent in viral faxes and all... i mean, in a sense, nothing ever changes, plains apes gonna plains ape, but faxes ain't flash.

that era had that ethos about it in general: shock jock stuff, south park became wildly popular, and so on. howling willie cunt is a perfect example, and his album came out in 2006, so the tail end of it. on the one hand, you have the 'end of history' (lmao), koichi toyama in 2008 saying all the world is america, but -- and i don't know if it's a nietzschean "end of struggle" thing where people came to realize that the cold war was over or if the timing was a coincidence and all it was was the internet and all, or if it was that bush was in the white house so a shock-jock pose is the natural one to adopt for the (very left-leaning) media elite and it bleeds over and accelerates past buck-fush code-pink into a general rejection and explosion of variation burning through the potential energy stored up in decades of subtly-enforced consensus, or what -- on the other hand, that variation was there, that mass appearance of vectors that early animutation tapped into.

just as faxes ain't flash, 2014 ain't 2004. animutation has largely been in this... i don't want to call it a human centipede setup since there's nothing shit-eating per se about it. but like, when i was in high school there was this summer camp i went to, where they had dances every weekend with very codified playlists -- 'canon'. what was on them? the stuff that was on the radio when the place started. it had started off as them just playing whatever was popular at the time, but became its own thing, taking the playlists as traditions, that continue basically unchanged to this day. similar thing here: it's a little bubble of 2004 in 2014, it's its own thing that preserves, like, ren and stimpy, '00s video game graphics, oldschool forum emoticons and so on.

and that's cool, but i wonder: what would it look like if one were made that was rooted in 2014? i don't want to go all marinetti and "set fire to the museums!" but if there was something that reflected the conditions of today, based in the same format, what would it look like? nietzsche:

"The dangerous and uncanny point has been reached when the greatest, most diverse, most comprehensive life lives past the old morality. The “individual” is left standing there, forced to give himself laws, forced to rely on his own arts and wiles of self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption. There is nothing but new whys and hows; there are no longer any shared formulas; misunderstanding is allied with disregard; decay, ruin, and the highest desires are horribly entwined; the genius of the race overflows from every cornucopia of good and bad; there is a disastrous simultaneity of spring and autumn, filled with new charms and veils that are well suited to the young, still unexhausted, still indefatigable corruption. Danger has returned, the mother of morals, great danger, displaced onto the individual this time, onto the neighbor or friend, onto the street, onto your own child, onto your own heart, onto all of your own-most, secret-most wishes and wills: and the moral philosophers emerging at this time – what will they have to preach? These sharp observers and layabouts discover that everything is rapidly coming to an end, that everything around them is ruined and creates ruin, that nothing lasts as long as the day after tomorrow except one species of person, the hopelessly mediocre. Only the mediocre have prospects for continuing on, for propagating – they are the people of the future, the only survivors: “Be like them! Be mediocre!” is the only morality that still makes sense, that still finds ears."

now, nietzsche doesn't go into what causes this, but one believable argument (i think nick land has said something along these lines, or at least he or someone around him pointed me to something saying etc) is that it's a combination of malthus and mencius moldbug: on the malthusian hand, the ceiling has raised, the necessities of survival are less pressing, constant downward selection comes to a temporary end, and on the menciist hand, civilizational norms put a lid on the accumulation of potential energy, directing it toward the future. samo burja's concept of the apocalypse cult is a development of this: time-preference shortens dramatically, allowing energy once directed to the future to be directed instead to the here and now. the important thing about the malthusian ceiling-raising is that it's temporary: when downward selection lessens, upward movement lessens (dysgenics, though it doesn't have to be genetic per se) and eventually things decline to the point where the ceiling lowers again.

the internet parallel is twofold, but the two parts are related: first, the eternal september (1993 for usenet, around 2007 for the internet), and second, the establishment moves in and it stops being a frontier. the wild west can't be wild forever. burja's apocalypse cult in reverse: things are more *directed* now, so instead of wild orgies in the streets we're back to no sex before monogamous marriage. (metaphor, obv.) the creation/injection of new vectors is possible (i've been working the eastern europe angle myself, and some USA romantic-nationalist ICP/nascar stuff) but it's much harder. if you charted the distribution of hits per site over time, i think you'd see a stratification: fewer and fewer sites getting more and more hits. and the shared cultures of the internet are much more top-down. (somethingawful is relevant here, but dunno how much.) where once there was geocities, today there is gawker.

some of what's getting written about things like vaporwave today reminds me of what animutation was like back then. the east asia angle is still alive, but rather than anime it's capitalism. japan still has some nostalgia value as the place furthest ahead in the future, but it's getting eclipsed by china big time. (again, nick land.) debordian capitalist freakout -- the vaporwave people are all commies, of the postmodern abstract-expressionism type (cia'd, lol) -- office hold music, gulf petromonarchies, on and on. pulling together all that's going on today. but just as there's no unmoved mover in culture, there's nothing that gets moved without moving something else -- every repetition is an amplification. as befits my futurist tendencies, i want to see this stuff *live*, not in any crapshack political sense (and not that there's no place for keeping alive the traditional mode) but -- man i've written too many words about this i wonder if i can get flash working again

it's been five years, damn

idk if any of this makes sense. anyway it's cool that this stuff is still around, and i think i see one of my things in the background so 5/5 for that

For what it is, it's pretty entertaining. You seem to have put a lot of effort into it.

Glad to see anumitations aren't dead yet. I take it you got more of these lined up huh?

Ah it feels just like a classic Drunkmagikoopa flash. Wonder what that guys been up to anyway. Ah well this was a great tribute to all those old anumatiations. Can't wait for more