Watched the 1+6 route, skipping through a few of the more obviously redundant parts. I gotta say it’s better than the clusterfuck I was expecting - clearly Tim spent those 10 months (plus the year preceding them) really thinking about what he had to say and polishing the editing to a mirror sheen. I do appreciate that the whole Season 1 endeavor is the most legitimately ambitious idea he has ever followed through on, and possibly ever will again. I haven’t always vibed with what he’s going for in these mammoth-length neo-AB reviews - and I still don’t completely, and don’t believe they couldn’t be a lot more concise and respectful of the audience’s time - but I do respect that this one more or less delivers on its maximalist manifesto of following every contextualizing train of thought peripheral to the game while coming around to a thematically cohesive whole that transcends it. I thought the attempt at broader cultural commentary in part 6 was a lot better executed than, say, its equivalent in the Doom video - I suspect that’s where the kamikaze effort levels applied to this one most paid off - though I’d be curious to hear @Moon assess Tim’s stint as a cyberpunk historian. While I can’t go toe-to-toe with Tim for sheer volume of media consumed - one game he’s determined to never ever lose - I do feel like he reduces some pretty important elements of the genre (its evolution from New Science Fiction, its response to real-world material conditions, its philosophical underpinnings beyond “real” vs. “fake”) to either footnotes or vague insinuations. Tim heaping praise on Gibson’s poetic diagnoses of late capitalist/postindustrial malaise seems amusingly at odds with his simultaneous (and wholly typical) fetishism of his own material possessions and media consumption - maybe that’s another layer of gotcha irony too, who knows.
goonbag Hell, I’ll say it: the meta-meta-meta stuff has gotten exhausting and after threatening so many times to drop the act, I wish he’d just do it. Stop hiding, talk like a regular person.
As someone who’s also pretty tired of recursive meta-commentary as a “clever” aesthetic in media (inb4 someone mentions I like Evangelion), I really feel this sentiment. “Exhausting” is really the best word I can think of to describe any of these audiobook-length videos of labyrinthine schtick. Especially as I get older, I find much of Tim’s signature confrontational style simply exhausting, in these extended doses especially: not just the length and verbosity but the endless brags mixed with ritual self-effacement, the ambiguously shifting triple-quadruple-quintuple layers of irony, the “am I fucking with you or not?” mind games, the imperious nitpicking of others’ word choices and faux pas; all sophisticated methods to render an audience disarmed and vulnerable to rhetorical domination. I don’t find it a comfortable place to spend hours at a time. It’s not that he doesn’t have interesting things to say, but in this form you’re never allowed to just access them straightforwardly without sifting through the full baggage of the Tim Persona (which, granted, some people appear to enjoy).
The thing is, I doubt there’s really any extricating all of this from the Tim Rogers who’s evolved with the internet for 20 years. Tim, the Internet Personality - I can’t speak to the flesh-and-blood human being I’ve never met - is never “authentic”; he’s always “authentic”. He’s inauthentically authentic; he’s authentically inauthentic. Like his role models Orson Welles, Quentin Tarantino, and (until it was bad juju) Woody Allen, the line between a theatrical performance of public ego and the real thing is functionally nonexistent. You wear the mask long enough, and it becomes your face. Etc. etc.
Authenticity and truth may be irreversibly decayed concepts, but not everybody lives their demise in quite the way Tim projects onto the world. It’s more conducive to certain personality types than others.