I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, SWEETHEART! 🐻💚🦊

I want things to feel real again, like real people worked on them because they loved the art of the thing and not because an LLC demanded that there be this THING that exists only to make money.

Please give me monsters made of latex, chewing gum, and lube for drool. Give me outfits that flow ethereally because you filmed the scenes in giant clear tank of water. Give me exploding miniatures filmed at 60 FPS so that they can be shown at 30 FPS and look like gigantic skyscrapers under attack.

Vaporwave's aesthetic comes from a time period where we've already tried to give someone enough power and money to fix what we thought made America suck, and no matter which way people tried to spin it, they only ended up making it worse.

They'll try their damnedest to convince you that life was so much better back in the day, but if you give them all of the power and money they ask they'll be willing to fix it for you and you'll be "winning so hard your head will spin".

Vaporwave for me is a bitter reminder that no matter what memories you retain of the past, that they are still memories. And often memories can be tainted by bad faith actors who want to use your nostalgia for their own personal gain.

Over time, as I watched a not-insignificant portion of the population assume that America was best when it was still firmly in the segregationist era of its history, I began to realize that vaporwave may be sarcastic, but it's also immensely grounding.

The one thing that helped me weather through this period was vaporwave. I had grown attached to the genre in 2017, but it helped me to keep grounded during that period of my life. Something about it being the soundtrack to working in a post-capitalistic hellscape seemed apt.

Through a combination of shoddy public transit and walking, I was able to retain my job and even find a better one with my accounting degree. But that job didn't pay me enough to get a used car, and I worked for a dealership. I ended up walking two hours a day just to save on bus fares.

One of the biggest of those decisions is that I should never earn enough to ever afford a new car should I need one. Back in 2016, my car failed inspection to the point where it was basically totaled. My job didn't pay enough for me to buy a used car, so had to do without.

I'm not buying it. I grew up hearing tales about how the future is ours for the taking if we try hard enough. But the most important decisions of my life were made by assholes I've never met before in boardrooms I've never seen in meetings I was never invited too.

This has lead me to feel exceptionally bitter towards my parents' generation. It's like the 1950s propagandic advertising can be drummed up to bolster fascist talking points that life was so much better back then, and we need to return to a point when life didn't start sucking.

But what we have from the 1950s is a boatload of post WWII propaganda, proclaiming that America is one of the greatest and most prosperous nations on the planet. Provided you were white, straight, and most notably male, you had it made in the shade. And boy howdy, was that so heavily advertised.

The advancement of technology, science, and society itself over the past several decades has been overwhelming and glorious. The same tech that allows you complain that being a modern human blows can miraculously connect you to thousands of other people who believe the same delusion.

Think about how since the 1980s there's been a movement dedicated to "Making America Great Again", when the actual goalposts for what made America great aren't clear. The general consensus is that America was great in the 1950s. But is it really that much better than today?

It's a funny thing about nostalgia that the inconvenient or painful aspects of the past are often glossed over for remembering only that which we enjoyed about it. And when your memories are heavily influenced by advertising, you can retroactively forget just how awful things used to be.

Nothing that companies like Microsoft and so forth were designing with "Frutiger Aero" were trying to show you a brand new future. It was advertising. It was all marketing gimmicks meant to emulate the style of the "New Millennium" while George H.W. Bush was trying to bring back coal jobs.