Hello again from Highfield with our fourth and best edition yet of Stupefy, a newsletter made to help busy people navigate a chaotic media landscape. If you're reading this, it means you're keeping this thing alive and we'd love to hear your thoughts. But first read on for weirdo satire, a monster, gaming and Zuck.
- Must-hear mimicry
No modern satire takes as wide a sweep of current trends and boils them down to small moments of absurd mimicry like Episode 1. Like an irony-poisoned Monty Python who are never in the same room but always in a group DM with infinite obscure gaming jokes.E1 is a podcast that about fake podcasts that were abandoned after one episode and has given birth to a mid-sized Midwestern city's worth of pathetic but scarily realistic characters like the Tumblr poet Joseph Rogan (no relation) and the conspiracy quack Dr. Ying Ljubljana. E1 has a small following but enough Patreon subscribers to go on a small tour. But by far the best part is the songs. The invented NBA Stupid As$, a teenage Soundcloud rapper who is constantly OD'ing but beloved by music critics, has three songs that are each nail-on-the-head parodies of 2010's hip hop and genius songs bursting with references. I recommend hearing "French Stewart" first.
- Genius
The best media story of 2018 might be Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers' new mascot. He's perfectly attuned to the media landscape of 2018: visually visceral, like the ubiquitous pink background or a green matcha latte. He makes you stop. I'm relieved to read in this origin story that Gritty was created by an internal team at the Flyers and not by a marketing agency.
- Working in gaming
Time is the most fascinating thing about Red Dead Redemption 2. The reviews have coalesced at the intersection of "best open-world video game ever made" and "made on the backs of overworked developers and designers." Rockstar's previous game is the world's biggest-selling entertainment product of all time. To follow it up, the studio pushed their staff into 8 years of unrelenting crunch time. In the process, they pushed video games themselves forward. Is transporting ourselves to fully-imagined virtual worlds worth that? How does that scale as RDR2-level craftsmanship becomes the standard?
- Zuck Stories
The future of media is the Story, a mobile-first format invented by Snapchat and proliferated by Facebook. In an earnings call last week, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned Stories 71 times and said, "I just think that this is the future.” As Facebook growth plateaus, Stories are an opportunity for revenue and for advertiser creativity.
Links
Lil Peep Died Before Becoming Pop Royalty. His New Music May Change That.—The rapper and singer’s death at 21 left questions about the future of his songs. Now his closest collaborators are preparing his first full posthumous statement. From book clubs to cookware,BuzzFeed finds new ways to make money—BuzzFeed is teaming up with Amazon to start a book club. Vice’s Adult in the Room—Nancy Dubuc’s Plan to Fix a Media Pioneer (And Keep Its Youth Cred)