After completing Serial Experiments Lain, I found myself needing more ideas around this. The anime has a story, but it is heavier in ideas than plot or even character development.

So, I looked around online and found a few video essays arguing various interpretations of episodes or themes within it. These were all interesting in various ways, despite one of the longer ones consistently mispronouncing certain words ("id" or "omnipotent", etc).

It got me thinking about the problem with modern media: It isn't art, but a product.

Too much media these days is written with a concrete "message" in mind, which is being screamed by the creator in a simple-minded and ham-fisted way, as though they lack confidence in what they are saying and are afraid that you might find your own interpretation, not the one they intended. In essence, this is barely even a product, but propaganda, as the message is usually political in nature and is often treated as the entire purpose of the media existing.

So, it is interesting to be back to consuming a piece where the discourse isn't even as concrete as "do you agree with character X?" (which isn't bad), but is more about "what does this make you feel or think about?".

When the running time of the media can easily be massively dwarfed by the time one could spend discussing the ideas derived from it, that seems like a good thing.

I miss interesting media, interesting conversations, and interesting people. The world is so empty, these days, but somehow so noisy.

Save me from the awful din,
...Nights