The Menagerie Decade

July 5, 2025

-8:40 AM: I am sneezing and I woke up kind of late. Nevertheless, I do feel good in a way that I have not felt for a while.

-Good morning, so how do I live as an Evangelion-inspired video game kid today?

-Evangelion ran out of a budget halfway through? I don’t even understand what that meant for the creators in a practical logistical sense for the rest of their work. (Freelancers were essential for anime work but they couldn’t afford them anymore, leading the core team to do all the work in a way that was unsustainable. It came down to “they couldn’t afford freelancers.” So in the later episodes, unlike the earlier ones, it was only the core team working and that normally is never done.)

-Surely the only reason the studios and networks allowed a show in such sordid condition was due to the state of the Japanese economy at the time. In a more well off state surely the suits would have gotten more resources to Anno’s team as soon as he complained about it. It is not showing face to have a show in such a condition air on television.

-Yeah, the sponsors step in to stop “weird” both in Japan and America much more often than I think most people realize. But by the mid 1990s there was no real appetite to do so and so something like this manages to slip through the cracks. And then, it changes everything.

-I guess the sponsors who agreed to have their ads aired alongside the later episodes of Evangelion had no idea what they were getting into. Or?

-You’d think the very first episode that showed real signs of a budget crisis would have been enough for a studio intervention and course correction. But in 1995-1996 in Japan, due to the economy, that just wasn’t how it worked.

-When the budget broke, a show went from being polished to being human. And in the world of 1990s television, that was rare. And according to a very strange law of supply and demand, what was rare was automatically valuable. (Although I kind of doubt that Evangelion was the only children’s anime show in that particular moment facing real budget challenges in that moment.)

-People do tend to overlook all the Christian imagery in the series based on that statement by Anno about how it meant nothing and he would have chosen something different if he knew the series would become popular overseas. But I suspect that that comment from him was kind of a white lie.

-The strange law of supply and demand in “imperfection” on 1990s television led in Japan to the success of Evangelion and in America to the success of “trash TV” like South Park and Attitude Era WWF and Jackass. Interesting how the same phenomenon emerges in very different ways in different places.

-Another similarity is how The Simpsons had Comic Book Guy as a joke while Japanese media talks to obsessive otaku as a sincere emotional plea.

-Early video game media on the internet tended to highlight “secrets” and “cheat codes” and “easter eggs” as the most prominent information above everything else. This sort of reflects this very 1990s television addict desire to always want to be peeling back the curtain on everything, but has always felt unbalanced. I swear that there were certain video games that I knew cheat codes for before I could even provide a basic synopsis about them. The best commentary about video games nowadays, by contrast, will seek to emphasize the themes and cultural context of a work that was almost always overlooked back then.

-(Not ruling out the tremendous autism of early internet adopters as a major reason as well.)

-It was kind of assumed back then that if you were the kind of person who would look up a video game on the internet, you already knew the basics about what the video game was and were looking for advanced “details” about instead. Nowadays we get all of our information from the internet so that sort of mentality cannot be assumed.

-Before, we wanted to know if Mew actually was under the truck. Now we want to know what actually compelled the developers to want to put this character in the game in the first place.

-Here’s the thing: The 1990s impulse to find every secret was founded in a world where not everything is completely systematized and documented. We’ve lost that same impulse because we know what everything already is now. “Mystery” does not exist in the same way.

-But not everything has been documented in that way, even if many of us think so. The trivia section in the article of Ocarina of Time will tell us about the Mario character paintings in the castle courtyard, but it doesn’t yet tell people about just how much the story of Link has been built on the Arthurian cycle and Parsifal. So in one sense, the work is incomplete. This reminds me of that beautiful conversation between Solid Snake and Mei Ling in the first Metal Gear Solid about saving memories, too.

-For the longest time we assumed that the quest for knowledge about a video game was complete once the 100% icon appeared, once all the Gold Skulltulas were defeated, once the game’s code was fully datamined. But, actually? That was never the case.

-The underlying point I wanted to make with the Evangelion talk is that the cultural and television landscape that made the 1990s so unique in America really wasn’t all that different in Japan. Japan was responding to the same influences and challenges that we were, although in unique ways.

-In the 1980s America thought that Japan was about to take over the world. In the 1980s Japan probably thought that Japan was about to take over the world, too. And it was on this basis, the utterly incredible rise of Japan in the decades after being disgraced by World War II, that Japanese people found it able to justify the cruel system of employment and social order that had been crystallized over that period of time. “See, it’s clear that what we’re doing is working!” And then the 1990s happened, and then the narrative was in peril. It’s in this context that Evangelion emerges and really speaks to people.

-And my suspicion continues to be that the best way to understand the nature of modern Japanese work and social culture is not in understanding ancient rice farming teamwork or ancient Confucian texts but in understanding the fear that Japanese conservatives had of another Anpo protest situation happening after 1960. That’s why there is overwork, and that’s why there is the tradition of after work drinking with the company. “We want to keep an eye on you. We want to make sure that you aren’t hanging out with anyone suspicious.”

-In the 1950s, the Yakuza and the CIA kept the order. In the 1960s and 1970s, corporate culture and the fear of another Anpo kept the order. In the 1980s, “Japan’s success” kept the order. After the 1990s, I’m not sure anything keeps the order. The situation had been going on for so long that the order sustains itself by itself.

-And this’d be America too to a tee if only John F. Kennedy wasn’t embarrassed by the Mafia lolol

-It sure is funny how the exact same phenomenon can be described as both socialist and anti-socialist at the same time. Take, for example, the Civil Rights movement, opposed by that notorious sign “Race Mixing Is Communism” and the pro wrestler Sputnik Monroe getting his nickname for supporting racial integration. When in reality, the Civil Rights movement only truly succeeded because the federal government pushed it top-down as they wanted to win the Cold War and images of Jim Crow South were embarrassing overseas. Or take for example, the claim that in education America traded in a classical model of education for a grey STEM-focused one as part of an alleged socialist plot to unhitch Americans from their cultural heritage. When in reality, that STEM switch came as part of the post-Sputnik panic and the Space Age desire to beat the Soviets to the moon. What other examples of this phenomenon can you think of that fits the bill here?

-After decades of incredible progress, the Digital Revolution rapidly transitioned from a river to a small trickle of advance at around the mid-2010s. And I suppose it’s no surprise at all that that is the exact time when “woke” begins to advance rapidly in education. It is almost like that at that exact moment, everyone knew even if only subconsciously that the project of education for technological advance was for all intents and purposes over and that education would be back to instruction in “values.”

-I would be more upset about this “woke” turn, by the way, if I thought that education actually taught anyone anything. Who actually gets their values from “education” in this day and age?

-And I guess that means also saying that Engel and Abington were bad in the early 1960s and set the stage for where we are today, but that turning them back now really wouldn’t accomplish all that much and would largely be just signaling. In this information drenched age, what a child gets in school however well-intentioned will only be a fraction of the media diet that they actually end up consuming.

-The 1980s is the menagerie decade, and this includes how “ultra-religious” the culture supposedly was. The culture valued prayer and the Bible! (But thanks to Engel and Abington still applying, they couldn’t do or teach it in the schools.) The culture valued church! (But thanks to the recent wave of suburbanization due to urban taxes and crime, traditional communities that were centered around church life had been uprooted and the new suburban churches felt shallow and rootless, a community where everyone lived so far apart from one another could not be centered around one building.) The culture valued religious messages! (But thanks to the rapidly expanding media ecosystem due to the rise of cable and VCRs, these voices were increasingly small among many.) It can’t really be called surprising that in the 1990s and 2000s their children rebelled against this.

-You sort of wonder that part of the problem of these new megachurches is inherently just they are new and rootless in a way that many others are old. You wonder if Joel Osteen’s church may get to have a bit of prestige simply as it becomes a bit older. And by the time that happens, Eric Kaufmann’s thesis will have kicked in. We feel like the world around us is rootless because, if we live in the suburbs, it literally is. There hasn’t been an intense amount of human settlement here for even a half a century. We are pioneers, on land that has never really seen sustained human development before.

-Man, I’m killing it today. I thought I had lost the “it” factor for a while. I might even upload this one. You know.

-A pretty girl who is a new employee here asked me for help finding the sign in station.

-(cut) is back. She is nice. I told her about my ESL overseas project today.

-(cut) laughing was tremendously obnoxious to listen to. She laughs less now. I imagine that that is because she has gotten used to the promotion that she got.

-Two nice conversations with (cut) and (cut) today. I told them about my plan to drive to (cut) soon. It may not be possible to do this immediately, though. (cut) will be up soon.

-It’s sad that (cut) is ignoring me.

-I just finished my third day in a row and I feel fine. I don’t normally feel this good at this point. I know that I’ve gained a ton of weight since my sub 220 low point but it’s exciting to see how healthy I can still be.

-Huzzah! I am healthier in warm weather! Obviously, this is proof that I need to be moving south!

-Finally got the haircut.

-I am a five Solas Protestant. I think there is no good news for those within Roman Catholicism who along with their official teaching knowingly explicitly deny the biblical gospel of grace. But I don’t actually think that even defines most who attend Roman Catholic churces in the world today. I think most even in the know would have a difficult time enunciating with clarity the issues that have historically divided Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Does that mean those who haven’t tried to learn this will never enter the kingdom of Heaven? How could I possibly say that?

-The Protestant Reformers won the only victory for the gospel and for reformation that was possible for them in the moment, the only victory that was allowed. And Roman Catholics mock this today as “founding a new church.”

-I’m not as hateful against laugh tracks as you might think. Maybe it’s because I was born slightly too young to truly be disgusted by television. But from my vantage point it seems like a decent way to inject some energy into what would otherwise be a fairly lifeless and boring three camera one room sitcom setup.

-Just finished episode 13 of Evangelion. Lol.

-Wrestling: Roxanne Perez vs B-Fab. On Main Event. In Saudi Arabia! Did I say once that Main Event secretly has the best wrestling in all of WWE? Well, I want to say that again. I kind of wish that all the matches that they do would be like that.

-I read two more pages of Neuromancer by William Gibson today. I like this book. Every sentence is a little bit of futurist poetry. I don’t have a single clue what is going on in the story. One day I vow to be The Man Who Figured Out Neuromancer. But that day is certainly not today.

-One more ESL application in. This one for a job in Shenzhen. I didn’t want to do one in China at first but Shenzhen might be the most important city in the world today so that’s actually exciting.