Tag: Gonzo

Stuck Inside a Bunker with the Tariff Blues Again

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The stairs creaked beneath my boots as I descended into the bunker, a subterranean shrine to American paranoia. The air was thick with the scent of lard, motor oil, and the unmistakable tang of off-brand cola gone slightly flat. Somewhere in the dim recesses, a radio squawked out a tinny voice—half preacher, half doomsday salesman—preaching the gospel of tariffs and self-reliance.

“Damn shame about the price of Oreos,” my host muttered, lighting a cigarette with the shaky hands of a man who had seen too much daytime television. “But we were ready for this.”

And ready, he was. Floor-to-ceiling stacks of canned Vienna sausages, Velveeta bricks gleaming like gold bars in a vault, gallon drums of mayonnaise arranged with near-religious devotion. He kicked open a plastic tub labeled EMERGENCY RATIONS—inside, a sea of bottled ranch dressing, bulk ramen, and enough Moon Pies to outlast civilization itself.

“You got water down here?” I asked, trying to ignore the way the fluorescent light buzzed like a dying hornet.

“Water?” He let out a laugh like a truck misfiring. “Ain’t worried about that. Got plenty of Coke.”

He patted a tower of two-liter bottles like they were old friends. Somewhere deeper in the bunker, a generator growled to life. The man cracked open a can of SPAM with the precision of a surgeon and slid a chunk onto a cracker.

“We’ll ride it out,” he said, chewing solemnly. “America’s been through worse. Hell, my granddaddy lived through the Carter years.”

I took a step back, careful not to disturb the delicate ecosystem of snack cakes and beef jerky that lined the walls like grotesque wallpaper. This wasn’t just survival—it was a vision of the future. A land where commerce had collapsed, but the dream of infinite processed cheese had endured.

Outside, the world might be unraveling, but down here? Down here, the Republic still stood—propped up by Twinkies, canned chili, and the last defiant crackle of a Slim Jim being snapped in two.

“What are you doing for veggies?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. A man with a mayonnaise drum the size of a washing machine isn’t tending a hydroponic lettuce farm.

He squinted at me like I’d just spoken in tongues. “Veggies?” He let the word roll around in his mouth, testing it, suspicious. “Well… got pickles.”

He kicked open another tub—sure enough, floating in a briny abyss were enough pickles to survive a biblical famine. Next to them, cans of creamed corn, green beans cooked to the color of Army surplus, and a suspicious number of cocktail olives.

“Fruit?” I pressed, feeling reckless.

He jerked a thumb toward a lonely stack of canned peaches drowning in syrup thick enough to patch a radiator. “Peach cobbler in a can, brother. That’s dessert and vitamins in one.”

I nodded like this was the gospel truth. Who was I to argue? The man had planned for everything—at least, everything that could be purchased in bulk from a Walmart clearance aisle.

He leaned in, lowering his voice. “If things get real bad… got these.” He reached into a crate and pulled out a pack of Flintstones vitamins, the kind that taste like chalk and childhood neglect. “One of these a day, I’m set.”

A vision flashed in my mind—some post-collapse wasteland where this man, pale from years underground, ruled over the last gasps of humanity with an iron fist and an unlimited supply of gummy vitamins.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” I asked.

He cracked open a warm can of Dr Pepper, took a long, satisfied swig, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Son,” he said, “I been ready since NAFTA.”

I noticed the trapdoor in the corner, half-covered by a stack of government cheese and what looked like a taxidermied raccoon wearing a Make America Great Again hat. It was bolted down with a length of chain and what I could only describe as unnecessary enthusiasm.

“What’s that for?” I asked, knowing damn well I wouldn’t like the answer.

My host exhaled through his nose, shifting uncomfortably in his lawn chair. “Well…” He scratched the back of his neck, eyes darting around the bunker like the walls might betray him. “It’s for the peppers.”

I blinked. “The what?”

“The peppers,” he repeated, nodding. “You ever had a jalapeño that don’t behave? Gets too spicy? Gets ideas? Well, I got a place for ‘em.” He patted the trapdoor like an old dog. “They cool off down there. Learn their place.”

I took a slow step back. “You have a cell for insubordinate peppers?”

He shrugged. “You eat a bad one once, you understand. Ain’t takin’ no chances.”

Something deep below us groaned. A low, guttural sound, like a rusted-out Buick trying to start on a cold morning.

I turned to him. “What the hell was that?”

His eyes went dark. “Might be the geek.”

He said it casually, like he was talking about the weather. Just another day in the bunker, keeping mayonnaise fresh and negotiating territorial disputes with Satan.

“The geek.”

“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat. “Man’s gotta have company, don’t he?”

I stared at the trapdoor, at the black gap where the chains didn’t quite meet the wood. The air that seeped through smelled like sulfur and warm root beer.

“You’re telling me you have a geek locked in your bunker, next to a bucket of powdered mashed potatoes?”

He cracked a grin. “Well, I didn’t plan on it, but, you know, these things happen.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So let me get this straight. You were stocking up for the tariffs, built a bunker, started locking up misbehaving peppers, and at some point—what? You not a tenant ?”

He nodded. “Yeah, ‘bout sums it up.”

There was a scraping noise below. Something shifting in the dark, slow and deliberate, like it knew we were listening.

I took a deep breath. “What does he do”

He hesitated. Just for a second. But I saw it—the flicker of recognition, the shadow of a secret he hadn’t meant to say out loud.

He took a long sip from his now-lukewarm Dr Pepper. “Well,” he said, licking his lips, “depends on what you mean by ‘deal.’”

I shouldn’t have taken those drugs, because things started to get really weird right then. The walls of the bunker, once reassuringly mundane in their suffocating beige, now rippled like they were made of water. The faint hum of the generator was replaced by a low, rhythmic thump, like the heartbeat of the entire goddamn planet—or maybe it was the devil himself, thumping in time with some cosmic snare drum.

The trapdoor creaked open by itself. Slow, deliberate, like a funeral march made of wood and rust.

I tried to focus on my host, who was now staring into the corner, his eyes glazed over, mouth slightly ajar. His hand trembled as he lifted the can of soda to his lips, but it wasn’t Dr Pepper anymore—it was glowing neon green, pulsing with a light that made my retinas burn.

I rubbed my eyes. Maybe the stuff was kicking in. Maybe I had taken too many tabs, but it didn’t explain the shadows stretching unnaturally across the room, twisting like they had minds of their own. Or the muffled screams now echoing from beneath the trapdoor.

“What the hell’s down there?” I rasped, clutching the edge of a shelf as if it might ground me back into some form of reality.

He didn’t answer at first. His eyes twitched, and a thin smile crept onto his face, but it wasn’t the smile of a man at peace. It was the kind of grin you’d expect from someone who had just sold his soul for a lifetime supply of Pickle Juice Energy Drink.

I swallowed hard. The trapdoor was open just a crack, but the air pouring out of it was thick and wrong—hot, metallic, humming like a power line about to snap. Something was moving down there. Something vast and slow, shifting in the dark like a great beast stirring in its sleep.

“What the hell is down there?” I rasped, gripping the shelf to keep myself steady. The bunker suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in, like reality itself was starting to fray at the edges.

The MAGA guy—let’s call him Dale, because he looked like a Dale—wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead and leaned in close. His breath reeked of beef jerky and conspiracy. “I think it’s the Chinese,” he whispered.

I blinked. “The Chinese?”

He nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah. The goddamn Chinese.” He exhaled, took a sip of his lukewarm Dr Pepper, and then launched into it like he’d been waiting for someone to ask.

“See, people think the Chinese been buildin’ up their military, right? Thinkin’ they’re gonna come at us with jets, or missiles, or some kinda Red Dawn bullshit. But no. No, no, no. That’s just a distraction. The real plan? They been diggin’, man. Diggin’ for decades.”

I stared at him. “Digging?”

“Yeah.” His eyes darted to the trapdoor, nervous. “Tunnels. Deep ones. They started somewhere outside Beijing, just diggin’ straight down, deeper than any man’s ever gone before. And you know what happens when you dig too deep, don’tcha?”

I nodded, throat dry. “You awaken something.”

“Damn right you do.” Dale’s fingers twitched. “At first, they just wanted to get under the Pacific, see? Sneak up on us from below, pop up in San Francisco one day, all grinnin’ and sayin’ ‘Ni hao, motherfuckers!’ But the thing is… they didn’t stop.”

The trapdoor rattled slightly. A low, grinding noise echoed from below.

“They dug too deep,” Dale whispered. “Kept goin’, past the magma, past the mantle, right through the goddamn core of the earth. And you know where that tunnel comes out?”

I already knew where this was going, but I had to hear him say it.

“Right here,” he hissed, pointing at the floor. “Middle of goddamn America.”

I took a slow step back. “You’re telling me there’s a direct tunnel from China to this bunker?”

I could barely process what I was hearing, but he wasn’t done.

“I seen things, man,” he continued, voice dropping to a near-whisper. “Strange things. Sometimes, late at night, I hear ‘em down there, speakin’ Mandarin real low, tryin’ to copy our voices. Other nights, I hear ‘em eatin’—crunch, crunch, crunch—like they’re gnawin’ on bones or somethin’.”

Something thumped against the trapdoor from below.

Dale jumped, eyes wild. “Jesus Christ, they’re closer than I thought!”

I staggered back, my mind racing. This was beyond paranoia, beyond madness. This was a fever dream of xenophobia, processed snack foods, and too many hours of late-night AM radio.

The trapdoor rattled again, harder this time. Dale grabbed a can of SPAM like it was a weapon. “If they break through, we go to plan B.”

I swallowed. “What’s plan B?”

He locked eyes with me, deadly serious. “We drown ‘em in ranch.”

And that’s when I knew: I had to get the hell out of this bunker.

Watching Miami Vice with the Ghost of Ronald Reagan at Midnight

There he was, the Gipper himself, grinning like a Cheshire cat fresh out of Hell, sitting cross-legged on the couch, a fog of spectral smugness curling around him. On the screen, Crockett and Tubbs were locked in a neon-soaked cocaine bust, their pastel suits radiant under the glow of South Beach debauchery. Somewhere in the haze of cheap bourbon and static-filled memories of the 1980s, the lines between fiction and history blurred.

“The Cocaine Cowboys,” Reagan muttered, adjusting his ethereal tie as though preparing for a press conference in the underworld. “They weren’t all bad—just another side effect of capitalism, really. Can’t build an empire without a little chaos at the edges.”

And there it was: the flicker of malice behind his avuncular mask. The ghost of a man who had intentionally destabilized his own backyard, who had looked at the fragile dominoes of Latin America and decided to let them fall—not out of necessity, but for spectacle. Domestic discord was the true driving force: a nation addicted to fear, a populace high on the dopamine rush of righteous indignation.

“There’s never been anything like it,” I said, gesturing wildly with my drink. “An existing hegemon opting to dismantle the system it dominates just to keep the home front distracted? It’s historical lunacy! Or genius. Hard to tell.”

Reagan chuckled—his laugh a dry rattle like the sound of brittle bones breaking under a steel-toed boot. “You’re looking at it all wrong,” he said. “It wasn’t chaos—it was order. My order. A little destabilization in Nicaragua, a sprinkle of paranoia in Panama, and presto! You’ve got a country so busy watching the Miami Vice reruns of geopolitics that they forget all about the fires raging in their own streets.”

The ghost paused, a gleam of nostalgia in his spectral eyes. “And let’s not forget,” he added, “chaos is the best cover for profit.”

Of course, he was right. The cocaine economy fueled Miami’s real estate boom, and the wars in Central America weren’t just about ideology—they were business ventures cloaked in patriotic fervor. Guns, drugs, money—the holy trinity of American exceptionalism, blasted through the barrel of an M-16 and sniffed off a mirrored surface.

“Goddammit, Reagan,” I snarled, slamming my glass on the table. “You didn’t just destabilize Latin America—you made a habit of teaching the world that the big guy can rig the game and then torch the casino when the odds get inconvenient.”

“True enough,” he said, leaning back into the couch with that famous, infuriating smirk. “But hell, we all got rich, didn’t we?”

And just like that, he was back on the couch, hands clasped like a benevolent uncle preparing to dispense financial advice that would bankrupt you in six months. Crockett and Tubbs faded into the background, their soundtrack replaced by the muffled hum of drone strikes and the static crackle of collapsing global alliances.

“Look at us now,” I said, lighting a cigarette I didn’t remember pulling from the pack. “What we did to Central America—destabilizing systems for a quick domestic political hit—we’re doing it writ Large. The whole world is one big contra war now, except this time the stakes are nuclear and we’re running out of excuses.”

Reagan’s ghost leaned forward, his grin stretching past the point of human decency. “That’s the beauty of it!” he said, slapping his knee like an actor in a Vaudeville revue. “You take what works—freedom fighters, covert ops, a little propaganda sprinkled over the top—and you scale it up! Afghanistan, Ukraine, Taiwan—it’s all the same recipe. Just add water and stir!”

“But the world isn’t buying it anymore,” I said, waving a hand toward the TV, which had inexplicably switched to a rerun of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign ad. It’s Morning Again in America, the screen proclaimed, though the skies outside were pitch black.

Suddenly, Reagan was on his feet, delivering a line with the gusto of a man auditioning for The Ten Commandments. “Nancy!” he bellowed, turning to the empty corner of the room. “Bring me my script—this fella’s trying to say we can’t do it again! Nonsense!”

I blinked, half-expecting Nancy Reagan’s ghost to float in with a celestial teleprompter, but she didn’t. Reagan turned back to me, his expression now an unsettling mix of fatherly concern and used-car salesman slick.

“Exactly! You give the public just enough hope to keep them in line, and enough chaos to remind them they need you. It’s showbiz, son. Always has been.”

“And when it all falls apart?” I asked, gesturing wildly at the metaphorical burning wreckage of democracy outside the window. “What then?”

Reagan paused, his face softening into something almost human. For a moment, I thought he might break character, deliver a rare moment of honesty from the beyond. But then he grinned again, wider than before, and said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to ask Nancy!”

He stopped suddenly, throwing an arm in the air like a B-movie gunslinger.

“‘Win one for the Gipper!’” he bellowed, his spectral voice bouncing off the walls.

I stared blankly.

“C’mon, son! That’s your cue! You’re supposed to say, ‘That’s the spirit, Coach!’” he said, wagging a translucent finger. “You can’t just let me hang out here like a two-bit extra. Show some moxie!”

I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could, he launched into another performance.

“‘Where’s the rest of me?’” he cried, clutching his chest like a Shakespearean actor who’d wandered into the wrong theater.

“That’s—wait, that’s Kings Row, isn’t it?” I asked, my brain desperately clawing for context.

“Of course, it’s Kings Row!” he snapped, the glow in his eyes dimming just enough to look offended. “Now you’re supposed to say, ‘You’ll never walk again, Drake!’”

“Drake?” I muttered, already losing the plot.

But he wasn’t listening. Reagan had moved on, striding toward the kitchen like a man on a mission. “It’s all about commitment!” he shouted over his shoulder. “When I played Bonzo, I didn’t half-ass it. You think sharing a screen with a monkey is easy? That chimp hit his marks every time. Every. Damn. Time. Do you know how hard it is to act opposite perfection?”

“Bonzo?!” I yelled, trying to keep up. “You mean the monkey movie? You’re telling me a monkey outperformed you?”

Reagan spun around, his ghostly jaw tightening. “Outperformed? OUTPERFORMED?! That monkey was a professional! I learned more from Bonzo than I ever did from all those self-important actors on the Death Valley Days set. You’d do well to remember that, kid!”

I was too stunned to respond. The ghost of a former president was now lecturing me about life lessons from a movie chimp.

Reagan crossed his arms, glaring at me with all the righteous indignation of a man who’d forgotten he was dead. “Say what you want about the Cold War, but at least we knew our lines!” he barked. “You people today? You’re just ad-libbing chaos.”

He paused, his anger softening into something almost wistful. “You ever work with a monkey?” he asked suddenly, his voice quieter now. “You’d think they’d be unpredictable, but they’re not. They stick to the plan. Always stick to the plan.”

Before I could answer, he vanished into thin air, leaving behind only the faint smell of Aqua Velva and unfulfilled ambition. The TV flickered, Crockett and Tubbs speeding off into the pastel abyss, and for one merciful moment, the room was silent.

I took a long drag from my cigarette, staring into the empty space where Reagan had stood. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear Bonzo applauding.

Dispatches From The Edge

The Lithium Wars: A Modern-Day Game of High Stakes

It’s a strange new world out there, and it’s all spinning a little too fast. The old conflicts—the Cold War standoffs, the battle for dominance between Communism and the West—seem quaint in retrospect, almost like a sideshow at the circus of history. Sure, there were plenty of resources to squabble over, but nothing that could quite match the ferocity of what’s coming next. I’m talking about lithium, baby. And oil. The lifeblood of the modern world. The stuff that makes the wheels of progress turn, the engines of industry hum, and the money flow like whiskey in a Vegas casino. This isn’t some ideological skirmish anymore. This is about something far more primal, far more dangerous: survival in the age of machines.

And the stakes? Oh, the stakes are so much higher now. Lithium, that little metal that makes our electric dreams possible, is the new gold. The new oil. Everyone’s gunning for it, and the U.S. knows damn well what’s at the center of the map: Latin America, Africa, and the old playgrounds of geopolitics. Forget about democracy and human rights—that’s just the veneer. The real game is resource extraction, and if you can’t see that, you’re already a step behind.

But here’s where it gets even more twisted. We’re talking about a world where the lines are already blurred beyond recognition. The coming Trump administration—now there’s a wild card that makes all the old players look like amateurs. It’s not even about policy anymore. It’s about power. About flexing muscle in a way that feels almost… deranged. If you thought the U.S. was crazy enough under the last circus tent, wait until January 2025 rolls around. The new administration is already making noise like a meth-fueled warlord with nothing to lose. This is not a rational entity we’re dealing with. There’s no strategy, no grand design—just a hunger for control and chaos that could break everything in its wake.

So, what do you do when the stakes are this high, and the madness is setting in? You start playing for keeps. You go beyond economic pressure, beyond subtle sanctions, and you get your hands dirty. Covert operations, cyber attacks, proxy wars—all that old-school stuff that Washington used to dabble in but is now fine-tuned for the age of global connectivity. The fight for lithium won’t be fought on battlefields with tanks and bombs. It’ll be fought on the internet, in backrooms, and through the manipulation of governments that are all too happy to sell out their people for a cut of the pie.

And it won’t be pretty. This won’t be a clean coup. No, this is going to be a blood-soaked carnival of chaos, fueled by information warfare and corporate greed. The U.S. will encourage “revolutions” that will look like anything but—beautifully orchestrated, with the right slogans and the right spin, but underneath, it’s a power grab for the future of the planet’s most coveted resources. You’ll see “people’s revolutions” that are anything but. They’ll be corporate coups disguised as liberation movements, and they’ll be fueled by the most basic human instinct: the will to survive.

But here’s the kicker: the world’s already watching. They’ve got the Internet now, they’ve got social media, and they’ve got more eyes on every move than ever before. These “revolutions” won’t stay in the dark. The reality is too exposed, too visible. So, when the U.S. decides to ratchet up the pressure with the tried-and-true methods of destabilization, it won’t go unnoticed. That’s the danger. When the U.S. goes for broke in the fight for lithium and oil, it’ll be a bigger spectacle than anything the CIA cooked up in the 50s. And this time, there will be no clean slate, no quiet aftermath. Just a cascade of unintended consequences that will make the last century’s coups look like child’s play.

And that, my friends, is the powder keg we’re sitting on. Welcome to the modern-day scramble for resources. It’s more chaotic, more dangerous, and more unpredictable than anything we’ve ever seen.

The question lingers in the haze: Will all the lithium in the world bring speed or slow death? Are we barreling toward a future of hyper-speed, microchips blazing, building faster machines and smarter AI, unlocking some cosmic door to the godhead? Or is this just the start of one ugly mother of a bloodbath, a high-stakes looting spree dressed up as progress?

You’ve got all these tech prophets selling us the dream of transcendence, while the rest of us are left clutching the lithium-drunk promise of AI nirvana—a god in the machine, capable of thinking faster, smarter, harder than any of us ever could. But what if the real game isn’t some digital utopia but a ruthless, oil-and-lithium-slicked descent into tech feudalism?

Because look at the stakes: there’s no clean energy revolution without lithium, no AI empire, no smart cities, no next-gen gadgets feeding on the juice of progress. And that’s the trap, right there. It’s a war disguised as progress, and every nation with a shred of lithium in its soil is about to get hustled, conned, flipped upside down. We’re trading blood for bytes, and when the last of the dust settles, who knows what’ll be left standing.

Because the real fear, the primal dread at the heart of empire, is the terror of standing still. That creeping, suffocating sensation of being trapped in place, in time, in the relentless churn of stagnation. It’s the one thing an empire can’t tolerate. Growth is its drug, expansion its lifeblood, and the prospect of being unable to grow, of hitting a wall it can’t break through—that’s the nightmare.

Empires don’t just crave resources; they’re addicted to motion, to the endless forward push. The lithium rush isn’t about powering devices; it’s about powering the illusion of unstoppable progress. In the mind of the empire, being trapped is as good as dying. The real fear is the possibility that there are limits, that there’s a point beyond which it can’t stretch its tentacles, a place where growth hits the wall and stops cold.

So here we are, hunting lithium not just for the next AI godhead but to outrun that grim specter of stagnation.

We’re in full Wile E. Coyote mode here, legs spinning frantically in thin air, suspended over the void. For a split second, everything seems fine—until the empire looks down and sees there’s no ground left, just the endless drop to a canyon floor that’s way, way down there, hard as stone and coming up fast.

They’ve been charging forward, chasing the next resource, the next tech breakthrough, the next illusion of unstoppable growth. But all that talk of AI godheads, of eternal progress? Turns out it’s just empty air, a mirage to keep them moving until they’re way too far out. There’s no floor, no safety net, just a canyon that’s been there all along, waiting for them to realize that the game doesn’t go on forever.

And maybe this time, there’s no scrambling back to solid ground. It’s just a long, wild drop into the real consequences—the rock-hard canyon, not the high-tech fantasies they’ve been selling.

The Pacific Garbage Patch.

I’m putting all my money in the Pacific Garbage Patch. So long, suckers. The only safe bet left in a world gone mad—floating islands of plastic, bobbing in the radioactive soup of the Pacific, a monument to our excess, our undying tribute to convenience and indifference.

Every broker on Wall Street tells me to diversify. ‘Hedge your bets,’ they say, like I haven’t seen the writing on the wall. Like I can’t see the rats fleeing the ship, fat cats cashing in while the rest of us drown. No, I’m going all in. I want my money in a real American dream: one that’s impossible to clean up, too toxic to touch, festering just out of sight. The Pacific Garbage Patch—the ultimate long game.

You poor fools, still clinging to your IRAs and your crypto coins, your tech stocks, praying for salvation. You’ll be sipping iced lattes as it all burns, and I’ll be out there, watching my investment float along, indestructible. The garbage doesn’t go anywhere. It just builds up forever—my own personal slice of the apocalypse. So long, suckers.”

“But don’t think this is just some twisted retirement plan. No, this is a grand exit strategy. While you’re all scrambling to buy your little piece of the future—mortgaging your souls for condos and electric cars—I’m investing in the only empire that truly represents us. The Pacific Garbage Patch: a sprawling, eternal wasteland of plastics and microfibers, stretched across the waves like the final frontier. A true monument to human achievement, built from the scraps we left behind.

I’m calling it: the banks will collapse, the markets will crash, but the trash? The trash is forever. While your assets dissolve into dust, my kingdom of straws and Styrofoam will float on, circling the Pacific with grim determination. The rest of you are shackled to the illusion of progress, grinding along while my empire of waste rises with every tide.

Picture it now—me, the Lord of the Patch, sprawled across a throne made from discarded lawn chairs and plastic bottles, laughing as the yachts drift by, powered by the last gasps of fossil fuel. The brokers on Wall Street will call me mad. The influencers will call me insane. But when the dust settles, when the sea levels rise, they’ll all see what I saw: the Patch isn’t just trash. It’s destiny.”

The Illusion of Funding: How Hollywood Forgot How to Dream

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The primary challenge for Hollywood now is to abandon the idea of creating various schemes around box office numbers, realizing that they could essentially “print money” using alternative financial methods, relying on box office and streaming figures to uphold the belief that these streams primarily funded projects.

What it funded was an artistic vision of cookie cutter films, superheroes and remakes sacrificed on the altar of free market nihilism creating the stagnated, homogenized content while disconnecting from diverse audiences and jeopardizing long-term sustainability we’re “enjoying” today

@bravojohnson

Hollywood: A Gonzo Audit in the Age of Algorithm Gods

Hollywood. Sunset Strip’s a fever dream neon jungle, where lizard kings in Armani suits wrestle with stacks of cash taller than the Hollywood sign itself. But listen up, you sun-baked celluloid cowboys, the celluloid tape is running out on this flickering projector of dreams. The sun bleeds down, casting long shadows on a town drowning in its own shallow, chlorinated pool water. The air, thick with suntan lotion and desperation, carries the faint echo of celluloid dreams long gone belly-up in the director’s pool.

Hollywood, huh? Land of dreams, or at least that’s what the flickering neon signs would have you believe. But lately, those dreams have been smelling more like a dusty back lot and stale popcorn than fresh film stock. Why? Because the suits in charge have turned storytelling into a goddamn slot machine, cranking out the same tired tropes faster than a Vegas croupier on a sugar rush.

These days, the “creatives” in Hollywood are more like financial alchemists, desperately trying to turn derivative dreck into cinematic gold. Superheroes, sequels, and remakes – these are the sacred cows worshipped at the altar of market cannibalism. Originality? Artistic vision? Gone the way of the dodo, sacrificed to the insatiable maw of the falsifiable box office beast.

These numbers, like flickering neon signs in a graveyard, promise untold riches, a siren song leading studios down a path of creative oblivion. They chase the elusive white whale of the billion-dollar gorilla, their eyes glazed over with visions of franchised turds and superhero spectacles, all churned out in a soulless assembly line of mediocrity.

The box office, that golden calf you’ve been worshipping, is starting to look a little less golden and a whole lot more like a tarnished tin god. Numbers are down, folks. Your blockbuster “universes” are more like black holes, sucking in creativity and spewing out the same tired tropes faster than a Kardashian can change husbands.

Here’s the truth, served straight up in a chipped tequila glass with a side of mescaline: you’ve been snorting your own exhaust fumes. You tell yourselves these superhero sagas and nostalgia rehashes are “printing money,” when in reality, they’re just printing out the same tired script, page after forgettable page. The result? A cinematic wasteland of homogenized dreck, a never-ending loop of predictable plotlines and CGI-laden spectacle that leaves audiences feeling like they’ve been force-fed lukewarm gas station nachos.

It’s a vicious cycle, this obsession with box office numbers. It disconnects Hollywood from the kaleidoscope of humanity, churning out the same tired tropes and expecting us to keep shoveling money into your greedy pockets.

This “alternative financing” you’re hawking, chasing those streaming service dollars like a junkie chasing a dragon? It’s a mirage shimmering in the desert heat of desperation. Sure, it throws some cash your way, but at what cost? You’ve sold your soul to the algorithm gods, trading artistic integrity for data-driven drivel.

But the truth, my friends, is as twisted as a Kardashian’s weave. These box office numbers, these supposed harbingers of success, are nothing more than a gilded cage. They lock studios into a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing the notion that the only stories worth telling are those guaranteed to mint money.

What have you gotten in return? A cinematic wasteland populated by cookie-cutter characters, interchangeable plots, and special effects that wouldn’t impress a stoned teenager in his mom’s basement. You’ve sacrificed originality on the altar of market nihilism, and the only one left smiling is the bottom line. Oh, the cruel irony! These Hollywood execs with million-dollar tans and two-dollar minds claim to be printing money, but what they’re printing is a colorless, formulaic sludge, devoid of originality and soul. Superheroes punch each other into oblivion, sequels rehash the same tired ground, and remakes defile the memories of better times.

This relentless pursuit of beige entertainment comes at a cost. Long-term sustainability? Laughed out of the boardroom faster than a blacklisted screenwriter. Disconnected audiences? Easier to find a unicorn grazing in Rodeo Drive. Artistic vision? Sacrificed on the altar of the market god, its ashes scattered to the four winds like a prop bag full of fake movie snow.

Meanwhile, the audiences you’ve so meticulously alienated – the diverse folks tired of the same old recycled garbage – they’re tuning out faster than you can say “sequel fatigue.” You’ve built a wall of mediocrity, and on the other side, a vibrant, hungry audience awaits something real, something that speaks to their soul, not just their wallets.

But here’s the thing, Hollywood: you’re sitting on a gold