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- Media of The Month #1
The journey has had it’s share of ups and downs, but today, we celebrate one month of the LOOP newsletter. To mark this occasion, I am excited to introduce a recurring issue called "Media of the Month." Given that we all consume various forms of media, this segment will explore different titles, including video games, anime, TV shows, and more. Each month, we'll provide a recap of noteworthy media in our final issue.
Although the Ham Sandwich segment you’ll see later was written for week 3, it was removed due to mistakes explained in the following paragraph. We are including it in this issue to give it the proper release it deserves.
We want to address the unfortunate delay of the Week 3 release and maintain transparency about what happened and how we plan to prevent it from happening again. Karoshi (or Jay) created the accounts for the newsletter, including the email and the Beehiiv account. Blax was given access to the Beehiiv account to assist with writing, editing, and scheduling. Unfortunately, we overlooked the default two-factor authentication (2FA) settings for Beehiiv.
The issue for Week 3 was ready for posting, but Jay went out of town before making some final changes. Without access to a laptop or a way to verify the 2FA code, we could not publish the issue until the following Monday. In order to prevent this from happening in the future, we have provided Blax with an additional 2FA method for his personal device. This ensures that no single person is solely responsible for the login and verification code. We are learning as we go, and while mistakes are bound to happen, this one was relatively minor and easily preventable.
We also wish to announce a change to our release schedule. Starting with the first issue in April, we will move to a biweekly format. This decision addresses the challenges of rapid coordination within our team and allows us to enhance the quality of our content.
A biweekly schedule will enable us to better manage our backlog and reduce the risk of content burnout due to the pressures of weekly production. We are confident that this approach will result in longer and more varied issues. When applicable, we will include a table of contents to facilitate easy navigation. Thank you for your support as we implement this important change.
We appreciate your understanding and hope you continue to join us on this journey to enjoy LOOP’s media of the month.
Table of Contents
LOOP MEDIA
Ever present media shapes, controls, and alters us and our daily lives. The following media is a collection of what LOOP as individuals consumed and enjoyed throughout the month of April.
Modded Man (Karo)
There aren’t a ton of things media wise that I consumed over April. Actually the one thing I’ll probably play the most just came out, but I’ll save that for May. As for April the media I enjoyed the most was a Mod pack for Skyrim named Wildlander. With the news of Oblivion’s remaster ever looming and near by. I wanted a new connection to the world and universe and Wildlander provided that. It is known as a requim mod list which makes the game a lot more strategic. Bad with light armor? That archer one shot you. There is a lot more nuance and strategy in place. That is just one aspect of combat, the list also overhauls the survival and travel systems; they have added an economy system where shops make or have more based on what city they are in. Fast travel is disable and the seasons matter so how do you survive? The list provides you will several new gameplay mechanics and hotkeys. From making a campfire and sleeping through a cold night to refilling your flask and taking a bath in frigid waters. I had an intense amount of fun making builds and just playing brief stints in the pack. I don’t think I played any single game more this month and if that sounds like your thing I wouldn’t recommend going with any other list.
Go! Go! Loser Ranger! (Blax)
… look, we’ve all had our Power Rangers/Tokusatsu phase. I just never grew out of it. Thus, I’ve spent the last month or so reading the manga of Go! Go! Go! Loser Ranger! I had watched the first season of the anime when it aired, and while it entertained me, it definitely didn’t blow me away. However, as of reading Chapter 132, my time catching up with this series has been nothing short of incredible. I will try not to delve too deep into spoiler territory for the uninitiated, but the general premise is that the main character is one of the token mob villains that persist in Sentai shows just to get beat up weekly, and they are no longer having any of it. The story quickly devolves into a frenzy of trying to find allies in enemy territory, making enemies out of supposed allies, and the most expected quest you could expect from a villain; killing all the heroes and taking over the planet. I won’t say much further, otherwise I would definitely start going into detail about everything I’ve seen so far and how well done the story has been, but I highly recommend reading the manga and tuning in for Season 2, I know I absolutely will be.
The Nerdcore Community Is Not A Monolith – And That’s Ok (Ham)
A little while ago, a conversation was had about the current state of the nerdcore cinematic universe. Some people argued that the “supportive community” vibes have died out. Others argued that the community is still very supportive – it’s just a lot bigger now than it was five years ago. The former argument does have some merit to it – just a few years ago, all it took to get your song heard by the bigger nerdcore artists (at least in the YouTube scene) was to catch the odd Shwabadi stream or Shwab-Analysis. This era, which I guess I’ll call the “streamer era” of 2020 to early 2022, was probably the best time to be entering the scene. Even Divide Music would stream every now and then! Nowadays you gotta pay DizzyEight to reliably get a critique of your music from a larger artist. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it is at the very least an indicator that it has become harder to get the attention of bigger artists. Or maybe the tariffs are affecting the scene in crazy ways.
Either way, difficulties in getting eyes on your work persist. But the problem has multiple causes, most of which are merely side effects of the community’s growth. The community has gotten MUCH bigger than it was in 2020, and that’s great, but it also means that there are a LOT more smaller artists in the scene, and it’s very difficult to keep track of all the new faces while ALSO holding mental real estate for the artists that have been around the block. It feels like the scene has reached a point in which its growth is slowing down, as the last SoundCloud anime rapper imports funnel through and more and more smaller artists from the YouTube side of things intermingle with the Facebook side, so once that dust settles, it may become easier to separate the wheat from the chaff. But the sheer size of the scene makes it so that even if the larger artists wanted to return to the streamer era, it would be near impossible to, for example, host a stream every week or so listening to ALL of the new music. It’s just too much. As for the occasional big announcement or event worthy of praise – say, for example, Keetheweeb doing EVO (LET’S GOOO), the scene is so big that it can be hard to miss these things now. And so, when a community gets too big but the people within it still want to maintain a level of knowhow of what’s going on, people retreat to their small groups, relying on other people to fill them in on the news outside of their circle. And I’m here to tell you that that’s ok.
In fact, that’s how nerdcore operated for a very long time, I’d argue, if you consider the SoundCloud community, the YouTube community, and the Facebook community to have been all but completely separate until about 2020 (which I do). With the exception of a handful of transient artists like PE$O PETE or Richie Branson, pretty much everyone stayed within their preferred platform. The streamer era was when these soft walls broke down the furthest, and right now, there are communities – or to be honest, a few artists who operate almost entirely within their own spheres like Genwunner and Jay Eazy – forming on TikTok and IG Reels. If or when those walls break down, the scene could see another dramatic rise in participants, and whether that be an influx of new fans or new artists, the scene will likely go through the cycle of rapid growth again until people file into smaller, interconnected groups… again. And that will also be ok, but we’ll probably see this conversation make its return too.
Fact is, there is only so much that people can do or see in a day. The people who make the argument that the community should be one singular interconnected town square where everyone sees everything and supports everything whether or not they actually enjoy everything that they come across hopefully don’t actually exist – but as the Twitter space revealed, the people who believe that the community is no longer supportive either actually do believe the above, or they have no real thoughts on the matter and are just upset because they feel like they are the ones who aren’t receiving enough attention. If there’s some secret third thing that they believe, I’d be glad to hear it, but I honestly don’t know what these people want, and I honestly don’t believe that they know what they want either, because what they vaguely gestured to during the Twitter space is unrealistic and they know that. Everyone has their own sphere of information, and no one’s is as big as the community is right now. No one’s. And. That’s. Ok.
And you know what? If you feel like the community needs things that can tie it together, guess what – YOU can make those things! YOU can make a newsletter! We did 😮 There’s Nerdcore Central, Nerdcore Nexus, that one account on Instagram that posts the new songs that are coming out that weekend (I miiiight have just named the same person three times, I don’t know, I’m going off the dome at 2 AM), Nerdcore Centel… You Can Be The Change You Want To See In The World!!
Anywho, I’ve been talking for way too long about this already. If you’ve got a problem with how the community has changed, build something out yourself. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not gonna go anywhere fast, but if you build it… they will come. At the end of the day, it’s the algorithm’s attention you should be trying to get. :P
So long still - Karo
When the sadness fades away,
Sorrow will take its place
It’s a madness. Make no mistake
Please don’t ask about the pain
Its hallow hold has gravity
I’m numb to what they ask me
feel dumb when they all pass me
There is none when I hear laughing
Everything is colorless
Color binds emotions in
Color blind the oceans dim
You don’t mind it make a grin
Simle wide display some happiness
When sorrow is there, you don’t exist
The life you made, made Nonexist
So long to him a piece not missed