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WATCHMEN

Watchmen is insanely good.

I won't say anymore, because it's not a show that really requires a commentary of any sort. It does a very good job at piling meta-narrative on top of meta-narrative, and doesn't really require any extratextual writing.

That being said, I really wish there was a place to go and talk to other people who enjoyed it as much as I did. When Lost was on air years ago, I remember getting together with a group of my friends week after week to watch it together. It wasn't really about discussing it afterwards, it was just about saying "whoa!!" and "wow!!!" all at once, together, communally.

Twitter felt like a place for that kind of conversation at one point. Maybe it still does for some. But I always have the sense that if I post a tweet that 70% of those who see it won't get, it's an annoyance.

I am a little sad that so much of the internet has been split into two categories: rating / cataloguing and journaling.

The first category, creating catalogues or list of ratings, makes sense. The internet had such a democratizing power, of course we gave that power to the people by letting them select 1 through 5 starts to tell the world how they feel. It's so reductionist, though! I realize this now as a business owner on the other side of Yelp. I imagine that an author on the other side of Goodreads would feel the same. You realize that the thing that people are doing so trivially, rating a thing in their life and moving on, is so impactful for the person behind the thing being rated. When someone rates a book or coffee shop 3/5 and moves on, they didn't mean it to hurt...but it sure does.

The second category, journaling, doesn't feel quite right for so much of the world. A journal turned outward loses purpose more often than not. It's why Instagram is full of pictures of the people posting instead of pictures by the people posting. Somewhere along the way the people realized they got more likes when they posted pictures of themselves, and the subconscious training took root. I don't know anyone that posts on Instagram for themselves anymore. It's a behavior we do to be social, but it so rarely feels good. Twitter, too, is journaling, but it's journaling in public, out loud, with a 1,000 crazy people also journaling at the same time and often responding to your entries. It's journaling in an arena where, for some strange reason, you have to compete with the attention and draw of celebrities, politicians, and charlatans.

So what do I do with my desire to tell the world I love Watchmen? I'm not going to post it to a cataloging site where I'll be forced to see a popular reviewer giving a joke review of why the show (a project taking untold man hours and years of time) is 3/5. I'm not going to tweet about it and watch my post get washed away in a wave of retweets about the coronavirus.

I'm going to post about it here, and feel mostly content. If you liked the show too, let me know.