In October of 2022, Will Jordan (aka The Critical Drinker), an action/thriller novelist best known for his profanity laden reviews of woke movies, initiated a kickstarter to fund his own attempt at crafting entertainment.
I think part of the problem as well is that people do not bother reading physical books anymore. They might get a kindle version of a book as it is cheaper and now more familiar being on their ubiquitous phones. However, they cannot become truly immersed in the text as they have the ping of notifications or the alluring temptation to “quickly” check their feed with a swipe of their finder. If we could have some discipline in this domain, I think books (at least earlier ones and the more compelling indie ones) could regain some of their excitement and adventure. As an aside, I have started to put my screen on “color filter” mode that only gives gray scaling. It was incredible. On that very day, I felt the world around me was brighter and more colorful. It got me thinking that in the past, we would only have so many rich colors in great works of art that we could find in museums. How even the most cliched YouTube video is bursting with overstimulating colors that I think also drain our imagination for creative fiction.
Technically most people listen to the audio book. My sales are 60/40 between audio and all other formats. It's not my place to tell people how to enjoy my work, only to make it available to as many people who want to enjoy it as I can.
Interesting. Do you find a difference in terms of engagement from your readers based on Kindle vs. audiobook? Does one group post more online reviews? I don’t mind audiobooks. Sometimes, I even prefer them. For instance, Tom Weiner’s telling of “Armor” by John Steakley makes the work much better as his rugged, gravely delivery suites the narrator perfectly.
Amazon doesn't offer that kind of granularity. I see all types on my youtube or my substack. There's always a voice with a preference for hardcover, paper, kindle or audio. You can't trust them though because they only know what they like, not what everyone likes.
All I know is the amount of work to convert a kindle to a paperback, a paperback to a hardcover, and a book to an audio book is more than worth the investment.
As for reviews, no one cares about reviews, no one buys based on reviews, and I get far more sales from being 'that guy they like on the internet' vs people who like the reading. It's a hard pill people have to get used to.
That's why critical drinker is popular btw. It's not becuase he's good, it's because he's likeable. the gaff with this movie is because people were meant to like it on it's own merits, and not becuse they want to support the likeable guy who hates the things they hate
Well that is depressing. I checked out of Critical Drinker just as production of his movie started. The critiques had become repetitive to the point of self-parody. I wondered if Will had become captured by his audience and stuck inside the character he had created. I was even hoping the new outlet of the movie might re-energise him. What a shame.
I agree with your diagnosis of the general state of the creative industry. In particular that the purity spiral is a state of fearful paralysis, not hegemony- good insight.
I think Ya Boi Zack is basically right about him. He's been audience captured to the point that he can only make outrage content, but it turns out it's not really good for you to produce or consume hundreds of hours of content about the latest outrage over some Disney princess movie.
When it comes to Ya Boi, that one scene in Big Lebowski comes to mind. “You’re not wrong Walter, you’re just an asshole!”
I was watching Ya Boi (occasionally) for his reviews of old comics. But his channel turned into Walter from the Big Lebowski “AM I WRONG?! AM I WRONG?!”
I get that. I think I'm just in the same place as him on culture war stuff right now. Woke was a huge failure and the ships are slowly turning, but now there's a huge cottage industry of outrage content about how everything is woke and terrible. It's like the left and racism - the demand is eventually going to outstrip the supply, so these terms are going to get applied to more and more benign stuff. It's going to be a test for us - do we let woke go and move on to better things, or do we burrow down in comforting outrage content about how everything is gay woke girlbosses forever, even when it just isn't?
100%. I just think that the answer is to produce good work, not whine about those not doing what you think they should. Ya Boi, despite being right, is just another whiner now to me.
Yeah, I get just being done with all of it. It sounds like his comics have been successful. I'm guessing he'll end his YouTube channel sometime soon, when he finds a better way to advertise his comics.
He does do plenty of positive reviews too. Those videos are a bit less popular than his vids raging against the latest Disney slop, but not much so. They still get many hundreds of thousands of views. There are plenty of people who use him as a movie review service.
I like his Recommends videos, but I think his ratio is about 5:1 negative to positive videos, and the negative videos usually have about 2 -3x as many views. I think the demand bias for outrage content is real, and it puts creators in a tough spot.
At a certain point you need to pivot, either because the market is not there anymore or for your own self respect. Being a slave to a dopamine addicted audience and the YouTube algo is no way to live, even if the money rolls in.
I think Will will do this, though others, like Nedtropic, likely won't.
I hope so. It's too bad this movie wasn't the project that did it for him, but I think he'll get there. Yeah, unfortunately, I think Nerdrotic has burrowed in too deep.
I don't know if there's such a consistent pattern in his view counts. "28 years later - this actually looks good!" has 1.5M views for instance, and "Kraven the Hunter - a humiliating disaster" has 1.3M views. The former is about a week older, so my guess is they get views at about the same rate.
Overall I think you're right that positive reviews get viewed less, but I don't think it's 2x-3x less and it's definitely not so consistently.
With respect to the ratio of positive:negative reviews, that ratio feels about right, but that doesn't say much about the Drinker himself IMHO. Critics like him became popular because the entertainment industry felt so insulated by access "journalists" who encouraged them to engage in social engineering that their output became systematically bad or even downright offensive to a large segment of the moviegoing public. If you're a guy like the Drinker, you probably will find movies to be roughly 5 bad to 1 good.
By the way I have read the Will Jordan books and they’re … competent. In his books he does manage to avoid most of the errors he calls out in others. I wonder if he struggled with making the jump from print to screen - which is not a trivial transition at all.
This reminds me of the Tucker Max movie. He was super excited about working with the producers and on the script and then it was really bad and vanished without a trace. At least that’s how I remember it. It’s been years and I was only peripherally following his stuff at the time.
Excellent article, the odds are against us artists and there is an ocean of lesser to mediocre works of negligible quality for us to compete against. The goal of the artist is to say something of value to people and say it loudly and with strength and vigour.
I am a former film student turned musician/songwriter and the reason I left filmmaking is because it is incredibly hard. it took me almost a decade at songwriting and production to get successful, but that’s easy compared with trying to get any kind of film made. the amount of people needed and the twists and turns in productions are constant. I’m honestly shocked when even terrible movies get made. having good ideas and taste counts for nothing in the film industry. the directors I know that are successful at it have a maniacal, dictator side to them. Art is indeed hard.
When I was younger I'd write short stories for fun. At some point like all creatives I compiled "my best works" (never published) and day dreamed about becoming a writer. My creativity nose-dived.
My point being, intruding thoughts of financial gain ruin creativity. And so it becomes easier to follow an outline or formula.
I think the gradual expansion of making anything artsy a question of money has ruined the ability to create art. I think this is the crux of the matter. We can substitute in fame and social validation just as well.
I didn't know the CD made a movie. His movie commentaries were entertaining but eventually became formulaic, so I drifted away. Becoming formulaic isn't bad per se. Many creatives are one hit wonders, which we could say is like discovering a formula. I think the trick is not going for overkill or letting the motivation become infected from anything other than the joy of being creative.
Which is what then the game of making a living from the creative output becomes, like the BookTop part of your essay.
I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion about a renaissance. It might become easier to spot gems in the muck, so to speak, but there's an ever increasing amount of muck and the "game" of what we call capitalism is unforgiving.
Critique is like an acid out of which nothing positive can be built, and the majority of the people willing to stand up to wokeshit are unfortunately addicted to it. it's what attracts attention and engagement, while positive and creative stuff does not (this is clear enough to me after just 6 months blogging on Dissident Substack). Critical Drinker is just one of many who did what was popular, adapted to the poison and found himself unable to survive outside it.
It's not easy to change the preferences of a mass, even a relatively small one, but perhaps we could start gently nudging people out of a critical and into a creative frame of mind. "You don't like those characters, that scene, that story? How would you write them better?", etc. etc.
I think Asmon said it best. Essentially, nobody watches these kinds of youtube reviews to form an opinion, they watch this stuff to have their opinions validated. That validation is whats being sold, the information content is secondary.
I’d argue the vast majority of the people who watch this stuff already think the things he’s tearing apart are bad, they just want to watch a guy tear it apart in a funny and well put together manner. They get enjoyment from the latest thing they don’t like getting the “critical drinker” treatment.
Its become its own genre, honestly. One that crosses ideological lines.
Your analysis of the trap artist put themselves in politically is spot on. It’s either mainstream crap with no substance or nostalgic crap with no substance. Everything has to be an ode or a nod to some other work that can’t be replicated. It’s actually an exciting opportunity for true artists to do something bold and unique. I truly believe that there is a significant audience that wants and needs new ideas rather than content. We’re so close to a golden age of art we just have to stop trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The simpletons on TikTok are not going to praise the next Dickens or Tolkien.
The "criticism is easier than production" point is essentially correct, but we obscure and demean the critic if art criticism is just commenting on how woke slop doesnt live up to the standards of passable slop. That is not a fair representation of what art criticism is, though this is not the thrust of the article.
The funniest thing is that nothing will change with his content — straight back to telling other people their movies are shit. And most of audience won’t see the irony either.
I always wondered what came of that movie. I’m a huge fan of Critical Drinker and even reviewed his last book (about zombies and special agents, naturally). What a shame.
I think critics and artists are just cut from different cloths. Socrates saw this long go, just concluding that poets were possessed lunatics and that art really wasn’t something that could be taught, but maybe censored if it inspired evil.
A critic, as Oscar Wilde wrote about, is a scholar who has the genius to recognize beauty. He has to study the genre, the medium, and communicate principles in a compelling, defensible way. We need them too.
Maybe we just need to get the businessmen out of creative spaces and let the freak flag fly again. That’s the only way to save entertainment and art, as far as I can tell.
An excellent assessment of the current sorry cultural landscape, and a reminder that there is an abyss between identifying the problem (and complaining) and ACTUALLY contributing to the solution.
This might sound a little bit egotistical BUT I think poets have to lead the charge... PROPER poets not this God Awful Instagram one sentence nonsense.
Poetry provides an easy to manage burst of metaphysical ideas and literary concepts when it's done correctly of course...
THAT becomes the gateway drug to the essay, the novel, and the saga. Once the audience realises they enjoy a read that challenges their preconceived ideas and expands their horizons rather than reflecting back their current paradigm or stroking their ego, then they will step into the wider world.
This was a great article. I read parts of it at two different times of the day so hopefully I haven’t forgotten why I liked it so much. I think it’s true that people are lost in the sauce of simultaneously trying to write a story and make art that is acceptable to the current sociopolitical climate. I also think it’s hard to make something good that is challenging and asks questions about ourselves in such a constraining moment in society morally. In many ways I think at least as far as the arts go we’ve become our own big brother. People in the public eye reporting on each other if they step out of line and engage in “wrong think” or in this case “wrong art”. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone really does rise up out of the current dearth of interesting story telling and makes something transgressive, but hopefully not in a patently obvious way that is more predictably bigoted in an attempt to be insightful about our society rather than the genuine article. Though I fear if and when the time comes that that does happen it’ll be difficult to tell which is which.
Thing is, movies like The Room, Troll 2, Birdemic, etc actually do have redeeming quality. The term "so bad it's good" is derided as reddit cliche, but it really is onto something. The entertainment may be unintentional, but it's certainly there. Ultimately those works stand far above utter bilge like The Last Jedi, since they offer life-affirming hilarity, instead of boredom and insults to your intelligence/dignity.
I think part of the problem as well is that people do not bother reading physical books anymore. They might get a kindle version of a book as it is cheaper and now more familiar being on their ubiquitous phones. However, they cannot become truly immersed in the text as they have the ping of notifications or the alluring temptation to “quickly” check their feed with a swipe of their finder. If we could have some discipline in this domain, I think books (at least earlier ones and the more compelling indie ones) could regain some of their excitement and adventure. As an aside, I have started to put my screen on “color filter” mode that only gives gray scaling. It was incredible. On that very day, I felt the world around me was brighter and more colorful. It got me thinking that in the past, we would only have so many rich colors in great works of art that we could find in museums. How even the most cliched YouTube video is bursting with overstimulating colors that I think also drain our imagination for creative fiction.
For fiction I exclusively read physical books for this reason.
Most people buy the Kindle.
Technically most people listen to the audio book. My sales are 60/40 between audio and all other formats. It's not my place to tell people how to enjoy my work, only to make it available to as many people who want to enjoy it as I can.
Interesting. Do you find a difference in terms of engagement from your readers based on Kindle vs. audiobook? Does one group post more online reviews? I don’t mind audiobooks. Sometimes, I even prefer them. For instance, Tom Weiner’s telling of “Armor” by John Steakley makes the work much better as his rugged, gravely delivery suites the narrator perfectly.
Amazon doesn't offer that kind of granularity. I see all types on my youtube or my substack. There's always a voice with a preference for hardcover, paper, kindle or audio. You can't trust them though because they only know what they like, not what everyone likes.
All I know is the amount of work to convert a kindle to a paperback, a paperback to a hardcover, and a book to an audio book is more than worth the investment.
As for reviews, no one cares about reviews, no one buys based on reviews, and I get far more sales from being 'that guy they like on the internet' vs people who like the reading. It's a hard pill people have to get used to.
That's why critical drinker is popular btw. It's not becuase he's good, it's because he's likeable. the gaff with this movie is because people were meant to like it on it's own merits, and not becuse they want to support the likeable guy who hates the things they hate
Well that is depressing. I checked out of Critical Drinker just as production of his movie started. The critiques had become repetitive to the point of self-parody. I wondered if Will had become captured by his audience and stuck inside the character he had created. I was even hoping the new outlet of the movie might re-energise him. What a shame.
I agree with your diagnosis of the general state of the creative industry. In particular that the purity spiral is a state of fearful paralysis, not hegemony- good insight.
I think Ya Boi Zack is basically right about him. He's been audience captured to the point that he can only make outrage content, but it turns out it's not really good for you to produce or consume hundreds of hours of content about the latest outrage over some Disney princess movie.
When it comes to Ya Boi, that one scene in Big Lebowski comes to mind. “You’re not wrong Walter, you’re just an asshole!”
I was watching Ya Boi (occasionally) for his reviews of old comics. But his channel turned into Walter from the Big Lebowski “AM I WRONG?! AM I WRONG?!”
It got old VERY fast.
I get that. I think I'm just in the same place as him on culture war stuff right now. Woke was a huge failure and the ships are slowly turning, but now there's a huge cottage industry of outrage content about how everything is woke and terrible. It's like the left and racism - the demand is eventually going to outstrip the supply, so these terms are going to get applied to more and more benign stuff. It's going to be a test for us - do we let woke go and move on to better things, or do we burrow down in comforting outrage content about how everything is gay woke girlbosses forever, even when it just isn't?
100%. I just think that the answer is to produce good work, not whine about those not doing what you think they should. Ya Boi, despite being right, is just another whiner now to me.
Yeah, I get just being done with all of it. It sounds like his comics have been successful. I'm guessing he'll end his YouTube channel sometime soon, when he finds a better way to advertise his comics.
He does do plenty of positive reviews too. Those videos are a bit less popular than his vids raging against the latest Disney slop, but not much so. They still get many hundreds of thousands of views. There are plenty of people who use him as a movie review service.
I like his Recommends videos, but I think his ratio is about 5:1 negative to positive videos, and the negative videos usually have about 2 -3x as many views. I think the demand bias for outrage content is real, and it puts creators in a tough spot.
At a certain point you need to pivot, either because the market is not there anymore or for your own self respect. Being a slave to a dopamine addicted audience and the YouTube algo is no way to live, even if the money rolls in.
I think Will will do this, though others, like Nedtropic, likely won't.
I hope so. It's too bad this movie wasn't the project that did it for him, but I think he'll get there. Yeah, unfortunately, I think Nerdrotic has burrowed in too deep.
I don't know if there's such a consistent pattern in his view counts. "28 years later - this actually looks good!" has 1.5M views for instance, and "Kraven the Hunter - a humiliating disaster" has 1.3M views. The former is about a week older, so my guess is they get views at about the same rate.
Overall I think you're right that positive reviews get viewed less, but I don't think it's 2x-3x less and it's definitely not so consistently.
With respect to the ratio of positive:negative reviews, that ratio feels about right, but that doesn't say much about the Drinker himself IMHO. Critics like him became popular because the entertainment industry felt so insulated by access "journalists" who encouraged them to engage in social engineering that their output became systematically bad or even downright offensive to a large segment of the moviegoing public. If you're a guy like the Drinker, you probably will find movies to be roughly 5 bad to 1 good.
Yes the “Drinker Recommends” strand is good. Maybe he should have reviewed all of those before making his own movie.
By the way I have read the Will Jordan books and they’re … competent. In his books he does manage to avoid most of the errors he calls out in others. I wonder if he struggled with making the jump from print to screen - which is not a trivial transition at all.
This reminds me of the Tucker Max movie. He was super excited about working with the producers and on the script and then it was really bad and vanished without a trace. At least that’s how I remember it. It’s been years and I was only peripherally following his stuff at the time.
I vaguely remember Tucker as a young sex addict and partier and then I came across him on Twitter and learned he's a Trad dad. Tale as old as time.
Excellent article, the odds are against us artists and there is an ocean of lesser to mediocre works of negligible quality for us to compete against. The goal of the artist is to say something of value to people and say it loudly and with strength and vigour.
I am a former film student turned musician/songwriter and the reason I left filmmaking is because it is incredibly hard. it took me almost a decade at songwriting and production to get successful, but that’s easy compared with trying to get any kind of film made. the amount of people needed and the twists and turns in productions are constant. I’m honestly shocked when even terrible movies get made. having good ideas and taste counts for nothing in the film industry. the directors I know that are successful at it have a maniacal, dictator side to them. Art is indeed hard.
When I was younger I'd write short stories for fun. At some point like all creatives I compiled "my best works" (never published) and day dreamed about becoming a writer. My creativity nose-dived.
My point being, intruding thoughts of financial gain ruin creativity. And so it becomes easier to follow an outline or formula.
I think the gradual expansion of making anything artsy a question of money has ruined the ability to create art. I think this is the crux of the matter. We can substitute in fame and social validation just as well.
I didn't know the CD made a movie. His movie commentaries were entertaining but eventually became formulaic, so I drifted away. Becoming formulaic isn't bad per se. Many creatives are one hit wonders, which we could say is like discovering a formula. I think the trick is not going for overkill or letting the motivation become infected from anything other than the joy of being creative.
Which is what then the game of making a living from the creative output becomes, like the BookTop part of your essay.
I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion about a renaissance. It might become easier to spot gems in the muck, so to speak, but there's an ever increasing amount of muck and the "game" of what we call capitalism is unforgiving.
Critique is like an acid out of which nothing positive can be built, and the majority of the people willing to stand up to wokeshit are unfortunately addicted to it. it's what attracts attention and engagement, while positive and creative stuff does not (this is clear enough to me after just 6 months blogging on Dissident Substack). Critical Drinker is just one of many who did what was popular, adapted to the poison and found himself unable to survive outside it.
It's not easy to change the preferences of a mass, even a relatively small one, but perhaps we could start gently nudging people out of a critical and into a creative frame of mind. "You don't like those characters, that scene, that story? How would you write them better?", etc. etc.
I think Asmon said it best. Essentially, nobody watches these kinds of youtube reviews to form an opinion, they watch this stuff to have their opinions validated. That validation is whats being sold, the information content is secondary.
I’d argue the vast majority of the people who watch this stuff already think the things he’s tearing apart are bad, they just want to watch a guy tear it apart in a funny and well put together manner. They get enjoyment from the latest thing they don’t like getting the “critical drinker” treatment.
Its become its own genre, honestly. One that crosses ideological lines.
Your analysis of the trap artist put themselves in politically is spot on. It’s either mainstream crap with no substance or nostalgic crap with no substance. Everything has to be an ode or a nod to some other work that can’t be replicated. It’s actually an exciting opportunity for true artists to do something bold and unique. I truly believe that there is a significant audience that wants and needs new ideas rather than content. We’re so close to a golden age of art we just have to stop trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The simpletons on TikTok are not going to praise the next Dickens or Tolkien.
The "criticism is easier than production" point is essentially correct, but we obscure and demean the critic if art criticism is just commenting on how woke slop doesnt live up to the standards of passable slop. That is not a fair representation of what art criticism is, though this is not the thrust of the article.
The funniest thing is that nothing will change with his content — straight back to telling other people their movies are shit. And most of audience won’t see the irony either.
I always wondered what came of that movie. I’m a huge fan of Critical Drinker and even reviewed his last book (about zombies and special agents, naturally). What a shame.
I think critics and artists are just cut from different cloths. Socrates saw this long go, just concluding that poets were possessed lunatics and that art really wasn’t something that could be taught, but maybe censored if it inspired evil.
A critic, as Oscar Wilde wrote about, is a scholar who has the genius to recognize beauty. He has to study the genre, the medium, and communicate principles in a compelling, defensible way. We need them too.
Maybe we just need to get the businessmen out of creative spaces and let the freak flag fly again. That’s the only way to save entertainment and art, as far as I can tell.
An excellent assessment of the current sorry cultural landscape, and a reminder that there is an abyss between identifying the problem (and complaining) and ACTUALLY contributing to the solution.
This might sound a little bit egotistical BUT I think poets have to lead the charge... PROPER poets not this God Awful Instagram one sentence nonsense.
Poetry provides an easy to manage burst of metaphysical ideas and literary concepts when it's done correctly of course...
THAT becomes the gateway drug to the essay, the novel, and the saga. Once the audience realises they enjoy a read that challenges their preconceived ideas and expands their horizons rather than reflecting back their current paradigm or stroking their ego, then they will step into the wider world.
This was a great article. I read parts of it at two different times of the day so hopefully I haven’t forgotten why I liked it so much. I think it’s true that people are lost in the sauce of simultaneously trying to write a story and make art that is acceptable to the current sociopolitical climate. I also think it’s hard to make something good that is challenging and asks questions about ourselves in such a constraining moment in society morally. In many ways I think at least as far as the arts go we’ve become our own big brother. People in the public eye reporting on each other if they step out of line and engage in “wrong think” or in this case “wrong art”. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone really does rise up out of the current dearth of interesting story telling and makes something transgressive, but hopefully not in a patently obvious way that is more predictably bigoted in an attempt to be insightful about our society rather than the genuine article. Though I fear if and when the time comes that that does happen it’ll be difficult to tell which is which.
Thing is, movies like The Room, Troll 2, Birdemic, etc actually do have redeeming quality. The term "so bad it's good" is derided as reddit cliche, but it really is onto something. The entertainment may be unintentional, but it's certainly there. Ultimately those works stand far above utter bilge like The Last Jedi, since they offer life-affirming hilarity, instead of boredom and insults to your intelligence/dignity.