Pop culture timekeeping…

This comic (ideally) publishes once a week, but it’s not like you have to be here for it right on Wednesday. You can come by on Thursday, you can wait for the weekend, or your Monday mid-afternoon doldrums. For that matter, you can just skip out entirely and then catch up later at your leisure, even if that happens to be months down the road.

Nowadays it feels like with the rise of streaming television, more and more pop culture is falling into this model. Netflix of course is still famous for dumping the entire season of their shows all at once. Amazon Prime and HBO Max and such still stick to weekly premieres of episodes but keep an archive as they come out, accumulating until you once again could just binge the whole thing at your own pace.

I’ve been pondering if all this is contributing to my feelings of coming unglued, time-wise. The Covid situation has exacerbated it for a lot of folks, but I still have a day job, which still has a schedule to stick to even if I’m working remotely for the time being. I still have a comic to produce. And yet… and yet… there’s still a nebulous sense that the days have been blurring together, and to look at my friends’ posts on social media I’m not alone in that.

Conventions are virtual and being recorded on YouTube, many movies are on indefinite hold and some like Mulan have just gone ahead and debuted themselves on the television (albeit at a pretty ridiculous premium but that’s a whole other story). When does Season 2 of The Mandalorian happen? October 30th? I’m guessing on that, hold on while I look it up.

Ooh, okay I was right. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s dropped while I wasn’t paying attention, though. The “water cooler talk” I get into with friends is disjointed because Friend X has watched the whole Season, Friend Y has only watched the pilot and I’m somewhere around the middle. Even without bringing spoiler considerations into the mix, that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the kind of shared experience that anchors a discussion.

So it feels like my pop culture watch is broken, and because of that I’m sort of floating through the weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to go back to the old days where if I missed an episode I was just out of luck unless I’d happened to set my VCR, but I guess it’s just interesting to me to admit how much of my “clock” might have revolved around these little bits and pieces of fiction, and having them jumbled around or even just all happening “at once” has left me a bit adrift.