Aaaand we're back. Something that has come to me with age has been the understanding, however glacial it got here, that some things are Not For Me, And That's Fine. There are plenty of examples from back in the day - many of which recorded in the regrettable gibberings on this website before its recent Big Sleep - of your correspondent, as a white middle class male, refusing to accept things are Not For Me, and loudly complaining about them in obnoxious quasi-comedic fashion which hasn't dated at all why do you ask.
With time I have grown to understand certain truths, such as: don't have an easily searchable archive on your blog, and some things are Not For You. And that's fine. They bring other people joy, they don't materially affect yours, everyone's stuff can exist in the world without preventing your stuff from existing. It's not the zero-sum game of the monocultural 1900s; all the ludicrously niche shit you are into is no longer starved of sunlight by All That. The Gen X foundational dogma of socially stratifying by how loudly you can hate on what other people are into is as dead or irrelevant as most of our cultural icons. Basically, don't yuck people's yum. Unless their yum is the phrase 'don't yuck people's yum' because that's fucken ick.
Pop music is Not For Me. It's not made for me, it's not aimed at me, it doesn't care if I performatively stan it to appear relevant to the youths (brat summer is rizz!) or think it's shit. It certainly doesn't fucken care if it gets reviewed on our new music podcast so we very rarely do so. Superhero movies are Not For Me. Golf? For me, no. MAFS: NFM. Royals coverage, free-to-air news, kombucha, UFC, the last twenty years of Triple J, the continuing existence of Ed Kavalee? Not for me, Clive.
With that said, I watched the F1 75 Season Launch Event overnight. If you ever needed a sign of how much F1 has changed since the Seppos bought it, it probably looks a lot like cramming the O2 Arena with celebrities and LED screens to unveil a bunch of old show cars wrapped in 2025 team kit, and to savour thirty seconds of facile banter between F1TV faces and startled looking drivers while the next show car gets readied on the hoist. It was all about shiny objects and bright lights, celebrities and stars, and absolutely fuck all about what long-term F1 fans might call 'the point' of a 2025 F1 season launch: showing 2025 F1 cars.
But it wasn't for those guys (because we are old and need the kiddies'
help to tune the transistor radio into YouTube), it was for the new wave
of F1 fans of the post Drive to Survive era, who came for the drama and
the drivers, for whom the cars and the sport are largely incidental.
The Netflix Plastics you might call them. If you were a miserable old prick refusing to let things not be for them.
But that was fine, because none of that was for me, and by accepting and making peace with the whole not-for-me-ed-ness of the night, I was allowed to find my own highlight of the night: seeing old mate Nigel Mansell replete with Roy Keane fisherman beard looking so bored he hoped the ceiling would open up and the car hoist might snatch him away into the South London night, but alas. Mansell was on a table of Auld Legends posted up right near Mario Andretti, two guys who famously fucking loathe each other from their various stints as teammates. And that moment showed me that deep down, beneath the glitz and glamour, someone at F1TV properly understands and respects the history of the sport, and I celebrate that.
Also, the crowd booed the shit out of the FIA logo, so even the plastics know what time it is.
The Doctor is OUT. (do we still do that bit? - fix in edit)
