Artistic Merit Advanced Guide:
"It made me feel happy" - high art
"I could take or leave it" - slop, lowbrow
"It made me feel uncomfortable and challenged my perception of morality" - objectively immoral and should be banned. Bad feelings are BAD people!!

That sounds not good. You should be seeking news out, or otherwise you'll only see the stories that happen to be both important and consumable to the people you follow.

And maybe some curiously while browsing the non-fic at a library will do you well.

Just "happening" into learning seems flat.

Me watching Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog and going "What a poignant critique of the nice guy complex and its destructive nature" only to later learn it was written by Joss Whedon

The most I know about Ready Player One is that it checks out with some regularity from our library, but Ready Player Two checks out so rarely that our system puts it up for weeding review every year.

(here being a random ass town in the rural south, not Fetterman's home town)

lmao

Even the former mayor here who got sucked in by a vanity press sold a couple of copies of his memoir. I bought one because it had pictures of the town before they tore down the old factories and put up the new ones, and that was interesting to me

He's the only public figure you could life your job for publically saying you didn't like him. His wife immediately went "I can make money on this" before he was buried. He had no allies. Only business partners drooling over how to benefit from his corpse

(Being alone is important to this scenario. I was not going to let my sister in on such an advantage)

And then if you look up this random concerned citizen's name, she's a landlord who owns a large section of slums. This isn't mentioned in the article, of course.

Wonder why she might want her tenants to vote republican? Hmmm

Honestly, even then, if it was made exactly as it was then and realized today, it'd be Woke.

I was just thinking about how Backyard Baseball couldn't be made today without self-proclaimed leftists going "This game would be better if it wasn't virtue signalling with middle eastern kids"

I think the whole "outrage bait wrapped in therapy speech" gimmick just lost its novelty, and, like Fox News, stopped being relevant to anyone with any critical thinking skills.

But also they have 0.5% of the capital of Fox

For some reason I read this as force-crochet and I was trying to figure out how that worked