Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 6/13/25

Field Report: Cross Plains 2025 edition

This edition of the weekly update is being written from Cross Plains, Texas, the hometown of Robert E. Howard and the site of the annual pilgrimage and family-style gathering of fans and professionals who gather to celebrate his life and works. As such, it will be light on the day-to-day bunker activities and instead focus on the frivolity of a bunch of doughy, pale, middle-aged men standing around and chortling over yellowed paperbacks and trying to guess how many different names for swords there are in Conan stories.

Some of us even have wives and girlfriends. Incredible.

Bunker Ops and Admin, at Humphrey Pete’s, in Brownwood. Their motto? “It’s Pig Lickin’ Good!” It says so on the t-shirts!

Fun little rainbow off of hwy 36 between Cross Plains and Rising Star.

The view from the front of the intrepid fans and pros who followed me into the wilds of Texas, looking at the empty fields where houses used to be.

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The Nuances of Pop Culture

As I have found myself in the midst of a number of people we can divide into two groups, Conan Fans and Robert E. Howard fans, I have been ruminating on the nature of popular culture. I’m not interested in any Wikipedia definitions; let me tell you where I’m coming from. I see popular culture as a way to connect with other people through shared likes and interests in commercial arts and media-based entertainment. That act of us standing around, talking about Star Trek, and then someone saying, “You know, this is a lot like what’s been happening over those Middle East Peace Talks...” and finding ways to connect popular culture with real world events is what gives it meaning and significance. Connecting, sharing, and re-interpreting are all part of the experience.

L: Literary Conan, by Greg Manchess. R: Pop culture Conan, by Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Milius, by way of Marvel Comics and Roy Thomas.

Sometimes that act of sharing is easy. If you want your friend to hear the Spring Break Banger of 2025, you just open up your phone and play them the first eight bars. For TV shows and movies and other Storytelling Delivery Systems, it’s a bit harder, but that’s where the elevator pitch comes in. That idea that you need to be able to describe your book or your project in 30 seconds—the average length of time for an elevator ride.

So, instead of rattling off entire plot of the novel Dracula, you tighten up the pitch, leaving only the essential elements. Those essential elements are amplified in the re-telling, and most especially in the reconfiguring of that story for a new medium. In a novel, you have a (theoretically) infinite number of pages to impart every bit of detail and nuance. Not so much for a three hour play. Or a two hour movie. Or a one hour TV show.

That’s where the editing comes in, tightening up characters into their primary drives, their singular ambitions, their abridged backstories, and oh, please, if you can invent a catch phrase or something we can hang the characterization upon, why, that would be “Elementary, my Dear Watson.”

Pop culture isn’t complicated. It’s fast, and designed to be consumed mechanically, like how a shark eats, with the nictating membrane sliding over their eyes to keep the blood out. Oh sure, you can (and many do) go much deeper, but its primary objective is to get in and out of someone’s eye and ear holes in a short amount of time, delivering a succinct message and usually an ending swiped from one of those societal myths like living happily after ever. Good always wins. Justice for all. Crime doesn’t pay. You know...bullshit.

And if Dracula ends up pining over his lost love, or Frankenstein’s monster can’t speak, nor Tarzan, and if Conan is just a bloody barbarian with nothing else behind those eyes, what’s the harm? You got comics now! TV shows and movies! Action figures! Novelty records! It’s all just good fun, right, Trekkie?

Since we don’t get to decide what constitutes popular culture, it means that sometimes the unintended consequences are a confusion between message and messenger. Like all of the fans of Archie Bunker who didn’t realize All in the Family was a satirical commentary on family life. “Trekkie” became a derogative term, mostly thanks to the Shatner SNL skit wherein he charged his fans to “get a life.”

Pop culture moves through mass media, crossing its own streams, picking up pieces of other things and discarding what doesn’t work, changing, mutating, and like Darwinism, lives and dies on its own strengths. We’re still talking about Superman, nearly 90 years later. Not so much Howdy Doody. And that’s great, or at least, it was great, until Social Media, the biggest mass media distribution system of all, showed up.

That cultural slalom run got sped up exponentially, and things that would have flared out on their own due to overexposure in a year’s time now were considered “old” after three months. Now pop culture includes memes, the 21^st century version of a political cartoon, only way less funny or thought-provoking. It’s not even an appetizer. It’s digital candy corn. And since social media feeds itself on popular culture and there’s not enough for it to eat, it needs another source of protein.

How fortunate for us, then, that cable news has commodified and converted itself into entertainment, designed to be digested in pre-chewed chunks! The thing that we used to rely on, the thing that used to inform and educate us, is now part of popular culture itself. That means, if you can’t explain a complex and complicated political situation in four sentences, no one will care.

So we tighten. We cut. We edit. And by “we” I mean, anyone with a computer, regardless of their location and motivation. Now, something as important as sexual assault gets abbreviated to “MeToo.” The Affordable Healthcare Act becomes “Obamacare.” Systematic and institutionalized racism is shortened to “Black Lives Matter.” These are big, important, serious topics that require a lengthy discussion, and by giving them over to the capricious nature of pop culture, they become mutable, easily manipulated, and great fodder for things like memes. They speed up, flare out, and lose their initial meaning. Sometimes, the concept gets reduced to a single word, pregnant with this week’s meaning du jour. We have created a vernacular that is simultaneously too much and not enough to describe the complexities of our shared experience.

I’ve got more thoughts on this, but I will save them for next week.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”