Click link for article by Ted Giola Dec 22/25
Will this be the cool new thing of 2026?
https://open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia/p/the-return-of-the-weirdo?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
“People are less weird than they used to be,” claims psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He describes this as “an epidemic of the mundane.”
The strangest thing, he believes, is absence of strangeness.
Nobody wants to make waves—or even trickles. Conformity is the flavor of the month, and it tastes the same every month.
2026 may be the year the former weirdo and cosplay conscious video personality, the Nelson Auteur, makes a comeback—(if Ted Gioia is right about weirdos returning).
You, the most blessed subscribers out there in the ether… be the judge. As a public service, our technical team here at the Court Painter studio has assembled a selected small sampling of Nelson Auteur interviews and conversations from 2012–15.
INTRODUCTION:
The Nelson Auteur was a breath of fresh air for a video cottage industry stifled by the production values, professional standards, and mega-bucks of “Big Video” and its overly skilled art college graduates—all years before the AI introduction of “Slop!”
The Nelson Auteur raised creative thievery to new heights as the central feature of his oeuvre. The markers of his auteurish ways are evident in his rapacious pillaging of others’ words, phrases, inflections, and images. He insists his on-camera performances are highly choreographed and tightly scripted, utilizing the advanced iMovie 5 edit tools to create videos for the modern world. These have been described by an unknown Calgary art celebrity-for-hire as “Exquisite miniature costume dramas for shut-ins.”
Most of the Auteur’s videos are extensively researched adaptations, swiping vocals from the flotsam and jetsam of YouTube. He took pride in his contribution to the 21st century’s celebration of unstoppable opinion and contextual distortion.
His themes take up the neglected “grand narratives” of the 21st century: blather, nonsense, stupidity, the absurd, colonized word wars, and talent in absentia. His celebration of the long-winded is a trope evident throughout his more important works.
A noted Calgary art celebrity-for-hire has been misquoted as saying, “He was never afraid to let an absence of talent get in the way of blind ambition.”
This blessed, deaf-to-criticism ambition was underwritten by a one computer production company Nelson Auteur Promotions Unlimited, established in 2012 from a third-floor walk-up on Baker Street in Nelson, B.C.
The video site went weirdly dark in 2024 after failing to work for many years.