Gen Z already has some belief that Millennials did nothing but complain. No/not enough progress was made for all the protesting millennials cried for. It looks like Z is going the X apathetic route.

For about 5 years, I ignored theaters and said the same things as you. Now I’m back to going a few times a year. You don’t have to buy the popcorn - I never have it at home, so why do I need it there? You don’t take a date to a movie to talk during the movie, you go to share entertainment and have something easy to talk about from a shared experience later. There are many new movies, they just don’t get the hype compared to movies with existing universes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to reuse existing IP, either, because it can help skip the initial exposition and put more action and development in the screen time. Obviously, there are plenty of examples of poor writing and weak attempts to keep some IP rolling.

What brings me to the theater (usually on a Tuesday with a discount) is the immersion. It helps me really get into the characters’ experiences. It’s not required because I certainly get into plenty of movies using my phone on planes (work travel), but it’s something I choose to utilize. I’ll also try to see movies where I expect dramatic cinematography. Movies like 1917, Dunkirk, and La La Land come to mind for originals while I’d include Bladerunner 2049, Dune 1+2, and Mad Max Fury/Furiosa in the reboot list. Anything Wes Anderson, too, if that’s your flavor. I’m indifferent about superhero movies because the CGI is so overwhelming that it’s indistinguishable from a video game to me, so it loses value. I understand your aversion to reboots, but I’d say one I missed and absolutely wish I had seen in theaters is Tron: Legacy because that has become one of my all-time favorite movies. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a beautiful crossroads of my visual and audio interests at the time with the score by Daft Punk. It’s as if it’s a sequel to Interstellar 5555, their album anime movie.

Pixar has some bangers, too. I realized at some point I was ignoring them because they seemed too hard to get into, when in reality I just wasn’t trying. I thought I was too old, ignoring that I obviously already knew about the deeper themes in my childhood Pixar films. They’re pretty original. Inside Out 1 was an emotional trainwreck and Coco and Soul were enjoyable as well.

I’m not trying to say you’re wrong. It’s your opinion. I’m just seeing what I used to think and want to offer some insight on where I am now. It’s easy to miss the original titles because there’s so much rehash out there. There’s always another formulaic Marvel movie and a shoddy DC film coming up. We’re flodded with content, so it’s harder to get attached to a particular movie. I saw a meme or tweet that said something like “what ever happened to having families develop entire cult followings of some mediocre film because they only owned 15 VHS films?” and it stuck with me. Marvel is flooding theaters with mediocre superheros, Netflix is flooding streaming with mediocre everything, and Disney is flooding their platform with 80s-90s rehash. I get it. I was rolling my eyes when I heard Alien: Romulus was coming because I thought “yet another Alien?” and, when complaining, I looked up the list and found there’s way less Alien movies than I thought. But the gems are still out there, even if you never visit a theater again. I keep a list of loose recommendations, torrent them, and will randomly press play on one and let it rip.

Reasonable reason: pre-2020 theaters would be packed sometimes and it’s helpful to have assigned seats. It resolves seating disputes and gets people to go straight to their seats. When I saw Avengers End Game (or maybe Infinity War), they had to have employees spotting empty seats for everyone walking in.

Cynical theory: they’re logging seat selection trends and going to move to tiered pricing like airplane seats

Yeah, they’re not going to suddenly gain $50k+ cash for a down-payment to replace their home. Yes, a mortgage should be cheaper than rent but a renter probably can’t save an extra 3 year’s worth of rent to put it down.

Can’t park there

sees broken glass window with armed agents the other side protecting officials saying don’t come through, starts to climb through, gets shot, dies

“how could Biden do this”

That day was one of the few times a revisited 4chan since being an edgy teen. I knew they’d have a downloadable clip posted. Saved, just in case

You’re right and I forgot about those. Those sit in a different mental file under “solar lights that ship with the worst possible NiMH cells in a product that’s as waterproof as a sock”. I was thinking more of rechargeable on-demand use items like flashlights, power banks, wireless phone/computer peripherals, etc. It’s also a fair point that sometimes items that take aa/aaa cells will also have an onboard NiMH charger circuit and run off USB power if needed: a few mice/keyboards come to mind along with controllers. I haven’t paid much attention to that since I have a healthy stock of those rechargeables and got a few wall chargers that can do individual charging.

Many gadgets are smaller than an 18650 (the oversized thumb sized cell), which is about the only standard lithium size I’ve ever seen be replaceable. There’s hardwired rectangles everywhere, not just phones

They could also just change the game they sold. I had an early print of Need for Speed Carbon for PS2. I couldn’t unlock most of the cop cars due to a bug, iirc. Later burns fixed it

Does it have transition animations or is it actually smooth? Asking from Elite Dangerous where the transition sequences feel pretty immersove to me. Each solar system is an instance with a wormhole jump between. Sublight and FTL have a charge/dropout sequence. The worst is switching between ship/rover/foot where the screen goes black and you hear footsteps. So what does SC do?

Without movie context: blonde white man, traditional haircut, general frustration, devout determination

With movie context: he’s pissed that Barbie has so many freedoms and superior rights. It’s a woman’s world. Males are lower class and serve the women. And if you stop the movie 2/3 through, Ken/men take over the world in Barbie’s absence and take their revenge to live happily ever after. Conservative men tend to think the world has already been taken from them since they’re no longer supposed to catcall women walking, slap their secretaries’ asses, and generally blame this generally progressive trend for equal rights/freedoms as the reason they’re so unsuccessful in life. They don’t blame the economy, capitalism, imperialism, unsustainable growth, misrepresented postwar success, or politicized religious takes; they’ve been brainwashed to identify women as one of the outgroups taking away their resources in a zero sum game.

There’s some weird online connection issues on 360 that occur with certain modern routers. You get dropped randomly from the game. Annoyingly, the emulated 360 on One doesn’t skirt around the issue. It was annoying for Borderlands but made Left 4 Dead worthless on anything besides easy

Oh I see, you are 12 and these are the extent of your creative writing prompts.

Is flamboyancy the punchline?

Devout Christianity is a common reason. Specifically, the kind that believes abortion is murder and is the number 1 topic that can supersede all others. If one candidate vows to outlaw it and the other vows to protect it, the conservative Christian brainwashing machine gets these out-groups to vote against all of their interests to “protect babies”.

Taxes is another I hear. People actually beleive Republicans are fiscally responsible and going to help these out-groups, many of whom are lower middle class, get ahead by reducing tax. Ignore the part where reducing everyone’s taxes increases everyone’s gains, increasing everyone’s budget, and therefore not actually increasing anyone’s purchasing power because the market will adjust sales price higher.

Obviously, this works on the majority demographics too. But they’re closer to the in-group than who you asked about

Yeah, that’s why it’s mildlyinteresting. The general trend is change for the sake of change. This one didn’t.

Why change for the sake of change? Because marketing analytics says they need to be the face of new-new. Why risk breaking automation? Because that’s a you-problem. Google does not care about you, the user. They want you, the ad target. Things break all the time for meaningless changes

I can’t beleive I’ve never noticed the subtitle pun before today

Wild. I was just complaining that I used to follow Lockheed Martin on social because planes are cool, but it’s recently become filled with missile and other direct weaponry posts. I’m well aware of what the purpose of a fighter plane is. They used to at least have fun posts about the scientific work performed by the U2 and SR71.

BRB, taking a close up of a black HOOOOOooooooooo…