I was already complaining about the price when it was only $30 for two tickets, two drinks, and popcorn. To think it's more than double that now!
Add in the fact most anyone can have access to a pretty good quality 60" display. It's not as large as the theater, but it's pretty good-sized, has better color reproduction than a lot of older (read: less-maintained) theaters' gear, and you don't have to deal with people using their phones or talking over the movie.
Lastly, let's just consider that for most people the number of movies you'd actually want to watch on a yearly basis has probably decreased in general while the cost of actually producing those movies has skyrocketed-- it's the same problem with AAA gaming. Your costs are so high that if a movie/game isn't an immediate massive hit, you're doomed.
Yeah, the bottom has dropped out of that market entirely. Gaming will be saved by indie and AA games, but I'm not sure if there's anything like that for movies; sure, smaller films exist but distribution, etc. doesn't really have anything like Steam.
This is something I already knew, but I realized it even more upon seeing the film Wendy and Lucy.
Yes, it's an arthouse flick. No, it won't be everyone's cup of tea. No, it's not blockbuster material. But, what it does show is how filmmakers can do a lot with very little. It's a simple story with a bittersweet ending and no VFX. I'm certain it cost relatively nothing to make. And it's unfortunate that we don't get anything like it in mainstream theaters.
Hollywood has been pricing itself out of existence but they still have the surprised Pikachu face while things decline.
I had a conversation with a bunch of Hollywood people last year. Some were writers, actors, etc. A handful of film personnel. They were all quabbling about what was going to win at the Academy Awards, who was getting good and bad attention from the Hollywood Reporter, and so on. Simultaneously, they were lamenting about how bad things were in their industry.
I then asked the group if the industry had thought about making a good movie for a change instead of giving a shit what the Hollywood Reporter has to say. They were dumbstruck, probably due to a combination of my rudeness and not having a good counterargument. If people are losing their jobs and not making money then it's hard to deny how self-congratulatory the entertainment industry is.
Yep. I'd just about kill for a decade where we go back to 80s flicks. Some of the best quantity and quality we've ever had for mass-appeal movies, and they didn't cost anywhere near what the average cost is today.
And I'd have at least 2-3 movies a year I'd really WANT to go see, probably more.
Back to the Future, Lethal Weapon, Arnie's action flicks, Ghostbusters-- I could go on for quite awhile, maybe the last decade where we had that kind of movie output.
Yep. "Mother of all X" memes weren't even remotely uncommon for a handful of years during and after Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like.
Almost none of those memes are remembered outside of those who were alive and watching the nightly news at the time, but there were some pre-internet memes that were as spread as a modern internet one.
Why is it a major feature omission? Screen sharing isn't an easily solvable problem, there aren't any good FOSS libraries out there (at least that I'm aware of).
Expecting a way way way smaller team that didn't get $1billion in founding, like Discord did, is an extremely poor mindset to have.
All you're proving is the need to implement a tech tax to force companies to fund FOSS at the behest of the federal government, which frankly I'm all for.
It's a major omission because the voice and video integration is one of Discord's killer features. Sorry that it's hard, but something that doesn't integrate those seamlessly isn't a discord alternative
Okay, I'm sure if they got $1billion in funding they could implement the same feature but expecting a way smaller team with way less resources to have parity with such a company is just unrealistic.
Zulip is a website packaged into an electron app. It does not take $1billion to implement webrtc into a website as screensharing + video / audio calls are a solved problem on the web (Zulip is a web app).
Where did you get the idea that it takes a ton of money to do it?
* Centralized identity, and participating in multiple communities at once: People sign up once, then navigate to whatever autonomous communities they choose quickly.
* No hosting requirement (good for ease of use): Want a new autonomous space? Create it! Boom! No installation, no hosting, no monetary cost.
* Video streaming: No other chat client does this easily. Not Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, or these chat programs.
If you want to defeat Discord, particularly in the gaming server arena, you need to make interacting with multiple servers better and you need screen/video streaming.
Discord's main competitive advantage was getting a cool $1billion in founding and being able to support a massive team without the need to worry about profit for the entirety of its existence.
Nobody gives a shit about that man. I don't care if it's unfair. I care that this app does the things I want. How it came to be is entirely irrelevant to me.
So.. just because a tool can be potentially mishandled (e.g. put in the hands of a toddler, which is basically what vibe code ends up being) because it's easy to use, you never want to take a look at said tool?
That sounds like shooting yourself in the foot out of pure spite, but you do you.
Astro is enabling vibe coders with a section of the documentation that gives advice on using AI, an Astro docs MCP server, and a copy of the documentation that is specifically formatted for LLM use.
I'm getting off-topic with this, but a quick aside:
In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.
I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.
The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.
I try to consider how I feel about this, and all I come back with is an emptiness, a follow feeling.
I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.
I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.
I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.
--[not] remotely a good person?
Depends on the metric I guess.
Adams-- helped and cheeredd up thousands (millions?) of people, said racist stuff.
--You (probably) or me --helped maybe one or two people, didn't say racist stuff.
Wildcat was unique because it still required you to interact with the BBS. With majorbbs the bbs would be relegated to an internet provider and their bbs would disappear.
Wildcat was like aol for bbs but it immediately brought users to a web browser so they could get internet connectivity while still getting a pop up of the BBs’ services.
What you are missing is that “full isp’s” did not exist until about 1996, 1997. And even then AOL and secondarily Compuserve where the go to providers. Wildcat absolutely challenged that status quo in an independent manner
Add in the fact most anyone can have access to a pretty good quality 60" display. It's not as large as the theater, but it's pretty good-sized, has better color reproduction than a lot of older (read: less-maintained) theaters' gear, and you don't have to deal with people using their phones or talking over the movie.
Lastly, let's just consider that for most people the number of movies you'd actually want to watch on a yearly basis has probably decreased in general while the cost of actually producing those movies has skyrocketed-- it's the same problem with AAA gaming. Your costs are so high that if a movie/game isn't an immediate massive hit, you're doomed.
Yeah, the bottom has dropped out of that market entirely. Gaming will be saved by indie and AA games, but I'm not sure if there's anything like that for movies; sure, smaller films exist but distribution, etc. doesn't really have anything like Steam.