211–220 of 264 posts
I am old enough to remember when the wife would call me at work on a Friday and say hey, stop by the video store and get a movie for tonight and I'll stop and get wine and take out. What was special was the "Dave" at the video rental place (it wasn't blockbuster but whatever). I don't recall the guy's name, but he always remembered me and what we liked and had great suggestions and sometimes if you said, nah but how…
I am old enough to remember when the wife would call me at work on a Friday and say hey, stop by the video store and get a movie for tonight and I'll stop and get wine and take out. What was special was the "Dave" at the video rental place (it wasn't blockbuster but whatever). I don't recall the guy's name, but he always remembered me and what we liked and had great suggestions and sometimes if you said, nah but how…
Blockbuster always had the least interesting inventory of the rental places in our neighborhood and their employees tended to be less knowledgeable, but because they were the only place that was guaranteed to have the latest box office hits, they drove the other stores out of business. Their homogenization and crapification of the video rental industry is what created the opportunity for Netflix's rise -- NFLX's original DVD-by-mail catalog was vast and movie buffs could finally get their hands on the obscure classics they were no longer able to find locally.
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Feels like even without streaming or even Netflix’s original DVD-by-mail delivery service, Redbox could’ve eaten brick and mortar movie rental stores.
I don't recall Redbox existing, at least in my area, during that time.
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Websites don't need notices if they're not doing anything shady or unnecessary tracking, and just about every cookie notices I see is going against either the wording or the intent of the law. If they want to be annoying on purpose, we should blame them, not the GDPR.
So it's an effective law just not effectively enforced. Isn't that a distinction without a difference?
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Agree. Too much here is more of the same. Ugh. I like cowbell. Here is an endless loop of cowbell ringing and nothing else. It's like torture.
Just noticed this again today. Spotify vs Hype Machine (browse, then "recommendations" by checking out people who also liked $song). Spotify is somehow stuck on dark, aggressive electronic music for me. It's not the only thing that I like, not even my favorite really.
Whenever I try to get a service or other to recommend music they are remarkably bad at this.
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I've long pondered building exactly this, an anti-recommendation engine. You'd go through and mark some favorite films or genres, and it'd come back with something great but totally unlike your usual picks. Foreign flicks not your thing? Try Parasite. You don't remember what it's like to be an awkward pre-teen? Eighth Grade will remind you. Not a big action movie person? Maybe you need to watch Die Hard. Kids movies…
Agree. Too much here is more of the same. Ugh. I like cowbell. Here is an endless loop of cowbell ringing and nothing else. It's like torture.
I was in Bend a few months ago and swung by the last Blockbuster. I rented a movie (and bought a t-shirt), and had to sign up for an account. I received a laminated paper Blockbuster card with an account number scrawled in Sharpie on the back. I wouldn't have guessed that the store was still calling out to these old servers; that's pretty cool. The movie cost 99 cents to rent, which I thought was surprisingly cheap.…
Man, this job would be great, if it wasn't for the fucking customers!
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One of the most noticeable things about playing laserdiscs on modern displays is the poor black levels and noise in shadows, and of course the difficulty in scaling interlaced material. Even with what should be a decent (but not nearly top of the line) FPGA-based deinterlacer/scaler I still feel like it should look better than it does, given how much better laserdisc resolution can be than VHS. But it's also analog v…
Like you said, Laserdisc was way better than either tape format. But if you watched it on a Trinitron television, you noticed all the same artifacts you have. The best reason for owning a Laserdisc player in 2022 has decreased somewhat with the availability of the de-specialized versions of Star Wars. For decades that format was the only way to see the first 3 films as they were originally shown in the theater. Many…
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> With Netflix or whatever Streaming Service you have you have an immense catalogue… I got curious, so let's look it up. Googling, it looks like maybe Netflix has 17,000 titles total in in it's collection internationally in april 2022, but only a portion of those are available in a given market. One page from 2021 said the US catalog was ~5K titles, but I bet it's bigger in 2022 as the overall catalog has grown as mu…
Blockbuster carried the latest movies from all the studios. Everything newest and most desirable. They had a smattering of classics and art house and older genre films, but mostly it was about everything latest and greatest. Netflix streaming seemed like that at first, but better! Now, they have a tiny slice of content. And as a content-producer, they seem willing to throw money at anything B-list. Meanwhile, the stu…