Turner Classic Movies has had a lot Dracula inspired films on lately. I find myself watching them late at night. Some are ridiculous but they're charming.
Turner Classic Movies has had a lot Dracula inspired films on lately. I find myself watching them late at night. Some are ridiculous but they're charming.
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
Mister D (10-10-2017)
It's basically milk caps, if you've ever heard of that game before. But the pig-themed designs created by the World Pog Federation became really popular in North America in the first half of the 1990s because they were given away in McDonald's Happy Meals and to kids opening bank accounts and so forth. Other companies like Marvel Comics and the card industry began introducing their own lines to compete. I have Goosebumps-themed ones too. It was a whole thing.William wrote:
Lol, don't feel bad about it - I never heard of Pogs.
Play was very simple. Each player contributed an equal number of "pogs" (as they were simply known to my generation) to a stack and then took turns throwing a slammer down against the top of the stack, which caused the pogs to spring up and scatter. The player who threw the slammer would then collect the pogs that landed face-up. The pogs that landed face-down would be re-stacked and it would be the next player's turn. This process would be repeated until there were no pogs left. Whoever wound up with the most pogs at the end of the game was the winner. Generally this was not played "for keeps", i.e. players did usually agree to give the collected pogs back to their actual owners at the end of the game. However, sometimes people did play for keeps.
Half the fun of pogs wasn't so much playing the simple game as it was collecting the different pogs that were out there and showing them off to your friends. It was a fun fad.
That's what I thought! There must be a whole lot of kids who struggle with that! They're banned from my classroom too.I'm not heavily into the spinners - they are mainly for young kids and those with ADHD - but they can be fun. They are banned from class.
Yeah, when I look back at it now, their massively oversized clothes don't look as good to me as they once did. But you have to put it in historical context: there was a time when most everyone under the age of 30 was wearing deliberately oversized clothing, and JNCO's particularly massive apparel was a popular, street-looking, non-preppy option. You probably think it's weird because nobody your age wears those kinds of clothes anymore. But if they all did, you might think differently. They don't look as good to me now that they're out of style, but they were comfy and made me feel cool back around the turn of the century.I hate those stupid looking JNCOs, but what's to understand about Emojis? AFIK, they are just another name for Smileys or Emoticons.
As to emojis, for some reason when I think of that term, I don't think of emoticons/smileys. I get those. I use them all the time, as you can see in this very post. For whatever reason though, when I think of emojis, I think of like the umbrella and car and sun and poop icons and stuff like that that has scarcely any practical use that I can comprehend. Some of the kids seem to prefer communicating in those instead of with words, which to me is like trying to read hieroglyphics. That mystifies me. Why is that popular?
Aaah, that is an interesting interpretation! I thought it was just rightspeak opposing politeness and equality.Again AFIK, red pilling just means keeping it real, and recognising when someone is spinning you a line.
There seems to be a whole lifestyle to it, I observe. Eating at this kind of restaurant, moving to that particular kind of community, etc. It's one I don't understand.Hipsters are just fashion freaks.
Hipsters come across to me as upscale white youth who want to pretend like they're not spoiled and middle class, even as they go about gentrifying poorer communities and ignoring their residents when addressed like they're too good to answer a black or brown person greeting them. Have I missed something?
Yep, VHS was the fancy, formal name for video tapes back in the '90s. You played them on a magical device called a VCR. You slid the tape in, pressed play, and watched the movie or episodes or whatever applied. That was all. There was no menu or scene select options or special features like with today's DVDs and blu-ray discs. And the picture quality was worse. And you had to rewind the whole tape when you reached the end if you wanted to watch it again. And most people didn't have remote controls at the time, so you had to actually get up off your ass and walk over to your bubble-screen TV to do these things. Such was life.VHS was a video tape standard - wasn't it? But I don't understand sex robots or the need for them either (like excuse the language - but why not just have a wank?)
Nobody from my generation, even the guys, understands the appeal of sex robots. "Creepy" and "weird" are the most common words I hear used to describe them in my age cohort.
Grunge was a sort of blend of punk rock and heavy metal. It was really popular for a while after Nirvana came out with Smells Like Teen Spirit. I generally liked the aesthetic, personally.Not chuffed by Grunge, but totally hate Country. So can't help there.
I hear that the country revival is like a reaction to all this technology that's coming out so quickly nowadays or something like that. If so, that's a poor excuse.
Magic is a classic trading card game that was I think biggest around the turn of the century when the Pokemon trading card game briefly made TCGs cool. Explaining the rules would way too complicated for our purposes here, and I'm sure they've changed since last I played many years ago. Unlike with simple TCGs like Pokemon though, the main appeal of Magic was actually playing the game, not collecting the cards.Never played Magic - I like war games - but I don't really know what a Jock Gamer is.
As to what a jock gamer is, that's just how I describe the modern phenomenon of hyper-competitive gaming, as most intensely concentrated in the professional video gaming tournaments that now air on ESPN and other major sports channels, where players compete for millionaires of dollars and get laid off it and such like other professional athletes. When I grew up, hardcore video gaming was largely a solo or semi-solo (as in one-player-at-a-time) affair for geeks and competitive gaming took the form of dorky LAN parties where nobody won anything; it was just for fun, not money and blow. I struggle to understand that particular transformation. To me, video gaming will always be for fun.
I know what it is, I just don't get why it's so popular with today's teens, and teenage boys in particular. What's the appeal? What makes it sexy now that didn't 10, 15, or 20 years ago?AFIK, the Alt-right is just another made-up name for extreme right wing people who also support white nationalism.
Hush thy tongue, blasphemer!Never saw the movie, but it sounds pretty naff to me. Didn't see Twilight either, but it sounds like a bit of a 'girlie' movie.
First of all, Buffy is not a movie. It is a legendary TV series that ran from 1997 to 2003; one that revolutionized the way TV shows were made! It's smart, well-written, fun, and quite often hilarious. It is also my favorite TV program of all time. The monsters are metaphors for the struggles one navigates in high school.
When I was growing up, the Star Trek series on TV were, in order of release (and there was some overlap), Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager. (I'm not counting Star Trek: Enterprise. We're just going to pretend that that never happened.) Like the original series from the '60s, these shows were about diplomacy and exploration and futurist optimism. Then along came the Star Trek reboot movies beginning in 2009 that did away with all that and made it all about pew pew pew, pessimism, and big explosions, and that trend continues with the new Star Trek: Discovery series you mentioned. And it sucks! Nothing that drew me into the classic Star Trek series is there anymore. It's not even recognizable! Let Star Trek be Star Trek! Don't make into an action franchise just because you think those sell better. That's all I'm saying.Don't know what Action Star Trek is - unless you mean the new TV series coming from CBS.
To my generation, there is only one meaning: Total Request Live: the show that used to run every weekday afternoon on MTV where they would count down the top 10 most popular music videos of the day, as determined by the votes of their viewers, airing each along the way. It was something many, many, many teens were into around the turn of the century. The new version they started airing this year is...difficult to describe. I don't get it.Don't know which TRL you are talking about. Those initials can stand for lots of things.
(I think the MTV era may be coming to an end, as this would-be revival and a lot of their other nostalgia-dependent gestures lately seem a bit desperate.)
Last edited by IMPress Polly; 10-10-2017 at 06:50 AM.
William (10-10-2017)
When VHS (and, briefly, Beta) tapes became commercially available in the early '80s, they were priced for rental. In other words, it didn't make sense for most people to spend $60-$80 to buy one movie, but the video rental places could afford to spend that much, so that's what they cost. The first VHS tape priced to sell to the general public was the first Michael Keaton Batman, about 1990, which places like K-Mart sold for $20 - considered a huge bargain at the time.
It was about the same time that the price of VHS players began to come down to where everyone could own one; before that, many people just rented the machines for a night or weekend. I bought my first VHS player in the early '80s with part of a reenlistment bonus - a top-of-the-line RCA Selectavision 650, for $1,225, and that was on sale! If you owned a machine, you sometimes rented a second one (or got together with a friend who owned one, too), connected them together and made copies of the movies you'd rented. That 650 lasted for about ten years, then one of the heads stopped working and the repair shop wanted $300 to replace it; by then, you could buy a brand new VCR for that.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
IMPress Polly (10-10-2017)
I bought a DVD/VHS machine at Best Buy a few years ago for $75. The sales guy told me it was the last VHS player of any kind they were going to be carrying. I have some movies that, for whatever reason, have never been available on DVD, but I've found a VHS tape of them, plus shows I taped years ago that are similarly unavailable in any other format. My youngest son bought me a blu ray/DVD player last Christmas, so I'm not sure the VHS player is even hooked up, I haven't used it in so long.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
Crepitus (10-10-2017)
Ah, the memories. In the early 80's we were in Germany. We bought our first VCR at the BX, on Bitburg AFB.
We'd get together with another person, hook the VCR's together and, record movies. All we had was, AFN radio and TV, so, we watched a lot of movies..... recording them and, sharing with everyone.
I currently have a VCR/DVD combo player, but, I no longer have vhs tapes.
Bought a new DVD player a couple years ago, for under 50 bucks.
IMPress Polly (10-10-2017)
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
Holy ravioli, Batman, $80 for a single movie?! In 1980s dollars?! Yeah, by the time I was old enough to be buying videos myself in the mid-'90s, they typically ran $20-25, by the turn of the century were $14-17 standard, and by 2008 (the last year I can remember seeing VHS tapes on store shelves) you could get them for practically nothing: $1-5. And that was despite more than decade's worth of inflation.Standing Wolf wrote:
When VHS (and, briefly, Beta) tapes became commercially available in the early '80s, they were priced for rental. In other words, it didn't make sense for most people to spend $60-$80 to buy one movie, but the video rental places could afford to spend that much, so that's what they cost. The first VHS tape priced to sell to the general public was the first Michael Keaton Batman, about 1990, which places like K-Mart sold for $20 - considered a huge bargain at the time.
It was about the same time that the price of VHS players began to come down to where everyone could own one; before that, many people just rented the machines for a night or weekend. I bought my first VHS player in the early '80s with part of a reenlistment bonus - a top-of-the-line RCA Selectavision 650, for $1,225, and that was on sale! If you owned a machine, you sometimes rented a second one (or got together with a friend who owned one, too), connected them together and made copies of the movies you'd rented. That 650 lasted for about ten years, then one of the heads stopped working and the repair shop wanted $300 to replace it; by then, you could buy a brand new VCR for that.
We also recorded off TV a lot. In fact, I think I acquired more VHS viewing material that way than I did by buying the tapes at the store. It was just cheaper. But it wasn't as practical as modern DVR. You really had to actually be there in your living room when the show was on.
I used to have one of those DVD/VCR combo units, but my last one gave out about four years ago. I currently mostly use my PlayStation 4's blu-ray for video-watching purposes. I do also have a region-free DVD player for purposes (mostly) of my anime collection. I think it was like $40 or $50 when I bought it online a number of years ago.I bought a DVD/VHS machine at Best Buy a few years ago for $75. The sales guy told me it was the last VHS player of any kind they were going to be carrying. I have some movies that, for whatever reason, have never been available on DVD, but I've found a VHS tape of them, plus shows I taped years ago that are similarly unavailable in any other format. My youngest son bought me a blu ray/DVD player last Christmas, so I'm not sure the VHS player is even hooked up, I haven't used it in so long.
There are also a few things I can't find on DVD or blu-ray either at all (like my Nintendo Power promotional videos from the '90s) or for a price of less than $250 (Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla), so currently I'm in the process of getting the contents of a handful of my old tapes professionally transferred to DVD.