I go to the library to borrow movies, still fun.
Same, but I check out a lot of video games. It’s the same feel. I know it’s that I miss the pre-9/11 world. I don’t care. The library crowd is funny enough the dispensary crowd and the coffee shop crowd we all just kinda have the same haunts.
Huh, I should ask the dispo if they mind me busking while I sell tamales out front (I could go through a few hundred bucks of tamales real fast. Not like that I’m a shitty salesman I’m just hungry)
Yes, the 1980s/90s me misses Blockbuster. But not today’s me. I don’t need to make another stop before the grocery store to pay $20 in today’s money to borrow 2-3 movies to watch, only to have to return them tomorrow or pay a late or not rewound fee, then argue with the kids about overpriced candy.
We were so starved for things to do pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-netflix, video rental was like crack.
If you opened up a new one today where you could just take your phone around to a movie and scan a QR code to have it beamed to your streaming stick when you go home, no one would want it.
I do miss renting games, but in hindsight those games often kind of sucked specifically because they were still on the arcade model of difficulty 🤷♂️
The latter for me. I remember thinking as a kid that things would just keep getting better. That the best time to be a kid was always the future. Now I’m glad I was a kid when I was and I wish kids today had it better than they do. I’m sure that’s at least 50% old guy viewpoint but I really think some lines have been crossed that truly make childhood in the 2020s harder than it used to be.
I miss being able to physically browse movies and rent video games, but that’s about it.
Also you can still do the video rental store experience but even better where it doesn’t cost anything buy visiting your local library. Most libraries have lots of DVDs for checkout.
Blockbuster was meh. I missed my local movie rental joint that was next to a Chinese take-out.
Used to be a ritual every other Friday for the spouse and I to order food than walk around the video store well we waited. We used to walk past the weird obscure tapes and come up with fake silly stories about what they were about and look at the goofy covers. Most times we’d rent something unexpectedly good, typically not from the new releases. I never really watch TV sitcoms, so I consumed most of my media this way. The magic was that multi-million dollar media companies didn’t pick what was available on their stream. The selection at the video store was more eclectic and not some sterile selection of just money makers. So I got to see some really good, not so popular, films.
Also they still had VHS when Blockbuster converted DVD and fairly sure they bought all the old VHS tapes from that conversion. DVDs were still fairly new, so I only had a VCR. Yes, I rewound the tapes.
I don’t know if it’s different in the US but in Germany the local movie rental joints were usually split into a family and an adult section. I was always interested in horror and violent movies but to get to them you also had to go through all the really nasty porn movie shelves with the weird old dudes browsing them. I mean I like porn as well but these stores had really disgusting stuff…
That’s weird. In America all the porn stuff was hidden behind a black curtain in a dark room in the back lol.
While your country seems very tense with nudity and alcohol, Germany was very tense with violence and weapons.
Eg there were usually special German versions of video games where blood and gore are removed. E.g. the special forces in Half Life are robots in the German version. The pedestrians in Carmageddon are also robots. I believe BioShock has certain animations removed. Wolfenstein has the Nazi symbols removed and at computer markets they only showed the Christmas edition where you fought against snowmen.
Movies also exist in a German cut where e.g. RoboCop has like 15 minutes removed.
Many movies where also “forbidden” and could not be advertised and I believe only sold if explicitly asked for by a customer.
The whole situation has relaxed lately, I believe shortly after it was easy to obtain international version via the Internet.
I’m glad Germany realized censoring fictional violence is lame
Everything to do with nostalgia over Blockbuster is just comical. It was such a shit home movie rental store. The place was the McDonalds of video stores…
I just remember it being really expensive. I think it was $4 to rent? Plus the looming potential late fees. Whatever it was, at the time it seemed like a fortune. So you couldn’t really fuck around and rent “Mansquito 2: Womansquito” just for laughs because it really was a huge ripoff when a movie sucked, or was damaged, or something. Also the popular movies were never in stock. They would put hundreds of empty boxes on the shelves to make it seem like it was there, but the actual tapes were always gone.
To continue your analogy, the place didn’t have the Mansquitos, it was nothing but the tent pole movies.
The mom and pop shops that Blockbuster drove out of business had all the unusual and hard to find stuff.
I was mad when they got rid of our local Video Zone. That place had the best ridiculous horror movies. Blockbuster had only the most middle of the road bullshit.
This was my experience. There was a local video rental place we used to go to that later sold out to Blockbuster, and everything just got far worse when they did.
I loved blockbuster but I was definitely a child who probably didn’t know better
I really hated going there
blockbuster = 1) be excited going to blockbuster for an awesome movie; 2) spend 45 minutes looking for an awesome movie; 3) getting fed up and settling for something that doesn’t look quite as stupid as everything else
So basically same as Netflix, except now there’s no excitement and you can stay safe and depressed in your house instead of going outside
Netflix doesn’t even have anything to settle on these days. I canceled my sub years ago and I’ve missed absolutely nothing.
And each extra person along increased the time it took by 20 minutes
Recommendations used to be better. There was a sweet spot for a few years where Netflix had everything and I could talk to the rental clerk about what we were watching, and I miss that. But video stores were too pricy to miss
Blockbuster had gotten so monopolistic and predatory by the time Netflix was mailing DVDs that I was thrilled to end my membership with them.
If you miss blockbuster, you probably weren’t old enough to pay for it. Or you were super responsible and never had to pay fees.
Going to the local video rental place is something I miss. Seeing lines of VHS with the latest movie out, NES games my parents refused to buy since we could rent. Then Blockbuster bought them out, it still offered that but it was less personal where you can talk about the latest movies or games that had released.
I didn’t really have a good childhood, there was trauma I didn’t realize was trauma until I became an adult. There’s some nostalgia for the worries of the world not being a thing but I never had the luxury of a blissful childhood.
I liked the Blockbuster growing up. It was such a weird location though, this tiny triangle lot. Mother hated getting out of the lot so we didn’t go often.
We had an independent movie store here until about a decade ago which surprised people even back then. It was also nice.
I think the thing I liked about Blockbuster was the routine of it, but also how the limited selection helped you make a decision, particularly when you’re with a group. When you’re scrolling through a streaming service with hundreds of choices, it can become difficult to make one. If your only options are the 10 new movies on the shelf, it makes it a lot easier to come to an agreement.
I sure don’t miss using AI for nostalgia slop.
Is this AI? I don’t see any obvious signs and there is a “signature” in the bottom left corner of the box with name “Doctor Photograph”, who seems to be the guy doing a lot of fake products: https://www.instagram.com/doctorphotograph/
Unless AI learned to copy that too. I don’t have Instagram so I couldn’t check if he posted this particular image, though.
No. It isn’t.
This is the original image posted in 2022. AI was straight up not capable of this at that time. There is literally NOTHING about this photo that suggests AI other than the different text. People on Lemmy are turning into Facebook Grandparents but in reverse. People on Facebook can’t tell something is AI but people on here can’t tell what is real. I’ve had posts removed that I could prove were not AI as they were taken from multiple angles and were dated well before AI were capable of certain things but nah. Gotta be removed because the mod felt like they were AI.
It’s gone past ridiculous and has cycled into pathetic.
I saw someone comment on a short of a seal being rescued from plastic by Ocean Conservation Namibia that it was AI and that shit pissed me off so much. I’ve been following them for several years and they’ve done so much good work.
So many dumbasses now just saying anything and everything is AI without doing a modicum of research.
It’s the “It’s photoshopped, I can tell by the pixels” all over again but even more obnoxious this time. Sometimes I feel like people falsely accusing artists of using AI has done more damage to some than AI copying their work.
