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Prelude's Replies
The way it tends to work is that people who are "big" in the UK are the nobodies in the US -- nobody in the US has heard of Cheryl Cole, but Sheryl Crow has had a long and successful career in the US. It's immaterial if she hasn't in the UK - this market is insignificant if you've made it in the US market.
Your little UK world may think she or others are "nobodies" but the US doesn't care about UK shit.
Yep, I feel all those same ways you do. I don't like how society is now "always on" and any conversation you have face to face can and usually will be marred by somebody just deciding there's something more urgent on their smartphone! "Meatspace" interactions, from family dinners to dating, now includes a lot of accepted rudeness, all because everyone's hooked up to every department of their life via that phone in their hand. There's no living in the moment anymore! No being where you are right now with who you're with.
And yes, tons of privacy issues that we never used to have to even think about before.
Similar to you, I found the internet to be magical back when things got going. I was loving how I could build my own website and reach people around the globe. E-mail friends 5,000 miles away when international calls could still be almost a dollar a minute if you weren't careful, and snail mail took literally a week to get there (still does).
It's also great to have forum boards like this one, or social media to a certain extent - it's been eye-opening to be able to see news of world events blocked by my own BBC!! They don't report on the Gilet Jaune movement in France, and it's only via the internet that some of us are getting to find out.
It has great uses but as we've seen, increasing dangers, abuse and even just plain downgrading of the quality of real interactions.
If you wanted to purchase blu rays, can you order them from Amazon and get delivery where you are? You can find most zones of discs, although there will probably be import charges to buy from overseas.
Actually, I used to have unlimited internet data, then I moved countries and it's too bloody expensive where I live now. I literally can't afford it. Many service providers in the UK do offer only limited data for a set price. And more expensive packages with unlimited. I've worked out that it would be cheaper for me to buy a movie on DVD these days than pay an arm and a leg every month for a bunch of stuff I won't even be interested in.
As for movies on VHS back in the 90s, I wasn't talking about buying them, I was talking about rentals. Video stores that rented out movies. There was plenty of choice.
In the 90s before the internet, movie fans just sought out the right video stores if they were in a city or town where that was possible. I was fortunate to live in a large-mid-size university/college city that had tons of access to all kinds of movies.
Not only were there the usual Blockbuster and Hollywood Video chains, but we had several independent video stores that made a point of stocking obscure, classic, foreign and cult movies to rent. I was able to find anything my heart desired at a combination of those places - even our Blockbusters had some pretty obscure titles in the inner aisles!
We also had not just the big multiplexes but again indie movie theaters that would show revival cult classics.
There were also movie channels available on the paid tiers of cable, back when people really did watch TV more than just be on the internet. Movies all day long on cable.
It wasn't so bad being a movie freak before the internet.
I can appreciate that the ease of streaming opens things up to much more convenience. But personally I find it lacking in the excitement of physically having to go to a place and choose a movie. It's also hell on my data allowance.
I miss the 90s in general like you wouldn't believe. Personally I consider it to be my last best decade, or last favorite decade.
Life was simpler. It was the final decade before all kinds of shit hit the fan.
I feel similarly to you. While I love what the internet has done for communication - e-mail has been a lifeline for me, particularly internationally, I lived more of my lifespan without/before the internet. We all did just fine before it existed, and seriously I think it's brought a lot of problems with it.
I'm pretty sure they were all too young to be able to rent a room, especially in the UK where there isn't such a thing as high school kids renting rooms for prom night and such.
Also, it seems plausible to me that teenagers would rather have an adventure in a creepy hole like that - when I was that age we hung around in cemeteries and stuff. When you want to get away from adult supervision you don't care what kind of dump you resort to. To them, at their age, without credit cards and underage, unable to just get a room, this would be fun. Plus the added frisson of believing they were locked in. Teens love that shit.
I'm white and the evil white bad guys didn't bother me any more than when a movie has white people doing bad things to other white people. I found myself rooting for the good guy they were victimizing just the same, black or white.
A really important lesson for you to learn when you're busy judging people for what you think you see on the surface . . .
NEVER ASSUME.
You NEVER know what someone's life has been like. You may be surprised to learn that the same person YOU THINK is "sullen, accepts failure, is nihilistic, has given up" etc may have been quite different at an earlier time in their life.
They may have done things and achieved things you're assuming they haven't.
The place they've arrived at now may be what's happening NOW - but not necessarily where they've been in the past.
Don't ever, ever just assume you think you know all about a person. Shit happens in life. You don't know what may have brought them to that mindset, and you don't know that they've been striving and sometimes even succeeding before in their lives.
I'm really pissed off with people who ASSUME.
It happened to me on this forum last week, where some arrogant dickwad assumed the smallest, narrowest thing about me just because I was trying to stick up for people who couldn't meet his criteria for a well-lived life. He assumed I was one of them. Cannot describe just how wrong he was. But THAT rubs me the wrong way. People who see one thing someone wrote and then make up an entire life story for that person.
FUCK OFF with that shit. Never assume you know someone. They may have been having a very different life and they may have fucking good reasons why they feel the way about things that they feel now. FUCK OFF.
Oh, you're assuming I haven't done that?
Wow, you have NO idea. I have done EXACTLY THAT.
And didn't even stay in a hotel -- years before the internet I even went to great lengths to advertise in a paper halfway around the world for a roommate and stayed with a genuine local.
You have NO IDEA, buddy, how enterprising I was and it was the experience of a lifetime.
So DON'T TALK TO [b]ME[/b] ABOUT DOING THIS STUFF. I'VE FUCKING DONE IT.
BEEN THERE DONE THAT!
But I did it when I was young enough not to be tied down to a serious job. In life most people have commitments that won't let them do this.
You talk about opening the mind, and yet you flat-out ASSUMED, closed-mindedly, things about me, based on my simply trying to speak for those who can't do what I did or make your little trips like you do.
You only had a limited time to be there using it, and therefore didn't get to see how it feels and what happens to people who have to use it day in, day out, year-long. You probably also traveled on it at optimal times in the day instead of getting caught up in rush hours.
Live with having to schlepp around London full time on the systems here and you will soon come to hate it.
Yep, I love it!
No, the intricacy is part of the evolving in order to adapt ideally. It's an illusion that that has to be planned by a higher intelligence. It's only the way it is because evolution is all about arriving at the most successful "intricacy" - and everything that failed to fell away.
There doesn't have to be a god or anyone or thing who planned anything.
Nothing was "designed." Everything on the planet is the result of natural selection and adaptation for purposes of best survival, that's all.
Whatever falls short or goes wrong (murderers, chronic illness etc) is random, not "designed" as part of a plan. "God" didn't create anything. We created an idea that there's a god.
It Follows.
In essence what you say is fair as an opinion, but most people don't have the time or the money for such a luxury as spending "at least six months" living among the regular population of -- how many countries do you want them to do this in?
I don't think people need to do that to understand or appreciate another culture. That's extreme and is the option of only very few.
"Public transportation in the cities is excellent" ---
Speaking for London only.....no, it's shitty and miserable. Oh it's comprehensive - you're never far from a tube station or a bus stop. But it's overcrowded, constant delays, a few autumn leaves on a London Tube line halts the service, you will never get a seat, and it's horrendously expensive, when it wasn't always.
Visiting London might be pleasant. Living in it is a SHIT HOLE. Trust me.
Close but nope, not Charles Hallahan.
But that got me wondering if it's another Charles I'm thinking of - Charles Durning, maybe it's him that I get confused with Ned Beatty. Not sure....
Only once, and it's a really nasty doozie.
It was a genuinely "unfair dismissal" - by a woman who, it turned out, had been through a dozen people before me in as many years, either firing them for no reason or they quit because they couldn't stand it anymore. She was positively psychotic. And I got this news from her own daughter...
This woman was in a position of power and influence (trust me, big-time higher-up connections), and she actually threatened me that if I caused a fuss and file a case of unfair dismissal against her, she would use her connections and influence to "ruin" my life. There are still people today getting away with things like this.