Kinda seems like we should just listen to the French then

16 years ago, that was Reddit for me.

Guess we’ll see.

The difference is that before you walked up and got in line or got in early enough that you walk in and choose your seats. And your position was based on your arrival order. Now, you walk up and sorry all seats but the front were bought up and no they aren’t here yet of course. Why would they be? It used to be you just timed it so you got there 30/45 minutes before the start.

I’m just yelling at clouds honestly. It’s not that big a thing, and I reserve seats nowadays often, but mostly because I basically have to. Also, theaters are only ever crowded enough to care during tent pole releases and nowadays I just wait a few weekends.

I just find the social contact of getting to the venue when an event takes place early/on time to get your pick a better experience than choosing a seat on an app early. Probably a condition from growing up pre reservations.

Assigned seats mean you can hardly just ad hoc decide to see a movie nowadays. You basically have to plan it out. Used to be “hey let’s see the showing at 6. Ok let’s get there at 5:30 then.” Now, you go look and people already took the best seats and shows up mid preview. Or people buying literally all the seats weeks ahead of time for blockbusters.

How fun.

I haven’t seen any blockbuster on opening weekend in probably over a decade because I know the good seats are already purchased.

Also, the seating maps aren’t great.

The no seat assignments policy on SW is awesome. You literally just check in on time to get on the earlier groups through a mobile app. Click a button 24 hrs before your flight. Boom you’re in group A. B at worst. It’s straight first come first served. At worst, you can pay $25 extra for the early bird to be in the A group and not stress about check in. Then then line you up based on your spot, and you just walk on and pick which seat you want. Plus SW doesn’t charge you to check a bag.

Egalitarian shit. None of this class based, money grubbing crap. Those types of policies are the reason we have “fast passes” at airports now and then of course then even faster “fast passes”.

Other airlines are also charging you after your tickets to choose your seats and they charge more based on the seat. And charging for bags. And everything else.

Assigned seats also ruined the theater experience for the same reasons.

Unfortunately the author has a few paragraphs that miss the mark and strike me as coming from more of a centrist or right-wing “kids these days are too soft” which feels very off-base and disconnected from the issue.

Welcome to The Atlantic. It’s telling they think all these issues are because of phones and not other aspects of society or something like the looming, ever present threat of climate change.

It’s basically The Economist lite at this point.

This is the direction the big companies are looking to move in. This is the direction Microsoft is banking on, too. Even if you like one service more, the end result may be the same. It’s a matter of time before we see subscription exclusives.

GamePass subscribers are the pre-orderers and mtx consumers of yesteryear, normalizing the industry to practices harmful to general consumers.

“I used to have support for the Native Americans, but then a tribe massacred an outpost on the land that was slowly being carved from them by colonizers. Now I’ve lost all goodwill for their struggle”

The indigenous, oppressed peoples proceed to get wiped out and the colonizing states take over the entire land mass

This type of violence does not need to celebrated. It should be mourned as tragic. Its perpetrators condemned.

But so many are applying fairness or rules to a conflict that has neither.

If you create the conditions for war and terrorism, do not be surprised when war and terrorism come.

I had a university professor give me a 99 on a written exam because “only Jesus is perfect”.

I didn’t really care but it’s also something I may never forget because of how bizarre I found it

Have movies typically planned and scheduled 10+ sequels/spinoffs in a shared universes prior to the MCU? I don’t remember ever hearing that X1 is going to come out this year and Y1 the next with Z1 in the winter, etc etc over the course of 4-5 years.

Is that really similar to “pirate movies” or westerns or whatever from back in the day? When it comes to budgeting? Locking yourselves into set releases publicly, blocking theater schedules, etc?

Something can be lighthearted or action based and still be interesting film making in contrast to the paint by numbers MCU films and some others.

It’s pure action, but Fury Road is an example of a simple action movie that had thought put into the editing, cinematography, etc. Barbie is light hearted but similarly had some ideas to play with.

Sony started this game

Did they, though? I think exclusives predate Sony and even the PS1. They’ve been a part of the console space since basically the inception of the medium. Xbox itself launched with an exclusive “killer app” in Halo. Timed third party exclusivity and exclusive Map Packs were very popular with the 360 when it was on top in the seventh generation as well.

I don’t think Sony has ever made an acquisition of the same scope as Zenimax either in price or in how much of the market was fenced off from a studio they previously had access to. That’s not even going into the Activision deal.

Maybe we can now point to Bungie, but that was still half the price. Most of Sony’s acquisitions over its time were studios that were already de facto developing exclusively for their consoles. Even Insomniac. If you look at their history, Sunset Overdrive is a lone anomaly.

Exclusives suck, but I don’t see them going away as long as consoles and capitalism exist. You’re basically throwing shade at Sony for daring to fund the development of critically and commercially acclaimed games that gave them the reputation of having a quality first party library. Starfield on the other hand was developed as cross platform title until Microsoft paid 7.5 billion to acquire a major publisher. Wasn’t this confirmed this week by the document leaks?

Few complain when Halo is released exclusively because no one is being surprised that those games are now exclusive titles. That isn’t the case with the new Bethesda deal.

What the fuck did you think was going to happen?

Microsoft would develop their existing first party studios and improve the quality of their first party titles, invest in third parties that they already had exclusive relationships with, or invest in up and coming studios?

Had Bethesda published a Microsoft exclusive since Morrowind?

It is incredibly typical.

My reaction to the sponsor list would be the shocked Pikachu meme.

It is/was a terrible idea. It inherently devalues the end of the original trilogy and it’s incredibly lazy.

It makes sense.

Most people who came here two months ago did so because they explicitly wanted to leave Reddit, but not because of Reddit content or the site culture. It was because admin decisions on third party apps and the API.

They still wanted Reddit, just with different Admins and different apps. Ideally, they’d have wanted communities to fully migrate over.

lemmy.world specifically became basically a lifeboat, having been linked to from original third party apps.

Yes, it was created and had the technical and resource requirements to keep up with the new influx of users without constantly crashing (in the beginning), but nonetheless, that meant it got the largest influx of the migration.

It’s honestly a bit strange for me to see people in here with two month old accounts saying “oh yeah the culture has just changed so much”.

You all were the change. It’s that influx of users that basically brought Reddit here.

Anyone who came here before the API changes did so either because they had some kind of issues with Reddit, whether it was the dominant culture or what, and wanted an alternative or because they were interested in the open source and federated nature of the project regardless of Reddit’s own decisions.

Though tbf, pre migration, this place was basically dead. Posts would have a handful of comments at best and it was mostly Lemmygrad users and also FOSS enthusiasts. Hexbear was the most active Lemmy instance and was a chapotraphouse lifeboat formed in 2020 but it didn’t federate so it was really mostly just Lemmy.ml as a general instance and Lemmygrad unless you explicitly knew and cared for Hexbear. Neither was very “toxic” in their own communities and there really wasn’t much inter instance fighting, even if there still were people on lemmy.ml who didn’t care for grad, as far as I remember. I honestly mostly lurked and didn’t participate often.

The apps also were much worse.

Things started picking up as the API announcement happened. That’s probably when we had the best balance of positivity and user growth.

It exploded when the API changes went into effect and voila.

Still, I would say it’s mostly still a bit better than Reddit and there’s more effort in commenting for the most part.

I don’t think I’ve seen a pun chain or a “he’s not your buddy, guy” or anything like that.

Aftersun.

Absolutely stunning and moving debut film.

Banshees, EEAAO, and Tar follow closely behind it, but that was so far the one that sticks with me most.

Still have a lot to watch from last year

Kbin’s UI reminds me of old Digg.

I prefer Lemmy’s.

This happened to me earlier. also reset my password and got locked out. At one point I was able to log back in so I think it’s possibly a server load issue

Yeah the poor trillion dollar company couldn’t possibly compete with the billion dollar company by organically building an attractive portfolio. It’s not like they did it before and only lost their position due to their own mishandling of studios and misunderstanding of the market.