With real ones it does not even matter if they are true or not.
I could ramble how products are mere substitutes for game. How shopping might be like hunting.
Category: daily life
It has been a bad year for the US movie box office.
Now everybody jumps to conclusions. Me too. Of course the theatre owners point to everything but themselves. I think they share much of the responsibility for their demise.
People stop going to the movies, and theatre owners blame the bad Hollywood product for it. Maybe they should buy some diversity instead. Maybe -gulp- they should take some risk? Only few theatres have more character than a chain restaurant. Most of them are generic as it comes. And then they show dismal ads.
Cinema also lost the arms race in quality: For the average consumer the picture at home can look as good as it does in the cinema. And this is mostly pre HD DVD we are talking about. The audio at home already is as much 5.1 as it can be in a cinema. Plus that the volume will be always right, and there is no talking person next to you. Or if there should be then that is your own choice, and there is always the pause button.
During the 50s TV took away the cinemas monopoly of showing moving images. Colored movies got a boost from this, but Hollywood and the theatres went one step further: They changed their own format to widescreen. This was costly for production and theatres. But seperated the movi experience from the pale 4 by 3 Black and white TV set. Content adopted to what worked well in cinema. Some Movie genres surrendered to “I Love Lucy” and the likes,
new ones like the Cinemascope Western thrived.
Nothing like this happens right now. The movie theatres have the same whinning tone that we heard from the recording industry for years. They seem equally unable to adopt. Media habbits are changing. Games, DVDs, Internet are booming.
Just like the recording industry the Theatres blame piracy for their demise. Which is the classical looser argument. It’s not going anywhere. It does not help to search your audience for camcorders.
Theatres would have a chance though: They could make movie going an experience. Something that is fun and cool. With bad projection, bad seats and dirty theatres you will loose against any big screen TV. If movie theatres don’t make the show an event again, then they will go away. With the advent of color TVs in the early 70s many cinemas in Europe started showing porn in their struggle. I don’t think that this strategy would help US theatres right now.
If (young) people would start dressing up to go out and to the movies then theatres would have a market that nobody could take away from them. People want to celebrate an evening. Current multiplex generic mall type popcorn outlets are not the right offering for this.
Flew with Air France from Boston to Paris. I wasn’t a fan before, but this time the food was actually allright. Maybe 30 Atlantic crossings with KLM created a “oh – please – no – nothing – thanks” reflex whenever somebody asks me “chicken or pasta”.
The A340 had an ok inflight entertainment with a medium choice. My current ranking of inflight entertainment options:
1. Lufhansa LAX / MUC A340
Wifi / Internet with the Boeing Connexion system
It does cost 20US$ but it is worth it. Internet on the plane, nothing can beat that.
2. KLM AMS / NY Boeing 777
Inseat Video with on demand library. Decent Selection of movies. Unfortunately
not letterboxed.
3. Airfrance BOS / CDG A340
Inseat Video. 8 movies Loop. Similar systems I saw in the mid ninetees in business class. Back then the movies were hi8 based.
4. JetBlue (only by heresay)
Cable TV including premium channels. It’s TV, but at least there is HBO from wha t I have heard. Inseat.
5. Song
Cable TV without premium channels. Inseat.
6. Inflight TV on monitors
Most have it. Usually worth avoiding.
7. Inflight domestic
Projection screen, colors and contrast are all over the map. United wanted some money
for headphones. The “Feature presentation” was a very mediocre US family movie.
The worst of the worse.
flying song. They have baby colored plastic utensils, colorful plastic seats, and the TV in front of your nose. 24 channels of not even basic cable channel line up. No HBO nor Showtime. The aspect ratio on those LCDs is not 4:3 so everything is squeezed and everybody looks real fat. Movies on demand are five dollars, the soso turkey sandwich is 8. Not much more choice on the menu. I remember ads with sushi. There are supposed to be 1600 mp3 that you can add to a playlist. The interface for this is beyond dismal, and the music choice looks rather dull. at best. NWA says you can not collect miles on ‘Song’. So far the general song impression.
My specific one was even more horrible:
The flight was supposed to leave at 10:30am, we entered the plane at 4:30pm and took off an hour later. During those 6 hours they pushed the departure time hourly and requested that we stay at the gate. In the first 3 hours
I had once the opportunity to get a drink served, despite the decimated passenger count of forty people. All that nice marketing money: Down the drain. Song simply sucks. Just in different plastic colors.
When I got to get a drink myself I realized why the flight attendants never showed up: I found them both being maniacally engaged in a minesweeper/tetris like game that they must have discovered on their iPaqs. Those Song had given them to process all those food purchases.
Watching commercials: ‘easy’ is a very prominent word these days. Maybe stuff becomes too complicated for the average consumer so that now things need to be ‘easy’.
in case you need a power cable
Since people sell this, it looks like people buy this as well. Which does surprise me.
On the right you can find a Car factory, probably the only visible corporate logo in google maps:
BMW museum
Violence in games is a good thing is the title. And it is written by a person who went to Columbine.
This get’s people to read it. I don’t see an satisfactory argument for the claim of the title in the text. But it illustrates a couple of aspects about gaming. And that makes it worth the read: Games are what is surrounding young people. If you grew up a while ago like me you have no idea what that really means.
KCRW one of the better things of living in LA.
I said so before: I am not sure if I still would live partially in LA, if there would not be any KCRW.