Jeffool

In 2019 a friend and I got subscriptions to Regal and began going to a movie a week. Most days we’d plan something, but sometimes we’d just show up and pick something. (We blindly picked Underwater, and what a great surprise. Also decided to see the Tom Hanks Mr. Rogers film and proceed to ugly cry all over myself.)

Then COVID.

The last movie I saw in theaters as a subscriber was Bad Boys for Life. I tried to go see Dune 1. I drove 30m, bought popcorn and a slushee, and waited… But the video file was corrupted. They said they had to redownload it before the next show, so they canceled the showing and gave everyone a free ticket. I never bothered using it. I just went home and watched it for free on HBO Max.

I love theaters, both as nostalgia and just to have the experience. But man, “paying extra to go out of your way” is a difficult sell.

It’s incredibly common in the US, especially among younger people. This was just on the first page of my search but I’m sure you can find tons of similar stories over the years: https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/more-americans-prefer-watching-shows-with-subtitles-study-finds/ar-AA1rj48O

Overall, half of respondents said they use subtitles regularly.

Personally I’ve always done it since my youth as well (around '96.) Admittedly that was mostly because I mostly used my TV to watch late at night instead of sleep… But it wasn’t even unheard of then to prefer subtitles. And it was pretty common at the HD switch over, often citing bad speakers (both quality and physical design.)

This chart makes me wonder about cigarette smoking specifically. It feels like if you looked back 40 years it would be a “U”.

A string is just a collection of characters, in programmer speak. When you use quotation marks in your search to find exactly what you want. If your search was:

dog “fast drive”

Google used to show results that only had both the word “dog” and the joined phrase “fast drive” in the same result. Or tell you there were no results.

Now it feels like Google uses that as a suggestion, giving you “dog” and any combination of “fast drive”, “fast driver”, “fast driving”, or whatever else Google thinks you want, instead of what you asked for. Or if they don’t find it, they serve you up whatever they want, with a small message about there being no matching results.

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I forgot where I saw someone else suggest it… But if you really want to win over shoppers this Black Friday? Don’t run a week of discounted TVs. Discount groceries.