Topic: Other Unpopular Opinions (tech and non-gaming media) v2

@Xyphon22 I don't mean this in a snarky or condescending way, in this case if it's not available via streaming for you, if you don't care aboutt formats and if you don't mind physical media, the easiest and least expensive way to see some of the Ghibli movies is to look at getting the DVDs. You can find some pretty good deals on those movies. At least, I have on them in the past. I would warn about the old Disney Castle in the Sky DVD. I don't know how, but they released that one with awful picture quality.

That brings me to my opinions which might be unpopular — I don't really know. I'm sick of the escalation of TV resolutions to prey upon people's FOMO. 4K seemed to come out of nowhere years ago and there was no content, but they sure marketed it heavily. 1080p was fine until it wasn't. And now they're pushing for 8K because our lives have been empty up until now. A higher resolution is technically better, but it doesn't make writing, acting, or directing better, and a good show or movie will make me forget about resolution in short order.

I also still prefer DVD to blu ray, but that's more for flexibility and convenience.

@Xyphon22 Other than DVDs, you can also do what most people do to watch the American Netflix stuff... by using VPN. There might be language problems though if you do that

@Heavyarms55 I'll take that one step further. I don't like mobile phones.

I've never liked calling someone or being the one who receives a call. I pretty much don't answer a call unless I know who it's from because I feel so awkward when I'm on the phone.

I don't know if it's still the case (probably is) but 10-15 years ago people were getting new phones all the time even though their previous one worked fine. Kids wasting their parents' money. Most of the time it felt like the only thing that really changed was the look of the phone and not its features.

Speaking of features, phones have bunch of useless features that are there just to increase the price and take up space. Newer phones probably don't have a lack of memory anymore but mine is pretty much full and I'd get so much free space if I could just delete all the unnecessary stuff from it.

@Late I don't know if I'd go as far as to say I dislike mobile phones in general, but I absolutely agree with you on the people who just buy the newest phone because it's the new one and looks cool. I only upgrade to the new version when my old one is hit with the forced obsolescence BS that shouldn't be legal. I've no hard proof, but I firmly believe that many phone providers throttle older phones to push people to upgrade, and producers like Apple and Samsung deliberately design their products to wear out after about 5 years. Especially the battery and storage. There's no reason an 800 dollar phone should ship with 64 or 128GB of storage. And some phone models don't even have an SD card slot, that's absurd.

@sdelfin, on the DVD/Blu-Ray thing, how is one more convenient than the other (other than that DVD's are a bit cheaper due to the lower resolution)?

From my experience they work exactly the same.

As for my own unpopular opinion, I still prefer physical media (Blu-Ray & DVD) for movies over streaming.

I'll use Netflix whenever there's no alternative, but it seems like whenever I try to stream something the picture quality fluctuates too much for my liking (it almost never seems to happen when my parents are watching something, but due to bad luck or some other reason it seems like I can never get too far without the issue showing up, no matter what device I use). It seems to happen a lot more (or is just more noticeable) on animated films & shows too. Last time I tried watching a movie on Amazon it devolved into an absolute blurry mess during the entire climax.

At least I know with physical media the picture will be consistent.

It's just that DVD players are more readily available. Many desktop computers contain DVD drives, DVDs are also more widely adopted for a range of other purposes (particularly cheap data storage before flash memory prices plummeted in recent years). You can easily find cheap in-car DVD players, but no such player exists for Blu-ray. Portable DVD players are also widely available, but portable Blu-ray players were only very briefly available and are no longer being produced (I for one would love a portable Blu-ray player; my laptop with with a BD drive is far too bulky to carry with me solely for that purpose).

Back when my folks bought their last computer, I insisted that they buy one with an internal BD-R drive, I have a laptop with a BD-ROM drive, and I also have an external Blu-ray burner for producing Blu-ray discs of home videos (and jobs for clients), as I produce Blu-rays by default (I shudder at the thought of people watching my material on DVD). I also have a professional 4K camera (that shoots at real 4K resolution, being 4096x2160), as well as two portable UHD cameras (shooting at 3840x2160), so my work is future-proofed. Unfortunately, UHD-R discs and burners aren't available yet (and I don't know if they ever will be as Blu-rays are niche enough as it is), but the sooner they become available the better.

The relatively low adoption of Blu-ray players also means that more content is available on DVD, and people still choose to buy DVDs if they are cheaper than their Blu-ray counterparts, and sadly, the majority of content isn't available on Blu-ray even though almost everything nowadays is shot and mastered in HD at the very minimum.

Frankly, I think that DVDs should have died a long time ago. It's crazy to me that there are DVD boxsets that contain dozens of discs when they could easily have been supplied on far, far fewer Blu-rays instead (which would cut down on wasting so many discs, cost, shelf-space, and prove itself convenient for binge watching).

There was a DVD box set planned for release in Australia that was going to cost $500 and contained 120 or so discs (the release was since cancelled), which I thought was absolutely, maddeningly crazy. They could have just supplied the same material on as little as 100 fewer discs, yes, just 20 Blu-rays, if not less, and bundle a Blu-ray player for less than that absolutely ridiculous price, and to everybody's convenience.

As tech savvy as I am, I must be an anomaly in the first world as I am not currently subscribed to any sort of streaming service. I have heaps of Blu-rays/DVDs to watch (with the collection growing beyond what I can feasibly watch!), so I'd say that I have more than enough content to last me several years, so at this point, I have no interest in streaming, particularly, as you have mentioned, the picture quality fluctuates, and the frequent buffering (thanks to our bloody awful internet here in Australia) just ruins the viewing experience.

@RR529 Silly_G is correct when he says it's about availability. I didn't explain that point in my post because I wanted to be brief. When I say convenience, it is for a couple of reasons. One, I've had bad experiences with a blu ray player or two, so my enthusiasm for the hardware was low. The first player I had had less functionality than previous DVD players I used, and it malfunctioned a lot. Apparently, that player was known for that. I eventually came to prefer ripping my discs to store the video on a hard drive. DVD is more convenient because I probably have around 12 DVD drives handy, but I had to go out of my way to purchase a BD drive in order to rip the discs I had already accumulated. Hopefully, it doesn't malfunction any time soon. If it wasn't for the stuff I already had on blu ray, and because some stuff is blu ray only now, I probably wouldn't even have bothered and stuck with DVD.

@RR529

I would own a lot more physical media if I could afford it. The main benefit of streaming to me is that I can mooch off my parent's Netflix while I continue to be in school for the rest of eternity.

The switch has cheap batteries. I have a new(revised switch) that can take inbetween 3 and a half to 4 hours to charge.

Depend on your setting.
Mine is First model have battery life between 3.5 - 4 hours with Half screen brightness and playing not so draining energy Switch games.

Btw, chills.
No need to feel anxious about Nintendo Switch.

Unpopular opinion: I dislike driving and car culture in general. Which is perhaps a paradox because I do like cars themselves. I loved hanging out with my father at car shows and watching him work on his classic cars and he had a collection of model cars unlike anything seen outside of a hobby shop!

But I hate the societal necessity of cars in America. I didn't realize just how good and reliable public transportation could actually be, until I came to Japan. I've lived here nearly 5 years now and never once felt the need to own a car. I can get virtually anywhere reliably without one. The only issue I've ever run into is if I want to buy something too big to reasonably carry on my own or on my bike.

But everywhere I lived in the US, if you don't have a car, you're just out of luck. Few if any places outside of major cities even have consistent buses or subways and air travel is costly, bad for the environment and generally unpleasant.

And in general, I don't enjoy driving. For one, it's dangerous and through no fault of your own. You can do everything imaginable right, and still get killed very easily because some moron thought a couple beers were no problem. While driving, for obvious reasons, you need to pay full or very close to full attention the whole way. But on a bus or train you can read a book or play a game and relax. Driving is also quite expensive, between insurance, fuel, car loans and repair/maintenance costs you can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars every single month on just one vehicle! Not to mention insurance companies are often bigoted against younger drivers, charging more to insure the same car just because the driver is younger, even if said driver has had no accidents or tickets. Those same companies often try anything they can to not pay for repairs when you do actually need them, they bend over backward for it. Even when you've paid them diligently for years!

Further, more and more car companies in the US do not offer small, efficient and affordable cars. I've heard some are even shifting away from cars entirely and only selling large trucks and SUVs and sports vehicles! And those cars are chalk full of features most people don't care about and will never use, but hey, it's there and so they'll call it standard and make you pay for it.

And then there's parking. How much space is wasted by having massive parking lots taking up huge swathes of land? Or huge, hulking, ugly, parking structures? Yuck!

@Heavyarms55
" I dislike driving and car culture in general. Which is perhaps a paradox because I do like cars themselves."

Me: Don't like driving cars too but still okay with kart games (Mario Kart and other kart racing games) 😅

I prefer riding mountain bike to go anywhere as long not too far.

@Anti-Matter Oh, well in terms of gaming I have zero issue with it. Mario Kart is awesome, and driving is one of the only 2 things I do in GTA games. There was a glitch in GTA 4 where you could break the physics engine of the game and launch yourself like a missile across the map! It was so much fun! And one of the first games I ever owned myself (not my father's) was Test Drive 5 on PS1.

@Heavyarms55 The problem is not with cars necessarily but with the American culture of needing everything bigger and better. I've never been to Japan, but from what I've seen and heard it seems like no problem to walk or ride a bike almost anywhere you would need to go. I live in a small town in Tennessee and it would take me hours to get my kid to school or to the grocery store walking or bicycling, that's how far away everything is. Our egotistic society has unfortunately made cars a necessary evil (although I guess public transportation could be used more).

@Xyphon22 Thing is, if your town had a good bus or subway system, you still wouldn't need to drive. I often hear people say that because America is so big, public transit isn't practical, but how does that make cars any more practical? The train system in Japan is so well developed that it's not problem to go from one side of the country to the other, entirely limited to public transit.

And it's actually a quietly documented fact that auto companies in America have pressured politicians to not support the development of public transportation systems. You do have to do a little digging, but if you look, it's there. They keep it quiet, but it's there.

@Heavyarms55 Yeah, I'm not interested in learning to drive, for pretty much the same reasons as you said. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to manage without a car, it depends what I do in the future, but I'd much rather stick with public transport if possible.

Some other unpopular opinions:

I don't really like Howl's Moving Castle (the Ghibli film). This may be my own fault rather than the film's but I found the plot very confusing and I had no idea what was going on by the end. I'd like to read the book some day though, I expect that will be easier to follow.

I also don't like streaming services. When I've been subscribed to Netflix I've just found it very overwhelming, as I feel I have to watch something on it every day to get my money's worth from it, and yet I still don't get round to watching everything I'm interested in. I prefer regular TV where if I want to watch something I can just watch it at the time it's on, or record it if I'm busy at that time, instead of having to constantly make decisions about what to watch when.
I know a lot of people like streaming services so I wouldn't mind them existing if there were other ways to watch their shows, but a lot of shows are exclusive to a particular service and you can't even buy them on DVD. And there are so many streaming services nowadays that it would cost a ridiculous amount of money each month to get them all and avoid missing out on any shows. So I've taken to just ignoring them and only watching things that I can get on DVD or watch on TV for free, and I much prefer it that way.

The movie industry hijacks other media. I was watching a news segment on "Resident Evil" and it was described as a franchise that had made just over 1 billion dollars, which means they only counted the movie box office, and not what truly matters - the pachinko machines.

Joking aside, the movie industry also hijacked Tomb Raider, Silent Hill, The Witcher, every single comic book ever made, as well as holding Stephen King hostage in a Hollywood studio lot. What I mean by hijack is that when you hear about anything, or search for anything about a franchise, if it has been turned into a movie or a tv series, information about that will take over. Only Pokemon has survived this fate.

@Agriculture Pokemon are those monsters from that Detective Pikachu movie right?

Not sure if this is an "unpopular opinion", but I'm just not really into film at all. I can't quite pin down why.

Maybe it's structure? 2-3 hours of beginning, middle, and end, doesn't sit well with me. It just seems to be the worst of both world - not only does a film have to be particular exciting to have me invested for such a long period of time (c.w. TV shows where resolutions can occur in 20 mins to an hour), but it leaves little time for character development (c.w. TV shows where characters develop over many episodes or seasons). Also many films these days just seem to be long for the sake of it. I absolutely hated Batman Dark Knight because it just wouldn't seem to end.

Maybe it's content? I will admit I've not seen many "classics" - I grew up with a crowd that would watch the crappiest things available. But I don't often see film trailers that appeal to me, and it's hard to find something interesting amongst all the remakes and superhero moves going about at the moment. I guess it's true for all media though that you have to sift through many things to find something that you like. It's just that, even when I find a film that I like, it seems to have very little lasting appeal (c.w. games and TV shows, where there's a plethora of options that I enjoy not just the first time, but again and again).

Lol! If they make a franchise out that movie people will probably start saying that.