One. It’s all you really need. Watch what you want on it for a month. Then cancel and sign up for another. Repeat.
As others have pointed out, you can get a lot of services for free, even if just for a while. Cell phone plans, Target Circle, Best Buy, and other places frequently send out freebie codes or include services with membership.
YT Premium comes with my Google One subscription which gives 100GB storage on their cloud and YT Music (which is, in my opinion, better than Spotify - there are better mixes and Spotify doesn't do great with Japanese songs, which I listen to a lot)
Disney+ because my gf got me into Marvel and I watch the new series' (plus Star Wars and classics from my youth like Kim Possible)
For other content (like the Office), I just use Stremio with Torrentio. Disney+ is still worth it because it's a pain to set up the HDMI every time and I'm peak lazy
Not a streaming service, but if you have a partner you should really look into Regal Unlimited / AMC's variant of that. Movie dates are great and there are always enough new movies to keep you going, plus you can sneak snacks in super easily in a bag (even just a full bag of popcorn lol). You can watch and rewatch like 10 movies in the theater a month if you want lol, plus it gets you out-of-the-house. It's not for everyone, but worth it for us!!
Game pass, GeForce now, YouTube premium, Hulu, Netflix, Apple, Disney, Max, Amazon prime, Paramount, and Grandma just insisted we sign up for peacock to watch the football games.
I want to cancel paramount and Disney, but some family members really enjoy some shows on it.
It’s part of an ‘extended cinematic universe’ which is apparently a thing these days. So it counts?
Anyway, I love westerns and space fantasy, and The Mandalorian kinda combined them in an episodic way that I could basically watch forever. Although it did fall apart in season 3, despite the well-intentioned efforts to tie back to the larger Clone Wars arc.
Ok, I admit it soon got outmanoeuvred by Andor, which was damn good even if you’re not a Star Wars fan. But Mandalorian paved the way IMO for a good pulpy episodic series with no bloody Skywalkers or Jedi Council BS. So that’s a win, right?
It’s literally a modern western, not a lot happening in each episode is pretty much the western model. There is and should be an overarching plot and goal each season and mandalorian does do that, slowly, like a western should
I wholeheartedly disagree. It’s one of the best things to come out of the universe. Maybe it’s because my son and I watch it together. But there are some great actors in there putting in some stellar performances.
Paying monthly for Apple, Netflix & YouTube TV. Paid for a year of Prime just before they announced they were adding ads. Got a year of Peacock with ads last year for $20. Also have a yearly subscription to Tennis Channel Plus.
I usually rotate a few of the monthly subs every 3 to 6 months to catch up on some shows and movies I’ve missed, but I’m getting closer and closer to cancelling them all. Too expensive and too much time on the couch.
I pay for Hulu and Prime (for the shipping), and get Netflix & Apple TV thru my T-Mobile subscription.
edit: oh, derp. I also have YouTube premium because I paid up for the Google Play Music family plan back in the day, and then it converted to YouTube Music + Premium. Later, I upped my subscription to Google One for the extra storage and phone support and get some okay, ad-free free content on the 'Tubes
I get Max for free with my phone, Hoopla free from the library, and my sister lets me use her Disney+ account. The only streaming service I pay for is PBS Passport.
I pay for Peacock, Netflix, Paramount, and Apple. I get Disney and Hulu free with my phone plan, and I’m sharing someone else’s HBO Max, Brit Box and Prime accounts until they say accounts can’t be shared anymore. None of the ones I pay for cost too much except Netflix, which I would have canceled by now if my mom didn’t watch it so much lol
If Pulp Fiction is on, unless it’s been a few years I’ll probably switch the channel, if Django Unchained is on though…I’m grabbing a snack and watching it everytime. This isn’t to say Pulp Fiction sucks, just think Django’s more entertaining.
I could never enjoy Django. It’s not a bad movie, but the way I watch a Tarantino movie you get desensitized by the violence and it becomes part of the humor and charm. I couldn’t do that in Django. The theme was too serious for me. Curiously I didn’t feel the same way in Inglorious Basterds.
Oh, and let’s get this out of the way. I fucking LOVED the Hateful Eight. It’s pure Tarantino.
Extremely depressing, socially isolating, psychologically warping. I’m a responsible, intelligent, ambitious person, but I’m not a functioning human. I’m severely and permanently damaged by poverty, even though I grew up in Canada. I’m 40 but I just managed to start a career about two years ago because I’m borderline unemployable and emotionally unbalanced (I worked my ass off at careers for 20 years, and utterly failed, constant burnout and humiliation, social assistance, moving back into a parents’ tiny apartment). I work remotely which is the only way I can ever hope to maintain a steady job. I can’t maintain normal relationships because I was largely denied social interaction growing up, and my brain can’t cope with social things now. I stopped trying to force myself to learn because it was literally decades of torture that didn’t work. People keep telling me I’m autistic but all the doctors say “nope, you’re just fucked up” (actually they use words like “personality disorder” and PTSD and anxiety disorders and ADHD and other stuff. I have a long list of diagnoses for which no treatment was offered except pills which mostly don’t work, although I’ll admit that ADHD meds helped me get a bunch of work done and also straightened out my brain a little bit. I don’t take them anymore but the positive effects are still with me).
Now, it looks like I’m doing a lot of complaining here. But in truth I’m just describing my “no hope” landscape. Hope sounds like poison. I have things to do, and right now I have a pretty good life.
Yeah that sounds a lot like my current life. I’m 41, broke, can’t keep a job, socializing is painful, country upbringing. Whatever happened in my childhood did something like that to me.
But I was asking what it was like, not so much what outcomes did it have on your adult life. If it’s too painful to relive it you don’t have to, but I was curious. What was it like, when you were a kid?
We moved around a lot, almost always rural. I had a big family so they were always a close crew, but also always very strained and stressed. We had a Nintendo and bicycles. I usually had friends around until I was 11, but then we literally just moved out into the forest where there was nobody else. For 7 awful years I was like in a prison. I lost the ability to communicate, but not the desire. I dreaded the summers because I knew I wouldn’t see a single person outside my family. My parents were constantly stressed, always on a sour mood. The forest was hard on them too. I would mostly try to entertain my siblings amd read books. Depression became the biggest feature of my life. There was just nobody. Then I would go back to school in the fall and I didn’t know how to communicate anymore, and was constantly sad and lonely. But I denied those feelings because I didn’t want to be a bitch.
My very young life was awesome. Until I was maybe 7 or 8 we always had tons of family and friends around, including when we lived in rural villages. We were poor but so was everybody else. But we had to keep moving to chase work, and I always lost those relationships. And then as I described above we moved out to the absolute woods and my brain started to rot. I really have no idea what “hope” could even have looked like.
There were good times too. My siblings and I would explore the forest. We followed a river up a mountain until there was no river anymore (its weird to see it getting smaller and smaller until there’s nothing). We built sledding tracks. We found an abandoned cemetery from the 1700s just in the middle of the forest.
Mostly I just read books. And that’s still what I do.
Thank you for talking online. It might not appear to be much, but it is. You’re connecting and communicating your pain. Hopefully we merry chums can take on some of the burden you feel. Keep going; this is your one shot and it doesn’t have to be noteworthy to anyone but yourself.
The rich won’t be allowed to lose. The whole system is bullshit. You can do everything right, get sick cuz fuknature, have to sell everything off for medicine and still die, younger than you should, in debt and penniless. It’s not even necessary, the Cruelty is the point. That’s capitalism. It’s about control, and capitalists need to be looked at like they have a mental illness. Most our jobs are bullshit and don’t matter. The national debt doesn’t matter. Money isn’t real, it’s a vehicle for resource allocation, not a store of value, but try getting someone not ready to hear that to even think about our social systems as something mutable and not organic or ordained. Nope. Society was designed, by people, and it’s working exactly as it’s intended, which is, fucking great for them and fuck everyone else.
At the end of the day, your physical body has had just one goal. Survive. Everything I have to do to achieve that end is justified by existence itself. Building a system that puts itself in the way of people simply surviving is building a system to fail. When it comes to politics, and by that I mean, do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it-doesn’t-hurt-someone-else and then policies, and for policy I just ask “is this the best we can do?”
We have a living constitution, a living body of law. Current laws have been bought and paid for, just like judges, representatives, senators…
The deviation from where we started to where we are was a process of the living and still is for today’s legislators, or more accurately, today’s lobbyists who actually craft the laws and have them at the rest in case the Overton window moves to the point they’re feasible.
Millennials grew up in the 90s, possibly one of the “best” decades in modern history: good economy, closest we’ve gotten to “world peace,” comparative political stability and “quiet” (the biggest scandal in US politics was Monica Lewinsky), and problems existed but generally seemed to be getting better with time not worse. The 90s were an optimistic time, especially considering the snowballing disaster of a 21st century that followed.
Edit: also advancements in science and technology were bright and exciting, without the constant existential dread of “what calamity have we unleashed this time?” The biggest tech/science-advancement ethical debate I remember was about cloning people, which is a genuine sci-fi-esque moral quandary but ended up being generally moot in reality.
At least where I live as a millennial you could have had a really nice childhood - until you finished school. Most struggled to find a job. Businesses would hire you as unpaid intern at best, etc. All while your parents (the boomers) expected you to have house, car and family in your twenties.
Yeah, but us millennials were only teenagers at best, toddlers at the youngest. Not really enough time to do anything with it. So while we got to experience a cool time in our youths, we had it all ripped away as soon as the .com bubble burst, and then 9/11 hit, along with other mixed events, like the Unabomber, Columbine, etc. We were also the first in line to get sent to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile Gen X got to live their adult lives during the 90s and make a name for themselves.
Sure, some aspects of the 00s were shit, but that felt like a bump in the road: things were still on the up-and-up overall, and the general expectation was that we could change the future for the better, resolve the world’s issues, and live better lives than our parents. That all came crashing down sometime around 2010 with the Great Recession, failure of Occupy, and realization that Obama wasn’t the knight in shining armor we’d literally hoped for. So the difference is that Millennials remember a pre-9/11 world and the less-great-but-still-hopeful early 00s, whereas Gen Z doesn’t.
I’d say that we’re all fucked. There’s going to be at least one global population correction in the next century. Even if we are able to push it back through mitigation, new development, geoengineering, luck and pluck, the zoomers are going to see it by midlife and everyone’s life will be defined by it the way Dresden hit Kurt Vonnegut.
Someone recently asked why the devil admitted he’d lost the fiddling match with Johnny. They said “If he’s the devil why didn’t he just claim he’d won?”.
I’d never asked myself that before. It had never occurred to me that the devil might cheat in a contest.
It made me realize that the dominant view of how people operate has changed in our culture. We now tend to assume people are slimeballs. The shittiest, back-stabbiest, most underhanded dishonest stuff now seems like normal behavior. Not even consciously necessarily. We just assume everyone is a barely-held-together antihero just looking for an excuse to take the gloves off and do nasty shit, and that we’re only good to our tight inner circle while it’s okay to treat the rest of the world like garbage.
It’s our zeitgeist. I’m finally starting to grok that word’s meaning, after having lived through four decades.
Satan doesn't punish. Satan's whole job is temptation. Anyone tempted would technically be punished by god.
I assume the mixup has to be resultant of the constant game of religious Telephone. Not really surprising. It's pretty awkward to frame your spotless savior who is the living embodiment of Love as also doing deliberate premeditated torture, even when it's written right there. And comparatively simple to expect it from someone who's supposed to embody unpleasantness.
What’s hell all about, then? I always understood from Christian theology that it was a place controlled by Satan where Bad People are tortured for an infinite amount of time after death.
Our biggest environmental worry was landfills growing to cover the entire planet. We were all convinced this was our fate and that we had to recycle everything mainly to protect ourselves from having to live on ever-expanding waste dumps.
This is generally what I came to say, except to add that Gen Z is giving me (old millennial) some hope. We were frogs in the pot, but it's a rolling boil and zoomers like Greta, David Hogg, and the 12 year old who interrupted COP28 seem alright.
Ultimately, I'm determined to break the cycle of previous Gen calls current Gen lazy. These kids are alright and I wish we had left them better.
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