Traditional news ironically. It seems to be the "adult" thing to watch the news but it's just gloomy and controlling. Just wanna claw my eyes out every time I hear them exclaim "X is outrageous!" "The West has fallen." "We live in a third world country!" "Migrants are destroying America!". Pisses me off so much. It's entirely irrelevant whether or not I agree, but it's how they try to force you to think or feel a certain way, treating us like children. Just tell me the facts like an adult so I can decide for myself.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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"News as entertainment" I believe they call it. Total trash IMO.
This one hits home, but because it feels like I've lost my parent to the 24 hour news cycle. They also had motorcycle accident around a decade ago that might have caused some brain damage. If there was damage, it was never formally identified by a medical professional.
I've watched them become more angry at and scared of the world as they grow older. I don't fully agree with their beliefs on various topics, but always try to listen and understand why they feel the way they do.
It's so frustrating to watch someone you care about ruin themselves trying to stay "informed" while surrounding themselves with others that contribute to confirmation bias.
If you're looking for a good show, Sorkin made "The Newsroom" on HBO a few years back. Very good take on what happened with the news and flips it around.
But I'll warn you that you'll get angry, because what they accomplish there will not happen in our timeline.
Traditional news ironically.
Rolf Dobelli wrote a good essay about that some years ago:
Cable TV for over 10 yrs now. I‘m not blasting my brain with ads and doom news.
Game consoles since after ps3, I was thinking about ps5 in 2020 but I didnt want to buy a small car so now I‘m not interested anymore.
I have t had commercial TV since 2005. It's media with ads, isn't on-demand, and doesn't have the stuff I want—even dumber if a paid service. That stopped being an option a generation ago.
The only time I turn the tv on is when my niece is around and wants to see bluey. For streaming I'll use my computer or phone because I like to wach with headphones
Online Multiplayer. I used to love to connect with people, friends and strangers and play games. Now I just want to play alone on my terms and find it super annoying when games introduce online stuff into the single player mode, like raids.
I still enjoy the occasional couch co-op though.
Television in general. Video in general. A movie is nice now and then, but I almost never seek it out.
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Comedy news shows. They can be funny, but the more I learn about topics in depth the more I realize how much biased the shows are. A segment that might have previously left me feeling better informed might instead make me feel like someone is trying to fool me or tell a one sided story.
In one episode of last week tonight, John Oliver was roasting Boris Johnson for mumbling the poem 'Road to Mandalay' while visiting Myanmar. Calling the act, absolutely offensive or something. Now, not a whole lot of Myanmar people here don't know the poem. And among those who know, the poem is either fairly well regarded or they hold no such feelings like taking offense. Atleast among the people I know. Boris Johnson's an absolute clown, but you can definitely sense the bias there.
Bingo. John Oliver is one of the worst offenders here, I think. He has a slick, humorous presentation style and a lot of his material is genuinely informative. At the same time, as you note he'll throw in something that is either horribly cherry picked or has a bad misinterpretation.
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I literally stopped watching movies, especially Bollywood and Hollywood movies. Somewhere along the line, I just decided to consume almost exclusively Japanese media, particularly anime. The simple reason is that anime tells some really amazing stories that most Hollywood movies don’t hold a candle against. Think Attack on Titan or FMA. I am not saying that all Japanese media is great, no it’s not. But, the variety there is pretty amazing.
I kinda went the other direction where I had to cut out all anime. Too many fascist undertones and sexualizing children for it to be comfortable to watch for me.
Obviously not all shows/movies from anime do those but it's difficult to really know until you've already started watching and so it's safer to just cut it out.
I do like some of it, but far too often the story is going along fine and then it's like SURPRISE HAREM! SURPRISE SLAVERY (and the main character is fine with that). Too bad Crunchyroll doesn't have a tag for "not creepy".
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Hollywood is too formulaic, at least when you shake it up with foreign media you dont really know where its going to go.
I enjoyed Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon quite a bit. It's not exceptional or great, but good. It certainly tells a unique story.
Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn't even using my PS4 much. I don't know if I'd call it outgrowing it exactly though... this one is borderline to me.
What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn't and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.
Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it's completely off the rails.
Certain "nonfiction" authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the "evidence" I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you're like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.
Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn't really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it's a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn't matter if the computer doesn't do the computation you need.
In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there's so many choices, I don't have to take "mildly entertaining" as my bar for watching a show, it's way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it's harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it's ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn't know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the "this was done better before". Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.
Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.
Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I've really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you're not burning data like with streaming... Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.
I don't watch television, streaming shows, or movies for the most part for years now.
I've got podcasts, music, video games, and books left.
May I ask why? Just curious.
Watching something doesn't really feel engaging anymore. With audio mediums I'm usually doing something else like walking or working.
Do you have any examples of shows or movies that you did find engaging before you stopped?
Bare with me I'm going on a timeline here of about 7 years.
I was into Game of Thrones before the seasons where they ran out of source material. I liked Owl House then Disney cratered it via scheduling. I was watching the Mandalorian, but after watching Book of Fett I realized Star Wars was never going to be coherent. I enjoyed watching Marvel movies until Dr. Strange showed previews then they died for me. Inside Job was ok on Netflix, but I never watched the second season (that was a thing right?). I used to watch some classic BBC shows like Cadfael and I,Claudius.
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Well, if "media" is in general, I'd have to say television. I'll watch some things once in a while, but for the most part, I have way too much anxiety from a bad marriage. Audio books, and certain Youtube channels can trigger it, too.
Bruh, this doesn’t sound healthy at all.
We're all broken somehow
Television. Can't remember the last time I turned my TV on to actually watch TV. It's mostly for streaming, but even that's getting harder to keep up with. It just feels like there are too many services and shows to keep track of. If I sit down and watch a show then I really need to want to watch it. More and more I've been listening to podcasts or treating Youtube videos like podcasts. It lets me multitask in a way that sitting down and trying to watch something just doesn't.
More and more I’ve been listening to podcasts or treating Youtube videos like podcasts. It lets me multitask in a way that sitting down and trying to watch something just doesn’t.
How much of them do you catch as you're multitasking? Any time I try this I'm astounded at my unwitting ability to almost entirely tune out whatever they're talking about, defeating any point to playing the podcast outside of giving myself some background noise.
It miiiiight be an ADHD thing as the only people I've been known to actually retain info while doing this are all diagnosed, including me
Or at least more commonly possible in ND brains like that
I personally only find myself rewinding my audiobooks when either:
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Something weirdly worded or confusing happens. Going through discworld right now and I had to repeat a lot of Pratchetts descriptions of people, for example
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I need to read something in the language the book is in. IE, english Text that's actual words that have meaning, but not numbers or acronyms or other non-sentence English, if that makes sense
Its a trainable skill. Ive got it to the point where my boss doesnt give me shit about listening to audiobooks while I work because I'm faster when I do.
Gaming consoles for me.
When the PS4 came out, I couldn't justify spending that much for a device that doesn't have the amount of utility as a PC, nor are the games retro compatible. I'm a PC gaming convert.
Inb4 anyone says Reddit.
I mean, I didn't outgrow reddit, I like the reddit platform, just not the guy running it
YouTube. From around 2008 - 2016, it was pretty much my only source of media and entertainment. I was subscribed to so many different channels and never missed an upload. I could spend hours just binge watching all types of content. These days, I only watch / follow a handful of creators. Really only visit the site when I have nothing better to do.
I'm the same way. And Google's algorithmic bullshit they pull makes it really hard to find quality content that actually keeps me interested. They killed the "magic" of finding a new favorite creator.
Same. I can't tell if the content has declined or I've just outgrown it, but it went from my go-to my, "eh, if I've got time."
Eli the Computer Guy and Philip DeFranco. For much the same reason. They told me to leave, and I did.
DeFranco was truly biased but balanced news. And then came the US election before last and balance lost out. Trump won and DeFranco decided political influence was more important than unbiased reporting. Shortly after Biden won the last election, he streamed a response to criticisms of bias, and he flat out said "if you disagree with my politics, leave. I don't need viewers like you." Favoring neither is disagreement too. It was that easy. Last I checked his subscriber count was cut roughly in half.
Eli said "If you don't want to see me study 'What is a duck?' Leave. No really, leave. Leave." His subscribers vanished and he blamed the algorithm, or so I heard.
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3-2-1 Contact
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point I stopped receiving that magazine.
There was always a section called “BASIC Training” that had a bunch of source code in BASIC. They wouldn’t tell you what it did. You had to try and guess what it did, then type it into your computer to find out whether you were right. But I didn’t have a computer.
In 1994 I finally got a computer, and immediately opened up the QBASIC interpreter and started typing it all in, to see what it did.
Holy shit I just realized that’s 30 years ago this year.
I don't watch movies that much anymore. They just don't seem that interesting nowadays, and I can't bring myself put that time sink in of just sitting. TV shows are kind of the same way. I don't really just sit and watch them unless I'm eating or with my friends. Books have also gotten away from me, but I'm trying to get back into reading. It's just a little overwhelming when I look at my unread pile lol.
If ever, don't overestimate what you "have" to read. As a real bookworm I stopped reading for various reasons, got back into it many years later by reading simple manga and so forth.
Funny enough, that's actually how I'm working on getting back into reading too. I really liked Trigun and Trigun Stampede, so right now I'm slowly working my way through the manga. And then after that I have a couple other manga series that I want to check out.
Streaming.
It's the new cable, in that it sells to customers based on intentional market fragmentation. It's actually a worse, because anything you "buy" on a streaming platform is actually just leased.
Everything that is ad-supported.
Media funded by ads has a different objective than other media. I simply reject advertising in total.
I like that simple take. It is very succinct. It pairs well with: money spent on advertising, reflects a poor quality product.
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American TV and movies after the '00s. Not representative enough of normal American life to be relatable (which is why I like '90s and '00s American TV so much) and not original enough to be interesting (which is why I'm into anime.)
Only watch sports (footy/cricket/tennis) on TV and nothing else.
TV in general, I can't remember the last time I've sat down to watch anything airing that wasn't, say, footage of the new year's eve fireworks show or something.
I don't really care much for recent movies as well, most of what I watch is stuff from before 2000 and if I ever go to the theater I go with friends just as an excuse to hang out.
And I think I'm currently in the process of outgrowing gaming in general, I still play games but I've been gaming less and less nowadays, most of what I play are old games from my teenage years and childhood, and I don't really keep up much with newer releases... In truth I'm sort of disgusted by the industry in general nowadays, so that might have some influence as well.
All of them, unfortunately
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