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by PaulHoule 1530 days ago
I'd think that people have said this about the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, ...
1 comments

When my father use to say this I used to be like I will change with time and like the stuff that current generation likes.

I try. But it's becoming harder and harder. When someone asks me my favourite TV/movie show I end up telling them something that is decade old. Something from time when I was still in college.

I'm older than dirt.

Last week I watched 'Severance' on Apple TV. It was very good. Last night I watched the first episode of 'Tokyo Vice' on HBO Max and it was definitely good enough that I'll keep watching.

Sure, Billie Eilish sucks, but Wet Leg doesn't. (Apologies if you like Bilie Eilish, but art is subjective, not objective.) There's good stuff out there being made today, you just have to look for it.

I try to keep a wide net in terms of what I listen to and I have a spreadsheet of the music that makes it past a certain threshold. At one point I graphed it and was shocked that the decades came out in this order: 1970's->90's->60's->80's. There is some good new stuff out there but it seems less of it than earlier. For example, where are all the one-hit-wonders?

We had the same argument yesterday in the thread, "Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?" People responded the same, "It didn't, you're just old," and cited examples of cool technology. But in my opinion, the answer was the same: it's not that it stopped, but the volume has dropped. I think we could look at data of innovative startups and technologies and see the drop off -- not in terms of lack of existence but in terms of sheer volume of activity.

By the way, your examples are funny to me because, while I like both Wet Leg and Billie Eilish, to me the former is really fun but it's Billie who is doing something innovative, with a sort of ASMR vibe. Try "Everything I Wanted", "Billie Bossa Nova", "You Should See Me In a Crown" and "Ilomilo." Use high quality headphones or speakers at loud volume. There's something there.

Less Billie, and much more her brother, IMO, who I believe is the musician: she’s the face & lyricist. His music is definitely something new & of quality.
TV is dead. Young people aren't watching it. Big cinema is mostly dead. Streaming and social media has made mass culture a thing of the past. You're going to have to pick a bubble like everyone else.
For myself the amount of TV and movies I can watch is pretty limited compared to what I could obtain.

Lately I've been into the silents (Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino) but also Howard Hawkes movies not to mention things like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Jour_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Jackson_(1988_film)

feel free to laugh but my son got the family (including my wife who teaches people to ride horses) to watch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_...

... and then there are all the Gundam anime since Gundam 79, all the rest of Sliders, at least 200+ hours of video "in the queue".

I think how a few years back I would go see a movie like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_(film)

in the theater. I was talking to my son the other day how we lost interest in Marvel and Star Wars movies... We never had a moment when we said "Marvel Sucks", but they rarely make it into the queue to watch on video. And going to the theater post-COVID seems implausible to me because I don't want to deal with disgusting popcorn mess.

I'm sure there are good movies made today, even more sure there are good TV shows, but they have to fight for every minute of view time they get.