Star Wars - check. Saw the original one when it was rereleased in the cinema a few years back. Utterly banal. I know people that claim to have seen these films literally hundreds of times. There’s some hours you ain’t getting back.
MySpace. Why? It appears to be a tool for making the world’s ugliest web pages. If you want a website, build one that doesn’t randomly pile pictures, text, videos etc in whatever order you happen to think of them. It makes my eyes bleed.
24/Lost/any of those other must-see series. I work late on weeknights, so I have never seen any of them. I am partially intrigued by their popularity, though, so one day I will probably plough through the DVDs.
Ridiculous cellphone ringtones.
Cellphone wallpaper. Do people seriously spend three quid on a 200-odd-pixel JPG to adorn the screen of their phone?
Podcasts. Just the name is enough to send me to sleep.
Digg/Del.icio.us/similar sites. What the hell?
Facebook. Ditto.
I turned 30 last week, and boy does it feel like it.
I’m not really sure what the Yahoo thing is called. I just have it listed as a “Favorite” that I visit. I can check my Email thru Outlook, but if I go to the Yahoo page and click “mail” there, I can see if any spam has sneaked past the filters before I launch Outlook.
When I launch my browser, Google is what comes up.
And cell phones. I’ve never had a cell phone. I’ve used one a couple of times.
Yeah the whole cell phone being a part of your personality thing has always been way beyond me. I love having a cell phone and I totally understand their importance in people’s lives…but the ring tones, ringback tones, changing your phone every other month to get what’s cool…totally confounds me.
Some that others have mentioned I also have been whooshed by:
Harry Potter - my eyes glaze over when people discuss it
American Idol hysteria
Similarly, the Survivor show hysteria from a few years ago
I am also a bit puzzled by the Daily Show…I find it merely amusing, not the end all be all of comedy–I actually preferred it when Craig Kilborn was hosting.
The Ana Nicole thing also has me a bit stymied, I just don’t get the hoopla…Pop Culture at its worst.
Downloading music – this whole thing simply passed me by. Because I pride myself on being a rule-following sheep, the idea of illegally downloading songs via Napster (when it was the big thing) was just too much. And then, when legally downloading purchased music became the big thing, I figured that since I hadn’t needed any before, I probably didn’t need any now.
As a result, I’ve also missed out on ipod. I don’t think I need one. Plus, I’m confused when people comment that they can keep thousands of songs on their ipods – I can’t think of any scenario when I would want thousands of songs at the same time.
This is really underscored by the fact that I don’t listen to much music in the first place, so “thousands of songs” for me is like bicycles and fish. I get that people who like listening to music probably like thousands of songs.
I am with you on that. I have been collecting every song that I would like to listen to repeatedly in MP3 format for about 8 years. The total number is about 650 right now. Even a very old IPod can hold ten times that and the new ones much, much more. I have no idea how someone even finds 20 GB worth of stuff they would want to listen to more than once.
I think the current model of storing content locally is very inefficient. I propose we set up “IBroadcasters” which are “stations” that send out content semi-randomly to thousands of IPod listeners at the sam3e time. The “stations” will be based around a rough theme and be available all the time. Getting new content in real-time just means switching to a new IBroadcaster. It would be expensive to blanket the whole country with these but the efficiency gains would be great and some of the costs could be offset by advertisers.
First off, I never realized you were female. I assumed you were a male and a fan of Samwise. I still assume the second part to be true.
Star Wars was not something I ever got into. I was the ideal age for it, but it did not work for me. I actually disliked the first film. I cannot stand the last 3 at all.
Empire was a pretty good adventure movie.
American Idol and the entire reality show craze is one, I cannot quite grasp. My Reality TV is Sports, especially Baseball. Compelling and has been running for 130 years now.
If I were a sadist, I would provide a link to the video for “My Humps” at YouTube and try to trick you into clicking it. However, I’m not so I’ll just tell you you’re lucky to have somehow avoided hearing the song.
As for missed Pop Culture, I have never had any interest whatsoever in any reality show of any kind. I keep thinking that people will eventually tire of the genre and it will fade away. However, it’s been nearly 10 years and no end is in sight.
I’ve never seen a single episode of Survivor, Big Brother, American Idol, or any other reality show.
I never watched the Simpsons as a kid - only Nickelodeon. I’ve seen maybe three Simpsons episodes in my whole life, and all the references people make are lost on me.
That’s the beauty of it. “It isn’t anything”. A web “portal” is a “web page” that links to lots of other “web pages” in a simplistic layout that is decided by the portal staff. Yahoo is the major one left standing although this idea was hot shit back in 1998 or so. You can go to the Yahoo web site and you can access things like the weather, news, and other information rather quickly. The portal is designed so that all kinds of information consisting of other web pages is just a few clicks away.
Most people can’t be bothered to navigate most of the information that is out there so the portal staff hand selects things that people need to see and then they just click and learn. This revolutionary idea of having web pages that link to other helpful web pages meant that Yahoo was an increible high flyer during the Web stock boom. No one had any idea that information could be organized by young college graduates in a way that would people find things like “sports scores” and “car dealerships”. It was both a revelation and a collective orgasm.
I never watch the Superbowl or World series. Never cared about OJ, except when his little car chase preempted something I was watching.
Never read Harry Potter or watched the movies. I completely avoided Seinfield, Lost, Survivor, “reality TV” in toto, American Idol, Everybody Loves Raymond, Sex in the City, OZ, The Sopranos, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica 2, Everquest.
And Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch dolls, Ipods, palm pilots, Roseanne, Titanic, Gone Wtih the Wind, The Color Purple, web portals, Aladdin, My Space, cell phones, Friends, Trivial Pursuit, 24.
Network TV of the last 20 years, and pretty much anything Movie or “Hollywood” related since the early 80’s. Except an Indiana Jones Pinball game. But I don’t count that.
Actually, I’m so “out of it” that I really don’t know what the hell I’m not catching. I have no idea! The last big trend I even remember hearing was the “it” thing was the little virtual pet things everyone had and had to pretend to feed and interact with to keep alive.
I drink beer, play darts, drive fast on and off road, ski and brew beer. And watch pretty much only PBS. And live in BFE.
Yeah I’ll never understand that. I launch my browser so often that it would drive me batty if it started loading some page every single time. I launch my browser to go to X page, not Y page that is automatically loading, dammit!
I do have my son’s computer set to gmail as his homepage, though, because otherwise he forgets to check his mail.
Audiobooks. (Not to listen to more than once, but I had a membership at Audible.com for years and have probably 40 or so unabridged audiobooks, most of which I haven’t listened to yet. I could throw all of those on an mp3 player.
I lived in Berlin during the late 70’s and most of the 80’s - so I missed most of the American television shows during that time and heard only some of the music and, thankgod, missed things like polyester leisure suits.
So now, when someone says, “hey, remember ______ back in the early 80’s?” I usually shake my head and say, “nope.”
However, from what I have gathered, apparently I really didn’t miss all that much.
Ah, you are so lukey. I was forced to go the the Star War phenomenon. Had to go to the film as…it was unthinkable not to. Fine. But then we were expected to perform gymnasticts, offen with with poles and ribbons to the Star Wars theme song.
How that doesn’t violate the 8th amendment I just don’t know.
You should have gone back to Berlin in the mid-90s. They were just about catching up with the period you missed. (Polyester leisure suits and mullet haircuts can still occasionally be glimpsed in the wild.)
