Breyer’s Ice Cream – I’ve complained about this on the Board before. Their ice cream used to be the essence of simplicity – their vanilla ice cream had only cream, vanilla, and sugar in it. It was wonderful.
But now they’ve added various gums to all their ice creams, and it ruins the texture and, IMHO, the taste. As others have argued, it makes it less sensitive to mistreatment between the factory and your mouth, but they used to cope with this just fine before the change.
I argued about this with a home ice-cream-maker. His position was that, well, perhaps it could be shipped without mishap to the store, but that it was at home that it was likely to sit out too long, or be otherwise mistreated. My opinion is that I don;'t need the company protecting me from myself that way – nobody puts preservatives in the raw chicken I buy so that I don’t get sick from bacterial growth if I leave it out on a counter.
Absolutely right. Breyer’s is not a quality brand for me, anymore. I prefer Meijer’s store brand, honestly.
I do, however, still like Hershey’s milk chocolate bar. And I like the taste of Cadbury’s as well.
No. you’re wrong.
Comics aren’t just drawing figures or images so they look 3-D (and if you mean perspective, artists have been drawing images in perspective for years without the aid of computers)
It’s storytelling! To be a professional comic artist you need the ability to tell the story visually. You’re the director. You choose the proper moment for close-ups, for wide angle, etc… The masters of the 60’s, 70’s 80’s, they knew how to do that. They could tell a concise story in 22 pages and you felt as if you not only got your money’s worth but that you read a damn good story.
Today, they concentrate on pin-up pages, over rendered drawings (so they can resell the art at conventions). They can’t visually tell a story if their life depended on it.
Comics aren’t just drawing pretty pictures, it’s like watching a movie only on the printed page.
Back in my day any respectable cat or dog kept the kitchen floor cleaner than Jesus’s surgery ward.
These days, something get’s dropped on the floor and the damn dog can’t even find it. And if he does, he looks up at me like “what, you expect me THAT?”.
OK there’s some stuff there, for the posters. But they all mostly look like the same artist, drawing in an anime style. Every one of them worships Jack Kirby and is riffing on his advances. They would not describe themselves as blowing him out of the water. Barry Smith is a big influence on them too.
Hyper ornate? Looks like mastery to me. Kirby was the original master of filling space, but that’s exactly what these guys try to do too.
Kirby became stiffer and lost his currency after he had been in the business 35 years! Before that he was making the template for a whole industry.
That Wonder Woman is from the 40s BTW. I’d much rather read that.
Twining’s Earl Grey tea. Twining changed the formulation seven or eight years ago and now, instead of being the most delicious brew in the world, it tastes like soap. I’ve hoarded one box of pre-change Earl Grey that I bought at the Twining’s shop on the Strand, and I’m keeping it until a very special occasion occurs.
They do that to make work for gas station attendants. The rest of the world figured out a long time ago that normal people can & will pump their own gas.
It’s not your imagination. I read an article recently (perhaps on Cracked.com), and cell phones really do have much worse audio quality than landline phones. iPhones are among the worst. In their never-ending quest to create thinner & thinner phones, Apple uses the tiniest speakers & microphones they can find. With the result that it sounds like you’re having a conversation over the supermarket intercom system.
I’m going to don my Cranky Old Man hat and say music. Pop music these days is awful. You know it’s bad when the music industry pimps keep trying to convince us that Adelle’s “Hello” is a hit. (Sorry, Adelle. You’re a good singer, but that song is unmitigated crap. Slow, boring, maybe OK to play over the end credits of a movie, if the movie had a downbeat ending.) I think the major problem is there’s no guiding force behind modern pop music. When I was young, rock was the major scene. More recently, rock has faded and hip-hop became the big scene. But now hip-hop has faded, and so far at least there’s nothing to replace it.
The Hard Rock Cafe. Specifically their nachos and veggie burgers. My husband and I literally plan vacations around Hard Rock Cafes and I’ve been to 34 different ones. Then they changed their nachos from “absolutely freakin delicious” to “unedible crap” by putting some kind of nasty queso cheese on them. Then they changed them back to shredded cheese, but they’re awful now. Plus the veggie burgers used to be the best we’ve ever had - until this past January when we went to the Hard Rock in Orlando and neither of us could finish our dinner it was so gross. Soggy, messy veggie burger and craptacular nachos. We were actually quite sad at the decline of their food quality.
Vachon treats. Canadians might only know what I’m referring to, I don’t think they’re in the US. Jos Louis, Half-Moons, Flakie, Au Caramel - used to be chocolate and cake goodness - now they taste literally like nothing. Like you know you’re eating it because it’s in your mouth but you can’t taste anything.
Actually, according to the laws on the books in New Jersey, here’s their reasoning. At least their reasoning in 1949:
The Garden State self-service gas station ban dates back to 1949, when the New Jersey Legislature passed the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act, primarily over concerns about the safety of consumers pumping petroleum themselves. Many other states will follow suit, but eventually overturn their self-serve bans. New Jersey’s law, meanwhile, lives on as an iconic peculiarity of life in the Garden State — almost a badge of honor for New Jerseyans who haven’t a clue how to work a pump.
The more “realistic” one looks as though it’d make a better poster or other one-off. For reading 30 pages, I can see the benefits of the simple clean lines versus the over-rendered figure with weird shadows calling out “Look at my volume of form!” and light reflections everywhere.
I’m all for spectacle escapism to numb your nihilistic existence, but realistically speaking mainstream Hollywood movies are more childish and degenerate than ever. Awesome in a fratboy meathehad sense maybe, but good? Wall to wall super hero movies is what the people crave. Adults in tights running around and punching bad guys in the face. This is our culture, people. Everyone praised Mad Max for practical effects, but it’s still nothing but a two hour car chase, explosions, and T&A. It’s like a parody of an action movie that went over the line twice.
Video game wise, the FPS genre has been a dumpster fire for years. A lot of the classic video game series have seen huge quality drop offs. StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, all the Counter-Strike remakes, whatever the hell Nintendo is doing to Metroid. Hard to be optimistic for Doom 4. Thank god for indies that pander to nostalgic sensibilities.
Online comment sections for many sites are atrocious. Click here to expand! It’s like they don’t want you to use it. Come on, I need my daily fix of racism and conspiracy theories.
I find it hilarious that people are arguing about art…ART!
…I tell my artist when I want a close up or what I think the angle should be or what I think should happen on the page turn. It’s collaborative.
Comic book pacing has changed. They are paced like movies now-6 issue stories for the most part that are allowed to roll out slowly (I find this leads to more padding than anything- 4 issues seems more natural). During the time you love they were paced like 22 minute cartoons.
That’s all well and good if you’re talking about a graphic novel. A 100+ page graphic novel should have movie like pacing, should have “padding” (for want of a better word) but NOT 22 page $4.99 comic books. Really, how stupid do you have to be to pay around $5 for a flimsy, padded, pin-up page comic that doesn’t tell a story, but only a part of a story? Really, have people really gotten more and more stupid over the years?
You want to tell a story that takes time to unfold and feel as if you just watched a movie, fine. Then make a complete graphic novel. Just don’t expect me to be dumb enough to shell out money for chapters each month.
Most everything that has been outsourced to China. There are some exceptions.
Computer printers. My last one lasted a whole two years. I went to a friend’s house to install my old computer to replace her ancient one; she has an old HP printer that’s built like a tank and is still working perfectly. Many of the new ones get poor reviews.
That’s exactly why I couldn’t read a modern comic if I wanted to. The higher quality paper and ink doesn’t improve a “comic book” to me. It just looks like they lost the thread.
But I’m older now.
There used to be a thing called “camp” where older images had an appeal. Liking comics, I couldn’t see these images as “outdated.” That’s actually the only appeal comics have for me now. So you can take my arguments with a grain if you want.
That was different – for that you needed an electronics kit.
And THOSE were better, too, in the Old Days. I had several hand-me-down sets from my cousins, but my favorite was one I talked an electronics store into selling me cheaper because it was missing parts. The kit had a relay that you could use to turn on and off plug-in devices, like TV sets. It had an internal relay, too, that you had to build. It had a couple of different photocells and a moisture-sensing cell, and lots of components with an easy-to-connect layout.
When I looked for an electronics set for MilliCal the best Could find was ca magnetic snap-together set that did simple circuits, like lighting LEDs and powering motors. Still, she used to to make a propellor launcher that amused the cats.
Nobody makes Interociter Kits anymore. And if they did, they’d probably include the schematics. In my day, you had to figure out how to put them together.
– from the dust jacket to This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones
