Answer for question 4158.

[sabotabby]

[Error: unknown template qotd]Privacy and anonymity.

A stable job market.

Expanding social services.

Non-CGI special effects.

Comments

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

The illusion that the resources in the world will last for my lifetime.

[sabotabby]

See, I never had that. I was convinced the ozone layer would be gone and I'd die of skin cancer. Or I'd get nuked.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Oh good point but The Day After was on tv in, let's see, 1983, so I had ten good years. And honestly the nuclear We're All Gonna Die At Any Moment thing faded by college, and then I probably had another ten years in there before I seriously started to worry about everything all the time. An Inconvenient Truth was 2006 and I don't remember when Peak Bee got on my radar. But there have been periods of not feeling doomed.

[ironed_orchid]

<3 <3 <3

[sabotabby]

Back atcha.

[katebacross.livejournal.com]

Buying things that were built to last, as opposed to planned obsolescence.

[sabotabby]

Oooh, good one

I still have my iPod classic, going on ten years. It's still a far better product than anything Apple currently has on the market. I keep repairing it because I refuse to replace it with a lesser thing that won't last a year.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Planned obsolescence surprises me anew all the time. Well, I've got my goddamn wind-up victrola.

[katebacross.livejournal.com]

Have to admit I needed to Google Victrola, but then I am typing this on a desk given to my mother for her 21st birthday [the then age of majority in the UK]. She's now 82.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

The non-CGI wish is close to my heart. Last night, Ciro and I were comparing the newer Independence Day movie to the original Independence Day, and the newer one has a much larger budget but the older one felt bigger. Part of that's the writing, but I blame a lot of it on the CG. I couldn't tell you directly why that would be the case, but I look at older blockbusters compared to newer ones, and the old ones feel more confident. From Ben Hur through Titanic, I generally feel like I'm in the hands of a director who has mastery over what goes on screen, with a big budget that gave him more tools to work with. (It's always a him.) That doesn't mean blockbusters are my cup of tea, but at least I understand them as "here is some big spectacle! Enjoy!"

More recently, with the Marvel movies and the new Star Treks and the new Star Wars, everything feels frantic and panicky. It's not the fast cutting, because Moulin Rouge fast-cuts without feeling desperate and lost. I suspect it's that as movies have pushed more CG, more control has gone to the studio and away from the director. Also, it means a huge amount of what's in frame was added AFTER principal photography was wrapped, and when you're running into the end of your budget, so if something doesn't work there's not a "ok, we'll try it this way instead" where an actor adjusts their reaction or walks down a different hall because there wasn't production design budget to make the first one look good. You can't do noir stuff and underlight the parts that look bad, because you made your lighting decisions before you saw the thing. And then you can't fix the CG thing because there's no time or money left. Awful.

Don't get me wrong; I love digital editing tools. But over-reliance on CG has turned movies that should be popcorn fun into equal parts tedium and anxiety. It's like waves of stress coming off the screen.

[sabotabby]

Yes this! And it looks dated faster.

I noticed it especially with Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, which by all rights should have been a brilliant movie. Instead, the plot and acting was forgotten in favour of throwing in climactic CGI to make it "exciting," and the result was a hot mess that had none of the feel of the book.

The other big glaring one was the otherwise excellent The Magicians. It was clear they didn't have the budget to do what they wanted with the CGI, so they went out of their way to make it as cheap as possible. The thing is, with a story like that—which is playing less off Harry Potter than it is Narnia,—should have had practically no CGI effects, and instead gone for intentionally terrible practical effects. I'd have done the talking animals—and in particular, Reynard the Fox—in BBC-esque ratty costumes, and it would have been exponentially more disturbing.

CGI can be great, but too often it's a crutch and an excuse for not using one's imagination.

[rdi.livejournal.com]

This resonates with me in a musical sense…tools like Garageband and so one are fantastic, but sometimes I find I miss the simplicity (and limitations) of analogue recording tools.