I prefer to watch movies and TV shows in their original language. I feel it loses some of its cultural identity when it’s dubbed in another language. I especially hate when companies change the context of the show to make it relevant to the foreign audience. (e.g. changing rice balls to “jelly donuts” in the English dubbed Pokémon series.)

So when it comes to anime, I’m a huge advocate for watching subbed. I lived in Japan for 3 years and anime just sounds weird to me in English. It’s unnatural. And there are so many interesting cultural quirks with their language that get lost when it’s translated into English. It’s boring when the show is really identifiable as my own culture. I wanna enjoy a different culture’s perspective!

Broaden your horizons and learn more about foreign cultures. Watch your anime subbed! It’ll also improve your reading speed and comprehension skills. I don’t even notice that I’m reading subtitles anymore.

Plus, you’ll be able to easily identify Japanese in the wild after a while. I also lived in South Korea for a couple years and I’m very good at picking out Japanese, South Korean, Chinese, and Tagalog (Philippines) languages, just by sound. Not to mention a handful of European and Scandinavian languages from a few years living in the EU.

I never realized how ignorant and closed-minded I was, living in the US. Traveling abroad made me realize there’s a whole world out there that is extremely different from what I’m used to back home, and it’s given me a new perspective of the world.

I didn’t realize how much of an echo chamber America is. We’re isolated on the other side of the planet from most everyone else and are exposed solely to our own media propaganda, which promotes the idea that we’re the best country in the world and looked up to by everyone else. (We barely make the top 20 lists when compared to other nations, and are generally seen like a cringey edgelord by other countries).

Plus, we only have 2 foreign neighbors, but America is so huge, a majority of Americans don’t live anywhere near the borders and will never bump into Canadians or Mexicans. So most of us live our whole lives without foreign cultural experience, and it’s easy to fear-monger about “invading foreigners.” Watching subbed movies and shows, of any language, is the easiest first step toward stepping outside your comfort zone and exploring other cultures.

I measured like this when my first girlfriend asked what my size was. I told her it was 10". Suffice to say, she was definitely not impressed when the pants came off for the first time. 😅

They cropped off the fourth kid on the bottom, who is afraid of Conor.

Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!

And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.

If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.

I LOVE Saints Row IV! It’s my favorite of the entire franchise. Yes, it’s extra campy and over-the-top, but that just makes it more enjoyable.

Probably my favorite mission of Saints Row III was where you took an experimental drug and it gave you super-speed for a little while, so you could sprint across the city faster than if you were driving a car.

Saints Row IV just gives that to you as a permanent upgrade at some point. You don’t need cars later in the game, you can just run ridiculously fast and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.

I can’t remember if you can fly too, but I wanna say you can. It’s been quite a long time since I played that game.

I had so much fun in Saints Row IV, most of my playtime is just running all over the map and dicking around with NPCs once I was too OP for them to do anything to me. It’s hard for me to go back to the other games after that.

Same here. I had been playing World of Warcraft for over a year and still hadn’t reached max level with my main character, so I spent a whole day grinding to finish off the last few levels. Then I walked down the street to my local Walmart and went to hang out in the electronics section until midnight.

This was back when Walmart was open 24/7. I asked an employee where they would be releasing the Burning Crusade Collectors Edition and they said they’d bring them to the electronics register exactly at midnight. So I started a queue next to their sole register. By the time midnight struck, there were about a dozen people behind me in the line.

It was the first and last time I showed up for a midnight release of anything. I personally thought it was worth it, but I never did it again. The next WoW expansion released while I was stationed overseas with the US military, so I had to order it online.

Taco Bell

Pizza Hut if you saw the international version of the film. Taco Bell wasn’t well known outside the US at the time, so they changed the restaurant to something more familiar for international audiences.

I would love to see ReBoot (1994) with modern CG. And also a modernized plot, considering we know so much more about computers and the Internet now.

1994 was when the Internet started to spread publicly around the world and became a thing you could access from your very own home. It was this cool new technology that connected humanity across the globe, but most people didn’t really understand it yet.

So shows like ReBoot captured our fascination with the “Information Superhighway” and built a fantasy/sci-fi story around it. Even if it was horribly inaccurate to how computers and the Internet actually worked.

The Lion King (1994) is Hamlet.

“O” (2001) is Othello.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) is based on two minor characters of Hamlet.

She’s the Man (2006) is Twelfth Night.

Romeo + Juliet (1996) is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is Homer’s Odyssey. Not Shakespeare, but a brilliant modern retelling of one of humanity’s oldest surviving stories. In the same vein as the above mentioned films.

These are all I can think of off the top of my head. Not to mention dozens of modern Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth retellings over the years. Those three alone are the more popular Shakespeare stories for reinvention on the big screen.

The 2011 The Thing wasn’t so much a remake as it was a prequel to the remake, telling the story from the Norwegian scientists’ camp.

The 1982 John Carpenter remake opened with the last two remaining Norwegian scientists chasing “The Thing” until it reaches the Americans’ camp. But they’re misunderstood by the Americans. When trying to shoot at The Thing, which has taken the shape of a sled dog, the Americans instead return fire and kill them. Then the Americans explore the Norwegian camp and try to figure out what horrors killed everyone there, while slowly discovering why they were shooting at a dog in the first place.

The 2011 film shows what happened to the Norwegians before the 1982 remake. You’re correct, it wasn’t as great of a film (hard to compete with John Carpenter), but it wasn’t exactly a remake.

Maybe that’s it. I only watched it on DVD back in the day. It was grainy and everyone’s faces looked plastic and uncanny. You couldn’t see facial textures or wrinkles.

EDIT: Nah, the hair in the meme is feathered. Everyone’s hair in the film was solid and plastic-looking. You can see in your example images that Skull’s hair is one solid piece. I still think someone at least touched up the meme a bit.

Where did this HD version of this meme come from? I’ve seen Monster House, and CG wasn’t that good in 2006. I’m pretty sure someone’s enhanced this image with AI.

My childhood home (where I currently live) is 50 years old. Not only is there a phone jack in the kitchen wall, but the master bedroom has a 4-ft phone line coming out of the wall. Like, a literal permanent line. There’s a plastic box on the wood trim next to the floor and the line is spliced and wired into that box. If the line breaks, we need to pull off the box and splice a new cable to the connectors inside.

That line used to be connected to a small rotary dial phone, but the phone was removed years ago.

Also, the kitchen originally had a large rotary dial phone hanging on the wall when I was a kid. I’m a millennial (in my early 40s), but my parents had kids late in their life, so they’re really old (my dad isn’t a boomer; he’s actually from the silent generation!). So they grew up with rotary phones, and thus I grew up with one too.

Also, eventually people got those cordless phones to get around the cord length/tangling problem.

My parents solved this problem by buying a 15-ft phone cord for the kitchen phone. You could wander anywhere in the kitchen, dining room, and a few steps into the living room from the kitchen phone.

I have OCD and was obsessed with untangling the curly phone lines, so my family never had to worry about that.

Fellow millennial here. I’m in the same boat. Zero subscriptions except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix for educational documentaries, and it’s dirt cheap.

I bought the lifetime subscription to Nebula. It’s been worth it; I have a few channels I follow and I appreciate the extra content and freedom of video producers to say/do whatever they want without platform censorship. YouTube has so many restrictions, no one can post content without bowing to Google censorship.

Parody laws should allow people to actually review or poke fun at other media, but Google will demonetize or block any content that they arbitrarily decide is copyright infringement. Most film review channels I follow have to be extremely creative in how they show clips of movies. Most of them mute music scenes, and some will insert their own public domain (or homemade) music over scenes to avoid a ban. It’s ridiculous how far the MPAA and RIAA have gone in locking down media from public consumption.

Under a fascist regime, yes.

If/when I shower at night, I just need to soak my hair in the shower, scruff it a bit, then towel dry. Then I can comb it out and style it as if I just took a fresh shower.

I’m a guy though, with relatively short hair. If I had long hair like this photo, it’d probably be a rat’s nest in the morning and need a full shower to fix.

The military is definitely all about following regulations and protocol, even if they don’t make sense.

[…] the military often does stuff in a dumbass way

I was in the Air Force when I served, but I deployed with some Marines once. Their motto, which they repeated all the time, was, “If it’s stupid, but works… it wasn’t stupid.”

They used this as an excuse to try very dumb ways to problem solve everything. And it led to very creative ways to do things; some of which actually worked.

But myself and a couple other Air Force folks got a kick out of watching the Marines figuratively smash rocks together, hoping to ignite a fire.

My favorite quote from that deployment came from one of the young Corporals in my office. He had just returned from a week-long forward mission and got stuck in an airport for 24 hours before his connecting flight.

He said, “I was so bored, I actually read a book from cover to cover! I don’t think I’ve ever read an entire book in my life!”

I expected that to be a joke, but instead of laughing, the rest of the Marines just solemnly nodded along. Wow.

Yup.

EDIT: I see someone else commented that they’re not the same. The truth is… it depends.

When I was serving in the military, we used the two terms interchangeably. They were basically the same thing to us. Although “military grade” is a more common term in the civilian sector, we would still use it when working with contractors on custom military equipment.

So if you want to be pendantic, mil-spec may be the more official term in the military. But in practice, we don’t really differentiate between the two terms.

Former military member here. There are a couple things at play here.

1.) The military will outline a specific requirement for specific equipment that contractors need to meet. Requirements depend on the mission, usage, tools required, etc. so “military grade” just means “we needed a specific product to perform a specific way.” This does not mean it’s good for any use. Just that it’s what we needed in the moment for a specific job.

2.) We are required to buy from the lowest bidder. We ask contractors to build products for us that meet the specific requirements we outlined, then compare/contrast prices. Every contractor that built our product are in the running to become our supplier for that product… if they can beat every other contractor in price.

So how does a contractor win a government contract while still making money on the product they’re selling? By cutting corners, using cheaper materials, and ensuring the product will last just long enough to meet our requirements before breaking. The cheaper they can build it, the more money they make while also selling cheaper than all their competitors.

So “military grade” just means it’s a cheap piece of crap that met some arbitrary request the military made for a specific tool at one time. If you want quality products, avoid military grade.