the future of cinema is community

I’m from Germany and I took a trip to Nuremberg this year. They have a very popular and massive cinema, because they understand the culture. You can find dancefloors in there, a big cafe area to hang out, an underground cinema where they carved the screen out of the wall (it’s like the batcave with a screen). They livestream soccer matches and you can even listen to audiodramas in a dark room or watch movies on the roof at night with drinks served.

It’s really amazing and I wish more cinemas would understand that surviving on endless Marvel movies will not work out for them in the future. Cinemas need to do more activities to draw people in.

The picture quality on that enormous screen was absolute shit.

At my local cinema, they have a system that opens a curtain automatically before the movie starts. Except it often doesn’t work right and only opens up halfway, so someone from the audience (usually me) has to get up and look for an employee to manually open it all the way. I missed quite a few movie intros because of that. 😑

When I watched Robot Dreams at another cinema, there was a small tear right in the middle of the screen. The state of cinema in this day and age is very sad.

It used to be a great picture

I have a 300$ projector at home and the image is better than at the local cinema. People don’t go to the cinemas anymore, so they don’t have money to keep up their technology and fall behind. It makes me sad, because my local cinema is from the 1950s and it could be an amazing place with a really unique architecture, but the technology to really enjoy the movies isn’t there.

Heck, they show 3D movies in half framerate, but you still have to pay the full additional charge. I can get better quality with 140$ VR glasses at home. :(

The attention span from social media like TikTok has ruined people, too. It’s annoying when a movie takes its time and people start getting their phones and smartwatches lit up to distract themselves.

In 2024, I’ve been at the cinema almost every week, but this year I just didn’t feel like it. I watched a few movies, for sure, but the excitement wasn’t there.

I don’t know if that’s just me, but I also think movies have gotten too long. I don’t want to sit at the cinema for 3.5 hours and watch a movie that doesn’t even have an ending (looking at you, Killers of the Flower Moon). I get my popcorn and my drink and after 2.5 hours I need to pee and having to get up is just annoying, having to endure my full bladder for another hour even more so.

It’s really weird why filmmakers have decided to make such long movies in this day and age. The Whale was under two hours and the room was flooded with tears afterwards, you don’t need to put a whole series worth of story into one single movie.

I am also tired of the endless remakes and re-remakes. Jurassic World Rebirth was terrible, just let it die already - and what the hell was that “I Know What You Did Last Summer” movie? The first one was bad already, it didn’t need a sequel.

Maybe 2026 will be better, but I don’t have a lot of hope.

At my local cinema they usually play around 5 to 10 minutes of ads before a movie. But I still remember one particular movie where it just didn’t stop and they blasted jewelry ads left and right for a whole 22 minutes. It was “Wish” from Disney.

That whole ordeal made the movie even worse. I do like seeing trailers, because I get excited for new movies, but fucking jewelry ads? Those are the lowest of the low. I’m sure they would’ve played gambling ads next, if that was allowed in Germany.

digikam, it’s a really great alternative to Adobe Lightroom.

I’m currently running Fedora Linux with Firefox and YouTube opened up. The whole system uses ~4GB of memory. That’s totally fine and I couldn’t care less about what Microsoft is doing with their OS.

With that said, I don’t think we’ll see a lot of optimizations in commercial software. Maybe a few here and there, but a lot of developers nowadays don’t even know how to optimize their code. Especially people working in web development or adjacent frameworks. Let’s just throw hundreds of npm packages into one project and bundle them up with webpack, here’s your 12MB JavaScript - take it or leave it. Projects like this aren’t the exception, they are the norm.

Even if the devices that can run that code without running out of memory get more expensive, companies will just pay for those and write them off on the taxes. And if not, more apps will just get pushed into the cloud.

I’m the IT admin, so I can run whatever I want. As long as the work gets done, I could even run TempleOS on my machine. 😀

I stay off the internet more and only try to read terrible news about the world once a week. There’s always a war somewhere on the world that I can’t do anything about, so I don’t have to read about it every day.

I also bought an eBook-Reader without WiFi and I started reading books again.

It’s good.

struthless’ video about suicide was absolutely amazing.

Funfact: The voice actor reacted to this mod. :D

The story was excellent, the combat was a slog. Still finished it and overall enjoyed it, but it felt like they were being limited by the DnD system a lot, ultimately worsening the experience.

Act 3 launched half baked and half broken

It still has bugs to this day. I played through the whole game two months ago. The printing press mission was extremely broken. It’s a mission where you are supposed to swap out the headline in a printing press so a magazine doesn’t shit-talk your party. The mission progressed as intended, the press even praised me for swapping the article out and on the next day I still got shit-talked.

I had to do the whole mission again and talk to the printing press twice (for no reason) to fix it. Yenna in my camp also never cooked for me.

Larian announcing their next game to be even bigger than before makes me a bit cautious. I hope they don’t bite off more than they can chew.

Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related

I played the first release when it came out. There were a LOT of mission-breaking bugs, missing content, much less customization options, entirely missing features, a really messy perk system etc. It feels like a very different game now, since they patched in more content that was initially missing.

Someone did a writeup of all the patches here.

They should’ve pushed back the game at least for another year. 1.0 mostly focused on the cutscenes and Johnny Silverhand/Keanu Reeves since that’s what sold the game initially and left a lot to be desired in other areas.

If I remember correctly, you couldn’t even skip the first training mission. You also had to combine clothes that looked like ass because the armor rating was tied to them and there was no cosmetics system (that came with 2.0).

Hell yeah, the PS2 has an insanely large library of games!

Yes! :) I have dualboot with 98SE on this machine (the eGPU is pretty terrible to use on Windows 98).

VFX, not SFX. In our company, the team shoots real-life videos and then puts effects on top. The most recent project I saw was a movie for a manufacturer of paper colors. The artists made a big tower in one of their factories explode into a wave of paint, it looked pretty (but it was only a few seconds long).

All of those screens have a CCFL, it’s basically a miniature version of of those old tube lights. If that one reaches its end of life it gets dim and yellow and needs to be replaced.

The A22p also accepts the IPS displays from an A31p. I modded mine with one of those, so now I have a Windows 98 notebook with an especially beautiful display. 🥰

I’m still rocking an A22p! It was my first notebook in 2003. People went mad when I brought it to school because of the 1600x1200 screen. I used its S-Video output so the whole class was able to watch movies on an external CRT TV. :D

There’s even a docking station with eGPU support - before it was cool!

I don’t have it anymore (sadly), but for a while I owned a Hitachi TX200 projector.

All of the fans were standard PC fans and easily replaceable. The polarization filters came on little extra modules, you could take them out, replace them and realign them easily. The service menu had an option to shift the pixels for each individual LCD to counteract for pixel-drift and you were also able to calibrate the colors for multiple zones. It’s a great projector and can run for many years with a few replacement parts.

Sadly, it was only 720p and Hitachi never made a higher-resolution model. :(