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.

When I was a civilian, everyone called it military time, because only the US military used it.

When I joined the US military, they called it International Time, because the rest of the world used it and we were just meeting international standards so there’s no confusion with our global allies.

Fences

I live in the countryside, so for decades, my area just showed up as a few main roads and a lot of empty map space. I’ve had delivery and mail vehicles fly by my house because they didn’t know where exactly to turn in. Inviting friends over was always a challenge because I need to describe distances and landmarks. Everyone misses the mailbox.

With OpenStreetMap, I’ve not only been able to put in driveways and outlines of houses on the map, but I put in the fences between my property, the 40 acres of conservation wilderness next to me, then the neighborhood on the other side. Now you can actually see the local neighborhoods out here! And every house has an address associated with it, instead of just a number next to the empty road that doesn’t quite match up with driveways.

And since updating it myself, I’ve noticed those details populating on Google and Bing maps too, so deliveries have been more accurate lately. I’m no longer getting mail for my neighbors, or having neighbors drop off my mail that was left at their house.

I volunteer for my town’s parks committee. Lately, I’ve been marking and labeling our parks and trails on OpenStreetMap because locals are always asking where they are. And my town’s homemade maps are ancient and awfully drawn. I spent my whole childhood living here and I’m only now learning about some of these parks and trails in my 40s!

I’ve spent a lifetime irritated with how little information is available on maps for my region, and now I get to update it myself! It’s been wonderful. I’ve even edited details in my local town as construction changed the street layout and no one updated public maps. It’s so convenient!

This is an absolutely brilliant move by Valve. Get more buyers purely for the quirky behavior of the controller, then sell even more when people accidentally break them from throwing them on the ground. They’re just printing money at this point.

A lot of open-world games give an “endless world” vibe, even if the game itself has a finite plot.

For example, games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the entire Just Cause franchise, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Tom Clancy’s The Division 1 and 2, etc. are all games that let you continue to explore the game and do whatever you want, even after the main plot has been completed.

My friends and I like to fool around in the Ghost Recon and Division games, even though we beat them ages ago. It’s fun to just explore and cause mayhem and destruction, fighting infinite waves of baddies. And there’s not much grinding required because we leveled while playing through the main story. As long as the world is immersive and you can find stuff to do, you could practically play forever.

Actually, a great example of this would be Enshrouded. It’s an open-world crafting/base-building game, but it’s set in a medieval fantasy world, so there are quests to accomplish, lore to discover, and gear/weapons to acquire, build, and level. And when you’re bored of that, you can just settle down and build your own fantasy city. And it’s all single-player, unless you want to invite friends into your game. Or you can make your session public and let strangers check out your game. You can lock down their access so they can’t destroy anything you’ve built or take any of your resources. Then you guys can quest together or build epic castles or villages or Hobbit homes together.

A similar game that just released is Windrose. It’s the same base-building/questing concept as Enshrouded except instead of medieval fantasy, it’s theme is pirates in the Caribbean in the 1700s. You get to build and sail ships in this game, and even duel against other ships!

Good thing I don’t care about others’ reviews. If they start blocking access to movie information though, I might have to quit using their site.

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.

Heck yeah! It was pretty much the only way I could play RuneScape.

Other people were the one thing I hated about MMOs. I just want to enjoy a massive fantasy world with no definitive end to it. But people kept being… well… people. Every time I had to deal with others, the immersion was broken. Most people were there to play the game, not appreciate it.

Even on RPG servers, it was hard to find anyone who wanted to explore the world and enjoy the setting. Everyone wanted shortcuts to fly through quests, dungeons, raids, etc. as quickly as they could. They just wanted to level up fast and min/max their stats, weapons, and armor build. People would genuinely get mad at me if I didn’t play a certain way, or understand how a boss fight works, even though it’s my first time in that dungeon. I’d need to do online research before entering a raid or dungeon with a party, and that just ruins the enjoyment of discovering a new challenge.

Even “newbie-friendly” guilds, which claimed to be more immersive and helpful for exploring and leveling, would either require regular engagement with scheduled guild activities to stay a member, or they would be dead, with almost no one online to play with at any given time.

And that’s just allies. If you’re playing a game with PvP, then you had to worry about being ganked out in the open. I could be out soloing a quest and suddenly a player just attacks out of the blue. Now it’s a game of survival and I’m already at a disadvantage. It’s either fight a losing battle or hope to run and hide.

Screw people. I prefer playing solo in MMOs. Just leave me alone to enjoy the game at my own pace.

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.

I used to get irritation and infections often while using shaving cream. One day I ran out of shaving cream and just shaved with hot water alone. I shaved like that for about a week before I finally got to the store to buy more shaving cream.

I quickly realized that shaving cream is kind of pointless. I got a better shave with just hot water, and if I was gentle enough and used cold water to rinse afterwards, I never got irritation. Shaving cream was like a 25% chance I’d have mild irritation that day. So why am I spending all this money on shaving cream?!

And no, I didn’t have an allergy to shaving cream. It was minor skin irritation in certain spots, not swelling and itchiness everywhere the shaving cream touched me.

I exclusively shave with just hot water now. I haven’t bought shaving cream in over 2 decades and my face is still smooth and blemish-free.

I agree on the good razor, though. I’ve tried a variety from cheap ones, expensive ones, old-fashioned ones, straight-razors, and electric razors. In the 30 years I’ve been shaving, the best razor I’ve ever had was the Gillette Mach 3. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for ages now.

I’m actually worried what will happen if they ever stop making them. I have a box stockpiled with their razor heads just so I have a supply to last me a year or so. Although I’m retired now and shave less often, so it might last me about 5 years now.

It really depends on your facial hair. Some people have fine, light hair that’s baby smooth with a quick shave with the grain; others need to practically sandpaper their face against the grain to get rid of stubble. I fall into that second category.

From personal experience, there’s nothing wrong with shaving against the grain… IF you are careful, gentle, use a very sharp blade and really hot water, and rinse with cold water when you’re done. As cold as your tap water will go.

Shaving doesn’t just cut hair; you are also picking up microscopic skin follicles as well. Usually not enough to tear or cut your skin, but the risk of doing so goes up when you’re shaving against the grain. If your blade isn’t sharp enough, it might pull on hairs a bit instead of cleanly cutting through them, and then you’re at risk of cutting into your skin too, instead of smoothly gliding over it.

Of course, your mileage may vary, so if you have curly facial hair, you might be at risk of ingrown hairs by shaving too close. There are skin treatments to help prevent that, but I’ve never used anything like that, so I can’t speak to it.

The hot water helps to soften your hair and make it easier to cut. Cold water closes your pores and helps to keep infections out. If you’re shaving against the grain, you’re likely to have more micro tears and cuts in your skin, where bacteria can nestle in and form zits or other skin infections. So wash your face with cold water afterward!

I personally shave with the grain on my face and against the grain on my neck. It’s almost impossible to shave with the grain on my neck because it grows upwards in the center and then arches outward like a rainbow on both sides on my neck. Any way I shave will be against the grain at some point on my neck, so I just do a good job shaving until I can’t feel any stubble anymore. The only time I get redness or irritation is if I did a rush job or didn’t rinse well enough with cold water.