I scroll through a list of “the 100 best [movie / tv shows]” and literally 99% of them looks boring af. Is life just this boring, or does my brain just suck?
Pretty picky. I watch less shows and movies because there’s a content desert when you’re picky. Not a problem for me because video games has the extreme opposite problem. Especially when I’m also into emulation, hacks, translations, reverse engineered servers, whatever. Everything to do with games. Wish lists exceed lifespan.
Books are different because I have Aphantasia. Any author who likes writing long inner monologues and detailed environment descriptions is what I’ll look for, with fiction anyway.
Music I rarely look at reviews. My biggest influencer is CKUA, a local donor supported radio station. Also I just scroll sites like Bandcamp for a couple hours now and then until I stumble into somethings I like and bookmark them. If I keep listening to an album or whatever and still like it after a couple days, then I’ll buy. I’m pretty disconnected this regard I guess.
Social influences too of course, self explanatory.
Very. I dont think its boring or anything, just quite forgettable and i simply dont find it enjoyable enough to want to keep watching. Idk if thats a me problem though since I dont inherently look through lists or whats trending because Im not motivated enough for that either but if I do want a good movie to watch I ask some of my film buff friends for recommendations, while they do give the occasional stinker (to me at least since our tastes are different) the recommendations are very solid can legit be hidden gems that very niche and slip under the radar for a lot of people. Wouldnt have it any other way.
I heard our brains aren’t made to handle this many choices. It’s easier to pick a movie when choosing between 3-5 options
When consuming content bores me I know it’s time to create something. Also yeah “the most popular” stuff kinda always sucks. Gotta find your niche.
Find more cool underground stuff instead of pop slop (i just made that up and I like that term now)
Its usually that you’ve experienced the gold standard of something before and now you can’t achieve it again, so everything in comparison looks boring.
Not to be confused with nostalgia, but movies for example had a peak period of production and entertainment value that is long gone. Modern hollywood almost looks like slop compared to even decent film hits 30+ years ago, but anyone who hasn’t experienced that era wouldn’t know. You just never know when you’re in a golden era until its over because it’s all relative to your perspective. And it’s always possible another golden era appears, its just very unlikely.
Aside from that, I heavily critique everything because I used to be a big fiction reader and now I can’t help but notice every plot hole, character development flaw, trope, and archetype in literally any media.
They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but its gotten to the point where I can reasonably deduce most of the story of a movie from its quick description, which is not a good thing.
Example mega spoiler for Fantastic 4:
spoiler
I guessed the baby was gonna revive someone literally 30 seconds into the film even though I actually don’t know anything about Fantastic 4 comics or characters outside of the main crew and Dr Doom.
I was actually half joking but then it dawned on me that’s literally what was gonna happen and just went “oh… cool”.
If something interests me I add it to the list. Not overly concerned with critical opinion if its negative.
Sometimes I will seek other things based on enjoying something. So an actor or director’s other works for example.
Talking to people and finding out what they enjoy and then evaluating whether or not it is interesting to you is a good way to isolate something. For example KPop Demon Hunters looked like slop to me (and I enjoy some Korean media), but someone at work started talking about it and that got me just interested enough to take a look into it and them watch and subsequently enjoy it.
I watch things as background noise as I game, so not very picky. Kind of hate watched Halo recently.
A top 100 movies list is likely aimed at film buffs but if you aren’t into those same things, the movies aren’t gonna do anything for you.
There’s nothing wrong with being a casual fan, though. People get very hung up on sticking to “the best” but it’s just entertainment. Watch what you like
Basically at this point I need something spoiled to me by a literary analyst just to be able to tell if it’s worth my time.
I don’t think your brain sucks I think our ability to enjoy art now is just hamstringed by the unending glut of designed-by-comittee trash and the time demands of late stage capitalism
Tangentially related: I recently read American Kingpin, a book about Ross Ulbricht. The author starts by saying something like, “My mother had an unusual way of reading books. She would read the end first, then go back and start from the beginning. She enjoyed piecing together how the story got from A to B.” I realized that spoilers have never bothered me, for the same reason.
Ooh, that’s not bad. I think I used to do something similar in highschool when looking at a book I was uncertain I had the willpower to finish. It definitely helped with Shogun.
So I guess the author of Kingpin was literally telling you to go straight to the end of Kingpin. I wonder which books I have sitting on my shelf now that this might help with
He was actually introducing the format of the book, i.e. it started with Ulbricht being arrested for running Silk Road, then jumped back to the beginning of the story. Of course it’s a common structure especially for nonfiction, but I enjoyed the meta-ness of it.
Interesting. I suppose I have seen that in film before but never in a book. Pretty cool though
‘Boring’ is a lazy assessment that says nothing. Dig deeper. Why do you think a given thing would be boring? What about it specifically do you think you won’t enjoy?
Once you learn to start asking yourself those types of questions, you can start looking for things that actually interest you, rather than dismissing everything out of hand.
Hitting the real deepy deeps right here 🫵👌
So picky I don’t even bother picking it out.
Good stuff has to come to me, and the rest of it gets ignored.
Rotten 🍅 top ten list, anything that looks good I write down. Life too busy for me to finish my “watch later” list so I guess it’s working.
I have a hard time watching new movies and shows. I guess I usually look for a show to unwind with, and nostalgia is a pretty strong factor there.
If I’m watching a new show with somebody because they want to see it, I’ll generally enjoy myself. But lately I find that I’m pretty quick to reject anything made after 2020 or so
Another way I look at it is that there’s an awful lot of crap competing for my attention, and with the rise of gen-AI, writing for streaming, and other icky things, a lot of it really is crap. I’d rather watch the crap I already know I like
I’d rather watch the crap I already know I like
Same, tho I do catch a bit of shit from the gf “sigh This again?”
Meanwhile, I’ll hear her listen to the same song 5x from down the hall
