Feel you on the Netflix brain dead content. My wife and I were just talking this morning about this. She’s binge-watching some mindless show that came out ages ago, and was watching on her phone while eating breakfast.
Me: Are you watching that show now!?!
Her: Yeah! Why not?
Me: I can’t watch shows that way.
Her: That’s because you watch shows that require your brain. I might as well be watching kittens running in a field.
The shows she watches are absolutely ambient background noise, and I think it’s just yet another sub-sub-sub-genre of “content” now. I can’t really do it with anything other than sports. I guess it’s her version of having a game on in the background.
Keep those kiddos flying! I truly believe dealing with the randomness of air travel, people watching society in stressful situations, and dealing with the related logistics is a great real world education for kids.
We traveled a lot with our kids early and often. Last summer we put both of them on flights by themselves (17 and 14 at the time) and there were no concerns about their ability to navigate the process on their own.
We did have a teachable moment after arriving at LAX last December. I was sitting with our younger son toward the back of the plane. We were nearing our turn to deplane, so I stood up in the aisle. My son got up and jumped ahead of a couple rows still working on gathering bags. Granted, they did not have their shit together and were taking forever. But we can’t be doing that. We are not those people.
They know people are watching while scrolling tik-tok or whatever so they intentionally have writers/directors have characters say what they’re doing or what is going on.
Is this a safe space where I can say that I actually liked Carry On? Sure it was definitely TSA meets Die Hard, but I thought the actors played their roles well, especially Bateman, and, well, I like Die Hard, so naturally this appealed to me.
@Tron The printer issue is real. Especially the part about running out of ink. Got a bit of an inside scoop from an family member who was a chemical engineer for a major printer company back in the day. They were always trying to solve for the problem of printers in dry places having the inkheads dry out and become clogged, which would make those cartridges unusable. They called it the Arizona Schoolhouse problem - imagining the driest possible conditions in which a printer could exist.
To solve the issue they programmed inkjet printers to periodically purge some ink to stop them becoming clogged, meaning they were always usable in the “Arizona Schoolhouse.” Each purge uses a small amount of ink, but over a couple of months, even when you aren’t using the printer your ink will deplete. In a place like Jax you do not need this given the humidity - but the catch is that to stop it from happening you gotta unplug the thing, which causes all sorts of connectivity issues for a lot of wireless printers.
Re: Netflix has lost all its juice. I am finding it harder and harder to wade through the amount of televion and movies available to find quality stuff. All the platforms seem to just be throwing sequels, remakes, or total garbage on their platform, so when quality stuff is on there it’s hard to find. Especially because what their pushing in the algo or the banners are not at all correlated to the entertainment value. So, I have naturally been relying more and more on friends recommendations but that’s somewhat futile because they too have to wade through the never ending pages and find something worthwhile.