u/thedubiousstylus

I'm going to go against the grain of when this topic often comes up and against the nostalgia-tinted viewpoint and side with that they are better today.

The booming narration of Don LaFontaine and others had its charm but if you watch old trailers today you realize that the narration is actually pretty out of place feeling. They use a similar format to today's with cool scenes, lines, etc., but feels more disjointed with that being constantly broken up by "in a world" and "one man will rise" type cliches. Also it was very difficult to pace it well, you'll notice they often will take simple sentences and have the narrator say a few words...pepper a few lines of dialogue and then finish the sentence or even just continue it and do it again before finishing. It can also feel patronizing like we need to have this scene explained to us. Also people complain about trailers spoiling the whole movie....well that happened then as well (this has happened for a LONG time by the way, I remember once someone on social media dug up a newspaper article of people complaining about this from 1936), but it's even more blatant with how spoonfed it is.

Take the trailer to one of my favorites: High Fidelity. It presents the movie well but there's really nothing the narration adds that you can't easily deduce from the rest of it. It kind of feels like watching a movie in a theater next to someone who decides to narrate the movie to his buddy.

Also it's been noted trailers today do often have narration...it's just from a character in the movie's lines being overlaid and it feels much more organic. Not "someone already watched this trailer and felt they had to explain to us what's going on."

Also the whole "introduce the cast at the end" montage works much better now. In the old way it'd show a quick still of each character while the narrator just listed off the actors' names. Now it'll typically show the still or a brief scene with them with the actor's name captioned, and again, it's a much more organic and less distracting feeling.

And if nothing else let's be honest here: If trailer voice-over narration was still ubiquitous today, a lot of it would probably be AI. And we definitely don't want that.

People tend to bring up Cap'n Jazz, Braid, The Promise Ring, and Boys Life all as early examples of it...but I think this completely overlooks like Christie Front Drive (Colorado), Mineral (Texas), and early Jimmy Eat World (Arizona) who were all instrumental to the sound too at the beginning. (Sunny Day Real Estate from Washington tends to get mentioned too but their sound was actually quite different.) American Football gets brought up a lot but they're not a pioneer or even all that important, LP1 wasn't released until 1999 when it was already a clearly established sound and scene, and it didn't make much of a splash even then, they were generally seen as "the other Kinsella brother"'s post-Cap'n Jazz project and wasn't even the third biggest post-Cap'n Jazz band at first. And there were bands not even from the US as early as the 90s, plenty of examples from the UK, Canada, and Sweden.

I think what mostly happened is a name referring just to a defined Midwest scene ended up getting attached to the entire sub-genre because the only other name I've heard for it sounds really wordy and pretentious: "post-emo indie rock"....but it was still never an accurate name even at the start.

Something that recently came to me with the for some reason charged up debate over if alien life from other planets was confirmed would this impact how people view religion and their belief in God and speculation the government has proof of extraterrestrial life that might be leaked or declassified soon. Which I'm very skeptical of (explanation in spoiler text at the end.) But...John 10:16 seems to possibly fit this well, thoughts?

>!Any civilization advanced enough to be able to travel to Earth from home world light years away would not have to observe the Earth using flying saucers and other standard alien spacecraft, it is far far easier to observe other planets via advanced telescopes and astronomy methods than being able to travel to them, we know this because we're actually already able to do this to a large extent on planets in other solar systems and learned much more about even our solar system via these methods than we did the Voyager probes. Also the Roswell crash has been explained, it was a crash of an experimental sort of proto-drone device used to detect nuclear explosions, so something that definitely didn't resemble anything on Earth at that time but also still Earth in origin. We also basically do know from satellite imagery and leaks from other countries' intelligence what Area 51 is, it's a testing ground by the Air Force for experimental aircraft. All the secrecy is because even things as mundane as the shape of such aircraft are important to their operation and thus are classified, again an interesting spot, but everything tested and present there is still Earth in origin.!<

It was just hearing this again as I took it:

"The Body of Christ broken for you. The Blood of Christ shed for you."

I hear that almost every week so yeah it's not abnormal...but this week it just really hit me. Somehow I got really moved and I was almost in tears as I left the church afterwards and walked out to my vehicle.

Something like this ever happened to anyone else here?

This just randomly came up on my feed. Good find!

Not necessarily your favorite, just most representative.

Here's what I'd say:

1st: Moss Icon

2nd: The Promise Ring

3rd: Thursday

4th: Tiny Moving Parts

5th: Like Roses

I recall reading that the reason Millennials were so notorious for hating TikTok while older generations just didn't really care is it was the first real big Internet trend that wasn't specifically geared to us and so the old and out of touch feeling stung much more especially as we didn't really have that before. I personally remember writing it off because I wasn't interested in watching a lot of silly dances or skits that had an unfunny:funny ratio of 9:1, and I didn't want Chinese spyware on my phone so no way was I ever installing the app.

But apparently some of us actually did get into it? Kind of wondering who did. It actually did spawn a few trends that leaked into real life, although only with people way younger than us. For example I heard TikTok is what surged the trend of wearing corpse paint to all sorts of music, which I guess explains things like me seeing a very young woman wearing corpse paint to La Dispute which would've been unfathomable in like 2012, although I have still yet to see someone likely born before 9/11 in corpse paint at a show. And also that thing where kids will sit on the floor and play card games during bands...I dunno if it originated on TikTok but that seems to be a logical source. But yeah, any Millennials here who actually embraced TikTok?

Only just one full length, it's OK if they also put out some splits/7"/EP/etc.

The two big ones for me are of course 9/11 and the Iraq War.

9/11 comes up a lot with teenagers and now even college aged people asking what it was like and things like "Is it true you actually just spent all day in school watching the news on TV?" One thing I do distinctly remember is that the period right after it happened and we got the news, we already had a prescheduled meeting in the auditorium talking about how to process college applications...we filed in there very awkwardly and the speaker started out saying "yeah I totally understand this is not the main thing on your mind now" and you could tell she was fully distraught and didn't want to be there either.

But being asked about what the start of the Iraq War was like is even more striking for me, because I was actually an adult! A very young one who had just started college, but I went to some anti-war rallies and watched it unfold in real time. The truth is it's no longer the biggest protest movement of our lifetimes, the summer of 2020 topped that, but that it's just as much a piece of history for today's youth as Vietnam was for us never ceases to amaze me.

I almost never did until sometime after Covid....but then my ears actually started hurting at some and I realized it definitely couldn't be safe. It's also more accessible now because most venues even small little dive bars have a cup full of little foam earplugs up front. You can still hear the music pretty well with them.

Am considering ordering special ones that mean you can hear just as well and keep reusing them even if they cost about $50, they last so long if you take care of them and don't lose them it's basically just a one-time investment.