Asklemmy

Traditional news ironically. It seems to be the "adult" thing to watch the news but it's just gloomy and controlling. Just wanna claw my eyes out every time I hear them exclaim "X is outrageous!" "The West has fallen." "We live in a third world country!" "Migrants are destroying America!". Pisses me off so much. It's entirely irrelevant whether or not I agree, but it's how they try to force you to think or feel a certain way, treating us like children. Just tell me the facts like an adult so I can decide for myself.

Cable TV for over 10 yrs now. I‘m not blasting my brain with ads and doom news.

Game consoles since after ps3, I was thinking about ps5 in 2020 but I didnt want to buy a small car so now I‘m not interested anymore.

Online Multiplayer. I used to love to connect with people, friends and strangers and play games. Now I just want to play alone on my terms and find it super annoying when games introduce online stuff into the single player mode, like raids.

I still enjoy the occasional couch co-op though.

Television in general. Video in general. A movie is nice now and then, but I almost never seek it out.

Comedy news shows. They can be funny, but the more I learn about topics in depth the more I realize how much biased the shows are. A segment that might have previously left me feeling better informed might instead make me feel like someone is trying to fool me or tell a one sided story.

I literally stopped watching movies, especially Bollywood and Hollywood movies. Somewhere along the line, I just decided to consume almost exclusively Japanese media, particularly anime. The simple reason is that anime tells some really amazing stories that most Hollywood movies don’t hold a candle against. Think Attack on Titan or FMA. I am not saying that all Japanese media is great, no it’s not. But, the variety there is pretty amazing.

Well, if "media" is in general, I'd have to say television. I'll watch some things once in a while, but for the most part, I have way too much anxiety from a bad marriage. Audio books, and certain Youtube channels can trigger it, too.

Television. Can't remember the last time I turned my TV on to actually watch TV. It's mostly for streaming, but even that's getting harder to keep up with. It just feels like there are too many services and shows to keep track of. If I sit down and watch a show then I really need to want to watch it. More and more I've been listening to podcasts or treating Youtube videos like podcasts. It lets me multitask in a way that sitting down and trying to watch something just doesn't.

Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn't even using my PS4 much. I don't know if I'd call it outgrowing it exactly though... this one is borderline to me.

What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn't and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.

Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it's completely off the rails.

Certain "nonfiction" authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the "evidence" I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you're like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.

Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn't really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it's a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn't matter if the computer doesn't do the computation you need.

In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there's so many choices, I don't have to take "mildly entertaining" as my bar for watching a show, it's way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it's harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it's ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn't know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the "this was done better before". Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.

Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.

Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I've really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you're not burning data like with streaming... Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.

I don't watch television, streaming shows, or movies for the most part for years now.

I've got podcasts, music, video games, and books left.

Gaming consoles for me.

When the PS4 came out, I couldn't justify spending that much for a device that doesn't have the amount of utility as a PC, nor are the games retro compatible. I'm a PC gaming convert.

Inb4 anyone says Reddit.

YouTube. From around 2008 - 2016, it was pretty much my only source of media and entertainment. I was subscribed to so many different channels and never missed an upload. I could spend hours just binge watching all types of content. These days, I only watch / follow a handful of creators. Really only visit the site when I have nothing better to do.

Streaming.

It's the new cable, in that it sells to customers based on intentional market fragmentation. It's actually a worse, because anything you "buy" on a streaming platform is actually just leased.

Eli the Computer Guy and Philip DeFranco. For much the same reason. They told me to leave, and I did.

DeFranco was truly biased but balanced news. And then came the US election before last and balance lost out. Trump won and DeFranco decided political influence was more important than unbiased reporting. Shortly after Biden won the last election, he streamed a response to criticisms of bias, and he flat out said "if you disagree with my politics, leave. I don't need viewers like you." Favoring neither is disagreement too. It was that easy. Last I checked his subscriber count was cut roughly in half.

Eli said "If you don't want to see me study 'What is a duck?' Leave. No really, leave. Leave." His subscribers vanished and he blamed the algorithm, or so I heard.

3-2-1 Contact

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point I stopped receiving that magazine.

There was always a section called “BASIC Training” that had a bunch of source code in BASIC. They wouldn’t tell you what it did. You had to try and guess what it did, then type it into your computer to find out whether you were right. But I didn’t have a computer.

In 1994 I finally got a computer, and immediately opened up the QBASIC interpreter and started typing it all in, to see what it did.

Holy shit I just realized that’s 30 years ago this year.

Everything that is ad-supported.

Media funded by ads has a different objective than other media. I simply reject advertising in total.

I don't watch movies that much anymore. They just don't seem that interesting nowadays, and I can't bring myself put that time sink in of just sitting. TV shows are kind of the same way. I don't really just sit and watch them unless I'm eating or with my friends. Books have also gotten away from me, but I'm trying to get back into reading. It's just a little overwhelming when I look at my unread pile lol.

American TV and movies after the '00s. Not representative enough of normal American life to be relatable (which is why I like '90s and '00s American TV so much) and not original enough to be interesting (which is why I'm into anime.)

Only watch sports (footy/cricket/tennis) on TV and nothing else.

TV in general, I can't remember the last time I've sat down to watch anything airing that wasn't, say, footage of the new year's eve fireworks show or something.

I don't really care much for recent movies as well, most of what I watch is stuff from before 2000 and if I ever go to the theater I go with friends just as an excuse to hang out.

And I think I'm currently in the process of outgrowing gaming in general, I still play games but I've been gaming less and less nowadays, most of what I play are old games from my teenage years and childhood, and I don't really keep up much with newer releases... In truth I'm sort of disgusted by the industry in general nowadays, so that might have some influence as well.

Stupidly, anything that requires too much of a time commitment, which has led me easily to death by a million cuts. I'm conscious of my zoomer mentality in this respect, but it's much easier to generally piss away all your time on like, 50 tiktoks, that all last 5 seconds, compared to a TV show or a movie or whatever. The secondary effect, understated, I think, of this, and I think this is the kind of, horrible advantage of those platforms, is that you will inevitably spend more time trying to find stuff to look at that interests you, rather than actually watching content, so I think they can skate by a little more with a little less content. More efficient for them, less efficient for you.

I find myself doing the same thing with 10 minute youtube videos, but I also will end up watching multiple hour long video essays on random garbage, so I don't really know what that's about. Maybe just easier to convince myself that it's a "productive" activity, to learn about some random nonsense, as compared to engaging in some sort of probably wholly escapist form of media, that might in reality lend itself towards an easier foothold for conversations with other people? I dunno, maybe the problem is just kind of trying to look at media in terms of its pure utility value, rather than looking at media through some other lens.

Certainly, I think the biggest contributing factor is just environment. I'm on my computer and phone a lot more than on my e-reader or my TV, so I naturally engage with the easier to access forms of media found on those platforms. Regression to the lowest condom domino gator, or whatever.

Also, I feel like I've seen enough people answer "anime" that the anime... subs? boards? communities? communities sounds a little too long. Anyways, it should be more popular, but I really haven't seen any engagement on any of them, the anime holes.