A common thing among my high school friends when we got to bigger cities was unlearning the idea that someone who had heard of the Pixies or whatever was probably cool or interesting, but that was because in TN you had to really work hard to be aware of the Pixies; in NYC it was given to you.

You can’t be well aware of it, though! Napster launched before you were born, if you heard of an artist or record, you could listen right away, and you were more likely to hear about a wide variety of music because other people had access to Napster and were discovering things that way.

(I mean that literally: a lot of people bought “Pocket Full of Kryptonite” for its singles and dumped it; every single used CD store had twenty or more copies of that record in particular.) Shopping in Los Angeles is a whole different thing.

OK, but how old are you and where do you live? You have to imagine those used bookstores and record stores with a stock almost exclusively sold by people who could only shop at Waldenbooks or Turtle’s. You could buy 25 copies of “Pocket Full of Kryptonite” but you weren’t going to get into calypso.

Oh no, I’m a longtime believer in having All the Things. (I don’t love VHS but I can play it, just in case there’s something I can’t see otherwise.)

I think streaming should cost more and more of that money should go to the artists. But, like, spend six months shopping at Waldenbooks and Turtle’s and get back to me about how much you love friction.

I don’t think it’s all-in-one, I buy records and am fixing up a reel-to-reel player (the undisputed best format, IMO, if you can find the tapes). I *do* think that people vastly underestimate how much friction there was in the physical media age, especially outside of big cities.

It’s not like I get the copyright when I buy a CD! The important stuff I might buy on vinyl but being able to listen to almost anything for no additional cost is worth not “owning” the music, to me.

You say “human scale,” I say “cramped.” Being able to order physical media directly over the internet at least eliminates the “which CDs does *this* store have in stock today?” lottery, but reducing the cost of entry to a new genre or artist to $0 is an unbeatable advantage.

“But Matt!” you are saying. “What about that 1980s trend of killing rich South Africans on screen?” Well, if forty years from now the richest man in the world is an ICE agent, maybe they’re comparable. As things stand that was just a missed opportunity.

Then cheer up! This is a minor tragedy. “This cupcake really is worth the money and I’ll never be able to afford it again,” that’s the big one.

The only thing worse is if it was extremely expensive. It seems so unfair when you get what you paid for.

You know what has much better looking night shots than that kind of digital mud? The Blob, a movie where the focus puller keeps screwing up. It still looks miles better than most modern cinematography.

I'm kind of calling it "Log Profile" - where it seems a lot of Log Profiles are becoming the default shooting state and then the colorists aren't really doing much to actually change the image in post beyond a generalized filter (in this case, blue)