This podcast traces it back to the marketing of personal computers during the mid-1980s. They were portrayed as toys for boys. It became a self-perpetuating thing in the culture.
http://www.npr.org/sections…

It's the weirdest thing: If I'm wearing them when I walk out of my apartment and down to where I park my car, they tend to cut out entirely, yet they usually work pretty well when I make the same walk in the opposite direction.
But that's generally not the issue. But when I'm at the gym, sometimes even slight movements…

Of course! The Six Million Dollar Man conditioned me to expect a different sound, but I should have known that was just Hollywood bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…

Thanks for the tip. The relatively cheap bluetooth earbuds I have now have a tendency to cut out here and there, but it's hard to tell if I should blame them, my off-brand smartphone, or both.

On a somewhat related note, does anyone have some reasonably priced earbuds-suitable for running and going to the gym- that they really like? I have bad luck with earbuds, but that might have something to do with the fact that I often buy cheap crap. I'm not an audiophile or anything; decent sound, reliable,…

They have room to improvise, but they're also tied to Martin's pre-arranged plot points, which might not be the direction they'd have taken the show if they had their druthers. My understanding is that Martin has written himself into a corner, has no idea how to get out, and has tossed an outline to the showrunners…

It's the most non-Radiohead Radiohead album for sure. But I'll go to bat for "Anyone can play guitar" as a solid pop-rock song.

They're mostly preteen and early-teen boys, right? Their maturity level is roughly equal to Trump's.

No shame there. The Nutri-Grain ones (not sure of spelling/punctuation) are tasty.

While I'm sure it's been explained to me before, I'm still not clear on how Romero's zombies became the new standard for zombies when he didn't call them "zombies." How did the ghouls in NotLD get rechristened as zombies?

I'm pretty sure that was the distributor's fault, not his.

If enough people are wrong long enough, they become right.

Thanks, this is helpful. I do have a low tolerance for camp, and I do remember finding Heston to be terrible in the film. Sounds like this is just a matter of taste, rather than me missing something on first watch.

Maybe I was being a little harsh, but I think my expectations were high because it's supposed to be such a classic. So the flaws you mention, along with the stilted dialogue, put me off.
Also, does the twist ending actually make sense? They thought they were astronauts, but it turns out they were time travelers? Do I…

Am I the only one who thought the original film was sorta crap? Like, really ham-fisted and campy. I'm sure the twist had been spoiled for me so it didn't really have that going for it, but to me at the time it almost seemed Rifftrax/MST3K-level bad. Maybe I was just in a cranky mood and couldn't get past the…

Your first paragraph makes a fair point. I was thinking more of the technical definition used by sociologists. It's probably a bad idea for me to even weigh in on this question, since I'm largely drawing on a half-remembered college course taken years ago.
So I respect where you're coming from. But as an atheist…

That's a good question. I'm not a sociologist, so I'm not sure where they draw the line. But I feel confident saying Catholicism is far too large, old and well-established to meet the technical definition.

Cults are, by definition, small. The fact that Catholicism has billions of adherents makes them not a cult.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but the new films are generally pretty well-regarded. I found them to be pretty decent from what I saw (don't think I've seen either all the way through).
The original Charlton Heston film is a steaming pile of shit. You missed nothing, there. Supposedly the Marky Mark version was…

Was Memento actually bad? I remember liking it, in a "it's an entertaining movie once you get past the silly premise" sort of way, but I haven't seen it in years. I have always had my doubts about whether it held up.
Also been tempted to rewatch Following after seeing it pop up on Netflix. I remember almost nothing…