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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone who is actually getting old (just hit 60) this is a pretty click-baity title. Of course it's a gradual process that sneaks up on you, and of course you slow down and value quiet more, and of course you start wondering what's the matter with kids today. Does anyone really expect to just wake up one morning and say to themselves, "OMG, I'm old today"?

(Actually, and somewhat ironically, I do remember a very specific moment about 20 years ago when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window on a day when I was not looking my best and thinking, geez, who is that old guy looking back at me? Surely, that's not me.)

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I agree about the clickbait. As I come up on 50, however, I think there are a number of axes on which we can analyze aging.

Chronological age: there is no getting past getting older, you will age and it will be increasingly apparent with time.

Grooming and style: you can, nonetheless, choose to date yourself with your clothing and overall presentation, or not. This can be overdone and make you stand out “trying too hard” not to be old. But there’s a world of middle ground.

Physical: a mix of genetics, nutrition, exercise, access to medical care, self care, and luck. Some people slow down much more than others. Some people, like the author, simply choose to, having been relived of the expectation that younger folks be very busy.

Mentality: do you want to look at younger generations as an alien species, or do you want to deal with people as people and acknowledge that while we all have different backgrounds, new perspectives have their own value. I find I can still relate well to people of about any age. At some point mental decline may rob me of that, but I won’t stop while it’s in my control.

Interests: do you mostly enjoy media and activities particular to a time when you were younger, or do you have a penchant for novelty despite your age?

> do you mostly enjoy media and activities particular to a time when you were younger, or do you have a penchant for novelty despite your age?

I have negative interest in the superhero movies, so there's that. I don't care for the modern style of shifting the colors to blue/orange. Movies from the 70's have a natural look to the colors.

I prefer 1970s music. Autotune is for whippersnappers.

I yell at clouds a lot, too.

Somewhat ironically, HD killed cinematography.

Because there's enough clarity to see set errors, everything important is filmed in the dark.

Examples: just about every fight scene since 2018; Castle first season vs last.

One of the reasons why Shogun was so appealing is they did something different.

And "modern" TVs have motion smoothing which make so many things look so synthetic and dizzying.

We’ve got the minority opinion; most don’t even notice. I make a point to ask whenever around others near one.

First thing I turn off when I get new TVs. It destroys old cartoons especially. Neutral color profile too. RTINGS tells you how to do it.

On the other hand a surprising amount of modern movies are still filmed on kodak movie film then scanned for digital distribution.

> Somewhat ironically, HD killed cinematography.

Imagine Wild Strawberries in HD. I think it would seem bleaker. Or Blue Velvet. It would make Blue Velvet creepier. It would also make any Corman film seem classier.

HD didn't ruin cinema. It only ruins beauty.

HD is lower quality than film. Maybe this is true for home entertainment, but we take less advantage of darkness than ever from my perspective. It's the video-game CGI that kills me.

There was an experiment maybe 15 years ago, where they sent film material through the whole printing and distribution process, and measured the vertical resolution that could still be resolved on an actual cinema screen using analog projection. The result was around 700p IIRC, below full HD in any case.

700p? Are you sure? I don't belive cinemas had about the same resolution as PAL at 576p. 720p is blurry too on big screens.

See the PDF kindly linked by the sibling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43919991):

• “The highest resolution that the expert assessors could discern in the highest performing movie theater was about 875 L/PH.

• “The horizontal resolution averaged over the six multi-burst groups measured on the screens of the six selected movie theaters was about 715 L/PH.”

L/PH = lines per picture height, i.e. vertical resolution

This was for 35 mm film.

Also, well-mastered DVDs with anamorphic widescreen can look astonishingly good on an output device that doesn’t interpolate its lines.

Yeah, I'm gonna need to see some receipts. From what I remember super35 film should approach 8k resolution under ideal conditions.

> under ideal conditions.

I interpreted the claim as being under non-ideal conditions (which is fair, frankly—it's well-known that the visual and sound quality is better at the beginning of a run than at the end, and film quality doesn't matter if your local theater doesn't ensure it's preserved as best it can be).

Plus, I saw a film viewing of Sinners this past weekend (quite a fun movie, highly recommend it) and some visual artifacts were very noticeable—it was regular enough I figured there was a slice of the film roll that got damaged somehow.

Just for a quick update, I got curious and it seems the resolution actually should be a touch over 10k for super35, as for regular 35mm it seems spot on at 9.5k resolution.

https://www.filmfix.com/en/blog/35mm-film-resolution/

4k remasters are done by scanning film, 35mm has plenty resolution

Watching a 4K digital scan of a master copy on a 4K TV is different from what you would see in movie theaters. The roughly 700-800 lines is the apparent resolution one would experience in a real-life movie theater with analog projection.

The point is that even 1080p TV is an improvement in resolution over what you used to see in cinemas with 35 mm prints.

(https://journal.smpte.org/periodicals/SMPTE%20Motion%20Imagi...)

> filmed in the dark

House of Dragon was so filmed in the dark, with poor contrast, and color-corrected to be all blue and orange, is almost painful to watch. I have a hard time even seeing what is happening.

I'm "only" 40 and strongly prefer films made when they still shot and edited on film. The peak as far as visual quality and overall effect of film, for me, was probably the 60s through early 90s, though I love a bunch of films older or newer than that.

The constraints of not being able to color-grade the whole film with a slider or two, of every cut in the edit taking time to do, and of effects that weren't in-camera being relatively expensive, tended to lead to better and more-interesting filmmaking, even in middling films.

I appreciate what the right people can do with modern tools—I enjoy and even love plenty of newer films, and it's undeniably brought some cool stuff within reach of smaller, cheaper productions—but overall I see it as making cinema worse.

"We did it in a computer" being the answer to every "how'd they do that?" isn't movie magic, it's boring as hell. It's why even a film that tries to avoid that to some degree, like the new Dune duology, is in some important respects—though setting aside overall quality of the film on some other dimensions—just less interesting than broadly similar films like Lawrence of Arabia or Star Wars (or even, if I may be so bold, David Lynch's Dune).

I think this sort of opinion is fairly common among film-fans of all ages, due to interest in film making itself as much as output of the process per se. Not sure most movie watchers care, and they may well prefer the newer stuff because of the ultra-fast editing and tuned-to-be-cotton-candy-appealing color schemes and unconstrained video-game camera of fully CGI scenes and all that.

> I prefer 1970s music. Autotune is for whippersnappers.

Hard agree. I can't friggin' believe the heavy-handed autotune in children's media, especially (Daniel Tiger! Fred Rogers would be so unhappy with it). Let's teach them that natural human singing voices, like their own, sound wrong and bad. WTF.

> The peak as far as visual quality and overall effect of film, for me, was probably the 60s through early 90s, though I love a bunch of films older or newer than that.

Those movies were real. The stories were made up, scenes were sets, but ... the images are of real people in meat-world locations, standing near other people, speaking things they mostly really spoke, doing things they mostly really did. It's jarring by juxtaposition just how ... fake modern hyperreal CGI appears on screen.

I get vertigo from heights very easily, so much so that I even have to look away from movie scenes where a camera looks straight down, like the scene at the beginning of The Matrix where Neo is on the ledge and drops his phone and the camera follows it down.

A couple years ago, some friends got me to go along to one of the Spiderman movies. Early on, there's a big fight scene on a bridge, and heroes and villains are flipping around in the air, falling off towers and things, and I realized it wasn't bothering me at all. None of it had any weight, or whatever it is about heights that usually makes me feel sick even when I know it's fake.

A fun scene is when Hans Gruber falls in Die Hard. The panic on his face is real as the director tricked him into it.

Older movies are like actually real.

Like if there's a coffee shop scene you can look out the window and see like a postman deliver mail or a somebody walk a dog. Stuff that isn't between the main characters happens.

The newer trend of blurring everything that isn't a main character is really annoying to me. Real life isn't blurred ...

> "We did it in a computer" being the answer to every "how'd they do that?" isn't movie magic, it's boring as hell.

True. I lost all interest in "making of" documentaries due to that.

For comparison, go watch the 1975 Escape to Witch Mountain movie.

The practical effects are whimsical but are so close to realistic that it's quite jarring for people who have only seen digital FX, it evokes that wonder of, "how did they do that" when you suddenly realize that it's not perfect but it wasn't done with a computer and you can't clearly identify what isn't perfect about it.

It's charming and it will make you lament the lack of practical special effects in modern movies.

Disney used to be the equivalent of watching a magician perform an amazing stage play live.

Now it's a prerecorded bus stop ad designed to distract you from the burning air and dirty seats until you step onto the next leg of your journey between work and the office.

If you haven’t seen it, check out the 1990 Total Recall making of especially for how they built and filmed the Mars models.

It was the peak era of practical special effects, and hugely expensive to do something that now can be done with only a couple of people and a cheap computer.

> heavy-handed autotune

Anyone who doesn't understand this should listen to a Karen Carpenter song, and compare it with a modern pop singer.

Every sha-la-la-la, every whoa-e-whoa, still shines…

What was funny about the 70s was everyone was nostalgic for the 50s. (eg Happy Days) Now everyone is nostalgic for the 70s!

This is a tired argument. I can easily rattle off movies and music from the last decade that hit as hard as anything from the 70s.

Selective memory. Go listen to all the actual Billboard hits from the 70s. Even before autotune, there was no shortage of ways to make terrible music.

> Go listen to all the actual Billboard hits from the 70s

I have the set of Billboard hits CDs.

> hit as hard

I like a lot of music made since the 70's. But one thing is gone - quality singing.

Really?

I can’t make a top 20 movies from the last decade without including crap. There’s several years where I can’t even recommend a single movie.

This perception is an effect of what gets promoted, which is mostly hot garbage.

I watch a lot of movies and can't keep up with the likely-to-be-good ones every year.

There are north of 500 US & Canadian films released per year. Add in foreign (edit: I mean, even more foreign than Canada) cinema, and it's solidly in the four figures. How many movies were you aware of last year? Ten? A couple dozen? Maybe as many as fifty? Drop in the bucket, regardless.

I'm sure there hasn't been a year in the 2000s in which there weren't at least 20 movies released that were worth your time (for those with all but the stingiest and harshest take on "worth my time", and probably also coupled with narrow taste to get the list down under 20).

And I write this as the person who has been perceived as disliking modern movies, from my post a couple steps up this thread! (I don't dislike modern movies! They're just almost-all, for reasons of technology-related changes in production processes, missing certain qualities that I appreciated a bunch in film-era movies)

Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.

Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…

(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead

Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.

I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.

2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.

2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.

2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.

2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.

It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)

Ahh, I’ve seen quite a few of those and am surprised you actually recommend them.

I remember describing Ex Machina as the worst movie of the year I actually finished watching, but hey everyone likes different things.

Haha, I’d recommend that one for the performances alone, especially Oscar Isaac but also the other two.

Personally when I notice the acting the movie has already failed at something else. The Lighthouse’s acting stands out to me because the movie’s attempts at suspense fail. I quickly found it hard to avoid engaging with nuances of the films creation as an intellectual exercise rather than the film itself.

At the other end of the spectrum there’s a ton of movies with child actors where the kids are just vastly less talented, so the film simply demands less of them. It’s just as true of Let the Right One In a low budget foreign film as it is high budget films such as Harry Potter or classics like The Shinning. Characters come to life not through great acting but because all the elements line up so you forget you’re looking at puppets at the puppet show.

IMO, Great movies are all about understanding the limitations of the medium, the audience, characters, budget, script, etc. That’s why the snap at the end of Avengers: Infinity War was spectacle but didn’t have the emotional impact of a single deer being shot at the beginning of Bambi.

/soapbox

Again not that you’re wrong, but I was thinking about your response for a while.

Sure, no problem, never bothered by disagreement over art/entertainment. I appreciate the perspective. And sure, I’d not put many of these near the tier of, say, a Godfather or a Passion of Joan of Arc. Only a few anywhere near an Alien, for that matter.

> That’s why the snap at the end of Avengers: Infinity War was spectacle but didn’t have the emotional impact of a single deer being shot at the beginning of Bambi.

God, truth, and all the more effective a comparison for me because I happened to re-watch Bambi within the last week.

Marvel movies rarely achieve even that lesser connection, maybe a half-dozen times in the thirty-whatever movies.

It's not about "hitting as hard" and I admitted I like, and love, tons of modern films... it's not even an "argument", it's a statement of preference, part of what I, and many other film fans, enjoy is the craft of film, and there was simply more to that before everything went digital, so pre-heavily-digital films are more interesting and impressive, to me and to others who appreciate those factors, all else being equal (though often enough, all else is not equal!)

I simply find film-craft more interesting and impressive, and the constraints to drive more-fun (and sometimes absolutely brilliant) creative choices, before they were ~all shot and edited digitally. It's not about good or bad, exactly, but about an aspect of older films that's now all but gone in modern ones. I also happen to appreciate silent film, and some things about those that were impressive and fun went away with talkies—it's not that the talkies were necessarily worse in some absolute sense, but some potentially-enjoyable qualities of silents took a back seat once talkies took over. If someone had really been into those aspects of cinema, they might have tended to prefer older silents over newer talkies, without necessarily disliking all talkies. Similar story with film vs. digital.

I happen to like the film-craft side of things enough that, for me, it in general makes film-era movies more appealing. That doesn't mean I don't watch and enjoy three dozen or more digital films per year, but I do lose out on some of that aspect of my enjoyment of film, with those. This is most-pronounced in action and "genre" (e.g. sci fi) movies.

Like, I watch the modern US Godzilla (I happen to think the first one in this US series is pretty good!) and the action's... fine, nothing particularly wrong with it, but I'm marveling at none of it, just zero. I watch 1954 Godzilla, or Return of Godzilla (1984) and sure, the action's mostly less-convincing (though some of those room-collapse shots in the '54 movie...) but it's also far more interesting.

> Even before autotune, there was no shortage of ways to make terrible music.

Did anyone claim there weren't absolute mountains of bad music in any age? Of course there were, most of anything is bad. Disliking autotune and related tech's effects on music (e.g. visual vs. by-ear editing) doesn't mean claiming that music lacking it is necessarily not-bad.

I guess but has anyone really replicated peak Led Zeppelin or “wish you were here”?

Nope.

There is Greta van Fleet, where the lead singer's voice sounds like Robert Plant's voice, and I could imagine Zep was back in business. Unfortunately, the singer hated being compared with Plant and went off in some loser direction.

Zep is still the greatest band ever.

Radiohead

I can easily rattle off movies and music from the last decade

If you have recommendations for good recent drama, I'm interested to hear your suggestions. Let's limit it to interpersonal conflict, by which I mean a movie that follows multiple persons and multiple viewpoints. Think Closer or Dead Poets Society, not Lady Bird or Juno.

You know, it hadn’t occurred to me how rare that very-narrow sort of film is. I can easily come up with ones focused on a single character, or different sorts of films with multiple perspectives, but that? The only recent stuff I can think of is from Wes Anderson, though even that’s not a close match, if I’m reading your request correctly.

I certainly enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel, but I remember it more as an absurdist exposition rather than a gripping drama. I may be misremembering though. The only other movie I have seen from him is Moonrise Kingdom, so there's a lot left to explore. Thanks for the recommendation!

Maybe you're right that my request is quite narrow. I didn't mean it to be, but it occurred to me that many stories seem to fall back on the rather formulaic "one person's struggle against the world", so my intention was to specifically ask for movies outside of that formula. I could probably have phrased it better than I did.

Pretty much anything on Apple TV is super high quality and worth watching, IMO. Since this is HN, For All Mankind is worth checking out.

I like aviation movies. Consider:

1. The Blue Max

2. Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines

The special effects in them were - they built flying replicas of the airplanes used in the films! Can you imagine that happening today?

Two great and very special movies. Both made in the 1960s.

A special mention for Battle of Britain - they didn't build replicas, but dredged up the last remaining flying Me-109s and Spits and, well, seeing and hearing them fly is glorious.

Battle of Britain isn't the best from a narrative perspective, but damn is it a fun watch anyway.

My other favorite air war movies I've made it to so far are Twelve O'Clock High with its beautiful flying fortresses (they belly landed one of them! For the movie! For real!), extremely well-integrated war footage, and clear action (compare to the muddled, ugly mess that is The Dambusters); and Wings—how, how on Earth did they get such good aerial photography that early? And the miniature work isn't bad, either.

I've somehow heard of neither of your first two mentions, but will be checking them both out soon.

> I've somehow heard of neither of your first two mentions, but will be checking them both out soon.

I envy you! I wish I could see them again for the first time!

Based on your remarks, I bet you would love "The War Lover", 1963. They used 3 real B-17s for the movie. Very realistic. I know this because my dad flew 32 missions in a B-17, and was assigned by the Air Force to them as a consultant for accuracy for the movie. He made the mission map used in the briefing.

He was also responsible for the "cutting the grass sequence". The director was just going to use models because it was too dangerous, but my dad showed them how to do it safely. The sequence is just terrific. The AF was mad at him for recommending it, but the sequence was very popular with the critics and he was forgiven.

P.S. How to do it safely: do it at dawn when the air is still. Station people at various locations around the flight path in continuous communication with the pilot telling him his altitude. Fly the route again and again, each time slightly lower.

The War Lover made its way onto my to-watch list a few months back! I’ll bump it up a bit and keep an eye out for that sequence, thanks for sharing the story.

Martin Caidin wrote an entire book about the B-17's in that movie: "Everything But The Flak".

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-But-Flak-Martin-Caidin/dp/...

What about The Dambusters? One of my favorites. Not only aviation but also hacking (inventing a bouncing bomb to overcome the dam defenses).

I've seen documentaries on the dam busters, but not the flick. I should check it out.

> Autotune is for whippersnappers.

Yeah, WTF is up with that. It's autotune everywhere now. It was originally intended for some limited uses and it wasn't supposed to be obvious. And now it's obviously everywhere. I suspect it's going to make it easier for AI vocalists to take over.

You can thank T-Pain for it [1], but the hilarious thing is he can actually sing [2] unlike most of the others using it.

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/06/t-pain-usher-ruined...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ck0vJBygo

Almost every popular artist can sing far better than the average person. It's not a question of skill or talent, it's a question of perfect or imperfect.

The hype train does not allow for imperfection, nor does it stop for anything that isn't better than human.

AFAIK lots of new remasters of classic albums are auto-tuning the vocals as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/1bfxj2d/w...

I avoid the remasters.

With a few notable exceptions, today musicians need to be good looking in order to be marketable. It's much easier to take a beautiful or handsome model who doesn't have musical talent and use technology to manufacture a musician out of them, than it is to take a homely but talented musician and manufacture a star out of them.

And under 30.

I jest but let’s not say “musicians” need to be good looking but maybe in most cases “chart topping” musicians.

It’s always been a young persons game - at least as far back as the 80s

I’m lazy and didn’t feel like doing the work myself.

https://chatgpt.com/share/681bf3ea-c650-8010-988d-173af745c8...

But these results were based on using ChatGPT’s web search and Python tools and you can verify the citations and the Python code yourself.

Stats for the top 20 artists

Median age: 30 Mean: 30.55 Range: 22-29

I did the same analysis for 20 years ago for this week and the median and the range was 29.5 years old and the range was 18 to 35.

The top 10 20 years before that had a median of 26, a mean of 29.5 and a range between 21-37.

Those numbers aren’t quite as accurate because “We are the World” was #2 and you had a lot of groups back then

Also, they must work alone. It seems a music "artist" these days is only the face of the operation, the composers and stage musicians deserve no mention apparently.

I'm mostly a child of the 90s, and I prefer 70s music too. The music scene of the 80s and 90s was soulless (pun intended), at least when it comes to mainstream cultural presence. When I think of the music of my youth, the terms that come to mind are vapid imaging, bland instrumentation, and unimaginative lyrics. I guess you could say I was old the day I was born :)

The music did not get better with age either; that music is now old enough to enter "classics" radio stations, which means those stations now alternate between nostalgia and nausea for me. The only redeeming quality those songs seem to have is that they can get even worse, as judged by recent covers/remakes of earlier failures (really, how barren must your musical taste be choose to cover Liquido by Narcotic?)

That's not to say that nothing good came from that period; it's just that good music from that time was not successful. I had great fun in the 2000s and 2010s discovering the bands and artists that should have been big in the 90s.

I have no problems with the movies nor the cartoons of my youth though, those are still the best cinema ever produced.

Checkout Rocky&Bullwinkle from the 60's. It was allegedly targeted at kids, but there's a lot of sly adult humor in it. Sort of like the first season of SpongeBob.

Get the old used VHS tapes of it from Ebay, not the DVD. The re-releases of it replaced the music and destroyed it.

The Jetsons is fun to watch, as it predicted a lot of the gadgets we actually have today.

So much great dance music from the 80s. Also, David friggin Bowie!

> Grooming and style: you can, nonetheless, choose to date yourself with your clothing and overall presentation, or not.

One thing I admittedly do is stay clean shaven and bald so the gray hair and receding hairline don’t show. But I’ve had the latter since I was in my mid 20s.

I had a (White) former manager tell me years ago that no one can tell how old Black guys are that are clean shaven. I never realized that.

The old joke is that it’s the lotion…

https://youtu.be/RiH-_ZUILk0?si=3I68rm8P35sIy3ke

I have not seen a clip of a young Bill Burr in ages! Now that he is bald, he is my doppelgänger.

Viktor Frankl also claimed that staying clean-shaven made you look younger, and attributed it as one factor in his survival of the concentration camps. He used a piece of broken glass to shave.

Shaving can definitely help you stay younger looking, but there's also something to be said for the silver fox look. No question I get more attention from women today than when I was 20. Take good care of your body and skin and you can be good looking at any age.

I am married - I only need the attention of one woman…

But when I don’t keep my hair bald. I look more like George Jefferson than George Clooney.

https://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120725/ent/ent2.html

Yeah, going bald definitely helped me, though I think I aged into the look. (I went bald at 21 by mistake; it looked hella weird then).

I didn't like my hair. It didn't grow very long and, because I'm a side sleeper, I would wake up with super compacted hair that was itchy. I also didn't like paying to wait 30 minutes to make small talk with barbers about shit I didn't care about. Mach 3 all the way.

I _have_ to have a lotion routine. Otherwise my skin will turn dry and gray and feel rough and generally horrible.

At the moment, I use Palmer's shea butter body oil while I'm still wet from the shower, then I top it off with Palmer's coconut butter formula. I used to make my own shea butter lotion, but it was a fair amount of work and takes a while to dissolve into my skin.

> Grooming and style: you can, nonetheless, choose to date yourself with your clothing and overall presentation, or not. This can be overdone and make you stand out “trying too hard” not to be old. But there’s a world of middle ground.

for the longest time, I've resisted the zoomers' attempt to bring back 90s/early 00s fashion with oversized shirts and baggy pants, hopelessly clinging to my millennial sensibilities (I like my fitted shirts and skinny jeans, dammit). then one day I just said screw it and bought new oversized shirt and it kinda grew on me.

I'm not going full zuckerberg with the gold chain and whatnot, though.

I’m GenX and I hate that this style is coming back, even though I wore my share of baggy pants. It’s not really even the same style, it’s just warped through a second distillation via capitalism and I don’t think it looks that great.

You know what, I'm gonna say it: skinny jeans were never flattering, especially so for men. Even worse when they were low-rise. You're telling me I get to look like I'm shorter, fatter, and have skinny little chicken legs? Well... don't sign me up.

I'm very pleased that flares and high(er)-rise pants are coming back, kinda. With worse materials, unfortunately. Now if only we can have colors that aren't some variation of gray or blue...

Well, you have to dress for your figure. Me, I make fitted jeans sing, but I wear boots with stacked heels and I've got legs for days, and even in my forties still can just about put my heels behind my head. (And I wear button shirts which I tuck in, because I am a grownup...or wear untucked and unbuttoned, open over a black or gray strappy undershirt, never white. Or tie around my waist, if it's really hot.)

But I can't wear cargo shorts to save my life! It's all about figuring what works for you and how to make the most of it, you know?

I'll go on wearing clothes that fit, thanks. Eventually the children will come around. In the meantime it's hardly as if they aren't noticing all the gray in my hair, so why act the fool by behaving as if I didn't? And clothes that fit look good.

> Interests: do you mostly enjoy media and activities particular to a time when you were younger, or do you have a penchant for novelty despite your age?

I have been into hip hop and rap since the mid 80s. I was a fitness instructor until 2012 right before I turned 40 and had to keep up with modern music of all types depending on the audience.

I’m not one of those that think all new music sucks since I’ve seen the evolution over three decades, I do still recognize the new generation that actually has talent - can flow with the music, have clever turns of phrases, not overproduced, etc. My 22 year old (step)son shares his music playlist with me and pick out songs out of his list and add to mine just so I can relate to him.

As far as interests go, I like old and new music all the same.

I try to stay current with what's charging, even though I don't like mainstream media much. So much music these days trends on social media, which I no longer participate in, but Apple Music does a good job of tracking what's hot.

I'm 55 this year.

Getting junk mail from the AARP made me feel old. Especially when I opened it, saw the free trunk organizer and discounts and thought that's a pretty good deal.

It's weird for me to think that I was born 25 years after WWII and today, 25 years ago was 2000. A year ain't what it used to be.

Wait till you realize the commercials for the shows you watch are all for old people medical problems.

Just watching something where you get commercials already dates you. ;)

Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, etc., run commercials.

People on HN experience ads? WHAT!?!

Watch a major network like CBS on a Sunday morning. All they advertise are housewares, home decor, other old people shows and age-related & vanity drugs.

The senior center a mile away from me has weekly Scrabble afternoons! I was delighted to find out about that after being shocked to know that I'm eligible for membership.

The one near me is called the "50+ center".

i'm 55 in 10 days. I get a discount at the golf course!

You can likely join your neighbourhood seniors org too!

On the plus side, we were born in what I think was the greatest time to be born. Kids in the 70’s, teens in the 80’s, and were in our 20’s for the 90’s. We knew the world before computers were common and watched (or helped) network the planet.

> Getting junk mail from the AARP made me feel old.

Not only have I been getting AARP mail since I was 25, but you can actually join at any age. It's worth considering even for the relatively youthful.

I never, still don't, really feel like I'm old or even getting old. Yet somehow, at some point, I started referring to twenty somethings as kids. Not sure exactly how I reconcile the two, but maybe learning to accept our own inconsistencies is another part of this whole not getting old thing.

> Yet somehow, at some point, I started referring to twenty somethings as kids.

I never started doing it intentionally but at some point I noticed they are all about self confidence while in reality they have no knowledge or experience. Which can be catastrophic when you entrust them with something important. That's when I started calling them kids.

There are definitely days where you notice it suddenly, even if the buildup was gradual.

I'm younger than you, but recent years as the gen Z kids come up there have been more of these moments accepting that my cohort is increasingly less of the star of the show.

I knew I was getting old when shop assistants started calling me ‘sir’.

I ask for the old fart discount.

Any decent headline can be accused of being clickbait. The entire point is to get the reader interested.

I personally try to avoid attempting to manipulate interest and instead capture existing interest. In this framing, clickbait is something headlines can be accused of.

active male who's now 51; I disagree a bit about it "sneaking up" - at least for me. I noticed a massive decline in just a year or two, where I started commenting "I feel old" a lot more.

The delta isn't so different, but there are lots of things where I feel an inflection from "improving" to "flat or declining" and that is extremely noticeable. To me that's what aging is, and it happens FAST.

A couple years ago I renewed my passport. When the new passport came in and I compared the picture page of both, I went through a similar feeling (basically comparing my 20YO to my 30YO) noticing the bags under my eyes getting darker and just general expression looking more docile. After having my first born, my hair began to gray fairly rapidly (thankfully no balding yet) and when I look in the mirror, sometimes, it just feels odd.

It gets worse every time you renew it.

I considered myself old when I hit 30 and it’s been pretty liberating

same, and i'm 57 now but feel no sense of age

Wait until the health issues hit.

>Does anyone really expect to just wake up one morning and say to themselves, "OMG, I'm old today"?

That pretty much describes my 30th birthday. It's the "end of an era" aspect of it that makes it hit harder than any one before or since.

> geez, who is that old guy looking back at me?

Relevant Weezer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gkroIXktjgE

You know you're old when the pop music you loved decades ago is played in the supermarket. For me that hearing Weezer over the supermarket PA whilst browsing aisle 7 last year.

Honestly, the one thing I hope to hold onto is never wondering what's wrong with kids these days.

We've seen too many generations asking that question for me to conclude that there is anything wrong with them. There's just a lot of ways to be human, and they're exploring a different channel than my generation did.

If you’re in tech I’d argue you have a moral responsibility to be curious about what’s wrong with kids these days.

Specifically, the research that went into the book The Anxious Generation.

That's kind of what I mean. Every generation thinks this new tech is ruining kids: we thought it for radio, we thought it for television. Hell, we thought it for writing:

"O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."

I'm sure there are different stressors and challenges on young people that I didn't experience at their age, but "what's wrong with" is immediately the wrong framing. It flies in the face of a history of human adaptation to their environment. The notion that the newest batch of challenges is different, fundamentally, from previous ones is the kind of thinking that leads people to hold up THESE ARE THE END TIMES signs in the streets generation after generation for thousands of years.

(Having a couple teenagers in my life: the challenges they experience are special and different from what I experienced, but mine were different from my parents and their parents lived through one or two world wars).

I think you can be aware of the history going from newspapers to radio to portable explicit music, and TV, and still see that a kid having a smartphone truly might be something worse than what came before. As in this time it really is different.

When I was a kid I had Saturday morning cartoons, but was bored a lot. Video games existed, but you got bored of those fast and rarely got new ones. We went outside a lot. Kids these days (as well as adults) have access to 24/7 dopamine hits. That doesn't mean we're in the end times, but I don't think humans were meant to live in our own curated digital bubbles. People are now less used to socializing in person and it seems to be causing exacerbated feelings of loneliness and depression.

Of course my father complained whenever I wasn't hard at work, but the difference seems to be the magnitude of the modern problem. At times I think humanity is rapidly evolving into something else and the physical bodies we have can't keep up. I can't imagine the next thousand years of progress.

Every time is different. Worse, I'll have to see.

What I'll be surprised by is if kids can survive the black death and the second World War and not a smartphone in their pocket.

The smartphone in their pocket connects them to services designed by psychologists to keep them engaged for as long as possible. I can't think of a historic analogue.

Valid points. I will say though that this new era of instant gratification: smartphones, streaming services, engaging/addicting video games...etc is leading to large amounts of people choosing to not have kids. Heck, forget the having kids...people aren't even dating at the same levels as historical norms it would seem. Birth rates are below the replacement level in many countries already and that is concerning. Maybe we just drop back to older population levels after a sharp adjustment period.

Technology development appears to follow an exponential curve while human psychological development has remained relatively static.

It is entirely possible that without equivalent biological change, the attack upon the human spirit by various forms of media will become critical and at some point the kids really will not be alright.

What other explanation is there for the evidence we have that teenage girls in many counties across the globe report being more anxious and depressed and also are admitted into emergency services for self harm at a higher and increasing rate each year with an inflection point in 2012 specifically?

What is the significance of 2012?

Facebook acquired Instagram.

This is a pretty underrated comment. Yeah we've had world wars and stuff, but never some kind of service that makes young women hate themselves to such a degree. In my day they had the teen magazines, but not the 24/7 feed of polished celebrity faces and people with filters and stuff.

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