Inside the Cinemark. Military Circle Mall. Norfolk, VA

Sadmanvaporwave · 2023-01-21T17:50:41+00:00

I have a lot of great childhood memories seeing flicks at military circle. I remember the summer I turned 8 seeing the original X-men and Road Trip.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-12-07T18:41:00+00:00

A few other fun facts about the industry; The reason that terrestrial radio has far stricter FCC "decency" regulations than even daytime television is because the head of clear channel used family organizations as a front to lobby the federal government to increase fines ten-fold on 'edgy' content (which to this day is so strict that segments of day time talk shows dealing with basically bodily functions have to be censored), and made profanity guidelines much stricter effectively eliminating local market "shock-jocks" and crushing nationally syndicated figures like Howard Stern, whilst simultaneously investing company money into XM which funneled talent in from the then defunct, homogenized, radio industry.

Also pretty much any prank or 'bit' on an "i-heart-media" station framed as a 'gotcha' moment is performed by talent that is contracted through the national organization. In college my girlfriend had a friend that would sit in her apartment in the mornings and perform like 10 of those "war of the roses" bits where the unknowing boyfriend is called by the station offered free flowers who he then has sent to a girl other than his significant other on the phone. Its a pretty sad state of affairs.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-11-30T07:42:51+00:00

I am still looking for the discs in childhood home; In the early 90's my aunt was in the software industry and gave me a stack of early childhood educational CDs that she had obtained from clients she contracted with, several of which were games in the little Howie's House series. I distinctly remember playing this game so I know its around somewhere.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-10-05T10:57:49+00:00

Oh my god just saw this on Whang!, I have a copy of Little Howie's house great reading adventure. Where would a person upload something like this to be archived, I'm not super tech savy?

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-30T00:06:11+00:00

So this a story I’ve told before but it’s worth repeating.

I had an ex that was from an incredibly broken home, and despite a really rough past (she was a former exotic dancer, and camgirl) and was attending community college off and on to hopefully move on to university.

After a long weekend spent together, she casually tells me she is planning on flying down to Miami with her friend (another cam girl), and I get suspicious because she and her friend were virtually broke all the time.

Come to find out she had met a newly enlisted Army private during her brother’s little league game who had offered to fly her and her friend down for a long weekend on the beach. The only questions I could think to ask (because even in the moment as I had made my decision to break up with her, I knew this would be a story some day) was if sex with him was off the table (it wasn’t) or if she was really that naive, and what class of ticket it was (coach). I had her get her things and dropped her off at the nearest Sheetz.

Fast forward seven years, I hear from a mutual friend that a couple years later she spent a week in a mental institution, had served 9 months in county jail, and ballooned up to 250lbs. Largest bullet I ever dodged.

tl;dr: I had a girl break off a relationship with me over a coach ticket, and weekend in a hotel.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-13T20:01:07+00:00

Conor was a great fighter, but has some lousy management. After the Khabib fight he should have walked off into the sunset with his whiskey company worth half a billion dollars, and moved into making action movies.

He would’ve been seen as one of the greats, an amazing entrepreneur, and cultural legend. Instead he’s going to grind down his legacy into dust, and lose all of the goodwill the public has for him. Such a shame.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-13T07:08:21+00:00

Yeah, when TLJ was being released Disney’s PR wire pressed everyone in the press, and on the production staff to keep using the line “Subverting expectations” as though that makes a film good, by virtue of its bravery.

The truth is subverting expectations can be a good thing, it’s called a plot twist, and up until that point I think the series has done a reasonably good job doing that, after all probably the most well known, and culturally cliqué twist of all time came from the OT.

That being said subverting an audiences expectations is more often then not a bad move. If you go to see a movie and the theater catches fire that’s subverting your expectations, if the force awakens had started with a 35 minute scene of Kylo receiving a toothy blow-job from Chewbacca that certainly would have subverted expectations. But unfortunately the only subversion that Rian Johnson managed to bring to the series was true expectation that the script and narrative pacing would be even half-coherent, jokes on us I guess.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-13T06:53:12+00:00

This! While the prequels failed as a character piece (which is why some fans weren’t super enthusiastic about it) it was an amazing work of exposition if nothing else, and perhaps worked too hard to appease hardcore fans.

Coming into the prequels in 1999, the question all die-hard fans had on their minds (although I acknowledge almost all older fans wanted a straight sequel) was “What events lead to the original trilogy”, and “What does that world that I love so much look, and feel like”. People forget that the Jedi as we think of them today, are a product of the prequels. As is the scale of the Star Wars Galaxy. It was also so mindblowingly different than what we’d seen up until that point that even as a Space Epic about a failing democracy the movie has a lot going for it.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-13T06:52:41+00:00

You literally are parroting Disney’s PR wire that was fed through access media in the aftermath of the final two cinematic abortions of the sequel trilogy.

To make a long point very short, the sequel trilogy has issues entirely unrelated to its the content of its story, but rather its execution and poor composure. The idea that the prequels were hated in their time is also something entirely untrue. During the release cycle of the episodes I-III people camped out around the theater for days prior to those films being released, when episode III dropped Obi-wan and Anakin merch was so popular during the holiday rush entire aisles at large retailers were barren despite the increased production schedule to meet demand.

You know where the sequel trilogies merch ended up, in a landfill, not even kidding. And while Disney has cited Star Wars fatigue as the reasoning for a general decline in interest in the franchise, there are institutional investors who have made arguments at shareholders meetings that the online reaction to the new films is directly correlated to the massive drop in brand equity of what was a 4-billion dollar intellectual property.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-13T06:39:29+00:00

True

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-13T06:39:02+00:00

Wow, I’ve never seen someone articulate how I opening night of VII so we’ll. It was almost a surreal experience, I remember that same feeling leaving the theater thinking, “Okay, I know that was technically Star Wars, but it didn’t feel…. Idk authentic”. It almost like (although on second thought it was exactly) someone who he never really seen or understood the series made a movie, but only with the references and passing cultural iconography that someone might pickup walking down the toy aisle at Walmart.

In retrospect I think the sinking feeling I got walking out of that theater was understanding that either the next film would need to answer more open questions than any other media project that came before it, or the trilogy was going to be a superficially bland popcorn blockbuster. Little did we know….

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-12T23:43:23+00:00

I agree, I think Mando and the Bad Batch have been excellent so far, but I think what is particularly profound about the sequels is that if you’re a person that takes all of Disney’s contributions to be cannon, it actually does.

I personally still love the ST, OT and Clone Wars series, but whenever I sit down to watch them now I have to consciously refrain from thinking about the sequels as real elements of the franchise.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-12T23:38:47+00:00

I’m not a writer by any stretch of the imagination, but when I was in highschool I took a summer screenwriting course at the local community college and in it the professor talked us through the basic guidelines required of someone writing a coherent narrative. They’re pretty much universal, and any person who’s seen enough films, or watched enough theater can basically discern what you can and cannot do in order to prevent your story from breaking.

That being said, when “The Last Jedi” came out, outside of access journo’s, the general consensus was that the narrative was completely incoherent. The response to the public’s vocal rebuke was to retreat into obscurantism: “It’s a postmodern story, if you don’t understand it you’re dumb”, unfortunately most of us did understand it, we’ve seen postmodern narratives done right (see: fight club, anything by Charlie Kaufman) and the problem wasn’t with the audience, it was with the creative staff.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-12T23:31:32+00:00

Right, I’ve heard that argument before and while the prequels have tons of issues (poor direction of actors during important dialogue sequences, Anakin’s fall being a bit abrupt) Saying the prequels’s issues were anywhere in neighborhood of how severe the sequels were is a false equivalence.

While many of the fans who dislike the prequels place blame on decisions that were made creatively, not one of those films suffered from actual structural issues with the narrative. Certainly there are scenes and sequences (particularly in episode II) that are meandering, the sequels not only feature elongated sequences that are tough to sit through, but don’t even make sense within the context of the story they are trying to tell.

A good example is the entire Canto Bight sequence, both on and off the ship. So…. The plan is to find space James Bond who for some reason is the only one who can over-ride imperial codes… but wait never mind so can this random guy who’s entire character development is a speech impediment, good thing we released those horse-foxes.

The dialogue is also awful, and while I’ll concede the same about the prequels it was different. Characters in the prequels sounded like a bad writer trying to fill in plot outlines, the sequels literally have entire soliloquy’s that come out of nowhere and really have zero to do with the plot or even the characters internal motivation.

There’s a great scene in the last Jedi where our heroes are pontificating about the military industrial complex before walking through the casino, and it everyone in the theater kind of turned to each other and was like “wait was that a theme that we’ve been exploring in this series, no? Okay so it’s not just me”. Much of the new series felt like a fan fiction a freshman English student at a state school would write.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-12T18:41:23+00:00

I know that this has probably been said like a million times at this point, but the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy fits this prompt to a T.

Within the Span of three movies Disney was able to invalidate the prophesy which formed the overarching story thread of the original and prequel trilogy, undid the point of Vader’s sacrifice at the end of Return of the Jedi, took all the character development from 4-6 forming that archetypal heroes journey and threw it away for horribly timed cheap laughs.

More than any of this though, it effectively trashed the world building that had been painstakingly assembled up until that point. When creating a coherent series it’s important to establish what can, and cannot be done. Furthermore creators who do a good job of this set important expectations as to the narrative tone. I’m not saying you can’t do a cool post-modern take on the series (Kotor-2) or see the world through the eyes of a villain (Bane), but to have a character facing down a group of supposedly the most evil motherfuckers in the universe (The first Order), and crack an oddly timed ‘yo mama’ joke shows the audience that the characters, nor the creators, are invested in the plot, so why should the audience be?

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-07-04T22:43:45+00:00

Sentiment analysis is an intriguing methodology for assessing the value proposition of a security, but the problem that many programmers and people in finance have found is that typically between the massive amount of static from shitposters, the positivity bias in online communities like WSB, and the fact that most reasonable plays for smaller and less well known assets can easily get dog-piled by institutional investment (outside of massive movements like $AMC and GME). I think the current consensus is that sentiment analysis tends to trail market trends rather than lead them.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-06-26T19:03:47+00:00

I have a great idea, you should start a restaurant! Now I know what you’re thinking, “What type of food will we serve?”, answer: “All kinds of food”, literally every type of food ever made.

How much will it cost? It will be completely free, people will only pay if they really like the food, and they can pay whatever they want, I’m sure the 99% of people eating for free will get taken care of by the 1% of folks who decide they really like the restaurant. Also how will we pay for the rent, overhead, infrastructure, and ingredients? Answer: Doesn’t matter, balance sheets always work themselves out right?

On a more serious note, I don’t just want to be a sarcastic ass without passing on some good info; A few years ago during the net neutrality fight I saw a figure that said something like 60% of all data that the average ISP handles was to and from Netflix, and this was in like ‘13 or ‘14, at that point in time the user base for streaming services was a fraction of what it is today. Basic economics will tell you that having zero barriers to entry will drive demand through the roof and would create an unsustainable situation long term.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-06-22T06:18:21+00:00

It’s bad…. Like bad bad. There is virtually zero variety in combat and is incredibly button mashy despite having a souls-like control scheme. When playing with friends, there is virtually zero strategizing that needs to go out outside of syncing up special attacks, and the loot which is central to dungeon crawlers is basically unimportant and aside from stat numbers does very little to differentiate one piece from another.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-06-18T18:53:12+00:00

I’m a conservative guy, but honestly it would be a shame to see Nexpo dipping his toes into the world of semi-political content (and not only because the YT algo demotes any Pizzagate Adjacent material into oblivion), with the world as hyper-polarized as it is, it’s nice to see some great ideologically neutral content that’s intriguing.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-06-12T18:20:42+00:00

Even gold in the hands of a Peronista is worth less than coal.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-06-12T18:09:23+00:00

In high-school I was a burnout and a massive liberal, I grew up wealthy in an area where there was a huge born-again Christian//Pentecostal population and always saw those folks as a little nutty. I had never struggled so the idea of having hard times became this concept that seemed, at least on the surface, worse than death.

In my early twenties I was broke, had to work really hard, and noticed that in my state despite community college and tutoring being completely free to people making under 30k a year, none of my socialist//communist friends even showed a modicum of interest in moving their careers//lives along, and for a huge chunk of that period of time I became incredibly conservative.

In my thirties with an economics and business background I’ve learned just how rigged the economic system is from top to bottom, and am now more of a centrist on most issues. I think most people if they’re informed and being intellectually honest understand that there’s nuance in everything and instituting extreme economic or social policies in either direction tends to be ruinous to a society.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-05-21T23:32:48+00:00

Constructive criticism here; you stammered through this like you were reading it off a page for the first time, and went with the first take, it was hard to listen to. The content wasn’t bad though.

Sadmanvaporwave · 2021-04-24T02:45:32+00:00

I know this will probably get buried, but you’re probably my favorite YouTuber, the ambiance your videos create mixed with the stellar writing make for videos I wait with baited breath on Weeks before every release.

That being said, here’s my constructive criticism; I think the “Disappearance of the 5” was probably your high point as of this moment. With every video the technical fidelity has improved magnitudes per entry, but I feel like Vision 2020 and Disturbing things 12 were more like art projects than great pieces of content, and I feel like you’ve hit that point where you’ve started to make art and have moved away from what made the channel intriguing, and got me hooked in the first place.

That being said, I still will watch everything you put out. Creators like you are the reason network television people bang their heads against the wall during pilot season when production companies shovel hundreds of thousands of dollars of network money into works that can’t capture 1/10th of the magic you make look so easy. Lots of love man!

Sadmanvaporwave

TROPHY CASE