8 ms·

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 gett

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?

WalterBright 1y ago
> 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.
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  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.
  - mrmuagi 1y ago
    And "modern" TVs have motion smoothing which make so many things look so synthetic and dizzying.
    - horacemorace 1y ago
      We’ve got the minority opinion; most don’t even notice. I make a point to ask whenever around others near one.
    - nunez 1y ago
      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.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    On the other hand a surprising amount of modern movies are still filmed on kodak movie film then scanned for digital distribution.
  - drewcoo 1y ago
    > 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.
  - betterThanTexas 1y ago
    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.
    - layer8 1y ago
      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.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  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.
  - unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
    > 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.
    - 1y ago
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  > 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.
  - mtalantikite 1y ago
    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-music-auto-tune-depression-netflix-this-is-pop 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=CIjXUg1s5gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ck0vJBygo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ck0vJBygo
    - BizarroLand 1y ago
      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.
  - WWLink 1y ago
    AFAIK lots of new remasters of classic albums are auto-tuning the vocals as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/1bfxj2d/why_do_so_many_recent_remixesremasters_of_classic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/1bfxj2d/w...
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      I avoid the remasters.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    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.
- tremon 1y ago
  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.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    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.
  - nunez 1y ago
    So much great dance music from the 80s. Also, David friggin Bowie!
scarface_74 1y ago
> 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 https://youtu.be/RiH-_ZUILk0?si=3I68rm8P35sIy3ke
- flatline 1y ago
  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.
- poulsbohemian 1y ago
  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.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    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 https://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120725/ent/ent2.html
- nunez 1y ago
  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.
englishspot 1y ago
> 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.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  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.
- const_cast 1y ago
  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...
  - throwanem 1y ago
    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?
- throwanem 1y ago
scarface_74 1y ago
> 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.
nunez 1y ago
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.

WalterBright 1y ago

> 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.

readthenotes1 1y ago
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.
- mrmuagi 1y ago
  And "modern" TVs have motion smoothing which make so many things look so synthetic and dizzying.
  - horacemorace 1y ago
    We’ve got the minority opinion; most don’t even notice. I make a point to ask whenever around others near one.
  - nunez 1y ago
    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.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  On the other hand a surprising amount of modern movies are still filmed on kodak movie film then scanned for digital distribution.
- drewcoo 1y ago
  > 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.
- betterThanTexas 1y ago
  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.
  - layer8 1y ago
    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.
alabastervlog 1y ago
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.
- unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
  > 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.
  - 1y ago
UncleOxidant 1y ago
> 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.
- mtalantikite 1y ago
  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-music-auto-tune-depression-netflix-this-is-pop 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=CIjXUg1s5gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ck0vJBygo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ck0vJBygo
  - BizarroLand 1y ago
    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.
- WWLink 1y ago
  AFAIK lots of new remasters of classic albums are auto-tuning the vocals as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/1bfxj2d/why_do_so_many_recent_remixesremasters_of_classic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/1bfxj2d/w...
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    I avoid the remasters.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  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.
tremon 1y ago
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.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  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.
- nunez 1y ago
  So much great dance music from the 80s. Also, David friggin Bowie!

scarface_74 1y ago

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

flatline 1y ago
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.
poulsbohemian 1y ago
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.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  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 https://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120725/ent/ent2.html
nunez 1y ago
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.

englishspot 1y ago

> 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.

spacemadness 1y ago
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.
const_cast 1y ago
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...
- throwanem 1y ago
  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?
throwanem 1y ago

scarface_74 1y ago

> 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.

nunez 1y ago

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.