In your opinion, what is a thing that lived up to the hype it had or still has?
It can be a movie, a scientific discovery, food, whatever
It can be a movie, a scientific discovery, food, whatever
The Nintendo Switch when it came out. I was super hyped and somehow the console even exceeded my expectations.
Playing Breath of the Wild for the first time was amazing and even after 6 years the console still feels modern to me.
Yep, every time someone mentions how long it's been out, it surprises me again. It still 'Nintendo's brand new console' to me.
I feel you. The PS3 is still "last generation" to me and a Core 2 Duo still feels like a powerful new processor.
Or a second gen model of the Switch. I was really hoping they'd announce something at the direct today but nope!
Yeah it's about time for that haha, I'd guess we're still 2 years out or so. I think Covid still has a lot of stuff on delay for a year or three past when one might expect.
To add to that, I’d also say a lot of games on the console lived up to the hype. Mario Odyssey, Metroid Dread, and of course both Zeldas are some of the best games of the past few years.
Bluetooth earbuds. Took me the longest time to buy a pair. Now I have them all the time.
I thought airpods/cordless buds were stupid when they first came out, I thought I would instantly lose the buds. now I can’t live without them.
If they would make it so that the batteries could be replaced and recycled then it would be more sustainable.
Audiophile headphones are my hype good. I have a pair of Sony xm3 noise cancelling, and they're very nice and very useful. I have some nice Jabra earbuds, and they're very convenient and sound pretty good too.
But... Man. Nice headphones with a nice amp and dac, with nice recordings. It's just incomparable in quality. On the bt stuff you get left and right. But on the audiophile stuff you get close, far, left, right, behind, soft, punchy, up, down, and it all sounds even better. And no compression artifacting! No garble, no batteries, no waiting to connect, and they'll last decades as daily drivers and then have replaceable parts even after that.
Also, nice speakers are worth the hype. Just buy real studio monitors like a pair of Yamaha hs8's. You'll never need to upgrade pc speakers ever.
Good sound gear is one of those things where you have no idea the difference it makes until you try it. Particularly if you’re coming from AirPods, etc
I've recently discovered how great the neckband style ones are. So convienient to just always have them around my neck, never have to worry about losing them. Battery life is better than the buds too, I get like a day and a half out of them.
The only problem with them is that ever since I updated to Windows 11, my laptop no longer connects to any Bluetooth devices and absolutely nothing will fix this issue.
But that's hardly the headphones fault, it's this shitty operating system.
Sammmme. I was so against having to charge headphones to listen to them. No idea they would last as long as they did on one charge and my god do they perform well.
I had an extra SATA port on the side of my laptop that resembled a CD-ROM drive. Plugged in new SSD, installed win10, and it was so much faster. The original installation is festering until I finally back up all the data, cause I'm a data hoarder apparently. Doesn't help I used the old drive, now D:\ as storage.
Yep, when I got myself a new pc I was surprised at the speed of the sata ssd. I want to get a NVME SSD but everything is expensive in my country
I got a couple of electric scooters for me and my gf to fuck around on. Ended up selling my car.
Yeah I occasionally hire one of the escooters they have around town. They're a blast. Been thinking about selling my car and just buying my own
How hard are you finding it? My wife and I tried fucking around on our car once but there wasn’t enough room. How are y’all achieving it on a scooter? Any tips you can share?
MRNA vaccines. Not only have they saved millions of lives from COVID, they look like they are going to revolutionize other areas as well. For example, there is a wide-range cancer vaccine under development.
Vaccines. My uncle had Polio as a child and so my Grandmother was still advocating strongly for vaccines before her death at 98. I'm happy to have received my first Shingrix shot last week. It's amazing we can get a poke, with something that's completely gone from the body in a week but we will have T-cells protecting us for a very long time.
Lasers. They seem to have endless uses from playing with cats, scientific measurements, military, construction, heating, cooling, even used for space-based internet communications. There’s so many more uses that I’m not using.
A fucking laser gave me what I still maintain is my weirdest memory ever.
I was in my upstairs bedroom, shining my little handheld laser into the park across the road from my house. Since it was so dark, the laser dot seemed to travel an extreme distance compared to what I was used to during the day, so I was just enjoying pointing it at anything interesting - just random shit like reflective signs, trashcans, anything shiny or metallic.
After about five minutes, I decided to start toying around with the dot on a little sign that was sitting next to a small lake in the middle of the park, when all of a sudden, and I'm not really sure how to explain this, but I'll try; for a split second, the red light from the laser reflected off EVERYTHING in the vicinity for about 700 meters in all directions - all the reflective signs, any water surfaces, all the houses on the other side of the park, car windows, metallic objects, etc. I was so fucking taken aback, that I stopped and tried to contemplate what the hell had just happened. I was wide awake and this happened clear as day right in front of me.
To this day, I've still found no way of explaining how such a weak laser was able to a) reflect so much light off so many (hundreds) of surfaces simultaneously, if only for a fraction of a second, and b) if this is somehow a physical possibility, how perfectly everything in that park, alongside my own positioning from my house, would have had to align for each object to then perfectly - and without losing any luminosity - reflect the light into the next surface hundreds of times.
It's this shit that makes me think that just maybe those 'glitch in the matrix' people are onto something.
EDIT: So I guess to stick to the topic at hand, another use case for lasers is making me question the laws of physics.
The Steam Deck. I thought it was overhyped and it would just be another "sounds great but actually isn't that good" product like the Steam Controller or the Steam Link. Then I got one as a present. Hot damn is that thing amazing.
LeBron. He came out of HS as the "chosen one" and dominated the NBA most of his career. He could have easily have crumbled under the pressure and instead ended up being a top 3 all time player.
Also, no major scandals. Seems like a decent father to his kids, been with the same girl the whole time. No cheating or partying or rumors of shady behavior or other bs.
Linux, the internet, Smartphones and, IMO, in that order. The last two would be incrementally worse without the first one.
PS. I suppose you have to include e=mc^2 as well...
Red Dead Redemption 2 what a game. As a dev myself it's just awesome that there are still people respecting every inch of a video game. The animations, the story, the side activities, the acting, the underlying systems that are nearly prepared for everything. It's just insane. I lived like a hermit in the woods when it came out.
Such a masterpiece. Rockstar came under fire for working people a bit too hard to get this done, but damn the result is breathtaking.
A few years ago I finally saw Goodfellas for the first time. I watch a lot of movies, and I was certainly aware of it when it came out, it’s just one of those movies that I somehow never ended up watching. Of course I loved it and got it on Blu-ray immediately afterwards. But it sounds funny if I ever try to bring it up around anyone, like I’m saying ‘man that classic movie everyone loves, apparently it’s pretty good’.
Just rewatched Goodfellas for the umpteenth time this weekend. I don't normally like rewatching movies, but this is one I can watch over and over.
Minecraft. Still super fun and there are servers for literally everyone (from pure vanilla to factions to semi-anarchy and anarchy)