Rov_Scam
2hr ago
There's also Kanopy, which has the added advantage of being free to a point.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
If you seriously think that third world immigration is doing the kind of damage you're suggesting then I have some swampland in New Jersey that's for sale. Maybe you should consider moving to Pittsburgh? Only 4% of the metro population is foreign-born, compared to 14% nationwide and over 30% in places like New York City. We're also about 85% white, almost all non-Hispanic. I love my hometown, and the cost of living is low, but the population has been flat for a while, and before that it was actively declining. If you had been here 20 years ago I could have showed you working-class neighborhoods with high crime rates filled with drugged-out white trash. One neighborhood that looked like it was on the brink of collapse only turned around after the area's modest Hispanic population decided to settle there and revitalize the business district. The other one got significantly better once Bhutanese refugees moved to the area, though that area is still bad, and still 70% white.
Of course, none of these areas are that bad, and everywhere is full of people with names that end in vowels. If you want to see some real shittiness we need to go just down the road to West Virginia. And no, I'm not going to take you to hillbilly country, which would be too easy. I'll instead show you actual industrialized areas full of white Anglos that are shittier than anything you'll find in the Pittsburgh region. Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel ran 9 mills in the Ohio Valley—Follansbee, WV; Mingo Junction, OH; Steubenville, OH; Martin's Ferry, OH; Wheeling, WV; Beech Bottom, WV; LaBelle, WV; Yorkville, OH; and Benwood, WV. There was also a huge mill at Weirton, and several smaller facilities. Most of that is gone now, but the area is significantly shittier than Pittsburgh.
But that's the wealthier part of West Virginia. If we keep going south, I can show you Chemical Valley, which is even whiter and more Anglo than the Panhandle, and the chemical plants are still in production, though Kaiser Aluminum at Ravenswood closed a long time ago, and Ormet closed in 2013. Jamie Oliver filmed a show in Huntington after it was dubbed the fattest city in the US, and it also probably has more fentanyl addicts than any city in the US. Just remember that if you buy a house there not to leave anything in the yard, like grills or lawn furniture or even children's toys, because they'll steal anything that isn't under lock and key. I can assure you that this area is free from the negative influence of dirty third-world immigrants, though.
This is one of the areas where the current state of the market is objectively worse than in the pre-internet era. I remember when I was in college (the internet existed but hadn't subsumed everything) it seemed like every town had a video store that opened when the VCR came out in the 1980s, ordered every title that was available, and never threw anything out. The result was that you had independent shops whose archives included pretty much everything that was ever released on video. Sure, it might not be on DVD, and the tape might be in bad shape from having been watched 4 million times, but at least it was available. I remember they had a 5 catalog rentals for $5 deal, and the rentals were for a week, so it was kind of a weekly ritual to rent 5 movies every week whether I planned on watching them or not. They also had a byzantine setup that encouraged browsing because you never knew where you'd find anything, though they had a catalog you could consult. The new releases were obviously segregated, and they had the normal categories (comedy, drama, etc.), but the AFI 100 movies had their own section, as did "Black and White Classics", and there was something called the Video Vault that could have anything. I believe there was even a small LBGT section, definitely odd for a small town store in the mid 2000s.
They closed in 2007, well before streaming. I think it was a combination of OG Netflix and Redbox. I worked at a video store in high school, and 90% of our sales were newer releases, though the one I worked at didn't have much of an archive. It was part of a grocery store, and it became easier for the grocery stores to just put a Redbox machine in the lobby that would cover the dozen or so titles that actually made money. Netflix didn't make sense for new releases at the time, since you had to wait and could be on a list, but for movie buffs who would just put a hundred movies in the queue and watch whatever Netflix sent them, it was perfectly fine and didn't require as much effort. My roommate and I got the Blockbuster equivalent circa 2008 and I remember he spent an afternoon just inputting the entire 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list in, and we'd watch whatever came in. That was probably the peak of movie availability since they really did have close to everything you could think of, unless it was really obscure.
As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.
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