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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1922 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Do you normally watch movies in one sitting? I'm not really into cinema overall, but I watched The Northman the other day and it took me several sittings even though I liked it, especially the last third or so. Today I started watching Princess Mononoke and I decided to do something else half-way through and finish it tomorrow, even though it's not like I ran out of free time or anything like that. Can't imagine paying for watching either movie in a theater only to get robbed of my Rewind and Pause buttons. I think I'm fairly normal psychologically. I guess it's just a zoomer thing

OK, I'm going to be a boomer about this one - needing a break, needing captions, needing to pause and rewind, these are all signs that your attention span is broken. Rather than avoiding the discomfort of having to pay attention for two consecutive hours without getting to roll something back, you should lean into it, embrace the discomfort, and see the ability to just be present as a new power to develop.

What’s wrong with captions?

They take the viewer's eyes off of the actual visual content of a scene and diminish the need to listen closely to dialogue that is intended to be listened to closely. Try it out with a scene where the actors are speaking in hushed tones - if you turn on captions, do you tend to just read them without changing the way you're listening? If you turn off captions, do you tend to tune your listening to the sort of secretive tones that you would in real life? Different types of immersion impact the experience of content in a meaningful way.

I'm not saying everything needs to be engaged with this way. If I'm flying, the audio quality is going to suck anyway, the visual content is on an iPad, and I just want some entertainment to kill a couple hours, so I'm going to turn captions on. Nonetheless, I think it's a bad habit to get into more generally and feeds into the inclination to divert attention to multiple things instead of just paying attention to one thing.

If you turn off captions, do you tend to tune your listening to the sort of secretive tones that you would in real life?

No, I just end up not understanding what they’re saying and missing key plot points, replacing my immersion with confusion.

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