FTR, even with nice intentions, there's almost nothing you can yell at someone from a window of a car that won't unnerve them, IMO

Growing up in Seattle, my parents called it the "parking strip".

(I should say: ten-hour screenplay, not that there was that much footage or anything)

I mostly enjoyed Jupiter Ascending, but I remember coming out of it and turning to someone I'd seen it with and saying something like "so that felt like it was cut down from what was originally five hours, right?" They looked it up and the conclusion was: more like ten.

I disagree with this thread, but I appreciate the spirit of it.

as it always is, part of the trump problem is that describing his behavior in plain language makes you sound like you should be on a 72 hour hold

(does not help that my first couple of reads of the series were at an age where I would not have picked up on that sort of subtlety)

I've read it multiple times, but it's been 10-15 years at this point. I guess I could see "different voice" -- I don't specifically recall the extent to which Donaldson tries to separate the real world from the fantasy in that way, but I'd believe that he does.

It ... is and it isn't. The series has its share of heroic fantasy action, clever plot bits, and (more occasionally) zippy dialogue, to be sure. But it's also got no shortage of the protagonist characters living in their own heads, which IIRC is largely what the intro chapters are like?

Hmm, sure, whereas before the default sense was "oh that's a neat gadget that will behave as advertised", now it's "oh that would be a neat gadget if it behaves as advertised, but it probably won't"?

I agree with you that there's probably more to it than the bit I outlined; that part just looms larger to me because I mostly stopped getting sent that sort of catalog once I was on my own (though Amazon did send me a hard-copy catalog this year, which was weird, and as you say unfulfilling).

Now if I want the thing I can just have it show up on my doorstep in 24-48 hours, and while occasionally this is fun, I have enough self-preservation instinct to realize that doing it all the time is unsustainable (to say nothing of the disappointments).

I feel like the barrier to acquisition has to have been part of it: during a lot of the age when I was consistently browsing such magazines I couldn't just buy whatever on my own.

Not as much as I would've hoped, but I did eventually get in a couple good sessions of Factorio, which I'd most recently left at the point when I'd need to figure out how to make space work. (now trying to get myself back from Fulgora)

Good fries don't need dipping sauce