It can be a movie, a scientific discovery, food, whatever
The polio vaccine.
Bluetooth earbuds. Took me the longest time to buy a pair. Now I have them all the time.
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.
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.
And then Tears of the Kingdom in turn lived up to the hype set for it. So great
Yep, every time someone mentions how long it’s been out, it surprises me again. It still ‘Nintendo’s brand new console’ to me.
- The Lord of the Rings trilogy
- The Harry Potter books and films
The Wire. It really is the greatest TV show ever made like people say it is.
Better Call Saul. I just finished the series a few days ago and I thought it was amazing. At the moment I believe it’s actually better than Breaking Bad so I’m gonna have to go and watch that next to compare.
Milk.
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.
SSD.
It is way way faster than HDD.
I can’t use HDD-only PC anymore.Maybe a hot take, but Cyberpunk 2077. I didn’t experience most of the bugs people complained about and I loved almost everything about the game and world. It’s also only gotten better as they’ve patched it.
I know I was kinda blinded by the potential early on, bu the world is the most ambitious ever created in a video game. The fact that all of the missions use it at face value is really crazy IMO. The game is groundbreaking for that alone.
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 anything 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. Awesome, awesome device.
Smartphones.