It can be a movie, a scientific discovery, food, whatever
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.
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.
Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse
way exceeded the hype
SSD.
It is way way faster than HDD.
I can’t use HDD-only PC anymore.The Steam Deck. Awesome, awesome device.
Tv, The internet, the smallpox vaccine
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.
For me, it could never live up to the hype. But I am glad some people have enjoyed it so much and it has come a hell of a long way since release. I’ve been playing recently but going to wait for the new DLC and restart.
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.
Milk.
- The Lord of the Rings trilogy
- The Harry Potter books and films
Pokémon Go. Like a typical hype you are sceptic at first, try it, see why everyone loves it and then see how the hype cools off again. But for those few weeks in the summer it first came out it was a blast. I met so many new people, the whole atmosphere of walking in a random neighborhood just completely changed.
Tears of the Kingdom. A sequel to a game that swept the floor with all game awards that took 7 years, and it is getting nothing but glowing reviews.
Worth every day of the wait!
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 polio vaccine.
The super mario movie. I went in expecting it to be good, and I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting
I went to see the original Pirates Of The Caribbean movie knowing almost nothing about it and having no expectations other than air conditioning and cheap popcorn (a bit of a miracle to begin with). I think one of my friends said they heard good things about it. Turned out to be remarkably fun, so that’s a pleasant memory right there.
Smartphones.
