Why do you think that HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and Starz (a latecomer, relatively speaking) have all been in existence since the popularity of cable television exploded in the 70s? Because that fragmentation (only allowing one of them rights to a given movie) allows the industry to milk as much money out of consumers as possible.
Because they served needs that basic cable channels couldn't: first-run movies unedited for content, and later shows like Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones that you -couldn't- do in their current forms because broadcast channels and even regular cable channels wouldn't give the creators enough creative freedom.
It's gotten to the point where TV is now seen as the place for high-quality writers to go. Alexander Paine (Oscar-winning writer/director of Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska, Election) said not long ago in a speech I attended that the best work in the industry is now done on cable television channels like HBO, AMC, and Showtime. That was the place to be. You can't tell those types of stories in film.
It shouldn't cost more to "rent" a two year old movie to stream online that it does to BUY it in the bargain bin.
Ah, but there's the rub, those are two different sellers with different goals. You're not buying that bargain bin movie from the movie studio, you're buying it from a retailer which wants to get rid of its physical inventory to make room for better-selling items. They don't care about the slightly-out-of-date movies.
The movie studios never stop caring about their older titles. They want a catalog to provide them with an ever-growing stream of revenue, especially when they're under the financial pinch from the DVD market drying up.
Sadly, some people merely consume. I call them cultural leeches, as mostly never give anything back. My boss is like that. I was talking about the plot-holes in a recent movie, and she was all "I just go to get away from reality and never think about that sort of thing." Pretty sad. This next generation is going to be worse, with their fondness of throw-away streaming services.
Usually this depends on personality, but also it depends on how much you -need- an escape from the day to day. If you have a particularly stressful job or home life, you're often mind-fried by the time you get to watch anything entertaining. The easier your life is (like mine, honestly), the more mental effort you can put into such things, especially when you're not actually watching them.
It's weird and I understand your frustration -- I love rewatching my favorite movies, but once my spouse sees a movie once, he's (usually) done. The very prospect of watching an older favorite is something he'll find annoying: "why are we going to spend our time doing that when we have 40+ movies we want to watch and have never seen before sitting in our Netflix queue?" It's a problem when you have a lot of things you want to see, yet do not have that much time for watching (we're avid gamers, so the TV-watching is at a premium).
I think you missed what I meant about sports. Sports is the only thing, that I can think of anyway, where you really want to watch it while it's happening
Even American Idol moved from the "you have two hours until voting has closed" model that they used in all the previous seasons to a "you can vote for your favorite contestant until noon on results day" format.
They know that more and more people now are time-shifting their "live" broadcast.
The real problem is consumers of been sold on the idea they can't enjoy film that did not cost few hundred million to make and has especially shiny special-effects.
I'd say that your average art house movie is just as shitty as your average Hollywood blockbuster, but at least the blockbuster has the whiz-bang effects to admire (until you get to Special Effects Failure which is still distressingly common)... or fall back on, anyway.
It certainly is A problem though, as Comcast's shakedown of Netflix and other services show. Large ISPs are more than willing to allow their own customers' service to degrade if it gives them more of a position of power.
If we had a free market in the broadband sector consumers would be free to take their business to providers who respect their customers, but we don't, and Comcast is making the moves that a monopoly/duopoly with regulatory capture is free to make to better its bottom line. ISPs are now also content providers, and that conflict of interest has become more prominent in the last year.
Related things that are Comcastic: *) Bandwidth caps and bandwidth throttling for people who like high quality streams. *) Charges to content providers, something that the content used to use customer fees for. Now they simply pocket the money and there's nothing the end-user can do about it other than go without broadband at all. Some places are lucky enough to have competitive providers (I am), but that's the exception, not the norm.
I realize you're on a tech forum, but given your last comment I feel compelled to ask if you realize the difference between "streaming" off a local harddrive and streaming over the internet. Of course one is going to seek quicker than the other!
It's also yet another reason why those of us who don't like online streaming.. don't like online streaming. And there are so many reasons why online streaming is a step in the wrong direction.
Technology has advanced far enough that these days caches should be massive and seeking should be instant. That the player even needs to talk to the server and rebuffer content when rewinding is a failure of the interface.
Because I'm ENTITLED to movies and TV at a price I like!
This whole thread is occurring because many, maybe even most on the Internet don't feel like the content companies are entitled to their region restrictions any longer. It's long past time that they lose their legal protections for outdated region controls just "because they can."
The only things I've pirated in the last two years:
1) Accidentally missed an episode of one of my favorite TV series, which naturally wasn't available online (except from pirate sites). 2) Game of Thrones, because HBO delays the DVD version by a full year after the original air date. And I still bought the box set after it came out.
If it's available from Netflix, I get it from Netflix.
And not a fuck was given. There's more than enough to watch
If you just want to "watch something" and are fine cruising through a limited catalog hoping something will spark your interest, then Netflix's streaming is probably sufficient (I am pretty much never in this sort of mood).
If you have a list of specific titles you'd like to get to, then Netflix/Amazon/etc Streaming's piss-poor selection will be a source of endless frustration, and you'll think the service is nowhere near ready to replace the DVD-by-mail system.
And whose fault is that?! You went to the sticks and decided to live there. You knew the internet was crappy. I say let your streaming suck:P
Even in the big city performance on broadband is often pretty bad (comcastic is not a compliment) and I can't count the number of times a person I was gaming with kept lagging out until they discovered a roommate was streaming something and shut down the stream. This is especially prevalent on DSL connections.
Worse, all the big providers are moving towards bandwidth caps, so... good luck with that.
But this isn't really an answer because it just begs the question of why they don't make the same arrangement with "virtual DVDs".
Because the movie studios don't HAVE to. They hate the DVD model, they didn't have a lot of say with how that turned out. They don't want the virtual dvd model, they want people to pay $5+ pay-per-view.
The answer is still obvious, they want money per movie to do that and Netflix doesn't want to do anything but a flat-rate charge.
Even more, in the mind of a movie studio executive, they feel like they got SCREWED by dvd and vhs rentals (nothing further from the truth, but...). And so the streaming agreements are a "mistake" they seek to "correct."
Just look how much they charge for pay-per-view rentals from other services like Google Play or the Playstation store, etc. $5-$6, frequently. No way that they get the same amount of money from Netflix.
That is true [that the rental companies have to pay a special higher price
That's not true at all. OMG. WTF? What is wrong with you people?
It's both true and not true.
It's 'not true' in the sense that legally, Netflix can rent out any DVD it physically purchases. Content companies may not like it, but they can't win a lawsuit over being annoyed.
But it's 'true' in that Netflix and other companies trying to get into the streaming world have to gain the good graces of the content companies, lest the content companies shoot themselves in the foot (and that happens fairly often) by refusing to license content to Netflix and anyone else who pisses them off.
Now what really gets me is when Netflix carries special "rental" versions of movies which have all extras stripped out. When I got Inception from Netflix a year ago, I was anticipating extras and director commentaries (I do like the commentaries, as a film-lover interested in the movie-making processes). I got a Inception "special rental edition" that had no extras. Nothing but the bare movie -- even the closed captions and spanish audio track were missing! Crazy. Now I wonder why Netflix carries that. Maybe the rental edition is much cheaper so it was Netflix's choice to carry it.
I'm not sure there were story problems with D2; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least
Ack, I only caught this afterwards. I meant to say: "I'm not sure there were story problems with D3; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least."
Always online. Battle.net, while useful for chatting, is Blizzards answer to Steam for their 4 games. You can no longer play with friends in a LAN party, or via home to home without stopping by a Blizzard server that isn't guaranteed to be there in 10 years.
Blizzard's been pretty reliable keeping old game servers up, and I feel pretty confident I'll be able to play Diablo 3 in 10 years. That fear certainly wouldn't discourage me, though it's not my favorite thing in the world.
Incessant grind-fest. While the Diablo games are known for mowing enemies down for hours on end, in order to get to the maximum level pre-expansion you need to beat the game 3 times in a row. It gets tiresome the first time you do everything again. Try levelling more than one character and maintain your sanity... go on... try. D2 had pacing such that you would hit the level cap somewhere in your 3rd play through, though you could certainly grind at a lower level to give yourself better stats in the 2nd or 3rd run.
What??? I stopped playing Diablo 2 partially because I was sick starting in the same boring Act 1 Normal monestary over and over again. You want to get to the end of Diablo 2? You have to play the exact game three times in a row, all five acts in Normal, Nightmare, Hell. The only times I ended up making it to the end of hell mode in D2 I was about level 70 -- that's a lot of grinding afterwards. Are you sure you weren't talking about Diablo 2 instead of Diablo 3 there? I don't see -any- more grinding in Diablo 3.
The maps are not truly random. Many dungeons have a set organization, as you may expect from a scripted story. However, compared to DII, there aren't many "random dungeons" littered along the countryside, and those that are there are much more boring than their DII counterparts.
The D3 expansion introduces several new modes of play apart from story mode, and they have randomized dungeons. I'm not sure the DII counterparts were "interesting" though.
Loot and the botched Auction House. One of the big problems in DII was endless grinding for new great stuff, Blizzard tried to fix this by creating a real-money Auction House (and net themselves a little profit, much like microtransactions) and create a way for players to spend money instead of hours trying to find that new weapon. Only problem was it wasn't well received and, from what I recall, heavily abused.
The RMAH was intended to correct a problem with the D2 loot system and the horrible grey-market and black-markets that popped up around that. I entirely agree that auction house > trading games as a way of gaining items, if those are your only options. Unfortunately it had the unintended side effect that it became a much better investment of time for players to play for gold (it became TOO easy to find what you wanted), then use that gold to buy all your items. That killed the item hunt part of the game, along with you having little chance of finding a good item in the game. That last thing may or may not be getting fixed with the D3 Exp, only time will tell, and the auction house is now a thing of the past.
Different Dev Team = Different Game. A lot of the original folks behind D1 and D2 went on to form Runic Games and develop Torchlight. The DIII dev team was trying to emulate and expand on that successful formula of D2. From the few hours I played and the reports of friends, it sounds like DIII was hurting in the story and gameplay departments compared to it's predecessors. It just didn't feel "fun" in the way the others did.
I'm not sure there were story problems with D2; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least! Not that I had a problem with D2's story either. The big knock I could make is that there might be -too much- story in D3, and the story mode is too integrated with gameplay. I don't need elaborate cut scenes to advance the story and interrupt gameplay. At least it didn't go really off the rails like Starcraft II did. Fortunately there's no D3 story in adventure mode.
but really, you could build a passable to good character around at least 60% of the abilities, even more once synergies were introduced
Ah, but the reality is most of those weird builds were only usable if you had certain rare, very-difficult-to-obtain-unless-you-open-your-wallet items. The enigma runeword you mention, for instance, required the Jah rune, a rune rare enough that your average player has almost no chance to see it drop even once, ever.
Many of those D2 builds also only worked in the first two-thirds of the game but became fairly unrealistic when you got to Hell mode. Sorry werewolf druid, bet you wished you'd know you'd have to spec for the heavy elemental damage talents since half the things in Hell mode are 100% immune to your totally-physical-based attacks!
I loved D2 but damn that game did have some glaring flaws that I eventually sickened of (especially the piss-poor network/battlenet code that they fixed in WoW when it came out). The auction house in D3 was a direct response to the item trading black market in D2 being a HORRIBLE experience (and any public, non-friends in D2 was a horrible experience, but that's a different post).
I loved my D2 hammerdin though. And my conviction or zealot paladin. And the aforementioned werewolf with his base-upgraded Bonesnap maul. And my hydra sorceress..
Then again most of the stories you hear in school about Galileo don't mention the whole "G and the pope were old college buddies" or that he was basically playing politics in the late 14 early 15 hundreds.
I think the real story of Galileo is even more fascinating than the inaccurate/popular ones that get trotted out in history books and partisan sides. The science of the story almost didn't matter; the real lesson to be learned was "it may not pay to insult the one person who is able to protect you."
As usual, there were a number of shades of grey. I still don't quite know why we insist every story is black and white.
What does he expect these companies to do? Hire underqualified people just to get the numbers to match?
Yes, he expects the companies to hire unqualified people and provide job training for them to match their white counterparts. As if that's all it took.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think that HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and Starz (a latecomer, relatively speaking) have all been in existence since the popularity of cable television exploded in the 70s? Because that fragmentation (only allowing one of them rights to a given movie) allows the industry to milk as much money out of consumers as possible.
Because they served needs that basic cable channels couldn't: first-run movies unedited for content, and later shows like Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones that you -couldn't- do in their current forms because broadcast channels and even regular cable channels wouldn't give the creators enough creative freedom.
It's gotten to the point where TV is now seen as the place for high-quality writers to go. Alexander Paine (Oscar-winning writer/director of Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska, Election) said not long ago in a speech I attended that the best work in the industry is now done on cable television channels like HBO, AMC, and Showtime. That was the place to be. You can't tell those types of stories in film.
It shouldn't cost more to "rent" a two year old movie to stream online that it does to BUY it in the bargain bin.
Ah, but there's the rub, those are two different sellers with different goals. You're not buying that bargain bin movie from the movie studio, you're buying it from a retailer which wants to get rid of its physical inventory to make room for better-selling items. They don't care about the slightly-out-of-date movies.
The movie studios never stop caring about their older titles. They want a catalog to provide them with an ever-growing stream of revenue, especially when they're under the financial pinch from the DVD market drying up.
Sadly, some people merely consume. I call them cultural leeches, as mostly never give anything back. My boss is like that. I was talking about the plot-holes in a recent movie, and she was all "I just go to get away from reality and never think about that sort of thing." Pretty sad. This next generation is going to be worse, with their fondness of throw-away streaming services.
Usually this depends on personality, but also it depends on how much you -need- an escape from the day to day. If you have a particularly stressful job or home life, you're often mind-fried by the time you get to watch anything entertaining. The easier your life is (like mine, honestly), the more mental effort you can put into such things, especially when you're not actually watching them.
It's weird and I understand your frustration -- I love rewatching my favorite movies, but once my spouse sees a movie once, he's (usually) done. The very prospect of watching an older favorite is something he'll find annoying: "why are we going to spend our time doing that when we have 40+ movies we want to watch and have never seen before sitting in our Netflix queue?" It's a problem when you have a lot of things you want to see, yet do not have that much time for watching (we're avid gamers, so the TV-watching is at a premium).
I think you missed what I meant about sports. Sports is the only thing, that I can think of anyway, where you really want to watch it while it's happening
Even American Idol moved from the "you have two hours until voting has closed" model that they used in all the previous seasons to a "you can vote for your favorite contestant until noon on results day" format.
They know that more and more people now are time-shifting their "live" broadcast.
The real problem is consumers of been sold on the idea they can't enjoy film that did not cost few hundred million to make and has especially shiny special-effects.
I'd say that your average art house movie is just as shitty as your average Hollywood blockbuster, but at least the blockbuster has the whiz-bang effects to admire (until you get to Special Effects Failure which is still distressingly common)... or fall back on, anyway.
I dont think this is really the problem.
It certainly is A problem though, as Comcast's shakedown of Netflix and other services show. Large ISPs are more than willing to allow their own customers' service to degrade if it gives them more of a position of power.
If we had a free market in the broadband sector consumers would be free to take their business to providers who respect their customers, but we don't, and Comcast is making the moves that a monopoly/duopoly with regulatory capture is free to make to better its bottom line. ISPs are now also content providers, and that conflict of interest has become more prominent in the last year.
Related things that are Comcastic:
*) Bandwidth caps and bandwidth throttling for people who like high quality streams.
*) Charges to content providers, something that the content used to use customer fees for. Now they simply pocket the money and there's nothing the end-user can do about it other than go without broadband at all. Some places are lucky enough to have competitive providers (I am), but that's the exception, not the norm.
I realize you're on a tech forum, but given your last comment I feel compelled to ask if you realize the difference between "streaming" off a local harddrive and streaming over the internet. Of course one is going to seek quicker than the other!
It's also yet another reason why those of us who don't like online streaming.. don't like online streaming. And there are so many reasons why online streaming is a step in the wrong direction.
Technology has advanced far enough that these days caches should be massive and seeking should be instant. That the player even needs to talk to the server and rebuffer content when rewinding is a failure of the interface.
Because I'm ENTITLED to movies and TV at a price I like!
This whole thread is occurring because many, maybe even most on the Internet don't feel like the content companies are entitled to their region restrictions any longer. It's long past time that they lose their legal protections for outdated region controls just "because they can."
The only things I've pirated in the last two years:
1) Accidentally missed an episode of one of my favorite TV series, which naturally wasn't available online (except from pirate sites).
2) Game of Thrones, because HBO delays the DVD version by a full year after the original air date. And I still bought the box set after it came out.
If it's available from Netflix, I get it from Netflix.
>Most Oscar winners? Not present.
And not a fuck was given. There's more than enough to watch
If you just want to "watch something" and are fine cruising through a limited catalog hoping something will spark your interest, then Netflix's streaming is probably sufficient (I am pretty much never in this sort of mood).
If you have a list of specific titles you'd like to get to, then Netflix/Amazon/etc Streaming's piss-poor selection will be a source of endless frustration, and you'll think the service is nowhere near ready to replace the DVD-by-mail system.
You mean ... just like it is now?
Maybe, maybe not. I can get almost everything I actually want to watch -- on Netflix DVD-by-mail.
And whose fault is that?! You went to the sticks and decided to live there. You knew the internet was crappy. I say let your streaming suck :P
Even in the big city performance on broadband is often pretty bad (comcastic is not a compliment) and I can't count the number of times a person I was gaming with kept lagging out until they discovered a roommate was streaming something and shut down the stream. This is especially prevalent on DSL connections.
Worse, all the big providers are moving towards bandwidth caps, so... good luck with that.
But this isn't really an answer because it just begs the question of why they don't make the same arrangement with "virtual DVDs".
Because the movie studios don't HAVE to. They hate the DVD model, they didn't have a lot of say with how that turned out. They don't want the virtual dvd model, they want people to pay $5+ pay-per-view.
The answer is still obvious, they want money per movie to do that and Netflix doesn't want to do anything but a flat-rate charge.
Even more, in the mind of a movie studio executive, they feel like they got SCREWED by dvd and vhs rentals (nothing further from the truth, but...). And so the streaming agreements are a "mistake" they seek to "correct."
Just look how much they charge for pay-per-view rentals from other services like Google Play or the Playstation store, etc. $5-$6, frequently. No way that they get the same amount of money from Netflix.
The license terms on the DVD
are non-binding because they are not agreed to.
That is true [that the rental companies have to pay a special higher price
That's not true at all. OMG. WTF? What is wrong with you people?
It's both true and not true.
It's 'not true' in the sense that legally, Netflix can rent out any DVD it physically purchases. Content companies may not like it, but they can't win a lawsuit over being annoyed.
But it's 'true' in that Netflix and other companies trying to get into the streaming world have to gain the good graces of the content companies, lest the content companies shoot themselves in the foot (and that happens fairly often) by refusing to license content to Netflix and anyone else who pisses them off.
Now what really gets me is when Netflix carries special "rental" versions of movies which have all extras stripped out. When I got Inception from Netflix a year ago, I was anticipating extras and director commentaries (I do like the commentaries, as a film-lover interested in the movie-making processes). I got a Inception "special rental edition" that had no extras. Nothing but the bare movie -- even the closed captions and spanish audio track were missing! Crazy. Now I wonder why Netflix carries that. Maybe the rental edition is much cheaper so it was Netflix's choice to carry it.
I'm not sure there were story problems with D2; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least
Ack, I only caught this afterwards. I meant to say:
"I'm not sure there were story problems with D3; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least."
Always online. Battle.net, while useful for chatting, is Blizzards answer to Steam for their 4 games. You can no longer play with friends in a LAN party, or via home to home without stopping by a Blizzard server that isn't guaranteed to be there in 10 years.
Blizzard's been pretty reliable keeping old game servers up, and I feel pretty confident I'll be able to play Diablo 3 in 10 years. That fear certainly wouldn't discourage me, though it's not my favorite thing in the world.
Incessant grind-fest. While the Diablo games are known for mowing enemies down for hours on end, in order to get to the maximum level pre-expansion you need to beat the game 3 times in a row. It gets tiresome the first time you do everything again. Try levelling more than one character and maintain your sanity... go on... try. D2 had pacing such that you would hit the level cap somewhere in your 3rd play through, though you could certainly grind at a lower level to give yourself better stats in the 2nd or 3rd run.
What??? I stopped playing Diablo 2 partially because I was sick starting in the same boring Act 1 Normal monestary over and over again. You want to get to the end of Diablo 2? You have to play the exact game three times in a row, all five acts in Normal, Nightmare, Hell. The only times I ended up making it to the end of hell mode in D2 I was about level 70 -- that's a lot of grinding afterwards. Are you sure you weren't talking about Diablo 2 instead of Diablo 3 there? I don't see -any- more grinding in Diablo 3.
The maps are not truly random. Many dungeons have a set organization, as you may expect from a scripted story. However, compared to DII, there aren't many "random dungeons" littered along the countryside, and those that are there are much more boring than their DII counterparts.
The D3 expansion introduces several new modes of play apart from story mode, and they have randomized dungeons. I'm not sure the DII counterparts were "interesting" though.
Loot and the botched Auction House. One of the big problems in DII was endless grinding for new great stuff, Blizzard tried to fix this by creating a real-money Auction House (and net themselves a little profit, much like microtransactions) and create a way for players to spend money instead of hours trying to find that new weapon. Only problem was it wasn't well received and, from what I recall, heavily abused.
The RMAH was intended to correct a problem with the D2 loot system and the horrible grey-market and black-markets that popped up around that. I entirely agree that auction house > trading games as a way of gaining items, if those are your only options. Unfortunately it had the unintended side effect that it became a much better investment of time for players to play for gold (it became TOO easy to find what you wanted), then use that gold to buy all your items. That killed the item hunt part of the game, along with you having little chance of finding a good item in the game. That last thing may or may not be getting fixed with the D3 Exp, only time will tell, and the auction house is now a thing of the past.
Different Dev Team = Different Game. A lot of the original folks behind D1 and D2 went on to form Runic Games and develop Torchlight. The DIII dev team was trying to emulate and expand on that successful formula of D2. From the few hours I played and the reports of friends, it sounds like DIII was hurting in the story and gameplay departments compared to it's predecessors. It just didn't feel "fun" in the way the others did.
I'm not sure there were story problems with D2; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least! Not that I had a problem with D2's story either. The big knock I could make is that there might be -too much- story in D3, and the story mode is too integrated with gameplay. I don't need elaborate cut scenes to advance the story and interrupt gameplay. At least it didn't go really off the rails like Starcraft II did. Fortunately there's no D3 story in adventure mode.
but really, you could build a passable to good character around at least 60% of the abilities, even more once synergies were introduced
Ah, but the reality is most of those weird builds were only usable if you had certain rare, very-difficult-to-obtain-unless-you-open-your-wallet items. The enigma runeword you mention, for instance, required the Jah rune, a rune rare enough that your average player has almost no chance to see it drop even once, ever.
Many of those D2 builds also only worked in the first two-thirds of the game but became fairly unrealistic when you got to Hell mode. Sorry werewolf druid, bet you wished you'd know you'd have to spec for the heavy elemental damage talents since half the things in Hell mode are 100% immune to your totally-physical-based attacks!
I loved D2 but damn that game did have some glaring flaws that I eventually sickened of (especially the piss-poor network/battlenet code that they fixed in WoW when it came out). The auction house in D3 was a direct response to the item trading black market in D2 being a HORRIBLE experience (and any public, non-friends in D2 was a horrible experience, but that's a different post).
I loved my D2 hammerdin though. And my conviction or zealot paladin. And the aforementioned werewolf with his base-upgraded Bonesnap maul. And my hydra sorceress..
Then again most of the stories you hear in school about Galileo don't mention the whole "G and the pope were old college buddies" or that he was basically playing politics in the late 14 early 15 hundreds.
I think the real story of Galileo is even more fascinating than the inaccurate/popular ones that get trotted out in history books and partisan sides. The science of the story almost didn't matter; the real lesson to be learned was "it may not pay to insult the one person who is able to protect you."
As usual, there were a number of shades of grey. I still don't quite know why we insist every story is black and white.
I don't want to be absorbing Phelps Rays for the rest of my life.
What does he expect these companies to do? Hire underqualified people just to get the numbers to match?
Yes, he expects the companies to hire unqualified people and provide job training for them to match their white counterparts.
As if that's all it took.
I thought you were crazy at first. Now I realize that you're inspired and riding the fine line of satire.
Good job, sir, that is a talented touch.
I never imagined that I would see a worst presidency than Reagan, but Bush's was by every measure the worst presidency in the history of the Union.
Hardly! Maybe the worst presidency in a hundred years, but there were some fucking awful presidents in the first half of the 19th century.