Black Friday - boycotting or shopping? What'd you buy?

I stopped by the local mega-mall (Squeaky will know it -- Metrotown) after getting off work this afternoon. It was jammed full of excited shoppers. I checked out a number of places, went across the street to poke around Best Buy a bit, came back, bought a Parmesan cheese pretzel and a can of Coke Zero at Little Monk's then went home.

Total dollars spent on Black Friday purchases: $3.99, not including tax.

I was tempted to check out metrotown, but after the horror show of the TRU parking lot I figured it was best to stay far far away.

Were they DOORBUSTERS?

You mean like this?



I've never fancied myself a supervillain, but shit like that would make me at least consider releasing a toxic gas into the store (after warning the employees to get out).

The Walmart I was at had the same set up of shrink wrapped pallets of stuff, but there was no fighting. When the bell rang to allow people to get stuff, they were pretty civil about it. It looked absolutely nothing like that video.

I know this was a page back, but I just wanted to say: A-Fucking-Men.

I just want to see American History X Ed Norton fight Fight Club Ed Norton.

BUT FIGHT CLUB IS SO DEEP MAN ITS LIKE CHUCK P. LOOKED INTO THE VERY SOUL OF MAN

I know you're saying this in part because of your dislike for Fincher, though I forget if you like FIGHT CLUB in the least, but I'll piggy-back off it anyway and say how damned annoying it is even for people who love the film to hear or read the quotes repeated, ad nauseum, completely out of context, and from people who lack even the slightest bit of understanding as to what the film was actually about. (Edit: This is NOT aimed at you, man! You know more about film than I ever will - don't want you to think I'm lecturing you.)

Hint, angry catassers: the film isn't a personal love-letter to masculinity, giving the bird to commercialism, Generation X, women, the sexual revolution, baby boomers, pop culture heroes and corporate greed along the way; it is, in fact, a film about a person that goes temporarily ultra fucking crazy who, in the end, sells out everything that you, the rabid r/ows poster who cheers every time they blow up the Apple store despite posting to reddit from an Air, believes in just to get the girl. It's a film about a damned guy finding himself and finding out what is truly important in life along the way and realizing, at the very end, that it was his own selfishness that led to him almost destroying himself, his friends and society at large, because if he couldn't be happy, no one could be happy. The film even explicitly tells you that in Durden's dialog and these people don't get it. I can understand being too thick to understand the metaphor of "fighting" the visual manifestation of this self-loathing, but missing the entire point of dialog when Durden is speaking to the audience surrogate? Holy shit.

Of all of the films that came out around that time that had the "doom and gloom" view of American society, I tend to think of FIGHT CLUB as being the only one that was in any way self-aware. I'm not sure if it's ironic or not (or just sad), but the fact that there exists a large number of pseudo-anarchists, who most likely blame everyone else for the state of their lives, who most likely believe that the film was made out of some primal need on behalf of the film-makers', that then miss that self-awareness because they are themselves completely unaware is at once highly amusing and supremely annoying.

*sigh*

No, no, no!

Since Lowe's was still having Black Friday deals today, I twisted Garoun's arm, and we went and bought some more Christmas lights, a couple of which were Black Friday sales.

We went out and got a couple things and I THINK that means we're done with all in-person Christmas shopping and the rest of it we'll be able to order online. Hooray!

I'm guessing it doesn't happen at every Wal-Mart or even most of them. I'D BLAME THE POORS but that would be rude!

I didn't buy anything on Thanksgiving and only bought a peach Nehi in a glass bottle and a few AA batteries for my daughter's stuffed seahorse on Friday.

Bought a scooter for the kid and some bread for our turkey sandwiches. Thank you Target.

I don't recall anyone getting trampled and/or shot en route to the pretzels. However, the pretzel place doesn't have doors so there wasn't anything to actually bust down, just a Plexiglas shield to protect the pretzels from being sneezed on.

The pretzel was yummy. I want more.

And I ended up buying something more substantial after all. Today I headed out to a less insane mall and picked up a Samsung Galaxy S3. I only had to pay off the rest of the balance on my current phone so it was a relative bargain. Now I have two phones and a yearning for pretzels.

The person who sold me a micro-SD card for the phone offered to install it and while doing so referred to today as Black Saturday. Someone corrected him that it was Black Weekend. He then wondered why there isn't a White Friday. I was going to make a joke about how Vancouver doesn't get much snow so a White Friday isn't very likely, then I decided that it was better to just nod and smile and quietly leave with my new phone.

Honestly Fight Club is fairly inoffensive as Fincher movies go, but the people who like it basically ruined any shot it had at making it into my Blu-Ray collection.

The one Fincher film I do own is Zodiac. And I still don't fully believe Fincher actually directed Zodiac.

Is it weird that I was glad this was a multi-racial melee? I've seen some of these videos in the past where participation seemed predominantly of people of color, and the racist comments (on Youtube, natch) were off the charts.

People, we're not black, we're not white, we're not Latino - we are all bound together by our stupidity in the face of Black Friday doorbusters. It's touching, really.

I've never seen Fight Club. Nor did I buy anything on Friday. Do I win the thread, or lose it?

When did it become fashionable to hate on Fight Club? I'm sorry, that movie is fucking awesome, its love by people who completely misunderstand it not being something that it should be dinged for.

For those who aren't easily blinded by Rule of Cool and being told what's nice to hear as a frustrated young man in the late '90s, it's pretty fucking far from awesome, and is actually a simple-minded and cynical precursor to the MRA dipshits of today.

The fanbase just makes it that much more difficult to appreciate the good parts, which are primarily performance-related.

Fight Club is a feminist movie. Which one did you see?

I should note I'm dead serious. I think being a fan of Fight Club because it shows men being strong is like being a fan of Animal Farm because you thought Snowball was a pussy.

Win. But not by nearly as much as if you'd purchased the Fight Club blu-ray on Friday at a Wal-Mart at 5:00am.

Anyone do that "Small Business Saturday" thing? I ended up shopping in my tiny little local downtown (two whole blocks!) and found a few things for family. Liked the idea of supporting the local places. Found a great new bakery among other things too!

Yep. Got 3 $25 credits towards the purchases I made with my Amex cards, too.

I never heard about any special small business Saturday thing, but I made a point to stop into a local games store to buy some games workshop hobby stuff on Saturday where they were 19% off MSRP instead of getting them from an online vendor where I could have got them at 35% off MSRP. GW crap is expensive and good deals are great, but it's not nearly so useful to own the stuff if you don't have a place to play...

I bought four bed-in-a-bags for work, a makeup palette for a gift, and christmas music sung by the Rat Pack for me. This was at 10pm on Thursday, and the only other things I have purchased have been groceries, from local retailers, or online.

Considering I basically got one of those bed thingys for free (30% off on each!), I am totally okay with the fact that I am one of Those People who went shopping after eating dinner on Thanksgiving.

The one that the vast majority of its fans did not understand.

Majority of people do not understand nuance in storytelling. Film at 11. American History X is not an endorsement of neo-Nazism, but a lot of neo-Nazis consider it to be just that.

The fact that Neo-Nazis like AHX is not a knock on AHX, nor does it dimish my appreciation thereof.

Considering that you said

does this mean that you didn't get it either?

I'm not sure where this snideness is coming from since RyanMM is responding to something specific you said.

Is Keldroc saying he doesn't understand nuanced storytelling? Because I'm having a hard time following his argument too.

I'm saying I am not a fan of the (rather large?) segment of Fight Club's fanbase that adheres to the MRA-esque interpretation of its message, which is the version I have heard the most from people who like it. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to watching it until a couple of years after release, by which point I had already heard much from its supporters. At that point, maybe my view of it was already hopelessly distorted.

If the feminist themes are in the nuance of the film, evidently they went over my head, too. All I can say in my defense that I had no reason to suspect they were there in the first place. If you say it's a feminist film, I'll take your word for it since I haven't seen it in over 10 years and I have no interest in watching it again, but that's not what I saw, and it's certainly not what has been described to me by its fans.

Thanks for clarifying. That makes a lot more sense. Maybe I'll start a Fight Club thread in Entertainment where I can throw out my crazy ideas about a movie about men beating each other up being feminist.

Man, I'm usually all about films being widely open to interpretation, even if they usually do have only a handful of "correct" interpretations, and that's the ones with the most sophisticated plots and characterizations we're talking about, but FIGHT CLUB being a feminist film is, to be charitable, pretty out there.

Yeah I can see it as being against machismo-manly-man-stuff, but that not necessarily feminism so much as it is anti-douchebag.

I spent more money (all online, I hate the crowds) than I intended to and now I have a shopping hangover.

:(

I always, always have buyer's remorse. Especially when I get that credit card bill.

Where's the option for not giving a shit either way? I went to a Walmart opening on Black Friday a few years back because I couldn't sleep, and it was just fucking insane. People fighting over shit, shouting, pushing. The store was so packed it was like trying to maneuver to the front of the stage at a U2 concert.

I did manage to buy a Gameboy Micro for myself at $15 and a DS for the lady at $75, though. It's too bad the Micro turned out to be so goddamned small you couldn't play it for more than a few minutes without cramping your hands.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the key to Black Friday is not going for store openings. Forget the doorbusters--they usually have great sales that go until 6 am and then another round of slightly less great sales that last till 10 am then even less great sales the rest of the day. So eat your turkey, go home, set your alarm for 3 am, and sleep. Then get up and go get fucking fantastic deals with no pushing, shoving, or lines.

Be back home by 6 am so you beat the second rush of people getting up at 5 am.

BLACK FRIDAY DONE RIGHT!