Going to the cinema to watch a movie is one of my favorite things to experience. I like going with my wife and kids or with friends, but I’m also okay with just going to see a movie by myself. In some cases I’ve even been the only person in the theater—and honestly, that's a pretty neat way to watch a movie.

The things I like about going to the cinema are the big screen, the incredible sound system, the snacks, and—in most cases—being able to pre-purchase assigned seats ahead of time. Adding reclining seats that spread you further away from folks not in your party is always a plus, too.

I’ve gone to the cinema when I have a random day off from work, with the family when new movies come out, and I’ve even gone while on vacation. On a recent trip to Japan I found myself watching a movie by myself and I had such a unique experience I wanted to capture it here to hang on to the memory of it.

Getting Tickets

We were on one of the last nights of our vacation in Osaka and by this point in the trip we had done the majority of the things we planned on doing. We spent the days walking around shrines, riding the trains, shopping, and eating, so by the evening time we were ready to relax and wind the kids down and get them to sleep.

On this one particular night we didn’t have much going on and I thought about two things on my Japan bucket list: live music and movies. Catching a band in Japan is still something I want to do someday, but I was tired enough from the day of walking around that the idea of just sitting and watching a movie seemed like the better option of the two.

My wife agreed to get the kids down so I could head out after dinner. In the mean time I did some research.

I found that Japanese moviegoers had been reserving their seats in the theater for a long time and that it was pretty commonplace in lots of parts of Asia. It was a relief in that I already knew how that all worked so I found the website for the cinema nearest to the hotel we were staying at and looked at their seat reservation system.

Like a lot of things in Japan, it was all in Japanese, so I was at the mercy of Safari’s on-page translation feature. It worked well enough that from the context I could make my way to find the movie I wanted to watch, pick my seat in the theater, and get to the payment screen.

I had run into an issue when trying to fill out my credit card information, and while I don’t remember the exact problem, I believe it came down to needing to be a resident of Japan or some sort of issue using Latin characters in one field. Either way, I decided not to continue buying the tickets through that site.

Luckily the cinema was a 5 minute walk from the hotel, so on our way to dinner we stopped by the cinema to purchase my ticket ahead of time. The cinema was already bustling when we got there. Right near the entrance and off to the left was a row of ticket vending machines that take you through the same experience you’d have on the website. Luckily every button had English labels so I was able to follow along to get the seat I wanted for the movie I wanted. The only thing that was different from the website experience was the payment portion where you could use Japanese Yen or a credit card and you didn't need to fill out any personal information.

When picking which movie you wanted to watch, some movies were listed twice. In my case I wanted to watch Deadpool & Wolverine and one showing was the movie with English audio with Japanese subtitles and the other was a Japanese audio dub with English subtitles. I would have been happy watching either, but I went with the English audio version based on the showtime and available seating.

If you’re familiar with apps like Fandango, selecting your seat was done on an interactive map where you can see where other seats have been reserved. Just like the food ordering machines in Japan, the end result is a receipt and a ticket that are printed and spit out in the collection area.

After getting my ticket we went off and walked around some more. We ate a small dinner and eventually made it back to our hotel. Once the family was all set for the night I headed back out to the cinema.

Snack Time

The layout of the cinema’s lobby starts from the place you purchase tickets, then there’s the counter for snacks, followed by the ticket taker who directs you to your theater.

The snacks counter was very busy with four long lines. While I waited in mine, I looked around to see what kind of options they had. They, of course, had popcorn and soft drinks, but I also saw people getting hot dogs or these churro-style fried cinnamon sticks.

One thing I read earlier was that if you were going to order popcorn, most Japanese cinemas offered two varieties of buttered popcorn. One was a savory flavor and the other was sweet. While they did offer these two options, they also had a variety of novelty flavors. One was loaded with 12 different herbs, another was melon flavored, and they had a couple of caramel corn flavors.

Just like many food places we ate at in Japan, when you get up to place an order there is a menu next to the register that lays out all of the things you can buy. As someone who didn’t speak Japanese, this was very helpful since I could point to items on the card if I couldn’t pronounce the order correctly (which for me was most of the time).

I wanted to try so many things, but I decided to stick with one order of the savory popcorn, one salted caramel corn, and a soft drink. The caramel corn came in a little cup that I planned on using to bring leftovers back for my wife and kids to try. I thought that if it weren’t one of the last days of the trip I would have walked out of there with several flavors that we could snack on throughout the trip.

The caramel corn was pretty standard, although I liked that this cinema leaned into a salty flavor a little more than you’d think. The savory popcorn was sort of buttery and it had a tiny bit of soy sauce flavor in it. Overall I was happy with my selections and I took my tray of food with me into the theater.

Showtime

I found my way to the theater and up to my seat. The theater was on the bigger side and the seats were quite comfortable. It wasn’t super packed, but I think the area I was in had several people because it’s got a decent view of the screen.

I usually try to avoid trailers to avoid spoilers but it was cool to see what movies were coming up. Some of them seemed like movies made in Japan, the US, and other places. I made it in with just a few trailers left to go.

During the trailers folks were talking to each other and settling in, but when the movie started all cell phones got put away and everyone drew their attention to the screen. Other than laughs and reactions, the theater was quiet and people were focused on the movie.

I thought the movie itself was really good and there was something particularly fun about being in Japan and watching the crowd get into it when—minor spoiler—Deadpool and Wolverine do a 5-minute fight inside a Honda Odyssey. I got the feeling everyone else in the theater enjoyed it, too.

One thing that I think is a cultural difference between the US and Japanese moviegoers is that when the credits started nobody in the theater moved. It being a Marvel movie, you can expect at least one mid-credit scene and maybe a post-credit scene, but in the US there are usually a good amount of people who stay and some who get up and skip those extra scenes. In this theater it felt like it was expected that you stay through the credits.

Later on, I read that this is a thing! In Japan, people tend to stay through the credits and consider it part of the entire movie experience.

When I go up and left, everyone made a point to clean up their seats so no mess was left behind. As we all carried our snack trays out of the theater another short line formed as everyone stopped to divide out their trash and recycling into various bins. It didn’t take long and we were all out of there and back in the lobby soon enough.

My showtime was around 8PM and I think that was one of the later movies. By the time I got out to the lobby the folks at the snack counter had cleaned everything up and had already cleared out (I honestly thought about getting more popcorn for the flight home, so I was a tiny bit disappointed).

On the way out I stopped by a display rack that had small posters for all of the current and upcoming movies. I grabbed some as a souvenir for me and the kids. One guy was going through and taking one of each. Japan has a lot of collectibles, like stamps at shrines and area-specific mascots and manhole covers, so I can see movie posters being another thing you might want to hang onto.

We had an amazing vacation in Japan. We got to see castles, explore shrines, eat amazing food, and meet some really nice people. I wouldn’t do anything different, but there was also this great feeling of doing something so common as going to the movies.

I think going to the cinema around the world might be a new travel tradition.

I was reminded by a tweet or two from Henri Helvetica from a couple of years ago where he mentioning that he likes to listen to web pages sometimes and I wondered if I could make that work today. I remember trying this out on desktop Safari in the past and I think it was maybe an accessibility feature that let you select text and read it back to you. I remember liking the idea at first, but not liking that when you tried to do something else on your Mac you'd lost focus on what was being read and would have to set it back up again to continue. That feature just didn't really click for me after a few attempts at it.

I don't know when this was added to iOS, but today on mobile Safari I noticed that in the same menu that you use to trigger Reader Mode there's a button, labeled “Listen to Page”. This feature is pretty simple in that once you hit that button Siri just starts to read the article from top to bottom. I headed out for my dog walk with the blog post playing in my headphones and I noticed a few things:

• You can leave Safari while the audio continues to play. Just like listening to a podcast, you can jump to another app, put your phone to sleep, and control the audio using the system controls (including pause and play via AirPods).
• Siri sounds much more natural than before! Inflection and handling of punctuation sound great. The only time where I felt it didn’t sound right was when I was testing it on another blog post and I noticed it had an issue with some product names (which is not unexpected).
• Basically I think whatever text makes it into Reader Mode is what you are hearing when you use this feature. I think Reader Mode is pretty good at filtering out unnecessary page content, but I haven’t used it often enough to know if you'd be missing anything with this setup.

I think the ability to open up a blog post and have it play just like a podcast will allow me to squeeze in more learning in places where I wouldn’t have done so before. I like the idea of being able to have a page on MDN read to me while I’m cleaning snow off of my driveway or when mowing the lawn.

In the past I would normally wait until lunch or nighttime to catch up on RSS, but ever since I've started using Tapestry for RSS I find myself reading articles throughout the day or adding them to Safari to queue them up for later downtime. After this experience today I think my habits are going to change in a big way.

Epilogue

This whole thing has me thinking about a few more things:

• Having AI tools in iOS for proofreading is fine, but having my own blog post read back to me might be a really good way to catch errors or weird grammar problems.
• This reminds me of the Bespoken product that John Morton had created a Craft CMS plugin around. The idea is that you send your article text to Bespoken’s AI platform and it would provide you with an audio file you can embed onto your website. While you might say that with this Safari feature you might not need something like Bespoken, but 1. not everyone uses Safari, and 2. a thing I liked that John had presented was the ability to train the AI to correctly pronounce words and proper nouns or the ability to describe elements that wouldn’t make it into Reader Mode.
• Speaking of AI, this also might sound similar to Google’s NotebookLM product. I’ve listened to a few samples from NotebookLM and while I can see this being useful for aggregating lots of text, I would rather hear the original text as written in a blog post. If for nothing else, I feel like Siri is more genuine than the NotebookLM characters.

We talked about my experience as a web developer and then it turned into an impromptu review of the 2024 Dot One event in Toronto.

Dumb teenager me doing dumb things, I often kept a few pairs of earplugs in my stick bag but almost never put them on when I was playing. On top of that, the problem with being a band full of poor teenagers is that things like extra speakers and in-ear monitors weren't something we'd invest our part-time paychecks on. So if you’re the drummer and you want to hear the vocals and whatever the guitar is playing you’d put the main speaker and amps behind the kit and listen to them from there. You're also sitting at one of the loudest instruments in the band that has a huge dynamic range between the bass and all the cymbals.

Anyway, somewhere in my 20s I started noticing that I had a hard time hearing in my right ear. I went to the doctor and got my ears cleaned and checked out. While I was having a few issues with hearing a few different sounds it wasn’t bad enough to diagnose me as hard-of-hearing or anywhere worse than that. But I knew that something was off.

Now that I'm 40 I know for sure that my early drumming days did some serious damage. I often find myself having a hard time hearing people in crowded areas where a lot of talking is going on and I find myself asking people to repeat what they said from time to time.

It’s all my fault and while the ship has sailed I have found that being a remote employee has really helped me deal with it at work (because every conversation can be turned up with a volume knob). Elsewhere I find myself using headphones a lot to consume media and for basic hearing protection. I keep a pair of over-the-ear monitors at my drum kit for when I play at home, I have a pair of noise cancelling, over-the-ear headphones for when I mow the lawn or do anything in the wood shop, a pair of headphones for solo watching TV (which is also about not disturbing everyone in the house), and as of the last couple months I've started doing the thing I learned on ATP where you can wear AirPods Pros at concerts to kill off sounds above a certain decibel range.

AirPods Pros as Hearing Aids

At its 2024 iPhone event, Apple announced a software update coming to all AirPods Pros (2nd generation) that turn them into clinical-grade hearing aids. I can’t wait for this to roll out officially because A. I already have a pair of AirPods Pro that will work with this feature so it's just a software upgrade for me, and B. at this point I always have my AirPods Pros on me anyway.

My understanding of the feature is that you use an iPhone on iOS 18 to do a hearing test, then it helps you create a profile that syncs to all of your Apple devices. This means my iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV would all use this hearing profile to make audio sound better for me. Then as part of the AirPods themselves I can essentially put them in a hearing aid mode where it not only pumps noise from around me into the earbuds but it'll use that profile to help enhance the right sounds that work better for my ears.

While I don’t love being in this situation to begin with, at least I hope this new AirPods feature will help me out a little bit.

I wasn’t the only person shooting photos at Frostapalooza and a week later I'm starting to see tons of great photos and videos from the show pop up! The best place to get an idea what it felt like to be at this show can be found in the Frostapalooza! Google Photos album.

I also noticed Brian Kordell was shooting a lot of video from the crowd and has posted a bunch of shorts and videos on his YouTube channel, (including this clip of one of my favorite tunes of the night, Sledgehammer).

Over the past few days I’ve seen a few blog posts popping up that share some really nice insight on what it was like to participate in the show:

• Adactio: Journal—Frostapalooza by Jeremy Keith
• Frostapalooza in photos and videos by Brad Frost
• Frostapalooza by Chris Coyier (about 40% of the way down the page is a video of a very sweet jam between Chris and Jeremy from the pre-show get together)
• Vibe Check №34 - Dave Rupert

Finally, while I believe it’s currently in editing, there is a multi-camera video that is definitely worth looking forward to. I got to see a behind-the-scenes look at the process to capturing all of the clips from all of the cameras placed around the venue and it’s an amazing, yet complicated setup that got all the best angles of the night.