This Open Letter to Vending Machines

Dear Vending Machines,

Consider this my complete and utter unequivocal surrender. You won, I lost. It wasn't even close, and it would be laughable for me to consider it a draw. Sometimes you just realize you were beaten badly, pwned as the kids like to say. You got me, you really got me.

It was going so well for a while. I was able to resist your siren call and walk right on by. No matter how delicious your wares, I wasn't tempted. Okay, I was tempted, but I had the perfect way of preventing myself from succumbing: I didn't carry cash. Thanks to credit and debit cards, we are becoming more and more a cashless society, meaning that sheer practicality prevented me from giving in. I can't spend what I didn't have.

And then you installed card swipes.

More Sequels I Pretend Don’t Exist

After my last sequel article, I received a lot of feedback on what was left off the list. (The feedback wasn’t on this site. It was on a site in Canada. You wouldn’t know it.) The observations were fair; there are plenty more bad sequels that aren’t just mediocre follow-ups we tolerate, but movies that ruin the franchise.

You'd think that movie-makers would know why we loved the movie the first time and give us more of what we want. You'd be wrong, and a lot of these sequels jettisoned what we liked and replaced it with truly awful dreck.

It's also possible that this was supposed to be the script of another movie entirely and they wound up taking that script and making it the sequel. Or, the studio just didn't care about the integrity of the franchise and just saw dollar signs, figuring that the general public would pay to see an awful sequel.

Sadly, that last one has proven itself true again and again, which is why we can't have nice things.