The Fast and Furious franchise is, not unlike the late 2pac, a reflection of the community. A percentage of America has always been modding their cars and an even larger percentage enjoys dreaming about modding cars - the films draw from that, not the other way around.

It's a mutual thing. The Fast and Furious franchise draws from the car culture in America, but the car culture in America also draws from the Fast and Furious franchise. If the director had chosen to highlight slightly different aspects or de-emphasize certain aspects, car culture in America would be different (though stray too far, and F&F is potentially no longer the same mega-hit).

In other words, it’s the age-old question: does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? The answer, of course, is “yes.”

The street races in San Jose looked pretty much just like F&F long before the movie came out.

How is Tupac relevant?

Artists being blamed for causing preexistent negative phenomena that served as the inspiration for their art. Tupac's lyrics were blamed for being a cause of violence while in reality they were a reflection of the violence that was already there.

ah good ol’ C. Delores Tucker (you’s a motherfucker)

...."got money for wars, but still can feed the poor"... #merica

How did 2pac get in the conversation about aftermarket car modifications?

That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices.

It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.

I preface my comment with, I have a math degree.

First, I'm not sure what politics versus math reading has to do with the topic at hand - namely, car headlights. Second, you're complaining about downvotes. Third, you're complaints sound like "kids get off my lawn". So yeah... that's why you're getting downvoted.

To more directly engage with your point, politics isn't just an exercise in group think. It has very real consequences for many people - consider the number of deaths per capita in Germany versus that of Sweeden. The difference in response is one partly of politics and resulted in unnecessary deaths.

I appreciate your argument. What I was trying to point out was that the obsession with car modding is why films in the Fast franchise, even a decade after the first one debuted at the box office, still do extremely well. They're sheer entertainment, just fast driving with some plot points to justify the next action sequence.

What didn't land for you, maybe for more people, was that documentaries, classical and jazz, etc. are not as appreciated because they require some effort to understand and thereby appreciate. That was my point about wishing a textbook would top the bestsellers list and not yet another book shilling apocalyptic hypotheticals about Donald Trump that the author always has some magical cure for. It's like self-help politics, but The Secret is "impeach Donald Trump", every time. It's easy. It's low brow after the first dozen books, as it only intends to satisfy helpless aggression in readers. And while it's nothing new, I wish people were as enthralled with a book teaching math or chemistry or accounting. You know, stuff that's useful to people.

If someone wants to write a book about the process of governance, that's one thing. But if it's another pseudo-analysis-by-way-of-emotion book, it's disingenuous to suggest an anti-Trump political commentary is any more useful today than anything written by Ann Coulter.

I wanted to respond to your comment that started

> I've been here off and on for almost 9 years.

But it's flagged / dead.

Anyway. I'm not a Wrongthink Troll. Just a guy, probably more like you than not in most ways... that has a low tolerance for self-aggrandizing behavior. The tone of the post I replied to just rubbed me the wrong way.

I apologize for the unconstructive nature of my comment. I should have said nothing. Now I just feel like the Tone Police... And nobody likes that.

I guess you are new here, but HN is heavily, heavily edited and moderated. Posts get killed all the time, if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic.

Comments get rethreaded and killed at the drop of a hat as well. The buried comment was a non-mainstream opinion, so not welcome here. We have a flag on the profile screen to see hidden posts and they are often the best posts that point out when something makes no sense, but just happen to be worded slightly rude to someone else's point of view.

It's definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with. You should just take it as a heavily curated slice of SV echochamber that you can examine, but not modify.

> if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic.

Disingenuous headlines are a huge problem and are part of "spin" (aka marketing or propaganda effort).

All available research -- plus tons of anecdotal experience on /. or HN or reddit -- shows that people never read the links that are posted, and, if they did click the link, probably won't read 100% of it. Most people share links without reading articles as well.

The headline is what generates the controversy, and should reflect the actual or original content of the piece. I am okay with mods changing headlines to reflect that. I have no doubt this is a SV echo chamber -- but it's a news aggregator run by Y-combinator, what the hell did you expect?

See also: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/09/study-con...

https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-do...

http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-on...

Don't forget the folks in the 40's taking those old trucks and turning them into hot-rods.

The car modification scene is only slightly younger than the car.

My uncle told me stories about living in rural Michigan, and how the first thing that people did when a road got paved in the area was set up a quarter mile marker.

For non mid west born ppl,

A dragstrip is a facility for conducting automobile and motorcycle acceleration events such as drag racing.

Although a quarter mile (1320 feet, 402 m) is the best known measure for a drag track, many tracks are eighth mile (201 m) tracks, and the premiere classes will run 1,000 foot (304.8m) races

US people and their weird measurements :P

But honestly, why these lengths specifically?

1/8th mile = 1 furlong.

Many short races, for feet or horses, that started way back when are some number of furlongs.

Now THAT is an interesting information, never heard of "furlongs" before!

It's a fantastic unit if you need to convert distances from metric to imperial, because 1 furlong = ~200 meters. So if you tell someone something is half a kilometer away and they ask what that is in imperial, you can quickly respond "2 1/2 furlongs".

A furlong, the approximate distance that an average draft horse can pull a single-bottom plow before needing a rest, is my favorite measurement because it sounds so grounded in reality. It's just how long the furrow is.

Right next to the parsec, but only because of the Star Wars references :-)

Snails are rated in furlongs per fortnight.

As much as we like to point fingers over the Atlantic, here in the UK our roads are mostly imperial except heights and widths which are in both feet and metres, because lorry drivers from the Continent kept crashing into bridges!

They are even (in our wierd measument system), and reasonable distances for different engines to run out of power/traction/other factor and thus not accelerate as much.

Important also to note that a quarter mile is the unit at which one quantize one's life.

Car culture in SE MI is truly a thing of beauty and wonder.

What struck me back then, was how Fast and Furious and Need for Speed influenced each other.

It makes sense, the game devs saw how well the FnF movies did and wanted a slice of the pie.

It worked out so well because it gave people a way to experience car modding and illegal street racing in their own living room. If people are getting their kicks from street racing games... maybe we should make more street racing movies.

I think the nost blatent was when Tokyo drift came out, the next NfS had drift races.

I remember some Underground or Underground 2 cutscene or run that was identical to a run in FnF; I always assumed that they did a collab.