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All Posts, page 2

  1. Star Wars: Visions

    2021 TV show

    Watched 17 December 2021 – 3 January 2022

    Cool animation, but the presence of lightsabers in every single episode reveals a frustrating lack of imagination.

  2. The Voyeurs

    2021 film

    Watched 24 October 2021

    I couldn’t possibly predict twists this dumb, and that just made them all the more effective. Hats off to this movie!

  3. Nobody

    2021 film

    Watched 19 September 2021

    John Wick has been losing its way but this movie knows what it’s all about. A blur of a 90-minute punch in the face — just enough to put you in the hospital, not enough to kill you of overstimulation.

  4. 25 Edits That Define the Modern Internet Video
    vulture.com

    Vulture:

    Suddenly, anybody could shoot and edit a video, building the vocabulary of what that could look like: transition videos, lip syncs, and green-screen-driven storytelling began to cohere as distinct subgenres. That’s only accelerated in the age of TikTok, an app that offers more and easier editing tools for users than any that came before it.

    Online video is an inherently communal form; it’s defined by thousands of people iterating on the same idea. Every once in a while, though, there’s a leap forward. Every video on this list represents an evolution in the form or exemplifies a particularly influential editing style — whether the creator was one of the first to attempt it, or just pulled off a jaw-dropping editing feat all their own.

  5. Stowaway

    2021 film

    Watched 19 August 2021

    I learned that Toni Collette is australian in real life. Next: do solar storms actually look like that? This movie is great at making me want to check Wikipedia.

  6. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

    2020 video game

    Played 20 March 2020 – 27 April 2021 on Nintendo Switch

    Just… so many good feelings from this game. I’ll cherish it forever.

  7. For All Mankind, Season 2

    2021 TV show

    Watched 22–24 April 2021

    Once again this show attempts to strike a good balance between People Drama and Society Drama, but this season’s timeskip tilted the scales and made it clear that the long game is always going to be about the societal outcomes first. Character moments are less emotionally effective as a result, but boy is the spectacle of the alternate timeline geopolitics worth the tradeoff. Season 1 got me invested. But now I’m excited.

  8. For All Mankind, Season 1

    2019 TV show

    Watched 19–22 April 2021

    I’m super into this space trauma and societal progress nerdfest.

    It may sometimes feel predictable and clichéd but I just want to engross myself in this alternate history, and the level of realism is more than good enough to support that by my standards.

  9. Lena @ Things of Interest
    qntm.org

    This terrific short story by qntm contemplates the hellish potential consequences of brain uploading, in the form of a typically impassive Wikipedia entry:

    MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031.

  10. Godzilla: King of the Monsters

    2019 film

    Rewatched 8 April 2021

    The uncanny valley between the ponderous Godzilla 2014 and the bombastically campy Godzilla vs. Kong. I’m sorry but if you want to make a serious movie you have to stick to the serious monsters, you can’t put on the three-headed electric dragon and big moth. Pokémon aren’t scary.

  11. Microbes Don’t Actually Look Like Anything
    youtube.com

    Found this wonderful YouTube channel on Kottke.org. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting it to be so thought-provoking:

    Our brains play tricks on us to make us believe the world looks one way, but the world looks different at night than in the day, and both of those things have more to do with the physiology of our eyes and brains than with objective reality. Asking what a microbe actually looks like is, to some extent, forcing our own experience onto something that is beyond it.

    If, like me, you somehow recognize the narrator’s voice, that’s because it’s Hank Green (!).