Midwits love this kind of stuff. Movie critics heap praise on forgettable movies to get their names and quotes on the movie poster. Robert Scoble made an entire career in tech bloviation hyping the current thing and got invited to the coolest parties. LinkedIn is a word salad conveyor belt of this kind of useless nonsense.
The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.
I really love how kids today are so inundated with 3D CGI that when they see well done practical shots like this and my other go to favorite of the submarines in Hunt For Red October it is immediately assumed as CGI as well. Then again, adults are no less fooled either. The size of the sets is also surprising but makes sense when the size of a film cameras used defined the scales. The HBO intro is another example that makes the rounds.
I think it’s also important to remember that there are tons of terrible practicals out there, we just don’t think of them because they were bad and forgettable. Lots of great CG too that you likely never recognized as CG. Sicario is littered with examples. You’d be hard pressed to call out even most of them.
That's true on there being lots of terrible practical effects out there. The parent lauded Raiders of the Lost Ark for its practical effects. In contrast, Last Crusade was a great movie that had a few practical effects that were terrible. The scene with the tank going over the edge of the cliff is so bad and so fake that I could help rewind and pause to laugh at it when I was a kid.
Sure, the tank rolling at the bottom looks a bit like a model, but it isn't nearly as jarring as the part where the shot of the guy in the tank looks like it came from another world entirely and has been badly edited in on top.
True, but it really does hold up better than CGI. For example, a Dalek isn't really fooling anybody, but it's still far better than a CGI Scorpion King. I think it's easier for the brain to accept something as a representation of something it isn't when it's farther outside of the uncanny valley
You’re not comparing the worst practicals to what is considered one of the single worst CG renderings of all time though. There is also a camp culture that the Daleks fit in to - they weren’t trying to sell it as “very real” even at the time, that was “the look” and the budget. CG in live action is generally either shooting for 100% realism or is for comedic purposes intentionally absolutely awful. There’s a lot less in between than with practicals.
It's my favorite movie of all time, even though it's one of those movies that I don't expect anyone else to like. It's just a shot of joyful nostalgia right into my veins every time I watch it.
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.
Is Explorers the one with the Rollscanhardly joke?
Stand By Me is in my top 5 for the same reasoning. I grew up in very small town out in the boonies where my friends and I would go exploring in the woods/creeks just without finding a body.
I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.
I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"
I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"
Reduce the power of government if you want to reduce the power certain individuals have over society. Because government is such a single, extremely powerful lever it becomes a singular target of influence and corruption by the rich and influential. Why do you think so many of the rich and powerful move to DC or keep residences there?
The insistence of so many to take away power from Jeff Bezos, who won’t send armed goons to my house if I choose not to buy stuff from Amazon, and giving more power to the government that sent goons to Matt Taibbi’s house the same day he was giving Congressional testimony is an egregious case of missing the plot.
frankly I think much less than people assume. Obviously nuclear weapons need to be taken seriously but we should have taken a much more muscular posture ages ago.
There's this mental cold war image of these people grinding it out to the Armageddon but in reality the entire Russian leadership has their children living in the cities they're threatening. Putin has a daughter that manages an art gallery in Paris. Bullies back down when you punch back and that's the much better framing of modern day rogue actors.
Is this a precursor to Tesla offering autopilot in vehicles from other manufacturers? Sure, other manufactuers would have to adopt the hardware and integrate with the autopilot interface, but self-driving is inevitable and Tesla autopilot is the best.
Citations aren’t necessary when the incentives for fraud are so great and the means of executing fraud so easy. It’s not demonstrably problematic, it’s inevitably problematic.
Citations are needed when I can point you to six States that have vote-by-mail systems and there’s no evidence of meaningful fraud in those systems. And citations are especially needed when the very think tanks that are spending millions of dollars trying to disenfranchise voters by banning mail-in voting are unable to find meaningful cases of fraud to bolster their argument and instead rely on nonsense like ‘it’s inevitable that something bad will happen, trust me bro!’
It's a racket never ends.
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