Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. All three are the absolute pinnacle of every craft represented in them. (i.e.: camera work, costumes, casting, CG, practical effects, soundtrack, and all the rest.)
I thought it was a huge disappointment, most of all due to the CG.
- Everything looks hueless, often with only a few colors, with weird light angles and enemies often shown as a blur. As if it was made to put everyone on the same level as those who are colorblind and visiually impaired.
- Soundtrack was a dissonance of what went on on screen.
- The towns and villages were beautifully animated and showed wide shots of them, so one could be sure that they were missing any signs of food production or water sources.
- The world did not just look dry in color, but also literally dry. Especially the shire which gives it a plastic feel to it.
All of those put together made me feel it was taking place on a pre-dinosaur earth or not yet fully terraformed planet Mars, rather than a place of fantasy and wonder.
And Saruman’s death was absent in the theatrical cut. One of the most important parts of the story was simply cut out.
That was not the first film adapatation
The Princess Bride.
Inconceivable!
In this thread: people living in fantasy lands.
You dawg; you’re perfect!
The first twilight zone. All the followups just lacked the stark yet innocent tone of a someone reasoning with an unjust reality.
I’ve been making my way through the original recently, one-by-one and though some of them are hit and miss, even the misses are doing something amazing cinematically.
Dragon age origins
Splatoon. The design, the music, the art, the gameplay and the idea was executed so well.
Batman hitting his target with a batterang.
Tetris
You’re welcome
You can’t take credit when you’re the 11th attempt.
No no, that’s not 11, that’s one one
So the third attempt? My binary is rusty.
It’s the closest thing to a “perfect” game I can think of. Every new iteration is just fancy bells and whistles on the same perfect core.
I remember watching a documentary about it, and I think even tetris was based on one of those physical puzzle games with the same pieces, that you had to fit correctly into a square.
Alien. Maybe my only 10 out of 10 movie, and not my favorite!
We’ve all seen it so many times it loses it’s luster. Wife had never seen it so I sat with her in the dark and watched it for the first time in decades. Jesus. She was about to tear through the couch cushion in stress. I knew what was going to happen and couldn’t peel my eyes off the TV.
Pandorum re-awakened that feeling for me. I also that feeling was dead, but nope still Alice and well
Truly one of the best movies ever made.
Diablo 1 and 2 by Blizzard. I guess maybe the 2nd time around was perfection but between those two, nothin further was needed.
If you haven’t played it, path of Diablo is a really fun Diablo 2 mod.
Hadn’t heard of it before. Searched for it, and came across both Path of Diablo, and Project diablo. Some polls suggested preferring the latter 2:1. I haven’t played D2 in a few decades (sheesh). Any thoughts on comparing those mods?
I personally prefer Median XL. If it were a choice between PoD or PD, I’d say PoD.
Diablo 2 also had an expansion… and balance patches… But I agree.
I bought the whole battle chest back in the early 2000s (well my parents did for me). I consider those to be part of Diablo 2 broadly speaking
Instant Pot.
Apparently they went bankrupt because they built their units too well. Everyone bought one and never needed to buy a replacement.
Same with Saab cars
Wow I didn’t believe you until I looked it up, 758 million in 2020 to 344 million in 2022, that’s bananas. I love my instant pot
Highlander :P
There should have been only one.
Zing! Love it. <3
Horseshoe crabs. Unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
Can’t believe what we do to those poor perfect beings.
Or just the form of a crab in general! Carcinisation is so weird, but apparently evolution sometimes goes “Let’s just do crab again, that shit was 👌”.
I genuinely fail to see why it’s a thing. Like reading up it, it’s basically just convergent evolution of crustaceans to a crab-like shape.
Couldn’t the same be said for a ton of fish-like animals? The many attempts of nature to develop a fish? Hell, even some mammals went back to the fish, plan, although with the tail-fin the wrong way and having to visit the surface to breathe.
Or large-ish mammals all having pretty much a similar bodyplan, four limbs, head and neck.
Like surely there’s something so specific in carcinisation that I just haven’t picked up on yet. If someone know what it is pls inform me.
I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that the science indicates all mammals have a common ancestor. Not certain about fish, but I think that’s a similar case?
To me, the surprising part about carcinisation is that, the form of a crab seems oddly specific, but non-obvious. I mean, I look at the form of a fish and think, “yeah, it makes sense why that shape would be favored in water,” but I look at a crab and think “guess that’s just what worked out for your ancestors. Tough luck, buddy.” But apparently it’s not just bad luck, it’s a common strategy.
Not certain about fish, but I think that’s a similar case?
Did you know humans are more closely related to catfish than catfish are to dogfish?
¦“yeah, it makes sense why that shape would be favored in water,”
Yeah, I can see that. But also it’s swimming in water. Then again if tou want to crawl around the bottom? Hexapod is probably the way to go. But then you also need to be able ro manipulate shit, so frontlimbs become bigger.
Like a lot of space vehicles meant for surface exploring, both imagined and real, are usually six-wheeled, probably for added stability in a rocky terrain where there’s a bit less gravity and sometimes storms and whanot. And what is it like on the ocean floor? Rocky, basically “less gravity” and odd flows like storms.
Idk there’s a bit more to it I guess, I’m just looking for what that bit is, or if there indeed is one.
Yeah, that AI clip came to mind when you mentioned it, but to your point the shape that we consider “fish-like” shows up a lot in water. Even whales and dolphins figured out a similar shape, despite them not being fish (though they might still be etymologically related if you go back far enough?)
Ok, I can buy that the shape of a crab is probably optimized for a certain lifestyle.
First matrix
Animatrix was a good followup, and some of the comics
TIL there’s matrix comic. Which one you recommend?
The one above is my favorite “There are No Flowers in the Real World” by David Lapham (of The Darkness and Batman fame). Anything written by him, Troy Nixey, Gregory Ruth and Paul Chadwick are worth reading.
- “An Asset to the System” by Troy Nixey
- “Butterfly” by Dave Gibbons
- “Deja Vu” by Paul Chadwick
- “A Path Among Stones” by Gregory Ruth
- “A Sword of a Different Color” by Troy Nixey
- “The Miller’s Tale” by Paul Chadwick
- “Wrong Number” by Vince Evans
- “Broadcast Depth” by Bill Sienkiewicz
- “Saviors” by Spencer Lamm
Skip: “I Kant” and “Run Saga Run” and anything by Peter Bagge. Neil Gaiman also wrote a small story called “Goliath” but it’s not something I clicked with.
Delightful, thanks for taking the time to write it up.
Are there others?
