Interesting Links for 16-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Wikipedia Around - find Wikipedia articles near you!

(tags:Wikipedia location viaClare )

2. In a shocking change in direction, tech companies are going to have to actually make money

(tags:technology business )

3. Occasionally I find myself wandering around the house humming the map maker's theme from Hollow Knight

(tags:music games maps )

4. Goths are the Goths in the coalmine

(tags:history rome funny )

5. The Fifth Element Is One of the Best/Worst Sci-Fi Films Ever

(tags:movies scifi viaNancyLebov )

6. Robot animals that move realistically. (warning: realistic robot spiders)

(tags:robots animals walking video viaPatrickHadfield )

Comments

[melchar]

Robot animals? So cool - but smash them now!

And the 'Fifth Element' = so much fun! The scenery shows something new with every re-watch. I utterly HATED Ruby the first time I saw the movie - and then completely LOVED him the second viewing, as well as all subsequent movie watching.

I have only had this HATE him/OMG I love him= best character in the movie!!! reaction to one other movie character: Nicol Williamson's Merlin in 'Excalibur'. Remembering the flip still puzzles the heck out of me, since I can clearly remember the prior feeling, yet now feel the opposite.

[andrewducker]

Excalibur is another movie that's so not like what you might expect and full of personality. I love it to bits.

[melchar]

LOL!! I love that explanation = 'full of personality'. Yes, that is the -perfect- way to describe them!

[simont]

I wonder if it's something to do with not having let go of a preconception about what kind of film it is? Ruby Rhod is very out of place in what you might have thought you were watching up to that point – it looks like a SF action movie of the kind that has very little time for either thesps or PR people. But once you've watched it all the way through and found out what kind of film it really is, then you don't have that cognitive dissonance any more, and can evaluate Ruby on the basis of how he fits into that kind of film.

Similarly, when I first watched From Dusk Till Dawn, one of the people I saw it with came out of the cinema delivering a furious rant about how it was an awful film and he hated it to pieces ... and then he went to see it again the next night, which I conjecture is for a similar reason!

[andrewducker]

"From Dusk Till Dawn" is a classic of misdirecting the viewer about the kind of movie they're watching. Some people enjoy changes of direction like that, and others really don't like their genres to change out from under them.

[simont]

Yes. I think that must have been what happened to my friend – while he was still expecting the other kind of film, he was outraged, but once he reconsidered it on its own merits, he decided it was a good example of the kind of thing it really is.

I must admit I cling to a neo-Platonist superstition that somewhere out there in idea-space is the "real" second half of the first film, showing how the plot would have turned out if the Unexpected Change of Genre hadn't intervened. (Perhaps on the DVD shelf of Lucien's library.)

[andrewducker]

And also, the real first half of the other film, where the protagonists of the first half of the film don't show up where they do.

[simont]

Thank you, I think. You've just bent my brain into a Möbius strip.

[marymac]

When they launched Film Four as a channel, Fifth Element was one of the first films up, and my cousin and I spent a wonderful evening getting gently hammered sitting on the floor in her sofa-less new flat and trying to work out what was going on.

Still love it.