R. O'Brien-Bours

Mostly harmless.

Owner of The Brothers that just do Gutters - Los Angeles
IG @RobinsonOB

[Tristan 🇨🇦 @Ash_Undead]

I would like to use this opportunity to remind people what he originally titled Star Wars

“Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga 1: The Star Wars”

The man was always insane (complimentary)

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

i can still live another 50 years if @Mike_Pence has the courage

[Sonny Bunch @SonnyBunch]

45-day theatrical window is a great start. The real key is delaying the stream-for-free (or, well, "free" since you're paying for Netflix, etc) date long enough that people notice. Six months, at least.

[Americana at Brand Memes @americanamemes]

This is how the LA Olympics local ticket presale felt:

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

The cheapest ticket for FLAG FOOTBALL is $260 for a preliminary match. For Shooting, only finals tickets are available $328). Track/field? Most tix are $600+, though there's one for $272. No swimming or weightlifting tix available. Crazy cash grab. Also, their UI sucks. #Olympics

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

Yeah, it's crazy. My window started yesterday and I just can't do it. Hardly anything under $100 (just baseball and women's basketball prelims), and almost all sports don't have any of the cheaper seats available. Crazy to spend $300 to go watch a fencing or archery semifinal.

[Michael Sucsy @michaelsucsy]

As an LA resident, I was genuinely looking forward to the 2028 Olympics.
Got my ticket window. Saw the prices. Signed out.
#LA28

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

Wine Bookstore is about as perfect a business for me as I could imagine.

[palmer @decentbirthday]

overheard in a starbucks just now:

“i just saw that movie about the sun dying”

“project hail mary?”

“hamnet”

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real.

The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later.

Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him.

Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman.

Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact.

95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

[Kendra Grace @msKendraGrace]

How lucky we are to live in a time where Nolan and Coogler share custody of 70mm IMAX cameras and Ludwig Göransson

[Hear in LA @hearinladotcom]

Wise move

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

This is fantastic news.

[Jeff Sneider @TheInSneider]

BREAKING: Universal walking back its theatrical release strategy, which sent movies to PVOD after 17 days, or three weekends in theaters. In 2026, the studio is extending the theatrical window to FIVE weekends and in 2027, it’ll be SEVEN weekends. A big boost for movie theaters…

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

Correct. Washington meddled in the military, Jefferson meddled in everything, JQA was elected to Congress, Tyler was elected to the rebel congress, Johnson was elected to the Senate, Taft served on the Supreme Court, Teddy created the Bull Moose Party. Obama is not an anomaly.

[Josh @rightofwhey]

This is LA right now btw

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

While I'm skeptical about aliens ever visiting here, it's foolish to say that interstellar travel is impossible. It arrogantly assumes that we actually understand the laws of the universe (we don't). Also, extra-dimensional beings could manipulate space differently than us.

[Justin Peters @JustinPetersMin]

There are no aliens. Even if there were (and there aren't) they would have no way of getting here. The distances are simply too vast. Far, far too vast.

The nearest star outside of our own sun is 4.2 light-years away. No aliens, no matter how clever, will ever be able to travel anywhere near the speed of light. The laws of physics prevent it. To accelerate any mass at all (even a pebble) to anything approaching even 1/3rd the speed of light would take incomprehensibly vast amounts of energy. You need a lot of spaceship (and I mean YUGE) to hold that much energy. So, now you've got a heck of a lot more than a pebble to move. Your energy problem just got infinitely worse.

It's impossible folks. ET ain't out there, and even if he was, he ain't dropping by for a visit.

[Americana at Brand Memes @americanamemes]

Every street in LA after it rains for an hour:

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

*gestures broadly at everything*

[John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1]

What policy decision most spectacularly backfired in your lifetime?

[Dylan Park-Pettiford @dyllyp]

Dispatches from Culver City: Another day waking up in a war zone. Brunch was cancelled. Smoothies are still $20. Forgot to charge my EV. Do not know how much longer I can hold out. Send reinforcements.

[R. O'Brien-Bours @RobinsonOB]

Attention philosophy nerds: this couple is making a real-life Ship of Theseus argument for tearing down the house Marilyn Monroe died in, arguing it's been remodeled so many times it is no longer the same house. A judge is going to have to make a decision on the paradox.

[Hector Becerra @hbecerraLATimes]

L.A. stopped a couple from demolishing Marilyn Monroe's home. Now, they're suing - Los Angeles Times https://t.co/JNqJ9D49pz