Todd Lanier 🦚

I abide, do you?

[John @MagaGrunt1]

🇺🇸Do you see the difference in respect. This is great.🇺🇸

[Freddy🇩🇪 @FreddyLA7]

@GordonRamsay 😳🤯

[Dee @dee_ford]

201k followers? Man I’m jealous and I’ve been there every year for the past six yrs; lectured there and now employed a guy from there. Sort this out I need to earn 💰 from here 😂

[vids that go hard @vidsthatgohard]

Anthony Bourdain died on this day eight years ago and him describing Waffle House is still the single-most important description of America that has ever been articulated.

[Auburn Baseball @AuburnBaseball]

The Auburn Family understood the assignment!

Now let's finish this thing!

#WarEagle

[Auburn Baseball @AuburnBaseball]

The moment that sealed supers! 🎥

#WarEagle

[DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine]

Steven Soderbergh on George Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015):

"Interviewer: You never storyboard?

Soderbergh: No. The ability to stage well is a skill and a talent that I value above almost everything else. And I say that because there are people who do it better than I’ll ever be able to do it after 40 years of active study. I just watched 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015) again last week, and I tell you I couldn’t direct 30 seconds of that. I’d put a gun in my mouth. I don’t understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don’t, and it’s my job to understand it. I don’t understand two things: I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.

I could almost see that’s kind of possible until the polecat sequence, and then I give up. We are talking about the ability in three dimensions to break a sequence into a series of shots in which no matter how fast you’re cutting, you know where you are geographically. And each one is a real shot where a lot of things had to go right. I’m going to keep trying; I’m not going to keep trying in the sense that I’m going to volunteer to direct the next Mad Max movie. I’m going to keep trying in the sense that when I have sequences that demand a certain level of sophistication in terms of their visual staging, I’m going to try and watch the people who do it really well and see if I can climb inside their heads enough to think like that.

But he’s off the chart. I guarantee that the handful of people who are even in range of that, when they saw Fury Road, had blood squirting out of their eyes. The thing with George Miller, it’s not just that, he does everything really well. The scripts are great, the performances are great, the ideas are great. He’s exceptional. I met him once for about 30 seconds at the Directors Guild Awards in Los Angeles the year of Fury Road. But you don’t want to say that stuff to somebody’s face; it’s embarrassing."

(Steven Soderbergh's interview with Gavin J. Blair, The Hollywood Reporter, 2017)

P.S: On this day, 11 years ago, "Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015) premiered in Hollywood, California.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

You’re watching a game that took 2,000 people eight years to build. Some of them are still dealing with what it cost them.

Red Dead Redemption 2 started production in 2010, right after the first game came out. Rockstar merged every studio it owned across five countries into one team. By the end, roughly 2,000 people had touched the project, and the budget landed somewhere between $370 million and $540 million, making it one of the most expensive entertainment products ever created.

The numbers inside the game are hard to process. 300,000 individual animations (every hand movement, every horse gallop, every raindrop reaction). 500,000 lines of voiced dialogue spread across 1,200 actors. Recording those performances took 2,200 days in a motion capture studio, where actors wear sensor suits so their movements translate directly into the game. The main story script was about 2,000 pages. Dan Houser, Rockstar’s co-founder, said if you stacked every script in the game, including random people walking around town, the pile would be eight feet tall. Even background characters you’d never talk to had 80-page scripts each, about the length of a short film screenplay for a character with zero plot importance. The composer wrote 60 hours of original music. Most players hear about a third of it.

The level of detail borders on insane. Horse testicles shrink when the weather gets cold. Your character gains weight if he eats too much, loses stamina if he doesn’t eat enough. Guns degrade without cleaning. Rockstar’s studio co-head Rob Nelson explained the logic: every tiny detail you don’t consciously notice makes you forget you’re inside a game. Stack enough of those moments and you get something no other studio has matched.

That immersion had a price. In October 2018, Dan Houser told New York Magazine the team had been working “100-hour weeks” multiple times that year. He later clarified that was four senior writers over three weeks. But when Kotaku’s Jason Schreier interviewed 77 current and former Rockstar employees, the picture was wider. Nobody hit 100 hours, but many averaged 55 to 60 per week for months at a time. That’s six 10-hour days, often with weekend shifts too. Most were salaried with no overtime pay, their only extra compensation tied to year-end bonuses that depended on how well the game sold.

Multiple developers described depression and anxiety during and after production. One told Kotaku they’d been “pushed further into depression and anxiety than I had ever been.” Others reported breakdowns and heavy drinking. Kotaku noted some of the worst stories couldn’t be published because the people involved would’ve been identifiable.

The game made $725 million in three days, the second-biggest entertainment launch in history. It has now sold over 82 million copies, won more than 175 Game of the Year awards, and is the fourth best-selling video game ever made. Every frame of that clip was paid for, one way or another.

[grace. @marilynhacks]

by far the most devastating in memoriam.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

“There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

[VIKARE @vikare06]

Very very interesting from Dave Farmer, sound designer for the LOTR. Shows how much a movie gets enriched by the experience of many artists from many fields.
Look how subtle and effective his contribution is here on Wormtongue's sound design

[Barbarian Herodotus @BBHerodotus]

“Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels. I don’t mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written.”

- Teddy Roosevelt

[PS @dostoevesque]

The Count of Monte Cristo is the perfect antidote to depressed and anxious individuals who, deep down revere and in fact celebrate their own psychological suffering, and find solace in the likes of Kafka and Woolf. It may not sit beside Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Proust, yet despite structured as a revenge thriller, it reaches into the conditions of human life with a scale and clarity which something many novels of the modernist era do not.

What is striking is that absolutely refused to romanticizes despair. Unlike the latter writers of the modernist era, whose entire life was shaped by the uncertainty of their place in the world due to the world war, Dumas does not narrow down the scope of the literature to speaking about the internal anxieties and depression. He does not treat his characters like those who has no part in the moral order.

Edmond Dante does not become interesting because he is anxious. He becomes powerful because he endures. His transformation is not an inward spiral but an outward construction. He studies, waits, prepares. Knowledge replaces despair, discipline replaces helplessness. Suffering is not an identity but a phase of becoming.

The book in short does not deny pain, but refuses to worship it. It suggests the human condition is not exhausted by insecurity and anxities. There remains the possibility of resurrection, of rebuilding oneself within a world that still possesses moral weight.

[Hendrix @Reaver___]

what's really wild is the actors all leave this scene in order of death in real life

[Message Board Geniuses @BoardGeniuses]

#Auburn is responsible for killing college basketball.

[John Carpenter @TheHorrorMaster]

As you may have heard, “The Thing” has been added to the Library of Congress. We made the movie to push against the edges of what we could pull off, and it carries that strain in its bones. Seeing it now treated with the same care and reverence we had making it means a great deal to me and everyone who brought it to life.

I especially want to remember TK Carter, who brought heart and humor into that desolate, frozen place and should be standing here with us today sharing in this recognition. 

Thank you to everyone who continues to keep it alive.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Our highest loyalty doesn’t belong to people or parties. It belongs to principles.

If you wouldn’t accept it from the “other side,” you shouldn’t accept it from yours.

Integrity is upholding your values even when your own group violates them.

[Jimmy Reign @AU_FinalBoss]

No clue how the remainder of the season will turn out. But this I know. This guy stepped into a HUGE shadow. He inherited a team that had one returning contributing player. Period.

He also inherited one of the most difficult schedules in the country, including facing 8 Final 4 coaches, so far.

How has he done? 5-3 against those coaches. First AU win at UF in 30 years. Currently top 25 in KenPom.

This man has far exceeded what he should have ever done with what was on his plate. Let’s appreciate that.