James Stephen Jack

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Rewatching Black Hawk Down (2001) feels like spotting future stars every few minutes. Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jason Isaacs, Eric Bana, Jeremy Piven… it’s one of those casts that somehow became even more impressive with time.

[Ned Middles @NedMiddles1]

When BILL MURRAY filmed KINGPIN, they needed to shoot him bowling 3 strikes. The Farrelly Brothers told the hundreds of extras to keep their energy up because it could take him a while. Murray immediately rolls 3 strikes in a row and the crowd erupted in genuine amazement.

[Emir Han @RealEmirHan]

In The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger literally improvised when he threw a brick of money straight at Chin Han’s face.

He said:

“Heath jumped off a two-story pile of money, grabbed a stack, and threw it at me. It hit me square in the head. I was dazed. That was the first take.”

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Christopher Nolan has long cited Michael Mann’s HEAT (1995) as a major inspiration for THE DARK KNIGHT (2008).

The influence is easy to see in the film’s grounded crime drama, city-scale storytelling, and unforgettable opening bank heist.

[Rocketry @SpaceNews92]

Most rocket companies lock in designs years early... but SpaceX just ripped up Starship’s nosecone blueprint. They ditched the heavy header tanks entirely and switched to a sleek centerline propellant transfer system—slashing slosh nightmares, dead weight, and crazy plumbing under extreme G-forces. This one pivot unlocks easier orbital refueling and the path to Mars. Mind-blowing engineering evolution you need to see!
#SpaceX #Starship #RocketScience #PropellantTransfer #SpaceEngineering #MarsMission #ElonMusk

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A peregrine falcon weighs about two pounds, dives at up to 240 mph, and costs nothing to build. The B-2 underneath it is the most expensive aircraft ever made, around $2.1 billion a copy. The meme has the cheap one and the masterpiece swapped.

And the shape didn't come from the falcon. It came from Jack Northrop, an engineer who spent the 1930s and 40s trying to sell the Air Force a bomber that was all wing, with no body and no tail. His reasoning had nothing to do with birds. Strip off the body and tail and you cut drag, which buys you more range. His flying wings flew in 1946 and 1947 with the B-2's exact wingspan, 172 feet.

They also kept trying to flip over. A tailless wing is unstable, and 1940s pilots couldn't hand-fly it, so the design sat on a shelf for 40 years. It came back in the 1980s for one reason. A smooth wing with no tail and no sharp corners barely shows up on radar, because radar works by bouncing radio waves off hard edges and flat surfaces, and this shape has almost none of either. Northrop knew that back in the 40s. Nobody cared until hiding from radar became the whole job.

So the resemblance runs the opposite way the meme suggests. The falcon folded into that streamlined shape to cut drag at 200 mph and catch a swerving bird. The B-2 took a similar shape to disappear from radar and fly 6,000 miles. Same silhouette, two unrelated problems, and a smooth low-drag body just happens to be the best answer to both.

Where the falcon does quietly match military hardware is harder to spot. A team at Oxford strapped tiny GPS trackers to diving peregrines and found they steer using proportional navigation, the same targeting math built into most guided missiles. The bird turns at a rate set by how fast its prey slides across its view, which keeps it on a collision course without oversteering. Engineers worked that math out for missiles around the 1950s. The falcon had been flying it for millions of years.

As for cheap, the B-2 is the opposite. The Air Force ordered 132 and the order got cut to 21 after the Cold War, so all the research money piled onto a handful of jets. One crashed in Guam in 2008, a $1.4 billion loss and still the most expensive plane crash on record. Nineteen are left.

The two-pound bird that hits 240 mph for free is the budget masterpiece here. The $2.1 billion jet is the expensive tribute.

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

The Oldest Stuff on Earth
In 1969, a fireball streaked across the Australian sky and slammed into the small town of Murchison. One fragment punched straight through the roof of a shed — and inside that rock, scientists later discovered something extraordinary.They found presolar grains: microscopic stardust particles that formed between 5 and 7 billion years ago — long before our Sun was even born.These tiny crystals are the oldest solid material ever found on Earth. While our planet is only 4.54 billion years old, these grains predate the entire Solar System. They were forged in the dying breaths of ancient stars, ejected into interstellar space, and eventually swept up into the cloud of gas and dust that collapsed to form our Sun and planets.Most of the rock around us on Earth has been melted, crushed, or chemically altered over billions of years. But these hardy presolar grains survived the violent birth of the Solar System, the formation of Earth, and 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution — all while locked inside the Murchison meteorite.
To this day, they remain the closest thing we have to actual stardust you can hold in your hand.

[Emir Han @RealEmirHan]

Jake Gyllenhaal says he met Henry Cavill for the first time on day one of In the Grey:

“Lines were changing, scenes were shifting, and we got one scene’s dialogue minutes before. All I could do was root for Henry to remember his next line—and he nailed it.”

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The Matrix (1999) opens with a scene that must have blown audiences away in 1999. Nobody knew who Trinity was, why the Agents were so terrifying, or how she defied gravity. Within minutes, the Wachowskis announced that action movies had changed.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The Iron Man flying through New York in that clip was built inside a computer. In the flying and fighting shots, you are usually looking at a digital character, not a man in a suit. The metal suit they made for set was mostly there to teach the software how light bounces off polished steel, so the digital version would match it.

The Avengers used more than 2,200 visual effects shots, spread across 14 different effects companies. Industrial Light and Magic, the studio George Lucas started in 1975 for Star Wars, handled about 700 of them, building Iron Man, the Hulk, the alien army, and the city itself.

New York is mostly fake. You cannot fly a helicopter lower than 500 feet over Manhattan rooftops, so the crew could not get the low swooping shots they wanted. They sent a team to photograph the streets instead, 275,000 photos over eight weeks, then rebuilt about ten city blocks as a 3D model. Traffic jams, cars left with their doors open, sandwich boards from a city mid-evacuation, all dropped in to make a frozen photo feel like a living city.

The Hulk took the most work. Mark Ruffalo did more than play Bruce Banner. After the film was already cut together, he went up to ILM and acted out every Hulk shot in a motion capture suit, an outfit covered in dots that lets cameras track his exact movements and face. Artists built the green giant on top of that performance, then ran three layers of muscle and skin simulation so the flesh would jiggle and the veins would show when he moved. They added body hair, nose hair, stubble, and gray at the temples to match Ruffalo. They even worked out his weight, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,600 pounds. For the lab scene where he chases Black Widow, the crew dragged a metal sculpture shaped like him down the hallway to smash the set for real, then dropped the digital Hulk into the debris.

All of it cost about $220 million. The film made $1.519 billion. It earned an Oscar nomination for those effects and lost to Life of Pi.

That one shot of Iron Man in the air took a photo trip across New York, a city rebuilt from scratch, and a studio that has been doing this since 1975, so a digital suit could fly past windows that were also digital.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The climax of MAN OF STEEL (2013) unfolds at the exact same time as the opening of BATMAN v SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (2016).

Watching the same event from Bruce Wayne’s perspective completely changes the way you experience it.

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

The Largest Machine Ever Built: The Large Hadron Collider at CERNIt’s not just a machine. It’s a 27-kilometre ring of pure engineering ambition buried beneath the Swiss-French countryside — the biggest, most complex device humans have ever constructed.Weighing in at 10,000 tonnes of superconducting magnets, the LHC operates at an astonishing -271.3°C — colder than the vacuum of outer space itself. In fact, it is the coldest extended region anywhere in the known universe.This extreme chill is non-negotiable. The superconducting magnets must hover just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero to completely eliminate electrical resistance. Even the slightest warming, and the entire system fails in a spectacular “quench” — a runaway release of stored energy powerful enough to melt the magnets https://t.co/E7OPBINxTB 2008, one such quench caused $40 million in damage and kept the collider offline for 14 months. A brutal reminder of just how unforgiving this technology is.Yet when the LHC is firing on all cylinders, the numbers become almost unbelievable:Protons race around the ring at 99.9999991% the speed of light
They complete 11,245 laps every single second
Up to 600 million collisions occur each second inside the detectors
The experiments generate 15 petabytes of data every year
Keeping a 27-kilometre machine at near-absolute zero, year after year, while orchestrating hundreds of millions of particle collisions per second is an engineering triumph that borders on the miraculous.The physics discoveries are legendary.But the sheer audacity and precision required to make it all work might be the most impressive achievement of all.

[caio temer @canalCCore2]

Esse é o Bristol Hercules, motor radial de 14 cilindros desenvolvido nos anos 40. Repara no escapamento mudando de verde para marrom conforme aquece. O som que sai desse motor não precisa de apresentação.

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

Clancy Brown the set of Highlander in 1985....

This photograph captures Clancy Brown during production of Highlander, the cult classic that introduced audiences to one of cinema's most memorable villains: the Kurgan. Standing 6'3" with an imposing presence and distinctive voice, Brown was only 26 years old when he took the role that would help define his career.

Although Highlander was only a moderate box-office success upon release, it found a much larger audience through home video and television, eventually spawning multiple sequels, television series, novels, and comics. Its famous tagline, "There can be only one," became part of popular culture.

Brown went on to build one of Hollywood's most versatile careers. He portrayed Captain Hadley in The Shawshank Redemption, Brother Justin in Carnivàle, and became one of the most recognizable voice actors in animation as Mr. Krabs in SpongeBob SquarePants.

The producers originally struggled to cast the Kurgan. Brown's towering height, intense physicality, and ability to switch between menace and dark humor made him so memorable that many fans still regard him as one of the greatest fantasy-film villains of the 1980s.

© History Pictures

#drthehistories

[Dariusz Brzozowski @Darekbrzoza]

"Podczas kręcenia filmu Kolor pieniędzy w 1985 roku Paul Newman zaskoczył ekipę decyzją, której nikt się po nim nie spodziewał.
Po negocjacjach kontraktowych, w których przewidziano dla niego luksusowe zakwaterowanie, codzienne dostawy wina i prywatnych kucharzy, Newman po cichu zrezygnował z tych przywilejów jeszcze przed rozpoczęciem zdjęć. Pieniądze przekierowano do szpitala dziecięcego w Chicago, niedaleko miejsca, gdzie pracowała ekipa filmowa. Pracownicy placówki byli zdumieni, gdy otrzymali hojny anonimowy dar. Bez fleszy, bez konferencji prasowej, bez nazwiska na pierwszym planie. Dopiero dużo później dowiedzieli się, kto naprawdę za tym stał.
Podobny schemat powtarzał się na kilku planach filmowych w latach osiemdziesiątych. Newman wpisywał do kontraktów kosztowne udogodnienia: limuzyny, pięciogwiazdkowe apartamenty, najlepszy catering. A kiedy budżet był już zatwierdzony, prosił swoją ekipę, by wszystko wykreśliła. Zaoszczędzone pieniądze trafiały potem do szpitali pediatrycznych w pobliżu planów zdjęciowych. Często anonimowo. Zawsze cicho.
Jeden z producentów, wspominając pracę przy Kolorze pieniędzy, opowiedział zdanie, które dobrze oddawało sposób myślenia Newmana:
„Powiedział mi: jeśli ktoś ma płacić za wino, niech lepiej te pieniądze pomogą dzieciom, które nigdy nie dostały prawdziwej szansy”.
W tym samym tygodniu jeden ze szpitali dziecięcych w Nowym Jorku również otrzymał znaczącą darowiznę, gdy trwały przygotowania do kolejnego filmu z udziałem Newmana.
Newman nigdy nie robił z tego publicznego wydarzenia. Nie zapraszał dziennikarzy. Nie domagał się tabliczki z nazwiskiem. Żadne skrzydło szpitala nie musiało nosić jego imienia. Jego pomoc była dyskretna, świadoma i bardzo osobista. Współpracownicy często dowiadywali się o tych gestach przypadkiem.
Na planie Harry i syn jeden z asystentów produkcji zauważył, że Newman codziennie przyjeżdża zwykłym wypożyczonym samochodem, choć w kontrakcie miał zapewnione luksusowe auto. Kiedy zapytał go o to, aktor tylko się uśmiechnął i odpowiedział:
„Niech ktoś inny jeździ pierwszą klasą, jeśli dzięki temu jakieś dziecko dostanie dodatkowe łóżko”.
Te gesty mówiły o czymś więcej niż o samej hojności. Pokazywały powściągliwość, pokorę i rzadką umiejętność zamieniania przywileju w realną pomoc. Newman dobrze znał siłę zainteresowania, jakie budziła jego osoba, ale potrafił świadomie odwrócić uwagę od siebie.
Członek ekipy filmu Blaze wspominał, że podczas jednej z przerw zobaczył Newmana siedzącego samotnie z listą lokalnych klinik. Nie uczył się wtedy kwestii, nie przeglądał kostiumów. Porównywał adresy z mapą miasta i sprawdzał, gdzie przekazane środki mogą zrobić największą różnicę.
Nawet za kulisami zachowywał się inaczej, niż można by oczekiwać od wielkiej gwiazdy kina. Miał pozycję, która pozwalała mu dyktować warunki całym ekipom, a mimo to często siadał do lunchu z oświetleniowcami, technikami albo statystami.
Podczas pracy nad Werdyktem powiedział podobno jednemu z aktorów, że najważniejszą rzeczą, jaką zrobił w tamtym roku, nie była żadna scena przed kamerą, lecz wiadomość, że dziecko leczone w jednym ze wspieranych szpitali znowu zaczęło chodzić.
Nie szukał zaszczytów.
Kiedy podczas zdjęć do Fat Man and Little Boy jeden z dziennikarzy zapytał go o plotki dotyczące anonimowych darowizn, Newman obrócił wszystko w żart i natychmiast zmienił temat. Dla niego liczył się efekt, nie nagłówki. Zbyt dobrze znał świat, by dać się uwieść pochwałom.
Ludzie, którzy z nim pracowali, często wychodzili z tych spotkań odmienieni. Jeden z operatorów z końca lat osiemdziesiątych opowiadał, że gdy dowiedział się, co robi Newman, sam zaczął przekazywać część wynagrodzenia lokalnym szkołom w miejscach, gdzie kręcił filmy. Newman nigdy nikomu niczego nie narzucał. Po prostu dawał przykład, bez wykładów i moralizowania.
Pamiętać Paula Newmana to pamiętać człowieka, który mógł korzystać ze wszystkich przywilejów sławy, a wybrał podnoszenie innych.
W branży zbudowanej na blasku, pozorach i czerwonych dywanach potrafił po cichu postawić na to, co naprawdę ważne.
Udowodnił, że najmocniejsze sceny często rozgrywają się poza kamerą — wtedy, gdy nikt nie patrzy, a scenariusz pisze zwykła dobroć."
za Przytulność

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

In 1997, actor John C. McGinley’s son, Max, was born with Down syndrome. Shortly after, John's talent agent pulled him aside to deliver what was framed as practical advice: Do not talk about this publicly. Keep it quiet. People will stop hiring you.

For some, that might have sounded like reasonable career preservation. Protect the livelihood, avoid the spotlight, and pretend nothing had changed.

John’s response was immediate. He fired the agent.

Then, he did the exact opposite of what he had been told. He brought Max everywhere. Red carpets, talk shows, film sets, and public events. Wherever John went, Max was right beside him. At a time when society still largely preferred to keep individuals with developmental disabilities out of sight, John made a different choice. He made his son visible. Openly, proudly, and entirely without apology.

What began as a father's protective instinct grew into decades of fierce advocacy. John became one of the country's most recognizable voices for Down syndrome awareness. He spoke at global conferences, testified before Congress, and fought hard for employment law reforms that created real opportunities for people with disabilities to work, earn, and live independently.

During this journey, a reporter asked John a question that revealed far more about society's biases than it did about Max. The reporter asked if John ever wished his son were normal.

John didn't hesitate. He replied that Max was normal. The question wasn't. It was a blunt rejection of the idea that a person’s worth is measured by how well they fit into a narrow, conventional box.

Decades have passed since that conversation. Max is now 27 years old. He works, navigates his community, and lives an independent life filled with possibilities that the critics in 1997 never could have imagined for him.

Reflecting on their journey, John often says that Max never limited his life. He expanded it. Through his son, he learned what love, patience, and true commitment require.

The world signaled early on that it would have preferred Max to remain hidden in the shadows. John spent nearly three decades ensuring that the world looked Max right in the eye. Some fathers protect their children by shielding them from the world. Others protect them by refusing to let the world look away.

True inclusion begins when we stop treating differences as deficits. Max didn't need to change to fit into the world.

The world needed to change to make room for Max.