I can’t place exactly when it happened but at some point in the past five years or so the social expectation to add a new friend on facebook completely disappeared
every time you replace “this is hard” with “what’s the first step?” you shift brain activity from your amygdala (fear) to your prefrontal cortex (problem-solving).
that’s neuroplasticity in real time.
I STUDIED 50 PEOPLE WHO SEEM "LUCKY" IN LIFE.
None of them journal. Or wake at 5am. Or have a "system."
But They All Do These 12 Things Religiously:
1. They don't wait for the weekend to live.
#BREAKING Australian actress Holly Valance says that everyone “starts out as a lefty”
But then you “wake up” when you try to “run a business or buy a home”
“And then you realise how crap their ideas are”
Hard to argue, Holly.
The strongest red flag was when leftists lost the ability to be funny. Comedy relies on subverting expectations to expose truth. Leftism subverts the truth to peddle lies. That’s why they can’t be funny, they can’t reveal the truth, their entire politics depends on concealing it.
If you're a naturally anxious person, I recommend pursuing a high stress career path where at least you'll be compensated for anxiety you're going to have anyways.
Am I the only mom who gets annoyed by how ugly the illustrations are in modern children's books?
It's like they put effort into making them look horrible and depressing. Why?
If you see Project Hail Mary this weekend, I hope you'll remember how I told you over 3 years ago that stuff like this was going to explode in pop culture.
-From ironic cynicism to post-ironic sincerity.
-Embracing the "cringe" & the celebration of the earnest "try-hard."
-From deconstructing the past, to a nostalgia for some positive "vibe" we lost in the deconstruction.
-The rejection of Fight Club-era nihilism.
-The ability to stare at the apocalypse in front of you and be hopeful instead of a "doomer."
Just got out of Project Hail Mary and it did not miss on any of this.
I won’t spoil anything, but there is one line on which the whole movie and the entire cultural “vibe shift” we’re experiencing rests.
When you hear it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
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.
dear apple, the iPod needs to come back. not for nostalgia. for the parents who want their kids to love music and audiobooks without a browser, social media, and the whole internet attached to it
everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager
> drive your friends to the airport
> go to their party even when you're tired
> stop cancelling last minute
> host at your place
> support the wins & losses
it's worth every ounce of effort