blimps are cool too

[P]eople were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films.

] via What We Can Learn from Procrastination at the New Yorker

“I think the idea that Web applications are now becoming mature enough that we can start thinking about joy, and about surprise, and making a much more rounded experience than just one that’s usable, I think that’s really exciting… there are a lot of places we’re going to see game ideas put into applications in ways that we’re not going to see it and say, ‘Hey, that’s just like a game.’ So it’s going to be in much more subtle ways and much more disparate ways than building a full integrated game into an application.”

Assistant editors Tyler Nelson and Alex Olivares spearheaded the [Social Network’sconforming process.  “The assistants in this workflow essentially become the lab—they conform, they finish effects, all those things,” Baxter emphasizes. After the conform, only final color correction went outside.

”Don’t write for an audience,” she said. ”Write what you want to see.”

Espenson also had another, less contentious, bit of advice: watch what you want to write. ”Work backwards,” she said. ”If there’s a TV show you really like, watch your favourite episode and re-create the outline. Now you’ll know what a good outline looks like. That’s how I taught myself.”

the ‘science’ at the heart of the SciFi narrative can be defined as simply the plausible ability to do that which we otherwise cannot and that this ability – as Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling famously described – is The improbable made possible. This distinction is important as it tells us what it is that removes SciFi from Fantasy and it also explains some of the power Sci Fi has to garner intense cultural resonance – it has plausibility and and it has ramifications for the here and the now.

Good luck, right? But here’s the reality: naps are a powerful source of competitive advantage. The

Like all of Anderson’s works, The Darjeeling Limited offers highly aestheticized settings, but this film, unlike the others, seems to derive much of its stylization not from art direction but from a documentary-like attentiveness to preexisting locations.

The American version wouldn’t be a “godless” community. These were communities connected to faith. Especially at that time, in the Reagan era — right when Reagan was giving his Evil Empire speech. So, at that time, we thought of evil as something that was other - the Soviets — while Americans were fundamentally good. Now, imagine, what would it be like to be a 12-year-old in this world, a kid bullied so mercilessly that he gets these dark thoughts. Being in that community and having those kinds of feelings: Are you evil? In the book, he’s obsessed with serial killers. So I had to find a way to translate the essence of that story into this place that I remembered. At the same time, I knew I wanted to be really faithful to the story.

Matt Reeves, the director, quoted in this fantastic review of Let Me In. This made me *excited* to see this film. 

The key difference between the films that Mulvey dissects in her essay and the personal blogs I’m talking about is agency. The films were made by men — men called the shots (literally) and wrote the stories that cast women in the passive roles. Obviously a personal blogger decides what to post on her blog. But while this difference is worth noting, it doesn’t seem to matter much in terms of the audience’s reaction. In fact, the blogger’s agency frequently becomes a weapon for the blogger’s critics. “Well, if she doesn’t want to be called a slut, maybe she shouldn’t post such provocative photos.” Doesn’t this sound a bit like the “She was asking for it” argument?

Fantastic article via Musings of an Inappropriate Woman