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Yes!

This is such a delightful confluence of things I’m interested in, both aesthetically and directly.

The crumbling ceiling panels remind me of the musical interlude from Kentucky Route Zero. Was that an intentional inspiration?

Here's the splash image/title card for a TTRPG I run. The 'alien' text might seem familiar to some:

I'll probably do another revision with a higher detail car, and maybe a tad less bloom

Hey hey, it's been a little while since I last made a K thread video, so here's two:

This is mostly an inside joke, but I had fun making this salty emblem and wanna share it with the world:

Is it just a coincidence that the url nearly spells Teague?

I also recently rediscovered the forum after a long absence since 2015, then joined the Air Force so haven't been online for a month. Looks like the 'no access to the outside world' section of training is easing up, so I should be able to hop onto the forum more regularly again

I enjoyed the movie a whole bunch. It’s a big ol’ space adventure that strings together a bunch of set pieces with some character drama in between, and to me, that’s how you do a Star Wars. I feel like people who didn’t enjoy it don’t have their expectations properly calibrated for the fantasy romp whose target demographic includes under 10 year olds.

I felt like it tied in to The Last Jedi in enough ways that the whole trilogy does feel like a single story, albeit one with a few rough gear shifts. Really, that’s an issue that should’ve been fixed in 2012 by making a more solid outline for the trilogy, and not the fault of any individual film or director.

Favourite throwaway moment was the muppet-looking hand puppet that was Lando’s driver, shouting ‘okay!’ with all the exuberance of a golden retriever puppy chasing a ball.

As explained in the video, Ian Hubert's America the Beautiful is mysteriously absent from his youtube page, so here's a small attempt to rectify that:

If it was the copyright mafia that took down his original video, hopefully my singing is bad enough that I can escape their wrath

Just watched the whole trilogy over the past week, and though I'm pretty intimately familiar with the first movie, it's been well over a decade since I'd seen the sequels, so I'd thoroughly forgotten everything apart from the general pop-culture awareness things. My general takeaway is that the sequels weren't as bad as people made them out to be, but they definitely don't follow on in the same direction that seems to be set up at the end of the first movie, and they seem to be actively trying to prevent you from understanding the cool ideas within them.

The primary example for this is the scene with the Architect, in which Neo learns that the prophecy of The One was made up by the machines as a way to corral the freed humans and make them easier to control. This is a really interesting concept, and could totally be explored in greater depth, but the actual on-screen explanation of this is a dude in a chair speaking in deliberately difficult to understand phrasing (concordantly, vis-a-vis, ergo), and no follow up. Compare this to the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus takes Neo through his 3D slideshow presentation of what the matrix is, the history of the machines, how the world got how it is, and it's clear that there's a real lack of 'show, don't tell' in the sequels. There's no visual interest to aid the exposition, and there's no time dedicated to exploring the concepts presented. It's as if the movie doesn't want you to know that it has cool ideas.

To make matters worse, what Reloaded does decide to spend time on is an extensive and unnecessary rave in a cave scene, an extensive and unnecessary orgasm-inducing cake, and several extensive and unnecessary fight scenes in which one or more those involved is trying to just leave, and could do so at any moment, but instead decides to hang about so the scene can be more spectacular. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for action spectacle, but without justified motivation, the action scenes feel overly indulgent.

You may have noticed that this criticism has so far been centered on Reloaded and not Revolutions, and that's because I think that any of the problems that Revolutions has are all inherited from Reloaded, and the new content it introduces is all executed about as well as could be hoped for. All the effects of the Zion battle sequence hold up surprisingly well despite the age of the film, and after the first act (up until Neo gets back into the real world, all of which feels like story beats that really should have been part of Reloaded but were moved over into Revolutions so as to make the movies more sensible lengths), all the plot beats are well paced and keep escalating towards the conclusion.

In summary: The Matrix sequels have a lot more going for them than people give them credit for, the reason behind the negative reception isn't due to the movies not having an interesting story to tell, but due to them hiding this interesting story behind layers of unnecessary self-indulgent scenes and a lack of effort to communicate or explore the cool ideas when presented.

Then again, maybe I'm just bringing too much of my own concrete

In recognition of Ian’s recent Lazy Blender Tutorial series getting a lot of traction (Do the kids still call it ‘going viral’?) and the possibility that there might be some folks on the forum who haven’t come across it through other means, a little under a year ago there was a new Dynamo episode:

Supposedly the gap between episodes was going to be shorter than previously, but that’s a tale as old as time. Maybe a bump in this thread will be the sacred ritual required to finalise episode 7.

Back at it again with a cheeky two-in-one: