Search options (Page 3 of 16)

Deus Ex trilogy (plus a port of a mobile game) available on Steam, until Friday, for the princely sum of $7.73 (CAN)!

If anyone has yet to experience Deus Ex, now's the time!

Not really a course, but a supremely handy resource to have is Project Euler.

This is a bunch of math problems, generally increasing in difficulty. Every problem can be solved by brute force, but the goal is to write a piece of code which gets the answer in under a minute. It's not a course, but I've found it really fucking helpful for

• Thinking like a programmer

• Thinking about data structures

• Problem-solving

• Making use of common coding structures (loops and conditionals and boolean logic etc)

• Coming up with, and implementing efficient algorithms

• etc

Can't recommend this enough!

Re: the pop-cultural influence and idealization of Tony Montana

Why doesn't anyone ever bring up the fact that he's a man with no self-control who kinda wants to fuck his own sister?

Nicely done!

Jeff Bridges:
1. Arlington Road with Tim Robbins
2. Mystic River with Kevin Bacon
OR
1. Fisher King with Robin Williams
2. The Best of Times with Trey Stokes

James Gandolfini.

Resurrecting this because I want more Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (and/or Trey Stokes... yes, this sentence is ambiguously structured) in my life. Anyway, Jon Stewart:

1. Death to Smoochy with Robin Williams
2. The Best of Times with Trey Stokes

Or

1. Death to Smoochy with Danny DeVito
2. Throw Momma from The Train with Anne Ramsay
3. Goonies with Josh Brolin
4. Hollow Man with Kevin Bacon

Henry Fonda.

Okay. This was really freaking difficult. The top 3 were easy, 4-10 got tricky in terms of order, and 11-20 is subject to change based on my mood, but this'll work.

For 20 favourite films, I picked the 20 films I enjoy the most, but which also are legitimately great movies, most of which are bringing something new to the table, or doing something neat from a filmmaking point of view. (Otherwise, I would have had Beverly Hills Cop and Starcrash in there. I love those films, but BHC is a generic film with [arguably] lovable characters, and Starcrash is a hot mess.)

Herc's Twenty Favourite Films
1. 12 Angry Men
2. Die Hard
3. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
4. Shaun of The Dead
5. The Thing
6. Network
7. The Big Lebowski
8. Goodfellas
9. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
10. Being John Malkovich
11. Jaws
12. Dog Day Afternoon
13. Ghostbusters
14. Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade
15. This is Spinal Tap
16. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
17. L.A. Confidential
18. Back To The Future Part II
19. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
20. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels

For twenty greatest, I tried to pick films which are influential and important, but also legitimately good films that I've seen. (So, no Scarface... it's influential, but average, can we fucking admit it already? And no Casablanca... haven't seen it, sorry!) It came down to balancing how enjoyable it is as a movie, and how well-crafted it is as a film. And asking myself "if this film and all the films it influenced, disappeared, would that be a tragic loss to cinema?"

Herc's Twenty Greatest Films
1. 12 Angry Men
2. Citizen Kane
3. The Godfather
4. The Shawshank Redemption
5. The Wizard of Oz
6. Pulp Fiction
7. Apocalypse Now
8. Star Wars: A New Hope
9. Raiders of The Lost Ark
10. Die Hard
11. Jaws
12. Jurassic Park
13. Psycho
14. Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
15. Seven Samurai
16. Blade Runner
17. The Matrix
18. Chinatown
19. King Kong
20. Singin' In The Rain

Cicada on my balcony. It's quite a pretty thing. I dunno what species it is or how often this species emerges though:

Link to hi-def version: http://imgur.com/JM09GeG

Ok, could somebody please explain something about this George Melies film to me? I'm totally on board with the idea of multiple exposures, and blacking-out part of the frame so it isn't exposed to light etc. I get that, I really do. And I understand how his disembodied heads can be on the tables by matting out parts of the screen vertically.

But I don't understand
a) how he managed to get the matte to follow his head while he moved smoothly around (it seems unlikely he could hold a position while they advanced to the next frame and changed the matte, and then resume a frame's worth of motion for the next frame), and
b) how he managed those moments where his hand passes in front of his missing head (where the matte would presumably be)

Did he actually paint out his head frame by frame on the original negative (which seems like the simplest solution) instead?

Okeydokes, that's fine!

Tom's as handsome as his voice makes him sound. You can't have both. Just pick one.

I know! William "Princess Bride" Goldman?!? The first, say, 30 minutes had promise (and the memory-warehouse was well done), but good god that film goes off the rails fast. Mostly King's fault, I guess (he admitted he doesn't like the novel and that he was blitzed on Oxycontin the whole time he was writing it).

But that ending (changed from the novel)... wow.
There are two options:

1) Duddits was always an alien, who chose to be developmentally-challenged and later get leukaemia, or
2) Duddits was a developmentally-challenged kid who gets bodysnatched by an alien, and they spend the rest of their conscious lives trapped in this broken child.

Like I said... wow.

Y'all. I thought I could manage (and I've drunk a lot of coffee) but I didn't sleep at all last night and I am crashing hard . Gotta skip out on tonight, real sorry.

(Have fun storming the castle, though.)