Meanwhile, on a physical stage, visual effects are happening:

Iron Man costume made from balloons.

2001: A Space Odyssey had a huge effect on me, but I saw it before I was 13, so that's not in this list. (And, before you ask, it's not in my other "3 films" list because I only saw it once growing up, whereas I saw the other films over and over again.)

So, my adolescence list is:

• Star Wars (1977) -- duh, as Trey said. Also, the first film I saw in Germany, in German.

• Alien (1979) -- liked it so much, I dragged my parents to see it, with hilarious consequences.

• Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979) -- blown away by the visuals, still love the music, first time I experienced a movie get a standing ovation from the audience.

Indeed, but I'd rather not become another research project for my psychiatrist's students.

Definitely watch the 'Gerrit's Tagebuch' videos as well; all the behind-the-scenes stuff shows you that the people behind this are world-class geeks (and that's a good thing, by the way). I'm pretty sure some of the stuff they've done with miniature vehicle control is as advanced as any other research in the autonomous vehicles field.

I'm so tempted to travel to Hamburg just to visit this place, and I'm sure my wife would want to come too.

Magic Beard

Teague's First Law of Character Dynamics: the dickishness of a constant observer can never be zero.  (Dickishness is usually measured in microTrumps, because values approaching one Trump are incredibly difficult to replicate under laboratory conditions.)

A new maze has appeared in the UK, apparently:

Come to Glasgow, we'll give you loads.

(Disclaimer: I'm not actually in Glasgow. But I used to be.)

Maybe so that, by 2013, they could create this virtual news studio that's almost indistinguishable from their physical ones?

BBC News comes from a virtual version of their real sets at 9pm UK time for an hour, apparently, and that's the start of one such news programme.  Jump to 2:07 to see the real news room with a news set on the right, dissolving to the virtual set at 2:10.

Looking on IMDb, I'm actually surprised at how few movies named The Last Something have had sequels.

Whereas, we're up to Final Destination 5, and the Final Fantasy video games actually have a branching series of sequels, with things like Final Fantasy X-2 being the follow-up to Final Fantasy X, but distinct from Final Fantasy XI. (Although, to be fair, 'sequel' might not be the right term to describe how successive Final Fantasy games relate to one another.)

I do wish that, following Highlander's tag line of "There can be only one", Highlander 2's had been "Oops, there's another one, apparently".