New forum rules. Posts that include the phrase "I just watched" without also including a link, or a pointer of the form "It's on Netflix" or something, are now banned.

I knew these two girls in high school, identical twins, Christina and Patrice. They spoke fluent Twin. At first I just assumed they were putting us all on, but on a dare, they once spoke entirely in Twin for a solid hour. I believed then, and believe now, that the absolutely were not faking it.

It was kind of like pidgin. The sentence structure was really simple. No pronouns. They referred to themselves and each other as "Tee" and "Ree." Lots of one-syllable words. It was kind of awesome.

Alien

Mooltipass!

Oh man, I'm so glad Dorkman brought up cargo cults. Not only are they just plain fascinating, there's a fundamental human truth there.

Cargo cults popped up throughout the Pacific, and they actually predate World War II by a hundred years. But the really remarkable ones were in Melanesia, Fiji and New Guinea particularly. It's just like Dorkman said: After the war ended, the islands were essentially abandoned by Westerners, and the indigenous people there integrated the notion of "cargo" into their preexisting belief systems about sympathetic magic. It's just like Dorkman described; they believed that if they carried out the rituals they'd been taught, then they'd be rewarded with cargo — wealth, essentially.

Believe it or not, there's still an active cargo cult in Vanuatu. It's called the John Frum Movement. The practitioners believe that John Frum is a god who came to them in the 30s in the form of an American soldier, and that he taught them the rituals to bring forth the cargo from the "rot bilong kako," the "road of the cargo" whereby wealth is transported from the spiritual to the material world.

The locals wear homemade World War II-era Army uniforms and wave homemade American flags as part of their rituals. It's fascinating stuff.

The seminal work on the subject is Peter Lawrence's "Road Belong Cargo," if you're really interested.

Anyway, we can point and laugh at those guys — or study them abstractly as a sociological curiosity — but I think the fundamental truth is that we've got a kind of instinct for causality, as people, and a natural tendency to believe that if we do X then Y will happen, and to build up whole rationalized belief systems to support that. And the hell of it is, that kind of thinking leads to the desired outcome just often enough to make it difficult to argue against it from first principles.

The difference between the modern scientific method — which works — and cargo-cult primitivism is distressingly subtle.

It's been a while since I listened to this one (need to put it back in the queue), but assuming that's what Brian really said, he's not technically wrong, but he's partly wrong. The force exerted against the inside of a spinning drum is, in fact, a function of the radius of the drum. But from what I understand, that's not really why a small-radius centrifuge wouldn't work. I've read that it'd fail because of a combination of balance issues and Coriolis effects. If the radius of the drum is small in proportion to the size of your body, then the force pulling on your balance organs in your inner ears would be sufficiently non-parallel for it to really foul up your sense of balance. And any freely falling object inside the drum would appear to fall in a huge curve, which would also work toward upsetting your self of balance.

All in all, it'd be upchuck paradise, is how I've heard it described. All things considered, better to just stick with zero G for a trip of less than a couple years.

I love this movie. It's terrible, as far as things like rationality and plot go. But it's just so much fun.

(And I should've put "You are fired!" in quotes, 'cause you know, the guy with the floating Thai restaurant … "Grandfather say, it not rain every day. This is good news, guaranteed!")

Eh, that's a good point, Branco. Shooting on a small sensor teaches you nothing about creative use of focus.

It really comes down to what you want most. Do you want SOME camera in order to tell your own stories? Or do you want something that approximates the optical characteristics of a real motion-picture camera? Or do you want to do VFX stuff and the background plates are, on balance, less important than what you composite on top of them?

The DSLRs are fine, but in my opinion unless you're also going to be shooting a ton of stills, they're a waste of money. The only advantage a DSLR has as a motion picture camera is the sensor size; the 7D and 550 are close enough to Super 35-sized to make little practical difference, and the 5D is roughly equivalent to VistaVision. That's a very big deal.

BUT it comes with huge trade-offs in other areas. The guys have described some.

If it were me, I'd get my hands on a (possibly used) Canon HV30 or HV40. They're shitty little home-video cameras, with pinkie-nail-sized sensors and fixed, crappy lenses, but they're also really cheap. Brand new, they were only like $700. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find one on ebay or something for considerably less.

Working with HDV isn't the simplest workflow in the world, but I did it for two years, so I promise you it can be done. And apart from the sensor size and lens quality, the DSLRs don't offer much more, and they cost a LOT more.

I'd buy something really cheap to own myself for playing and learning, and stash the money I save to use toward renting a Red kit for a day or something when I really want to splurge.

UNLESS you're also a stills nut. In that case, get the 550 to use as your primary stills camera, and consider the motion features to be lagniappe.

This is who you are in my head.

Once upon a time I had a copy of Darabont's Indy 4 script. Didn't get around to reading it promptly, and now I can't find the damn thing.

Oh god dammit. Sorry, Switch. I fix.