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Throwback to a night out in the wild during a stay in Savoie in 2016, and a powerful sunset on the mountains looming over us. It took us a while to realize the biggest one in the distance (not pictured here) was Mont Blanc. We didn't recognize it from that unusual angle.
I actually processed that picture back in '16 but never published it. I gave it a finishing touch two days ago and sit for a while in front of it, trying to put into words how the scene made me feel. I was recalled of that feeling that the mountains were angry and spitting a fire before going to sleep. A "deafening silence" as I call it, followed by a quiet emptiness. It certainly was a memorable bivouac for us.
(that title made me think of Eddie; suddendoty.jpg)
There's a recurring theme in what I search for in photography, what we can't reach. This is a feeling I often get while contemplating high mountains. They always seem to me to be a universe of their own, hiding in their huge scale. It's very similar when I look at galaxies : they're finite objects we can more or less absorb with a single glimpse of the eye, but they hold billions of elements, maybe life, way beyond our grasp. Our imagination has the ability to make them infinite.
(this after-the-fact comment is actually the closest I've yet come to explaining such a feeling. I'm self-stealing it for my Facebook page.)
It can take a little while getting used to that guy's voice, though he's softened it a bit over the years. He's been compared a lot to Bob Dylan (though Dylan was never Swedish, as far as I know!).
Love Is All is his one song I always come back to. It's sad and very powerful.
The Russian town of Oymyakon is one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth with winter temperatures often going as low as -65°C (-85°F) ; in fact, it gets so cold there that recent studies show temperatures tend to increase with altitude.
There are many causes for the French Revolution; one of them may be… a volcano in Iceland.
On June 8, 1783, The Laki volcano in Iceland cracked open and erupted for eight months, spewing an estimated 120,000,000 tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. In addition to wiping out 80% of the country's sheep and around 20% of the Icelandic population through famine and poisoning, it resulted in a huge haze that spread over western Europe for months. This disrupted weather cycles; there were droughts, floods, and the following winters were particularly harsh. All this led to terrible famines, including in France where it helped worsen the situation of the population in the years preceding the 1789 uprising.
If you Google search the word "Askew", the result page will be titled to the right.
You know, from a corporation/monopoly/business viewpoint, Google is dangerous, but the team taking care of the actual website are freakin' cool people.
I think you guys could record a commentary for TPM every month and there'd always be something to say or another angle to take it from. It's great.
(I also haven't seen the prequels in close to 10 years. I have no idea how it will go when I break the cycle. Let's keep it for when it's my turn to visit L.A.)
It's nice to see Ryan again, too. I'll try and not be super jealous of Owen because I don't like to geek out too much, but it's my yearly reminder that I owe this guy a lot.
It's also slightly illegal to have a 12-year-old on a podcast. But who am I to judge.
PS: Teague's Auralnauts' 3PO game is on fucking point.
PS 2: re-Watto's dice: I actually think his reaction is somewhat plausible. It's evidently a loaded die (it's Watto.) and he actually knows Qui-Gon's Force tricks ("I'm a Toydarian, mind tricks don't work on me."). So he knows what Qui-Gon did.
If you ever watch a film directed by Alan Smithee... this person has never existed: it's a fake name directors are allowed to use if they are so dissatisfied with their project they don't want their real name to be associated with it.
It's the only pseudonym the Directors Guild of America allows, and this came about with Death of A Gunfighter in 1968-69. Lead actor Richard Widmark was displeased with Robert Totten's work and had him replaced by Don Siegel. This resulted in a dispute where neither director wanted to take credit for the film, and the DGA decided to credit the fictional name "Al Smith", but it was deemed too common and was changed to Alan Smithee.
(it's also an anagram of "The Alias Men")
Alan Smithee has "directed" dozens of films (like Hellraiser IV or Heat and Dune for their TV editions) and TV shows as well (MacGyver's pilot episode, The Twilight Zone's "Paladin of the Lost Hour" episode) ... and some music videos as well (I Will Always Love You, which I just learned was directed by the very talented wildlife photographer Nick Brandt). There are also a few examples amongst comic books and video games.
I'd like to wish a very happy 20th birthday to the best game I've ever played, Half-Life.
You couldn't tell my life without talking about Half-Life. It was my first FPS. I was 7 when I played it for the first time. From this point onwards, not a week would go without me playing a bit of it. My brother showed me its map editor, at the time Worldcraft and then renamed to Hammer, when I was maybe 9. It developed into me making maps for Half-Life for the next ten years. It got me to join my first forum community on the internet when I was 12, a website called Le Site du Zér0 (roughly "The Noob Website"). I took part in contests, community projects, but the biggest part of it was just me making maps for myself, largely taking place in the Black Mesa research facility. I was more interested in the world that in the gameplay. I was fascinated by the universe the game took place in. I think I was 10 or 11 when I made nearly a full pre-incident chapter, having the play wandering through Black Mesa with nothing happening except scientists doing their thing. It pretty much looked like shit, and stumbling upon the files years later, I re-made it with better skills. It was nice.
I think I lost my shit when Half-Life 2 was announced. I think I even more lost my shit when I played it. It's the second best game I've played.
Not everyone agrees with this. I've had lots of people tell me this game has better mechanics, that game has better AI...
But the thing the Half-Life series does is make you be an active part of a movie. Your character has no identity, he doesn't talk. You're the character, not like other games do where your actions become the character. You're an active audience. You're watching a film and making it happening. There are no cutscenes. You're never (except ONE time in the whole series) out of your body. Half-Life is the most extreme execution of the first-person structure. And though its gameplay mechanics are interesting, the best success of Half-Life is its experience of immersion.
I get out of a Half-Life game like I get out of the theater, having watched a great movie. I ask myself questions about the story, about what I've just witnessed. Like a great film, it raises questions without answering them. Like a great film, it leaves you room for interpretation.
(seriously, who the hell is the G-Man?)
Twenty years later, my love for this series hasn't diminished one iota. It's part of my culture, it's part of my identity.
PS: to celebrate this birthday, the Black Mesa devs have released a first trailer for Xen, the final chapter of the Half-Life remake, scheduled to be released in 2019.
I'm really curious to see this developed in a more appropriate thread. It's the second time I've seen this comment in a few days, and I'm not talented enough to understand why I should agree, because my instinct so far tells me I don't.
(undigested, rough instinctive take on said instinct: Fantastic Beasts lacked a proper narrative direction, but the second one was great.)
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Anyway, godspeed William Goldman. I'm a late bloomer in all cool things so I discovered the Princess Bride only a few years ago but it immediately became one of my favourite films. I'm downright staggered how absolutely every aspect, every tiny cog in its machinery is tongue-in-cheek (Knopfler is a goddamn hero), but also simultaneously how strong its story is. The book which I read a bit later on only emphasizes it, with the added layer of the narrator being a whole character, losing himself in anecdotal memories and telling the story however he feels like doing.
The Princess Bride is absolutely great in its two medium; they are to me two distinct works of art that perfectly make sense and don't need to be compared. And while I'll revisit the book but maybe not that many times, the film is one that I'll watch over and over again and never get tired of. It's one of these films you know every dialogue by heart; it's music.
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