As a companion to my writeup on the film canon, I made this list of 32 unique movies worth trying. I’m (mostly) not gonna waste my finger-breath on stuff already in the canon. If you actually want to use this as a film guide, I’d go through TSPDT in order, and for every 2 films on TSPDT, watch one of these. And if it sucks… hit da bricks!. David Sims at The Atlantic watches thousands more films than me, and he had a similar idea.
I recently came across the popular book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Something like this book would have been useful when I was starting to get into movies, just as IMDB and later, TSPDT have been. Rather than a point-by-point rebuke of the book itself, it’s a useful jumping-off point for the pitfalls associated with creating a film canon - a list of movies intended to represent the medium as a whole.
I spent the pandemic playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. My first 10 hours were incredible, the next 30, very good. But I clocked another 60 before I vanquished Ganon. The flaws in BotW become more apparent the more you play it. It’s a great game, but not the masterpiece people say.
The major flaw of this game is the length, which is a function of how huge it is.
Wonderful Life (1998) explores an interesting concept in ways you won’t expect. Released here as After Life, it follows an organization dedicated to shepherding the deceased into the next life. When you die, you get to select one memory, and only one, to remember for eternity. The viewer becomes more familiar with the spiritual bureaucracy alongside one crop of dead people, who arrive on Monday and are gone on Saturday. The rules are: each person has three days to choose a memory.
NFTs and #CryptoArt are a carbon dioxide disaster. Pause the whole thing for a month.
People are working on new solutions, but it’s important to stop wasteful activity NOW while those alternatives are being created and battle-tested.
What’s the harm? One single edition of one single crypto art generally uses “an EU resident’s electricity consumption for 2 weeks”. With more editions, more postings, more transactions (when an NFT is traded) and other factors I’m not sure I have a grasp on, the energy usage and CO2 emissions can go even higher.