SANANAB

I like this movie, but I wish I didn't. You don't want to be the guy who really likes Fight Club.

This is a big, professionally-made movie that's based around the idea that humans only use 10% of their brains. Except that's a dumb myth from the 1800s and makes the movie impossible to enjoy.

What's even more frustrating is that there's a lot of craftmanship and talent here and, with a bit of a rewrite, it probably could have been one of the great science fiction films of all time, instead of a cringefest. If only one of the hundreds of people who worked on this had pointed out the error, at any point during the film's making...

This is also at least the third movie where Scarlett Johansson has ascended to a higher plane of reality, and I'd be curious to know why producers and Johansson herself think of her that way.

Yowza, this is good! This used to be considered a rare example of a good sequel, now Google 'good prequel' or 'best prequel' and this is all people can seem to think of.

• My favourite pop culture writer is Brian Grub, ever since 'Which Beatle has the Worst Christmas Song?'. Lately, he's been writing weekly rundowns and this one is a doozy. Read it slowly, take it in, absorb it.
• There are a lot of lists of top programming languages, most of which are written by cheesy copywriters. IEEE's annual report seems more or less accurate, although their Embedded seems a bit weird (Python? For embedded? Really? What a waste of hardware). They just released their 2019 report.
• For some reason, I type 'moo' a lot, unconciously. It's my default metasyntactic variable (along with 'apple' and 'banana'). I think it goes back to one of those 'intro to OO' things that uses farm animals as an example, that I read many years ago. Googling 'moo' lead me to this low-budget, NSFW slice of joy. This is all the good things that people used to say about punk rock but weren't actually true.
• Ancient Clickhole of the week: Don’t Worry, There’s No ‘Arthur The Aardvark’ Shit In This List Of Total ’90s Memories.
• I've read before that before the internet, people would copy entire games from magazines in machine code, assembly, basic or a mix thereof. It turns out that most of these - having no commercial value nowadays - have been made free on archive.org. Take a look at this insane insert.
• Speaking of low-level programming and retrocomputing, this short tutorial is not just a great introduction to 6502, but a good intro to assembly in general. I wish I had something like that instead of the spiderweby books I learned from.

The author dances on a fine line between insightful and cartoonish. His writing style is so awful that every time he quoted someone else, I felt a sensation of relief, as if I were going on a pleasant little vacation.

It feels like it should be good. I kept seeing things and thinking, "Yes, what a good idea for this type of movie", but it still manages to be so so boring.