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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
Silent Hill 2 etches a surprisingly nuanced and complex portrayal of a grieving widower, touching on some of the ugly realities of watching one's spouse slowly succumb to illness that even unvarnished warts-and-all literary fiction avoids confronting. While it's at it, the game includes a secondary character who is a
Spec Ops: The Line depicts a well-meaning protagonist with admirable goals, whose monomaniacal stubbornness and refusal to take responsibility for his actions (indeed, refusal to even acknowledge the consequences of his actions) and steadily declining mental acuity combine to make him progressively more unlikeable and loathsome. The lead writer described him as a tragic hero whose fatal flaw is his inability to reconcile the disparity between the man he would like to be and the man he really is. Even if you don't buy into the meta aspects of the game's presentation, Walker is a masterclass in writing a character who is believeable and unlikeable, while still retaining the player's sympathy.
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7hr ago
Grease (both its original stage production and film adaptation) and Happy Days are both prominent examples of the wave of fifties nostalgia that swept the US during the 1970s. I chose the "Buddy Holly" music video to illustrate that the effect is cyclical: 90s looking back fondly on media from the 70s which was itself looking back fondly on the 50s.
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9hr ago
Tbf What Remains of Edith Finch is really good.
Glad you enjoyed Ten Little
About one-third of the way through The Matriarch.
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20hr ago
I used to think this concept was incoherent, and yet listening to Holst's "Jupiter" makes me feel patriotic for a planet I've never set foot on and never will (because one physically cannot "set foot" on it).
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
20hr ago
Surely you've heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart".
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
TV Tropes has a list of examples.. The creators of Gladiator originally intended to depict the gladiators doing celebrity endorsements for products, but worried that audiences would find this silly and anachronistic, even it's historically accurate and well-documented.
Tangentially related, I once read someone arguing that artistic nostalgia moves in twenty-year cycles, as writers, directors etc. grow up and make artworks either set in or heavily reminiscent of the time period in which they grew up. This phenomenon is best illustrated by the music video for "Buddy Holly" by Weezer, directed by Spike Jonze, which uses trick photography to make it look like the band is performing in an episode of Happy Days. That is, it's a video from the 1990s which is a nostalgic throwback to a sitcom from the 1970s, which sitcom was itself a nostalgic throwback to the 1950s in which it is set.
True to form, various films and TV shows from the 2000s had a nostalgic 80s setting (e.g. Donnie Darko, set in October 1988: writer-director Richard Kelly explained that he decided to base the setting on his own childhood rather than setting his coming-of-age story in the present day and getting the teenage slang and cultural references wrong). The British synth-pop duo La Roux made a name for themselves in the late 2000s with a sound that knowingly called back to the synth-pop of Eurhythmics and Depeche Mode.
But I feel like we've been stuck in a bit of an 80s nostalgia rut for a long time. A full decade after Donnie Darko, Drive starring Ryan Gosling received praise for its soundtrack full of modern electronic songs knowingly calling back to 80s synth-pop, and graphic design choices aping Risky Business. Four years later, Stranger Things came out on Netflix, with its exaggerated and heightened portrayal of the 1980s of Steven Spielberg. In 2020, The Weeknd attracted critical adulation for mixing up his pop-R&B sound with an album incorporating retro 80s synth tones and drum machines. And that's not even touching on video games, wherein you could spend a lifetime playing nothing but the retraux 8-bit shovelware clogging up Steam mimicking the look and sound of NES and SNES games, and never run out of titles.
In 2026, there is absolutely nothing new or surprising about movies, TV shows or music knowingly incorporating the aesthetics of the 1980s: it amounted to flogging a dead horse a full decade ago. But creators seem strangely reluctant to progress to the next phase, wherein 90s nostalgia reigns supreme for a generation. (The only medium proving an exception to this trend is video games, in which 8-bit RPGs and platformers have belatedly given way to so-called "boomer shooters" and survival horror titles mimicking the graphics of the original Silent Hill on the PS1.)
And I suspect this is illustrative of a certain kind of cultural stagnation. For most of the twentieth century, a combination of cultural shifts and technological developments meant that the music of one decade sounded completely different from that of a decade prior. A pop song from 1955 sounds nothing like one from 1945, likewise for 1965, 1975 and so on. But by the 90s, the pace of change had slowed to the point that the era no longer felt especially distinct from the one following. A pop song from 1985 sounds completely different from a pop song from 1995, but a pop song from 2005 doesn't sound that different from a pop song from 1995. The 1980s are hence the last decade with a distinct aesthetic which you can knowingly mimic in a way that feels different from the present day: since then we've been trapped in the Eternal 90s/00s. Announcing that your album is a consciously nostalgic throwback to the sound of the 1990s hence comes off as oxymoronic, like announcing that it's a consciously nostalgic throwback to 2026.
This hypothesis also explains why, as mentioned above, video games are the only medium doing the 90s nostalgia thing, and why I think it's unlikely we'll see a trend of 00s nostalgia in video games any time soon. The 1990s were the last decade in which graphics looked meaningfully distinct from those of the decade following. I'm not claiming that the AAA graphics of 2026 look identical to those of 2004, but it's been a case of slow incremental marginal improvement, wholly unlike the quantum-leap sensation of going from Half-Life to Half-Life 2. I think the days of being awed when a new video game achieves a heretofore-thought-impossible level of graphical fidelity are decisively over.
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1d ago
You do not need to worry. Ask her for her phone number.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Years ago I read a comment somewhere (possibility on Reddit) which pointed out that light travels at different speeds depending on the medium through which it's travelling, and so when we talk about the physical constant c, we're not really talking about the speed of light so much as we're talking about the speed of causality. The use of the symbol c was thus a presciently apt one.
I don't know why, but the phrase "the speed of causality" inspires a Lovecraftian sensation of the sublime whenever I think of it.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Three times in the cinema? Last time I did that was for Tár.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Sorry if you got a second ping just now, I just noticed I misspelled your username.
As described in Tuesday's thread, months ago I had an idea for a work project using geographic projection. @ToaKraka suggested using GIS, which I'd never used before, and I started work on Wednesday. While I'm not coding anything from scratch, ChatGPT and Gemini have been immensely useful for everything from sourcing the data I need, to writing Excel formulae, to optimising my workflow. I'm finding it so absorbing to work on that I even took a working lunch break today. After three days' work I already have something I'd feel pretty comfortable presenting to senior management, and would like to do so next week.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
You are correct, I was thinking of Tron. Will amend.
I agree. As I'm fond of pointing out, in 1989 The Abyss 1982 Tron was deemed ineligible for the Oscar for best visual effects because it used CGI. Eventually generative AI will come to be seen as just another creative tool that can be used well and used poorly.
The other night, my girlfriend was watching the trailer for Hokum on her phone and I expressed my frustration that trailers for every new film in a particular genre are so similar. I saw the trailer for Obsession the other day and it was functionally identical to that of Hokum (and functionally identical to every other trailer for a horror film I've seen in the last five years): quiet, atmospheric opening; critic blurbs introduced using the Hans Zimmer BWAAAH bass drop effect; steadily increasing cut frequency coupled with steadily escalating volume and intensity of sound (typically introducing more and more high-frequency sounds in the form of women screaming and/or Psycho strings); after the climax, a period of "falling action" and relative calm and quiet. It's as if they have a template in Premiere called "horror_trailer.prproj" and just slot clips from the relevant movie into it. Horror movies are where the trend is most visible, but it's also true of thrillers, action movies, comedies and so on. I no longer look at the trailer for a horror film and think "that looks good" or "that looks bad": I just think "I am watching the trailer for a horror film". The homogeneity of the form has collapsed the distinction: the trailer for a good horror film looks practically identical to the trailer for a bad one.
It wasn't the trailer for Hokum that piqued my interest, but a headline calling it the first good Silent Hill movie – do you think that comparison is justified? It's also directed by an Irish director – I was intrigued by the trailer for his previous film Oddity but never got around to watching it.
My girlfriend took me to the first one in the cinema and I was howling with laughter throughout.
Mindhunters is an unofficial adaptation of And Then There Were None from 2004, with the twist that most of the characters are FBI agents-in-training. It is spectacularly silly and cheesy. It features, among other things, Jonny Lee Miller doing a laughable Southern accent; the corpse of one of the most recognisable actors in the cast portrayed by an entirely unconvincing plastic mannequin; and Ice Cube saying "eeny-meeny-miny-mo: who's the next motherfucker to go?" in deadly seriousness. Absolutely nothing about the plot makes a lick of sense: the killer's plan hinges on impossible coincidences they could not possibly predict in advance; the characters (who are all, as mentioned above, FBI agents) behave incredibly stupidly when convenient for the plot; and Saw-esque death traps which would require, at the minimum, a vanload of equipment and several days' prep time are assembled out of an overnight bag in a matter of hours, without a hitch.
I've probably seen it at least ten times. It is tremendous fun.
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3d ago
What a convoluted run-on sentence. Right up there with "he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died".
and then insisted that the person who called out your fabrication was being unreasonable and worse.
I will reiterate that there is a difference between duped by a claim made by others and inventing a claim from whole cloth. You don't have to believe the claim that Hamas livestreamed themselves committing assorted acts of sexual violence, but this claim did not originate with me and I'm sick of you people pretending that it did. The person accusing me of making up this claim from whole cloth was being unreasonable by so doing. I have already pre-committed to eating my words if this claim turns out to be false, which is more than can be said for any of the people in this thread accusing me of lying through my teeth.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I never claimed that everyone had seen them.
I don't think this is a remotely accurate portrayal of Christie's oeuvre. In the most recent Christie novel I read, for example, the killer turns out not to be a member of the landed gentry, but rathera penniless physician who resorted to blackmail to maintain his standard of living.
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