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Google Earth is a thing. Having a monitor/phone and other modern tech actually decreases the relative utility of a flat map projection, as opposed to the days of yesteryear where it would have been much more convenient to carry an easily storable map around instead of an unwieldy globe, and most people's practical use of maps would (usually) have been in local small-scale contexts where the distortion would have been negligible. Now, though? I wonder why there are any map apps that don't project their satellite imagery onto a sphere.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but I got to halfway through Tarkovsky's Stalker and turned it off. I managed to read Roadside Picnic and play Shadow of Chernobyl all the way through, but the movie was different. The book and game resembled books and games pretty well, but the movie was extremely slow, shot weirdly, with characters that didn't really have names, with dialogue that wasn't particularly interesting to me.
I definitely get it, it's a weird niche movie that's extremely slow-paced and abstruse; I have a hard time justifying recommending it to anyone because of that. Your general perceptions of the movie probably correlates with how much patience you have for arthouse, and how much you enjoy the vibe (which is the aspect that carries the entire movie). For the most part, I wasn't expecting to like it either. I don't usually like exceptionally pretentious types of media and consider myself sort of ambivalent on arthouse (some are good, some aren't) and I'd heard Stalker was a particularly difficult one to get through. So imagine my surprise when I'd finished the whole thing and felt as if only an hour had passed, it was very dreamlike.
I suppose part of the reason why I had a different takeaway was because I conceptualised the movie in a bit of a different way than I do other films? It kind of felt a bit like a fable or myth to me, and I engaged with it as such. Your familiarity with the source material probably also has an impact since I never read Roadside Picnic and never built up any expectations.
Transnational Media Thread
I am very tired after a long week of work. Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? Anime still doesn't count.
I haven't really mentioned Soviet media around here much, except for the time I wrote about my experience with Tarkovsky's Stalker a while back, but I've had a longstanding love affair with it. There's an inexplicable poetic, sometimes haunted desolation to a lot of Soviet art that really grabs me, and I find no other nation manages to capture this as well as the Russians do. The latest music I've been very into is a Soviet rock band named Kino; they found quite a bit of popularity in the Soviet Union but not quite so much outside of it, and their relevance in the global music scene has steeply declined ever since the founder and helmsman Viktor Tsoi died and the group disbanded. But the music is so very timeless, with some incredibly evocative lyrics and musicianship. Gruppa Krovi is a great introduction; it's a very strong and immediately likeable number that's probably Kino's best known song (and was my introduction to the group), but Spokoynaya Noch is their masterpiece and towers head and shoulders above the rest of their discography. It's a six-and-a-half minute long rock ballad that manages to craft the most potent atmosphere I've encountered in the genre, with some very poetic and abstract lyrics; I never tire of listening to it.
On another note, here is your regular daily dose of Sinoposting; I continue to be surprised at how much interesting stuff there is in China that is just completely internationally unknown. This time, I've been looking at their 20th century works of ink-wash animation, which are so very singular and unique I'm surprised that I barely ever hear about them. The project started in the 50s, when the state-funded Shanghai Animation Film Studio was tasked with creating cartoons for children, and the animators working there quickly started trying to create something that looked uniquely Chinese in the style of traditional painting. The technique they used to create their animations was unorthodox, and it's mostly secret even today, but apparently it was so laborious that according to one of the creators it was possible to create four "traditionally animated" films in the time that it took to make one in the ink-wash style. Such a style was really only viable in the days of socialist state funding and ownership, and after the market reforms of the Deng era this style declined due to the introduction of financial and commercial incentives. As such, there are only four "original" ink-wash animation films, and of these four probably the best and most refined is Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988), which is completely wordless and stunning. A close second for me is Buffalo Boy and his Flute (1963). Apparently ink-wash techniques have slowly made some resurgence in Chinese animation ever since then with the introduction of more modern animation techniques that made it more cost-effective to produce, but these early works have a very good vibe to them.
Mid 20s here, expect I'm probably on the younger end of the user base in this forum. I do drink, but only very occasionally (somewhere on the order of once every few months) since I am pint sized, am a massive lightweight and get knocked on my ass from barely any alcohol. Basically, whenever any social event in a professional setting calls for it, I'll drink so long as everyone else is doing so. Very uncommonly, I will do so for pleasure or if I want to loosen up a little bit.
I have never gotten blackout drunk and do not ever plan to. It becomes physically difficult to force myself to drink after a certain level of drunkenness.
I really can't come up with a clear answer to this. Pretty much anything by Tate McCrae or Sabrina Carpenter or virtually anybody else in this new generation of pop artists is about as aggressively painful as it gets, to be honest. After a while everything melts away into the same homogenised corpus of liquidised shit that is modern pop music. It's virtually all irredeemable, there's no sense talking about "worse" or "better" in such a context.
At least stuff that's unintentionally but parodically bad such as Liz Phair's lyrical and musical masterpieces (Bollywood, U Hate It) are fun to listen to, these songs can't even aspire to that.
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