Fight scenes are one of the major elements in action films, and they just might be one of the most difficult things to get right in the movie. Everyone on the set should cooperate — the actors, the directors, the cameramen, the crew, and the stuntmen. The result of these people working in harmony is a beautiful fight choreography.
Actor and martial artist Scott Adkins breaks down fight scenes from different films (some of which he had participated in). Which of these scenes hurt a lot? And which of these hurt a little? Which actors hold back their punches and kicks, and which do not?
Softwares and apps are by no means perfect, and so it wouldn’t be surprising if, at some point in time, they fail to deliver what they promised. At other times, however, they deliver more than what you expect them to do. They unintentionally hurt your feelings sometimes as well.
Bored Panda compiles photos of all of these instances. Check them out over at the site.
Ever wonder why people can't stop gambling in casinos even when they're already losing everything? That's precisely because casinos were designed to make them want to play more. From the dark environment that makes them lose a sense of time to the ‘near miss effect,’ which makes the player feel as if they are “almost winning” rather than losing, thus further compelling continued play -- everything's planned. Moreover:
In most entertainment venues, you give your money away in return for some entertaining product or service—a book, a show, a drink, a meal, etc. In a casino, giving away your money is the entertainment. What it buys you is an internal, psychological event—a fantasy. You think you’re getting a chance to win big. Considering the odds, however, you’re actually paying for a chance to lose. Human beings are not very good at understanding and weighing odds. Once the odds are above zero, however slightly, they resonate in our minds as meaningful. The gambler’s enthusiasm about the tiny odds of a win is akin to the anxious person’s dread regarding the tiny odds of a calamity.
There's a big rock in the Mojave desert in San Bernardino County, California, that has a peculiar story. Not because of its origins or geography, or even its official designation, because it doesn't have one, but because of Frank Critzer.
It's called Giant Rock, because desert living requires many things, but wild flights of poetic fancy aren't one of them. It's not a very special rock. There's nothing particularly interesting about it. There's certainly nothing remarkable nearby, except for the time machine. It's not even that giant in the grand scheme of things. It's just a fairly big rock. Over the years, it's also been a family home, a center of pilgrimage, the scene of a bloody standoff, a potential rival to Las Vegas, and the galactic antenna for the wisdom of interdimensional aliens. A few years ago part of it cracked and fell off. Nobody seems sure why it did that. The giant rock doesn't have to explain itself.
Altogether, Giant Rock, or actually Frank Critzer, is pretty intriguing, and you can read that story at Cracked.
When it comes to painting and doing artworks, the first step is always hard to take. However, we won't improve without practice! Thankfully, My Modern Met compiled a list of 60+ fun painting ideas we can try. Here are some painting ideas inspired by real life:
Your favorite coffee mug
A prickly pear cactus
Your furry friend
A tranquil lake scene
Your eye and eyebrow (try observing from real life)
A leafy tree
Your childhood home
A piece of cloth draped over a chair
Fluffy clouds
A bouquet of flowers in a vase...
Meanwhile, here's a few from their list of good painting ideas inspired by the imagination:
A person with flowers growing from their head; Create an image inspired by your favorite song
A majestic unicorn with a rainbow-colored mane; Create a self-portrait in a Cubist style
Reimagine a scene from your favorite Disney film
Imagine a dog could walk and talk like a human. What would they say and do?
Create your own repeat pattern…
… or mandala-inspired design
A cat in a fancy hat
Your dream home
Try painting with your fingers
What are you waiting for? Pick up your art materials and start painting now!
Photos by Rifqi Ali Ridho and Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
Elvis is everywhere in Tupelo, Mississippi. The town was the birthplace and childhood home of Elvis Presley, and has embraced that designation in a big way. Businesses that were part of his life are protected from destruction because of their history. The town is a tourist destination and a pilgrimage site for Elvis fans. It's also the site of a qualifying event for the the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist Competition, with the ultimate winner crowned every August in Memphis. The Tupelo competition is one of many, but it stands out.
Each June in Tupelo, an average of 15-20 ETAs work their best snarled lips, swiveled hips, and wide range of vocals to channel Mr. Presley, from his early years rocking high-collared jackets and black-and-white striped shirts to the Peacock, Blue Swirl, and American Eagle jumpsuits of the 1970s. While the usual line-up is all-male, women are welcome to compete. The winner is guaranteed advancement to the Ultimate ETA Contest in Memphis, and gets an additional perk: enrollment in Elvis Boot Camp, an intensive two-day training, run by Downtown Tupelo Main Street, that’s specially designed for Tupelo winners. Not only does it prepare them for competing at Graceland but assures that, when they do, these representatives of Elvis’ birthplace shine.
COVID-19 forced organizers to hold the 2020 festival online, but Tupelo plans to welcome back competitors in 2021.
“As far we know, Tupelo is the only pre-qualifier that offers such a service,” Brangenberg says. “Nine of our 12 winners have either gone on to win the Ultimate in Memphis that same year, or a year or two after repping us. We like to think our boot camp helped.”
The system is like the Miss America pageant, in that when a local winner becomes a state winner, the experts and resources of that state work to prepare their winner for the national competition. Tupelo has a reputation to uphold. Read about Tupelo and its commitment to Elvis Tribute Artists at Atlas Obscura.
Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is illustrated perfectly with falling dishes, silverware, and food. This is not animated; as you can read about on the production page, Optical Arts really did drop and smash all those dishes, filming them with a high speed camera in order to get nice slow-motion footage. Then it was all edited together to perfectly match the music. -via Metafilter
Is the future of creative writing in the hands of AIs? A few years ago, Stephen Marche used an AI as an aid in writing a science fiction story. In an article, he recounted his journey on how a program called SciFiQ helped him write "Twinkle Twinkle" which he published in Wired.
Our goal in that first experiment was modest: to see if algorithms could be an aid to creativity. Would the process make stories that were just generically consistent? Could an algorithm generate its own distinct style or narrative ideas? Would the resulting story be recognizable as science fiction at all?
The answer to all these questions was yes.
Using the same program, he's writing Krishna and Arjuna which is in its second iteration of the process. For this experiment, he has a narrower goal:
For “Krishna and Arjuna,” we narrowed the focus from science fiction to the subject of my immediate fascination: robots and artificial intelligence. And instead of providing the AI with my favorite robot stories, we gave it every great robot story ever written—many of which I have not read. This may seem like a technical detail, but it’s huge. As a writer I usually read stories and internalize those influences; in this case I’d be submitting to the “influence” of material I’d never even seen.
According to him, the program has various features. For example, upon feeding the program's algorithm with various writings, it gave him a set of instructions on the story’s plot. As he typed into its web-based interface, the program showed how many verbs, adjectives, and adverbs has been used compared to the criteria set by the writings that were fed into it. If the writing passed the criteria, it would turn into green.
Aside from that, there are also word clouds summarizing common topics in the stories that were fed into the algorithm.
It is a sad, mournful tale of a young Irish lad named Will who was taken from the land of his birth during the Great Potato Famine to a faraway land where he could begin anew. This is The Fresh Prince of Bel Air as sung by Stefan Murphy. Listen, drink a pint, and mourn a bygone age.
"The Existential Threat" is a new song by Sparks, from their album A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip. It's about extreme psychological trauma, so of course they got Cyriak Harris to make the video. As you might guess, it's pure nightmare fuel. The lyrics are at the YouTube link.
Will Smith is a power player in Hollywood, a movie star with a long list of hit films on his resume, so it's hard to think of him as anything else. But those of us of a certain age remember that in 1990, he was a rapper who lucked into his own TV series. The trajectory of Smith's film career changed greatly in 1996, when the film Independence Day opened across the US on July 3rd. It showcased Smith's acting chops in a way that opened doors to all sorts of blockbuster roles to come.
As Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal has pointed out, the irony of Smith’s Hollywood coronation is that Emmerich had never considered his action-disaster spectacle to be star-driven. “One of the points we made was that we didn’t want this to be a movie-star movie,” the filmmaker said in 1996. “The movie was the star. We didn’t need a movie star to make it more expensive. And it would complicate the marketing.” And when crowds went in droves to see Independence Day, which premiered on July 3, 1996, the Will Smith they encountered wasn’t radically different than the one on Fresh Prince. On paper, Steven Hiller was just another smartass with swagger, but Smith seemed more poised and grownup than the sitcom kid audiences knew. And unlike Smith’s boisterous Bad Boys character, Hiller didn’t come across as a self-conscious asshole — Independence Day was the first time Smith seemed fully comfortable on the big screen, imbuing Hiller with effortless charm and buoyancy. Smith relaxed, and so we did, too. Suddenly, he looked like a movie star, the thing he was always meant to be.
Once I found a cat that had decided to live upstairs in my house, and had been there for a week. He did not want to leave. My other cats never told me about him. But that's not an uncommon story, as the Facebook group My house, not my cat is quite popular. A list at Bored Panda has stories of cats who moved in, or moved in and then gave birth, the cat who brought home kittens that weren't hers, and the dumped mother cat who is now working as a foster mom. The picture above shows what happened when Hannah went to feed her three cats and found five! I was particularly taken with this story:
I Have Been Feeding A Cat For Some Time Now. Of Course I Set Out A Little Shelter And Blanket Also. I've Grown To Call Them My Phantom Kitty. I Could Never Catch It During The Day So I Figured I Would Sneak Out To Take A Peek Tonight. Look At This "Cat"
Despite the Yamuna River not being able to maintain a thriving ecosystem, hundreds of birds still flock on to the place when winter comes, because of their tendency or habit to stay or return to a certain area. But it’s not only birds that come to this place. Humans also come here, too, and they go here to feed the winged creatures.
Because the tributary attracts such an influx of avians, it’s also a site of religiosity and legend. People travel to the water to feed the birds, an act thought to bring good karma, and disperse offerings for their loved ones who’ve died.
These ritualistic acts have been captured on surreal photos by Delhi-based photographer Sankar Sridhar. Check out the photos over at Colossal.
When Rick Van Benschoten (@oxdad) saw this young pigeon lying down on a street in lower Manhattan as he was riding his bike, he immediately checked to see what was going on with the bird. Upon picking the pigeon up, the pigeon did not respond. Rick knew that it was in a bad state, and he immediately took action.
“I’ve rehabbed pigeons before, and I didn’t know if he just needed rest, or if he needed medical care,’ said Rick as he narrated the video. “So I packed him up and off we went.” Thankfully, the pigeon just needed rest and was hungry, and so Rick fed him and took care of him at his home. And there, the pigeon regained his strength, and learned to fly once again.
Watch the video over at The Dodo to find out more about this wholesome story.
Sometimes people higher than you will give you jobs that you don’t really know how to do, such as translating something into a language that you have no clue how to speak. But in order to save face, you just do the job anyway, just like what this guy did. He literally put “No smoking in Arabic” on the tank’s body.
A redditor said that it might have been painted by a subcontractor that didn’t speak English, but what do you think?
I wonder what happened after this was shown to the contractor.
