Triggered by recommendations from Will Newsome and Gwern I watched all episodes of Death Note in like 3 days and it’s by far the best series I know of. I only comment here ’cause I feel really sorry for all the folks out there who haven’t watched Death Note yet.
The anime/manga Death Note is interesting on many levels. The shinigami are unexpectedly Japanese versions of the Grim Reaper; the cosmology is remarkably atheistic1; its genre is almost unclassifiable (detective/mystery, drama, suspense, action, Greek tragedy, supernatural, or what?); the plot warrants considerable analysis, and furnishes considerable scope for thought—just coming up with ingenious ways of exploiting a Death Note consistent with the rules is good intellectual fun, or one can devise interesting theories to analyze (example: could one use information theory to devise optimal strategies for a Kira and a L?).
And here the beginning of a short plot summary (again by Gwern):
The plot is the important thing. The brilliant, ambitious & altruistic Light Yagami comes into possession of a small black notebook called a ‘Death Note’, which allows him to kill anyone he wishes by writing down their name.5 (The Death Note was abandoned by a supernatural being, the shinigami Ryuk, who watches everything Light does with his old Death Note and occasionally helps Light in exchange for delicious food.)
Naturally, Lights begins to use the Note and starts by systematically killing off criminals listed in public records. Arrogantly (or hubristically?) he makes no attempt to conceal his murders, and eventually police all over the world begin to notice that an untimely number of criminals are dying of heart attacks. They dispatch their best detective, L, to hunt Light down and bring him to justice. (L is not his real name, but L, N, & M all adopt pseudonyms to foil the Death Note.)
By clever ploys, L manages to narrow down Light’s location to his town, and begins hunting there in person. Light turns the Japanese police against L, but at the cost of narrowing down the pool of suspects so drastically that L puts Light at the top of the suspect list.
I would just recommend stopping after a certain critical point in the show. There will be a big event that introduces several new characters, the show really goes downhill from then on.
But then you miss the ending and pondering over what it means! Although I’ll admit my essay probably means I am unusual in finding the ending so interesting...
I thought Jiro Dreams of Sushi was a really great documentary. Yes, it is about sushi, so for anyone who loves sushi it’s a must-see (and I know there are a lot of general Japanophiles here...). But much more than that it is about two things: dedication to your craft and father-son relationships.
Jiro Ono exemplifies the concept of conatus. I always thought and was taught to be well-rounded and know and be good at a lot of things. That still holds true, but only recently I’ve realized that, at least professionally, you should probably choose one thing and just become the best at it. Watching Jiro really inspired me to figure out how I can go on a similar path myself, even though all my impulses tell me to be a “generalist.” (After walking out of the theater I was inspired, but I also truly felt like shit because I was hit with the realization that I’m good at a lot of things but not AMAZING at anything).
The film also made me think a lot about father-son relationships. I want to write at length about this it’s difficult without spoilers...
I just watched it. I don’t think we should worry about spoilers, especially with non-fiction documentaries—there’s no twist ending.
Anyway, I thought it was a very nicely done documentary with many delicious images, avoided the obvious mistake of putting Jiro on a pedestal & ignoring his staff, and did a good job of highlighting the double-edged nature of being a shokunin (great term). I found very true a comment from The New Yorker:
Jiro’s most notable innovations are comically subtle. For instance, he cites as one of his breakthroughs the decision to massage the tako for an additional half an hour to soften the otherwise rubbery flesh, and to serve it warm. He also decided to cook the shrimp to order, rather than in a batch in the morning.
One does wind up feeling sorry for the kids—and while Jiro may be happy, are they? Why did he have kids if he wasn’t going to do a good job, one wonders, and was just a stranger? (He says he convinced them to not go to college (so they could work for him immediately!); one wonders how loud that conversation was...) I was shocked when he spoke of his wife in the present tense because we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her, and I had assumed she simply died a few years or decades back. I was strongly reminded of the passage about professional athletes from David Foster Wallace I quoted in my subcultures essay. Sometimes a sacrifice may just make one lesser.
Still, Jiro Dreams of Sushi provoked some interesting blog posts:
Robin Hanson takes the expected tack of defending Jiro as a proto-em. With Hanson, if a workaholic comes up, you can expect him to either say that as an em, he would have a life worth living; or you can expect him to say that we should praise him because he is producing so much value for other people and consuming so little himself (possibly with some half-baked evopsych theorizing that any criticism is due to the workaholic perhaps being a less valuable ally).
Personally, I found interesting someone’s observation that women appear only as consumers towards the end. And why wouldn’t they? Jiro is not a life one really envys—think of all the also-rans. Wouldn’t it be better to be an non-autistic women who can instead enjoy the finer things in life? Sort of like Greenspun’s defense of the gender gap in STEM: given the options available to smart young women, like being a very well paid child psychology, why should they go into the miserable grinding underpaid fields like science? Let the autism-spectrum nut nerds take the ‘rewards’ of being in STEM. Of course, this implies that as we see, men will take the very topmost positions in these sorts of underpaid fields (think the winner’s curse, but not for auctions), and if ems are winner-take-all economics, ems will almost 100% be male uploads...
Tyler Cowen focuses not on the economics of fishing which it touched upon, but rather why the labor system with regard to setting up your own sushi restaurant and being an apprentice is so messed up. Cowen does have the economist’s expected take on the conveyor sushi (which the movie clearly regards with some horror). At some points I did feel with the commentator:
Frankly, this seems like a triumph of marketing, in the way that sushi chefs have trained Japanese audiences to perceive such subtle quality differences in the slicing of raw fish.
It would not surprise me too much if Jiro’s restaurant had only a small edge over the competitors… When Jiro said that to surprise your customers you had have to a higher standard of taste than them, I wondered ‘but how could they then appreciate it? You just said it was beyond their standard of taste!’
Steve Sailer complains about the subtitles. I dunno, the subs in my pirated HD torrent seemed perfectly readable to me. Another example of life sucking for the good doobies, I suppose… He also reiterates his old quasi-conspiracy theory:
Now, it’s possible that Michelin is tossing out stars in Japan to pump up its brand in that market. Or, there is this theory that whenever you read about how the Japanese economy has been so horrible for the last 22 years, which is all the time, that’s what the Japanese want you to believe. Back in the 1980s, everybody believed that the Japanese were going to buy up the whole world, so they gave the Japanese a lot of grief, such as putting quotas on car imports, forcing them to open plants in America. But then their bubble burst in 1990, and now you never hear about the Japanese anymore, except about how tragic their economy is and they can only afford $300 sushi dinners.
Yeah, too bad about the massive underemployment etc. Life’s also pretty good for the elite in America too. (At least his commenters call him on it.)
Why would you expect Jiro to be a good father? That wasn’t what he was focusing on.
Of course it wasn’t, and that’s the problem. No one stole Jiro’s semen and presented him a year later with a fait accompli of a bunch of babies: he chose to have kids, knowing that he would deliberately spend little time with them until they became useful to his monomania. They are means for him—towards cheap family labor (he thinks he is generous in letting them go to high school!), and then the restaurant succession. Yes, ignoring them may have enabled him to make slightly better sushi than everyone else—but is this something to laud? That’s the question here about Jiro: was mutilating his life and family worth it?
I’m not sure I can answer ‘yes’. It’s just sushi. (And before you shoot back ‘well, he certainly considers it worth it’, remember that a heroin addict or a wirehead could say as much.)
It would not surprise me too much if Jiro’s restaurant had only a small edge over the competitors…
While I can’t attest to the quality of Jiro’s sushi, the quality of the sushi served by a sushi bar at Tsukiji market (you can see the front left facade of the restaurant in the scene where Jiro’s son is departing from the market, and the camera is behind him, leaving only his shaded back visible—I can’t recall the name) was at least two orders of magnitude* better than any other sushi I have ever had; I have consumed much sushi.
*An order of magnitude here being three octaves of “Mmm!”
At the risk of sounding like a sappy old grandmother, I really enjoyed Faces of America and the current follow-up series Finding Your Roots. You can watch them for free on PBS. They’re both done by Henry Louis Gates (the Harvard professor that famously got arrested entering his own house).*
The show features extensive research into the genealogies of a whichever celebrities are on that episode. We learn interesting details about their ancestors but it’s much more about the historical context in which those ancestors lived. Once the paper trail runs out (for some it’s a few generations, for others a 1000+ years) the show turns to genetics.
A few cool things so far:
about 40% of Ashkenazi Jews can trace their mDNA to just 4 women living somewhere in the Levant about 2,000 years ago (these were probably some really smart gals ;-)
many African-Americans have a LOT more white ancestry than I previously thought
thanks to a researcher that recently went around Western Africa taking genetic samples where the slave trade was prominent, many American blacks can now know which exact tribes they descend from
I got to see Samuel Jackson’s face when he saw a photo of his white ancestor
*Funny story: the officer that arrested him said that Gates told him “yo mama.” He really said he was coming back from a recording with Yo-Yo Ma (who was featured in Faces of America).
On AngryParsley and probably gwern’s advice, I watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It starts out as a monster-of-the-week magical girl anime but quickly takes a turn for the absolutely bizarre, intersecting a few LW tropes on its way out.
I also watched the first season of Kore wa Zombie desu ka? (which I think would be better translated as “This is supposed to be a zombie?” or “This is what it means to be a zombie?”). It’s also a memetic mutation of the magical girl genre; the main character is turned into a zombie and quickly gathers a harem of supernaturals, while accidentally draining the magic powers of the harem’s token magical girl.
I wouldn’t watch the second season until all of it is available; Hulu has a bad habit of giving up on a show halfway through (e.g., of all things, Serial Experiments Lain… facepalm).
One criticism I’ve heard of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (from my family; I think it’s great) is that it “has too many little girls crying”. So I guess if that’s not your cup of tea, that’s something to watch out for.
I wouldn’t watch the second season until all of it is available; Hulu has a bad habit of giving up on a show halfway through (e.g., of all things, Serial Experiments Lain… facepalm).
See above for redundant comment about the incredibly fucked state of copyright. Pirate away, really; I can’t imagine how perverse you’d have to be to obey such laws!
Agreed. The way I put it (and have seen similar comments):
I have made a new rule for my own mental health that I must check imdb to see if any of the Lost creators were majorly involved in anything I am considering watching. If they are, I won’t pay money to watch that film.
I will not rule out a friend’s invitation to watch it on their Netflix account (for example). Upcoming Star Trek and Cloverfield 2 are on my list.
Yes. After the film, my friend and I were so incensed that we filled out a full A4 page with things that annoyed us, in small handwriting. And half of the reverse side. I’m glad I saw that movie, because though it was the worst film I have ever seen, I got so much entertainment out of criticizing it.
I’ve been watching Prison Break, which I don’t really recommend as “great”, but is extremely gripping (at any given moment, everything is about to go wrong—they maintain ridiculous tension for almost all of Season 1). The main character is not particularly interesting, but demonstrates a lot of competence, intelligence and agency. So many shows have “reactive” heroes, and I’ve developed a particular appreciation for heroes that set themselves big goals and then go out and achieve them in a comprehensible manner.
Heh. You are correct. You’d think there’d be more than one show matching the description “intelligent, competent character” and “tension”, but apparently not.
I’ve recently started watching Modern Family, and it’s really good. It’s a comedy, somewhat a la Arrested Development, about a strange family, although the humor is somewhat different—it’s not nearly as dry as AD was, but it’s still dry.
I’ve seen a fair few episodes, I’d second the recommendation. Notable for having a non-traditional family presented as being completely run-of-the-mill.
I actually am most disappointed with the fact that all three families (including the gay couple) turn out to have a completely straightforward dynamic (working “dad”, stay at home “mom”)
That said, the show is incredibly funny and well constructed, as far as family sitcoms go.
I actually did too for a long while—Claire seems so tough and together that, apart from not having a job, she feels more like the stereotypical ‘Man’ in the relationship. But that toughness mostly gets applied to maintaining the household.
I actually am most disappointed with the fact that all three families (including the gay couple) turn out to have a completely straightforward dynamic (working “dad”, stay at home “mom”)
Mom or “mom” that doesn’t sound all that modern to me!
I very strongly recommend Avatar: the Legend of Korra. Great plot, strong characters, amazing worldbuiling and terrific art.
Also, its very realistic in the sense of avoiding conservation of ninjutsu and several other fiction fallacies.
The prior series (Avatar: The Last Airbender) is better-written. I was very surprised to learn that the Korra episodes are written by the same people—one ep was so clumsy I indignantly looked it up to know who to mock and, nope, same folks.
I’ve also started watching the first season of Fate/Zero; about six episodes in. It is fantastically better than Fate/stay night, if only because we can finally see the full power of Saber supplied with a sufficient quantity of prana.
However you’d probably want to watch Fate/stay night (or read a recap) anyway to learn how the Holy Grail Wars are supposed to work, because the first episode is a really bad recap.
Here is a Monty Python sketch you might not be familiar with: Theory on brontosauruses by Anne Elk
In future, when I have the urge to write a post here I am going to ask myself if my idea might be an ‘Elk theory’
《舌尖上的中国》 seems to be translated to “A Bite of China” in English (bad translation in my opinion). I have found a few HD torrents and it also seems to be up on YouTube and other video sites. This is an amazing documentary about food in China. It is beautifully filmed, so even those who don’t speak Chinese might enjoy it. For Chinese language students, it is packed full of excellent prose.
The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists—known as The Pirates! Band Of Misfits in the US, because scientists apparently don’t sell (and that’s quite apart from Charles Darwin being a main character). An Aardman Animations film for kids. UK-made, the US financial contribution only added a small amount of gratuitous pseudo-irony and one Dreamworks smirk.
Edit: I didn’t actually say if it was any good. It is. Go see it :-)
Movies and Television Thread
Triggered by recommendations from Will Newsome and Gwern I watched all episodes of Death Note in like 3 days and it’s by far the best series I know of. I only comment here ’cause I feel really sorry for all the folks out there who haven’t watched Death Note yet.
Here’s a short overview by Gwern (spoiler warning!):
And here the beginning of a short plot summary (again by Gwern):
I would just recommend stopping after a certain critical point in the show. There will be a big event that introduces several new characters, the show really goes downhill from then on.
But then you miss the ending and pondering over what it means! Although I’ll admit my essay probably means I am unusual in finding the ending so interesting...
I still clench my teeth thinking about the ending. So wrong and contrived.
I just read your essay and found it more entertaining than the actual ending itself.
I think the end of season 1 was honestly a perfect ending. N as a character was a boring L clone+.
IMO it goes from uber-awesome to good, but you’re right, it was somewhat disappointing.
I thought Jiro Dreams of Sushi was a really great documentary. Yes, it is about sushi, so for anyone who loves sushi it’s a must-see (and I know there are a lot of general Japanophiles here...). But much more than that it is about two things: dedication to your craft and father-son relationships.
Jiro Ono exemplifies the concept of conatus. I always thought and was taught to be well-rounded and know and be good at a lot of things. That still holds true, but only recently I’ve realized that, at least professionally, you should probably choose one thing and just become the best at it. Watching Jiro really inspired me to figure out how I can go on a similar path myself, even though all my impulses tell me to be a “generalist.” (After walking out of the theater I was inspired, but I also truly felt like shit because I was hit with the realization that I’m good at a lot of things but not AMAZING at anything).
The film also made me think a lot about father-son relationships. I want to write at length about this it’s difficult without spoilers...
I just watched it. I don’t think we should worry about spoilers, especially with non-fiction documentaries—there’s no twist ending.
Anyway, I thought it was a very nicely done documentary with many delicious images, avoided the obvious mistake of putting Jiro on a pedestal & ignoring his staff, and did a good job of highlighting the double-edged nature of being a shokunin (great term). I found very true a comment from The New Yorker:
One does wind up feeling sorry for the kids—and while Jiro may be happy, are they? Why did he have kids if he wasn’t going to do a good job, one wonders, and was just a stranger? (He says he convinced them to not go to college (so they could work for him immediately!); one wonders how loud that conversation was...) I was shocked when he spoke of his wife in the present tense because we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her, and I had assumed she simply died a few years or decades back. I was strongly reminded of the passage about professional athletes from David Foster Wallace I quoted in my subcultures essay. Sometimes a sacrifice may just make one lesser.
Still, Jiro Dreams of Sushi provoked some interesting blog posts:
Robin Hanson takes the expected tack of defending Jiro as a proto-em. With Hanson, if a workaholic comes up, you can expect him to either say that as an em, he would have a life worth living; or you can expect him to say that we should praise him because he is producing so much value for other people and consuming so little himself (possibly with some half-baked evopsych theorizing that any criticism is due to the workaholic perhaps being a less valuable ally).
Personally, I found interesting someone’s observation that women appear only as consumers towards the end. And why wouldn’t they? Jiro is not a life one really envys—think of all the also-rans. Wouldn’t it be better to be an non-autistic women who can instead enjoy the finer things in life? Sort of like Greenspun’s defense of the gender gap in STEM: given the options available to smart young women, like being a very well paid child psychology, why should they go into the miserable grinding underpaid fields like science? Let the autism-spectrum nut nerds take the ‘rewards’ of being in STEM. Of course, this implies that as we see, men will take the very topmost positions in these sorts of underpaid fields (think the winner’s curse, but not for auctions), and if ems are winner-take-all economics, ems will almost 100% be male uploads...
Tyler Cowen focuses not on the economics of fishing which it touched upon, but rather why the labor system with regard to setting up your own sushi restaurant and being an apprentice is so messed up. Cowen does have the economist’s expected take on the conveyor sushi (which the movie clearly regards with some horror). At some points I did feel with the commentator:
It would not surprise me too much if Jiro’s restaurant had only a small edge over the competitors… When Jiro said that to surprise your customers you had have to a higher standard of taste than them, I wondered ‘but how could they then appreciate it? You just said it was beyond their standard of taste!’
Steve Sailer complains about the subtitles. I dunno, the subs in my pirated HD torrent seemed perfectly readable to me. Another example of life sucking for the good doobies, I suppose… He also reiterates his old quasi-conspiracy theory:
Yeah, too bad about the massive underemployment etc. Life’s also pretty good for the elite in America too. (At least his commenters call him on it.)
iSugoi did a normal review.
Why would you expect Jiro to be a good father? That wasn’t what he was focusing on.
If everyone is an em, who would appreciate the em’s work?
I saw the movie in a theater, and had trouble with the subtitles. Maybe they were improved for the DVD.
Of course it wasn’t, and that’s the problem. No one stole Jiro’s semen and presented him a year later with a fait accompli of a bunch of babies: he chose to have kids, knowing that he would deliberately spend little time with them until they became useful to his monomania. They are means for him—towards cheap family labor (he thinks he is generous in letting them go to high school!), and then the restaurant succession. Yes, ignoring them may have enabled him to make slightly better sushi than everyone else—but is this something to laud? That’s the question here about Jiro: was mutilating his life and family worth it?
I’m not sure I can answer ‘yes’. It’s just sushi. (And before you shoot back ‘well, he certainly considers it worth it’, remember that a heroin addict or a wirehead could say as much.)
While I can’t attest to the quality of Jiro’s sushi, the quality of the sushi served by a sushi bar at Tsukiji market (you can see the front left facade of the restaurant in the scene where Jiro’s son is departing from the market, and the camera is behind him, leaving only his shaded back visible—I can’t recall the name) was at least two orders of magnitude* better than any other sushi I have ever had; I have consumed much sushi.
*An order of magnitude here being three octaves of “Mmm!”
At the risk of sounding like a sappy old grandmother, I really enjoyed Faces of America and the current follow-up series Finding Your Roots. You can watch them for free on PBS. They’re both done by Henry Louis Gates (the Harvard professor that famously got arrested entering his own house).*
The show features extensive research into the genealogies of a whichever celebrities are on that episode. We learn interesting details about their ancestors but it’s much more about the historical context in which those ancestors lived. Once the paper trail runs out (for some it’s a few generations, for others a 1000+ years) the show turns to genetics.
A few cool things so far:
about 40% of Ashkenazi Jews can trace their mDNA to just 4 women living somewhere in the Levant about 2,000 years ago (these were probably some really smart gals ;-)
many African-Americans have a LOT more white ancestry than I previously thought
thanks to a researcher that recently went around Western Africa taking genetic samples where the slave trade was prominent, many American blacks can now know which exact tribes they descend from
I got to see Samuel Jackson’s face when he saw a photo of his white ancestor
*Funny story: the officer that arrested him said that Gates told him “yo mama.” He really said he was coming back from a recording with Yo-Yo Ma (who was featured in Faces of America).
Razib Khan has some criticism of that show (a consultant for 23andme who worked with Gates for the show shows up in the comments).
On AngryParsley and probably gwern’s advice, I watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It starts out as a monster-of-the-week magical girl anime but quickly takes a turn for the absolutely bizarre, intersecting a few LW tropes on its way out.
I also watched the first season of Kore wa Zombie desu ka? (which I think would be better translated as “This is supposed to be a zombie?” or “This is what it means to be a zombie?”). It’s also a memetic mutation of the magical girl genre; the main character is turned into a zombie and quickly gathers a harem of supernaturals, while accidentally draining the magic powers of the harem’s token magical girl.
I wouldn’t watch the second season until all of it is available; Hulu has a bad habit of giving up on a show halfway through (e.g., of all things, Serial Experiments Lain… facepalm).
One criticism I’ve heard of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (from my family; I think it’s great) is that it “has too many little girls crying”. So I guess if that’s not your cup of tea, that’s something to watch out for.
I had more trouble with the early parts where they were just being normal little girls. Once things got creepy and tragic I was at home. ;)
See above for redundant comment about the incredibly fucked state of copyright. Pirate away, really; I can’t imagine how perverse you’d have to be to obey such laws!
Prometheus is to be avoided.
Agreed. The way I put it (and have seen similar comments):
I will not rule out a friend’s invitation to watch it on their Netflix account (for example). Upcoming Star Trek and Cloverfield 2 are on my list.
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Yes. After the film, my friend and I were so incensed that we filled out a full A4 page with things that annoyed us, in small handwriting. And half of the reverse side. I’m glad I saw that movie, because though it was the worst film I have ever seen, I got so much entertainment out of criticizing it.
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Eh, I know this is 6 weeks late, but I have it on my computer now if you’re still interested. In the meanwhile: Maddox
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I thought that was my particular quirk, I’m glad I’m not alone.
I’ve been watching Prison Break, which I don’t really recommend as “great”, but is extremely gripping (at any given moment, everything is about to go wrong—they maintain ridiculous tension for almost all of Season 1). The main character is not particularly interesting, but demonstrates a lot of competence, intelligence and agency. So many shows have “reactive” heroes, and I’ve developed a particular appreciation for heroes that set themselves big goals and then go out and achieve them in a comprehensible manner.
I think you accidentally deleted the name of the show...
I’m guessing Prison Break based on the description.
Heh. You are correct. You’d think there’d be more than one show matching the description “intelligent, competent character” and “tension”, but apparently not.
I’ve recently started watching Modern Family, and it’s really good. It’s a comedy, somewhat a la Arrested Development, about a strange family, although the humor is somewhat different—it’s not nearly as dry as AD was, but it’s still dry.
I’ve seen a fair few episodes, I’d second the recommendation. Notable for having a non-traditional family presented as being completely run-of-the-mill.
I actually am most disappointed with the fact that all three families (including the gay couple) turn out to have a completely straightforward dynamic (working “dad”, stay at home “mom”)
That said, the show is incredibly funny and well constructed, as far as family sitcoms go.
I hadn’t picked up on that, I thought the blonde mam had a job. Interesting point, I’ll remember that.
I actually did too for a long while—Claire seems so tough and together that, apart from not having a job, she feels more like the stereotypical ‘Man’ in the relationship. But that toughness mostly gets applied to maintaining the household.
Mom or “mom” that doesn’t sound all that modern to me!
I very strongly recommend Avatar: the Legend of Korra. Great plot, strong characters, amazing worldbuiling and terrific art. Also, its very realistic in the sense of avoiding conservation of ninjutsu and several other fiction fallacies.
I have seen two episodes, and they were both incredibly low quality for something that so many of my friends recommended.
The prior series (Avatar: The Last Airbender) is better-written. I was very surprised to learn that the Korra episodes are written by the same people—one ep was so clumsy I indignantly looked it up to know who to mock and, nope, same folks.
I’ve also started watching the first season of Fate/Zero; about six episodes in. It is fantastically better than Fate/stay night, if only because we can finally see the full power of Saber supplied with a sufficient quantity of prana.
However you’d probably want to watch Fate/stay night (or read a recap) anyway to learn how the Holy Grail Wars are supposed to work, because the first episode is a really bad recap.
The Creation of the Humanoids is a scifi film from 1962 regarding AI and uploads, primarily dialog rather than action. It’s excellently done.
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Here is a Monty Python sketch you might not be familiar with: Theory on brontosauruses by Anne Elk In future, when I have the urge to write a post here I am going to ask myself if my idea might be an ‘Elk theory’
《舌尖上的中国》 seems to be translated to “A Bite of China” in English (bad translation in my opinion). I have found a few HD torrents and it also seems to be up on YouTube and other video sites. This is an amazing documentary about food in China. It is beautifully filmed, so even those who don’t speak Chinese might enjoy it. For Chinese language students, it is packed full of excellent prose.
My (Chinese-born) wife has been watching all those quite avidly, it seems very popular across the Chinese-speaking internet.
I gotta admit that’s one recommendation I didn’t expect to run into on LessWrong.
The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists—known as The Pirates! Band Of Misfits in the US, because scientists apparently don’t sell (and that’s quite apart from Charles Darwin being a main character). An Aardman Animations film for kids. UK-made, the US financial contribution only added a small amount of gratuitous pseudo-irony and one Dreamworks smirk.
Edit: I didn’t actually say if it was any good. It is. Go see it :-)
… but is it any good?
We (two adults, parents of a small child) laughed like drains, so I’ll say “yes” :-)
Just lost about 45 minutes to TVtropes. Warning.
However, knowing that “Pirates!” was originally subtitled “In an Adventure With Scientists” increases my interest in seeing it.
I figured it was a reasonable hazard in a media thread.