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Things 25: Dead Fantasy, People Bucket, Oh No Pigeons

(Originally sent August 2008)

This week’s film
Clone Wars was terrible as a film, but it could be okay when it comes out as a kids’ TV series this autumn.

Next Week’s film
I keep going to American comedies and regretting it, but I think there may be something in Get Smart. I particularly like the ‘neither of us is dead’ bit from the start of the trailer:
Trailer: http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIAdF8SY2M
Imdb: 7.3
Rotten Tomatoes: 52%

A Puzzle
You would expect the abilities of humans to remain about the same over 100 years, and Olympic records to be broken at an ever slower rate. But this is not the case – it seems as if the athletes of one decade are generally better than those of the previous. Why is this?

Last week’s puzzle came from here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041127085423/http://fermat.ma.rhul.ac.uk/laurence/puzzles.html
(Dug out from the archive because it used to be hosted on a secret machine we had hidden in the maths department to act as a file sharing facilitator, which was eventually rumbled)

[Now mirrored here – T.M. 18/10/10]

A video (highlight of this week’s things!)
I like extreme things, things people have created where they haven’t let themselves be burdened by what’s been done before, or what people expect, or what makes sense. This is why I like films like Speed Racer and Day Watch.

And things like “Dead Fantasy I”, where one guy has used his favourite female character models from the games Final Fantasy and Dead or Alive and choreographed the most insane battle royale imaginable. Watch nice quality version over on Game Trailers, or just see this YouTube version if you’re impatient:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5v0_TjBxY8 (both links died, try this link instead – T.M. 17/5/22)

If you liked that, look for “Dead Fantasy II” which, somewhat unbelievably, is even more extreme.

A link
People bucket‘ is a silly fun little game in which you throw people into a bucket, found on one of the sites that is linking people to Talking pets.

A quote
Julia, earlier this week: “I believe in doing everything in moderation. Except cigarettes or alcohol.”

A picture
A comic from ‘Pictures for sad children’, for anyone that has ever been saddened by seeing one pigeon hassling another (mirrored here if that link breaks).

(You can now buy the t-shirt).

I also recommend the sequence on “how nerds destroy the world”, which begins here. (For context, the main guy is a ghost who has regrets and is destroying the technological gadgets he feel he wasted his life on)