Corpse farms, psychopathic games, Satan and bachelor parties, all in one place. What place? The Recommended Links of the Week, of course! What did you expect? Keep reading and you’ll also find a bunch of super cool videos and some galleries that aren’t too bad either.
The day Takeshi Kitano designed a video game: “Takeshi no Chōsenjō (or Beat Takeshi's Last Challenge) was presented as a video game but was actually a troll. Because that cartridge had been designed with a single purpose: to constantly and mercilessly mess with the player. It's not like it fooled anyone, given that the game's own box already warned on its cover that ‘common sense is dangerous,’ a very unusual statement in family-friendly entertainment that had a twisted concept of family. And very little friendly.”
The 38 best cinematography films so far this century: “To vindicate these sculptors of light, I bring you this list in which I collect the 38 best cinematography that we have been given so far in the 21st century. A selection that I executed after a small ‘battle royale’ among my favorites —prepare for an overdose of Roger Deakins—, limiting myself to selecting a couple of titles per year.”
How Hollywood pulled the wool over our eyes when it needed Russian planes in its movies: “In the movie, Tom Cruise and his pals faced the fearsome MiG-28s off the coast of Libya. The supposed Soviet-made fighters that appear in the film were actually American F-5s painted black, to look scarier, of course. Additionally, the producers missed a small detail: all MiG fighter models always have an odd number, since the Soviet designation system reserved even numbers for bomber and transport aircraft.”
The impressive fortune Robert Downey Jr. earned for his Iron Man movies: “Last week we told you about the great fortune Robert Downey Jr. earned for his role in Avengers: Endgame: 75 million dollars. However, he is not the actor in first place, since Chris Hemsworth (Thor) was the biggest beneficiary of the successful film with 76.4 million dollars. Despite that, the New York actor got more out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe because of his constant appearances. How much did Downey Jr. earn with each of his Iron Man movies? We tell you below.”
The development of Satan and the fragmentation of God: “Now, you might be thinking that I have ignored the most prominent appearance of Satan or the devil, even if not in human or angelic form. I refer to the serpent of the Garden of Eden that gave the apple to Adam and Eve (Genesis 3). Well, there was neither an apple nor a devil. The text simply refers to a fruit, but the Latin similarity between malus (‘evil’) and malum (‘apple’) did the rest of the work. And the serpent? It was simply a divinely created serpent that spoke.”
Why does one become an idiot at bachelor parties?: “Researchers Anthony Ellis (University of Salford) and Daniel Briggs (European University) conducted an ethnography of bachelor parties of young Britons traveling to Ibiza, or on home soil (...) In many cases they were not going to access fresh information, with its nuances and fidelity to the facts, but to memories: the protagonists had had time to rework the memory of what happened in a positive light. That makes one of the conclusions they reached more striking: ‘The men we spoke to felt an intense pressure to have fun. It is almost like a mandate or an expectation to enjoy themselves. Not a choice,’ recalls Ellis.”
This is what goes through a mosquito's head before it bites you: “Discovering what happens in a mosquito's brain is not a simple task. Even less so when it comes to knowing what processes fire in its tiny brain before it launches toward a possible victim. But Jeffrey Riffell's team has designed a series of delicate experiments that have allowed them to analyze which neuronal areas activate and which stimuli trigger these signals before they bite us.”
What are ‘corpse farms’ and why do they cause controversy: “On this plot of just over one hectare there are 15 human bodies scattered. They are all naked, some locked in metal cages, others covered with blue plastic, others buried and others directly in the open. Each body forms a silhouette of dead grass, but then, on that same piece of land, a vigorous shrub will grow, taller than the others. This place is an open-air forensic anthropology laboratory of the University of South Florida (USF), operating since 2017 in Pasco County, 25 minutes from the city of Tampa.” Thanks Francisco for the link!
The theft of the century in Bulgaria, a twenty-something ‘hacks’ (almost) the whole country: “Bulgaria has just stumbled upon an unexpected problem: a 20-year-old has put an entire country in check from his computer chair. He is a cybersecurity officer who, with a simple device connected to the network, has managed to gain access to all the economic data of 5 million Bulgarians, an incredible figure given that the country has seven million inhabitants. Now, authorities are trying to understand what went wrong.”
Epictetus, the philosopher of non-worry: “His doctrine focuses basically on ethics, on the best way to live life, and his teachings have gone down in history as some of the best ways to achieve inner peace. So much so that when we talk about ‘taking things philosophically,’ we generally refer to Stoic ideas, and therefore to those of Epictetus.”
Forgetting, an ally of learning: “Forgetting is not always a memory failure. Often it is an essential and active process. Only people who forget can distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, think abstractly and solve problems. Furthermore, forgetting helps us remember. The cellular mechanism of forgetting resembles that of learning and occurs in the same synapses of the hippocampus and other brain areas. However, it is not clear whether we delete contents from memory or whether they simply become more inaccessible.”
The stone of madness by El Bosco: “The extraction of the stone of madness is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, which represents the link that was made, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance of the Netherlands, between madness and the presence of stones in the brain. Today it is part of the collection of the Prado Museum, and in its day it marked the transition between medieval art and the modern world of the Renaissance.”
Videos
Fixing the CGI of “The Mummy Returns”, Heavy Metal + wool fabrics, Crazy Super Mario, “Castlevania - Wood Carving Partita” (Toni Leys Remix), the loudest sound in the ocean produced by this tiny organism, millipede mom, guinea pig doing tricks, Klingons ordering pizza, Keanu Reeves avoiding a robbery, giant jellyfish, pink bug, Jet Set Radio cosplayers, Planet of Cats, what Armstrong saw walking on the Moon, tripping over nothing, Furby with Arduino, what’s inside a turtle shell, Live Aid - Queen (Full Set), Evangelion:3.0, the strongest computer safe in the world?, how a billion dollars looks, hummingbird rescued by girl, Japanese commercials of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1989, jumping over the Tour de France, cartoon piano medley, training for Betamax salesmen, how Toy Story 4 was animated, counting to 221 in one breath, the exit! the exit!, beautiful and strange renders, almost died three times, and the shorts Negative Space and the great Zero.
Galleries
Alien behind the scenes, Eddie Liu, Gregorian chant generator, Sean Connery in Zardoz, book with insect illustrations from 1921, Mr. Bean in blockbuster movies, the passage of time, amazing toy photos, Audubon 2019 winning photos, terrible fake advertising photos, underwater photo sets, thermal photos of Iceland, astronomical maps, album covers, and finally: the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.
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