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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • Tesa outdoor double sided tape.

    That stuff is basically magic. It will stick anything to everything and you can remove it from almost any surface without leaving a mark. I used to stick a dashcam to my car window, a birdbath to my brick wall, a remote LED lamp to the ceiling (felt iffy, works great!). It’s even holding a metal plate from the doorknob in place because the door is more hole than wood by now.

    It beats basically every other kind of tape of multipurpose glue, and it’s removable. It’s kinda thick though, so you might see it, but that’s also a feature when sticking rough textures to eachother.



  • It’s a damn good thing that the Romans were fond of collecting nicknames and victory titles, because the tendency of every fucking Roman family to use the same goddamn names for their kids is something else.

    I’m pretty sure the second caused the first. And it beats what we barbarians in the north did, which was mostly choosing nicknames based on stuff that’s also hereditary.

    Oh, your name is Jan, and you’re tall? You’ll be Jan the Tall. No way, who could have expected your son, also named Jan, to also be tall…

    Oh, your name is Piet, and you’re a miller? Hello Piet Miller. No way, your son Piet also works in the very same mill you do? Nobody saw that coming, what a shock!

    Hello Kees who lives in the forest, I’ll call you Kees Forest from now on. What? Other people named Kees also live in the forest since the entirety of western Europe is 98% forests? Damn, that’s inconvenient!








  • we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.

    This becomes SO obvious when you look at “the great classics”. Citizen Kane is, by all modern standards, a pretty boring and uninspiring movie about a really lame topic.

    But at the time, it was absolutely groundbreaking. It basically pioneered half a dozen techniques such as “letting foreground and background be in focus at the same time” and “nonlinear storytelling” (which of course was hugely telegraphed, because it was new) and “using a montage” with “Sound to make transitions”. He also used such amazing techniques such as “long takes” up to several minutes. He moved the camera around, not just taking a stage-view, but low and high angle shots, and then he added lighting to make things stand out.

    Stuff like that is now SO basic that they might not even teach it in filmschool, simply because people are inundated with it from modern media. Orson Welles basically invented all of that though, and it was revolutionary. Now it’s just boring a movie about an asshole’s sled.