DF Emme

Europe is set to welcome Dracula Land, a massive Dracula-themed resort near Bucharest, Romania. 🧛‍♂️ 🇷🇴 Announced in December 2025 as part of a €1 billion project, it will feature six themed lands and over 40 attractions, including gothic castles, dark rides, and roller coasters inspired by Transylvanian legends and Bram Stoker's novel. The multi-day resort will also offer 1,200 themed hotel rooms, an aqua park, spa, 22,000 ft. entertainment arena, shopping district, and more, aiming to open by 2027!

I used to have a lot more fun on this website. Hot take though; I don't think it's only because of the changes Elon has made. I've just been growing more grossed out by the way social media(not just X) pushes people to fight over shit that doesn't matter

More old mags from the archives. Check this out. August 1987!

If you get deep enough into TikTok your feed becomes mostly Chinese commodity wholesalers

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

All art comes from something lol. Dune is a retelling of Lawrence of Arabia in space.

Star Wars is inspired by like 0-3% of Dune and would still exist without Dune. If we are powerscaling cultural impact, there is no argument. Darth Vader’s breathing alone mogs any iconography from Dune. Lets be serious

All science fiction and fantasy written after Dune is influenced by Dune. Dune is one of the modern foundational works, even if you have never read it you are influenced by works that were influenced by it.

Considering how much better Solomon Kane and the Cthulhu Mythos have fared since their authors' deaths, would Tolkien's legedarium be better off in the public domain?

NGL I want to see the delusional takes. The masses can’t get Starship Troopers straight. I want to see Wolfe melt their brains.