A Whole New Bubba

@simongerman600 They missed Cumming, Iowa

This map displays the most lewd-sounding town name in each US State. Essentially a mini #badgeographyjoke for each state.

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.

This needs to be said more often.

@colonelbong @MatthewFerrari he becomes very important mere pages after he's introduced 85% of the way thru the story

@MatthewFerrari denis put bijaz in the final cut you coward

where is the treacherous dwarf whose name I don't remember . . .

Bombing the center of a capital should be unthinkable. Apparently it depends on the city — and who’s dropping the bombs. In London, Paris or Washington this would be a global crisis. Here it barely registers.

@jamefaqs Varang

i’ve been saying this

At the current burn rate, it will take just 12 weeks for the @GOP to spend more on the Iran war than it would have cost to continue the Affordable Care Act subsidies for 22 million Americans.

she acting up

He wears jeans all the time because he’s got varicose veins that look like Mississippi delta tributaries from space

The resurgence of Lips Of An Angel is the biggest recession indicator since before that song came out

@SecKennedy @misraetel thoughts

Leg day in Austin.

@SecKennedy ZERO...ZERO....ZERO....ZERO.....ZERO

this is how your email finds me

Johnny Knoxville getting emotional and upset when talking about why he can’t be around bulls anymore is incredible. This guy just wants to get smoked by bulls, that’s it.

The fact that they are saying this ON CAMERA tells you THEY DO NOT GIVE A FUCK and the fact that the media is not covering this EVERY HOUR is A GROSS DERELICTION OF THEIR DUTIES AS JOURNALISTS. They are telling you this in FEBRUARY. Democrats don't wait till October to engage.

Charli XCX is short for Charles Xavier Charles Xavier

🇺🇸Vote Gavin Newsom 2028 on the JD Vance ticket! 🇺🇸 🇺🇸Vote Gavin Newsom 2028 if you want Tucker Carlson 2032!🇺🇸

gym teachers when they pulled those bad boys out from the wall

I actually think it’s a good thing to not preemptively swear you’ll vote for Gavin Newsome before he’s the candidate

I really can’t get over what fucking losers liberals are. Hasan Piker says the most obvious thing, that it is the candidates job to earn the votes of the people and Blue MAGA is now crashing out. Do you motherfuckers realize how you sound? You stupid fucks telling the party they already have your vote no matter what, they don’t have to do shit for you! All they gotta do is say “Republican bad!” And send you fundraising emails and you’ll act as their foot soldiers for free.