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The Sledgehammer projection â named after
the Peter Gabriel song â is a novel
equal-area map projection designed to fill the same niche as the Winkel Tripel. A composite of the
Hammer and Peters projections, it preserves area, gives both parallels and meridians pleasing
curves, and with its pointed poles, it does not distort areas in far northern latitudes to the
extent that flat-topped projections such as
Equal Earth do. (I dare even
say that it handles Antarctica alright.)
The exact formula, based on
Strebe (2017)âs technique:1
Welcome back, ladies and gentlefolk! Iâve been trapped labouring in a Colombian salt mine for the
past four months, but after a daring escape which my lawyers have advised me not to speak of, iâve
returned to safety to provide you all with yet more contentÂŽâ˘.
Some links iâve had sitting around gathering mothballs to start you off:
I was, tentatively, putting off finishing this until iâd gotten the relevant part of the main site
in a working state. But, given that iâm rebuilding the whole thing from scratch, and i was itching
to put it out there â behold! The world in 2025 of Looking at the Big Sky, a sci-fi
alternate-history -type setting iâm working on. (Itâs not particularly sci- at the moment, iâll
admit â this is just a stepping stone on the way to 2338.)
I donât know if itâll come across too well in photo form. I was lying
on the grass, as one does, and lo and
behold, there in the sky appeared what i could only describe as a double-backwards-double-rainbow:
Iâve never seen anything like it. Maybe that makes me a shut-in? I donât know. Some quick prodding
around revealed it to be not a rainbow, but a halo: a
circum-zenithal arc, its iridescent
colours made by the low sunâs light filtering through the icy clouds above.
The Sagrada Familia. The view from a Pennine peak. My home town from above, caught by pure chance on
a flight to Turkey. The first sight of the Tyne Bridge down Grey Street. And now this. Thatâs the
top tier â sights iâll never forget in my life.
Hello. Youâve probably figured this out by now, but my personal life has been getting quite busy at
the moment, and postings on the site will be taking a back seat until, hm, letâs say the end of June
or thenabouts. Donât call it a hiatus â itâs just a minor pause.
A visual book recommender
â like a big map of the literary world, designed to simulate the experience of looking through a
used book store. Wish there were something like
this for films!
Good evening, âGreeceâ was a 1000-year social experiment conducted by Oxfordâs classics department.
Thank you for your coĂśperation.
2008 Tom Scott video: The First Annual Yorkshire Pudding And Spoon Race 2013 Tom Scott video:
The Blinking Light That Keeps Pedestrians Safe 2018 Tom Scott video: I Got To Go-Kart Around A
Particle Accelarator 2023 Tom Scott video: It's like a TARDIS for foxes.
Well, i rode it out for three years, but i finally caught covid. o7
The internet was lit ablaze last year with the rediscovery of Martin Scorceseâs obscure masterpiece
Goncharov, and itâs easy to see why. Accessible yet complex, of its time and yet
progressive, it was ripe for a critical reĂŤvaluation.
What people donât often hear about is its sequel â one that Marvelâs biggest fanboy didnât even know
existed. The rights having fallen into the lap of the bloated corpse of Cannon Entertainment, they
dumped it straight to video in 1989, leaving it to be forgotten.⌠until now!!!
Goncharov 2: The Quest for Gonch (sold in the USSR as
The Quest For God) is the biggest piece of shit since the fat one i laid in the McDonaldâs
deep fryer last weekend.1 The Gonch himself is no longer played by Robert
DeNiro â clearly too good for this shit â but an up and coming Danny DeVito, wearing an unconvincing
latex mask which sits somewhere in between
Tom Cruise in Vanilla Skyand
that one I Think You Could Leave skit.
Yes, this was the Farrelly Brotherâs first picture. They tried taking a more serious film for their
first work, but it falls flat on its face in many places. I found the scene where the Gonch huffs
thirteen cans of glue to be quite amusing for all the wrong reasons. Devito put his heartâ
I neither know nor care who you are but please stop defending The Quest for Gonchâ˘. The Goncharov
Cinematic Universe does not need this sort of slander, and neither does this blog!
Listen, there is TONS of potential for the Goncharov Cinematic Universe to expand from this film.
Itâs not the best film, sure itâs⌠wellâŚ
âŚ..
âŚwell, it is definetly2a film.
Well if youâre going to get technical, itâs not a film! Itâs a video! Iâd say it was shot on a
potato, but thatâs an insult to potatoes â when you compare it to the beautiful composition of Gonch
1â˘âs ending clock shot, this was shot on a yam.
Ok, sure, the picture quality wasnât the best, but Iâd blame that on the filmâs rushed development.
It was first approved by Scorceses in the late 1980s as a fallback in case he was killed by a
conservative lynch mob during the production of The Last Temptation of Christ as a
fallback.
You have no understanding of the complex lore behind /The Quest for Go(nch|d)/, you
absolute fucking nitwit. You fool. You Fucking Nimrod.
The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, and Concharov
II was released in 1989â
Martin Scorcese had no involvement in this. This was that fucker Matteo Bunchofnumbersâ idea. You
know how i know that? Because if Martin Scorsese knew about the existence of Goncharov 2: The Quest
for Gonch, heâd have not only killed himself, but figured out how to kill himself twice.
Youâre half-right; he had no involvement in the film, but he did approve its creation solely to
profit off of any VHS sales. I know this because a friendâs cousinâs
nephewâs sister-in-lawâs bossâ sonâs great uncle knew a guy who worked for the Cleveland Plain
Dealer and did an interview with Scorsese not long before the filmâs release.
I guess killing yourself twice just results in you coming back to life. Look â regardless of Marty
McFly or whatever his name isâ affiliation with it, can we focus on the end product? I mean, that
scene where Kremlinova trips over her high heels in that blue dress, and then when it cuts to the
next shot, itâs orange! Orange! Donât you try and fucking pretend itâs some deep symbolism
that predicted the rise of every movie poster in the 2000s, itâs just the director having a fucking
washing sponge6 for a brain!
Actually, I thought it was one of the more insightful scenes of the film. The dress colors symbolize
the slow and gradual fall of Russian society from great pride in an idealistic world to the growing
realization that said utopian dreams will never fruition, and the subsequent moral collapse
127.192.34.27 therein.
They couldâve used a better dress for the scene, though.
73 West Boulevard, Ocala, Florida8
So then Goncharov gets aids. You know â given how tenderly G1 /
Gonch Wick Chapter 1 handled its gay love scenes, thereâs a real opportunity there! But
since this is being directed by Thomas Ouiseau (no relation? I think?), he âcatches aids from a
government cactusâ, starts coughing up blood, and immediately says âi have the aidsâ and dies.
Yes! Iâm writing over you! Fuck you!
My least favorite part of the film would be the scene where Goncharov punches an Albanian
consort woman. It was not necessary to the plot at all, and just felt like a dated excuse to
throw in a bar fight scene. Oh my god, are you seriously writing over me? Wha- how is
this even possible?
Fine, you know what, here.
Youâve heard of Marsyas and Applo before, right?
Youâre in Comic Sans now.
hhhNOOOOO
You know what, hang on, this is my blog. I donât have to put up with this crap. I can just tell you
to leave. Or whatever.
That feels rude, actually, now i think of it.
I was never invited, so telling me to leave simply doesnât work in the first place. Algorian logic.
Pretty deep stuff interdimensional. Donât think a normie like you would understand.
Look, can we just agree on a rating out of 10 and then go? The people need to know if G2ÂŽ is worth
the purchase!
âŚ
0.85/10.
I think youâre being too nice with that 0.85. I mean, what is this? IGN?
Thrembo/10. Too many overly long sex scenes.
Thatâs not even a real number. Not since the incident.
Anyway â i give Goncharov 2: The Quest for God (God never shows up, incidentally, unless you count
the Kandinsky painting in the beach scene) an (eiĎ+1)/10.
I revise my earlier rating. Rational numbers are better for ratings.
I give the film a
-bÂąâ(b²-4ac)2a/10. Has the potential for greatly expanding the Goncharov universe, but its attempts at being both
a psychological thriller and a slapstick humor film wrapped into a mafia film are simply too
confusing for most viewers.
Thankfully, the first Goncharov11 film on
VHS was also the last. And itâs stayed that way ever since. (We donât
talk about the Blockbuster trilogy.12) Good night.
I hate this sort of thing, you hate this sort of thing, letâs get it out of the way. In addition to
capturing old web pages, the Internet Archive is also home to untold thousands of old videos, games,
and books â each of the latter of which correspond to a real, physical book in their collections.
They lend them out like a library, for only one person at a time⌠until the pandemic, when they made
the perhaps ill-advised decision to lift the borrowing limits for that limited time. Publishing
companies, who werenât too happy with that, pushed the nuclear button, sued them over the entire
idea of digital lending, and
now a federal courtâs decided against them. Theyâre planning to take the fight as high as they can go â
and they could use your donation.
As i said, i hate to do this â you donât need me to tell you about all the ways the world is fucked
up â but iâm willing to make an allowance when it affects me in particular. So many pieces of
internet history, even on this site, now only exist as digital ghosts in their machines (hell, i
even had to replace one of the links here with an Archive.org link after the author was suspended
from Twitter). And i canât count the number of musty out-of-print books that i would have never been
able to access here from my comfy chair in England if it werenât for the IA preserving them for a
new generation.
The uncanny-valley tendencies of AI should be used to innovate and
create new, terrifying non-binary genitalia, neither male nor female but a horrifying third thing
the likes of which homines sapientes have never before seen
Director: âCameron Croweâ (possibly Tom Cruise in a latex mask)
Plot: Rich prick gets in a car accident, has some nasty dreams, and then Mr
Exposition shows up in the great glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in
the last 10 minutes to explain everything
Directorâs taste in music: Same as mine; you can tell because this film has like
fifteen pointless needle dropsa
Does it contain a Tom Cruise Triathlon�b No, although he
does do a Tom Cruise Run⢠at least once
Does it at least have good ideas? It has the germs of things that might be called
ideas, but none that havenât been done better before
When i was eleven, my dad told me to come downstairs. (I was on holiday at the time, you see, on my
semiannual Divorce Custody TripÂŽ back to the fatherland, where i could gorge myself on as many
sweets and spit out as many cuss words as i wanted.) He had something to show me on his home cinema
setup.
Normally it would be some documentary about watchmaking or nuclear waste storage or any number of
things that took his fleeting fancy. Neither of us were much for fiction, and my young self
especially wasnât much of a cinephile. I donât think my taste in movies had updated much since i
watched Finding Nemo on a loop at age three.
Two and a half hours later, there i was, on his lily-white fake-leather sofa, my jaw agape, needing
a lie down to take it all in. That was the day i met my first favourite film: Interstellar.
Christopher Nolan has a reputation for mind-bending bombast, but his directing is actually quite
plain when you get down to it. His palette of colours would be more at home in a hardware store than
an art department.a He has little time for the fancy camera trickery so
beloved by his fellow mass-market auteurs like Spielberg and Zemeckis. He shoots his pictures as
they are, not as a painter might like them to be.
It works to his detriment as often as in his favour. The Dark Knight trilogyâs dedication
to surgically removing every ounce of colour and whimsy from its inherently campy source sucks it
dry of life and fun. (Whenever Heath Ledger isnât on screen, all the other characters should be asking, âwhereâs the
Joker?â) But in the intervening years, it seems that Mr Nolan figured out how to use his un-style to his
advantage.
On Earth, he shoots everything like, well, a Christopher Nolan film â a look that perfectly suits
such a drab, dying world of omnipresent dust storms and weltering crops. When the plot shoots past
the stratosphere and into the stars, he anchors his fantastic alien worlds and black holes of
tantalising beauty against that same pedestrian style; devoid of his peersâ tricks and flourishes,
you get the sense that if his gargantuan star-eaters and tome-tiled tesseracts were real,
this is exactly what they would look like.
Much has been made of Interstellarâs Achillesâ heel: lurve. I'd like to offer a
lukewarm defence. Many take Anne Hathawayâs speech about love as a force âtranscending dimensions of
time and spaceâ as exposition, seeing her character, Amelia Brand, as a simple mouthpiece for the
Messrs Nolanâs hamfisted platitudes. I would call this a severely mistaken interpretation.
Dr Brandâs lines come at the lowest point in her life. She has spent years â decades, from Earthâs
view â floating alone in space; now, the crew have to decide how to use their one remaining shot to
save all mankind. She isnât making any profound statements or logical arguments. She is desperately
trying to explain to the two men beside her why she thinks, right or wrong, that they should take
the risk and visit her former loverâs last known location rather than the closer world the other two
prefer. Itâs clunky and melodramatic, but thatâs the point: sheâs grasping at straws, willing to do
anything to see her love again. Her speech gives balance against her comradesâ assumption that cold,
hard logic is all that matters, throwing gut feeling and emotion out the airlock.
When Cooper falls into that black hole and finds himself wall to wall with a myriad versions of his
daughter, it isnât some literal fundamental force of âloveâ that brings him there. It is his
acceptance of Dr Brandâs romanticism over Mannâs enlightenment. Cold calculations have brought him
nought but ruin, forcing him to watch his daughter grow up in front of his eyes and nearly killing
both him and the whole human race; so, he lays down his mask, dives into what science tells him is
certain doom, and lets the man who wept at those 20 years of messages take control.
Iâm not sure that it all comes together in the end. Matthew McConaughey is a fine performer, but the
role of Cooper deserves someone who can give it the gravitas (heh) and sensitivity his trauma
deserves â not just screaming âMurph!!!â over and over. Mr Nolanâs script is utilitarian as ever;
misunderstood as it may be, Dr Brandâs tangent fits into the rest of the film about as well as a cat
fits into a baseball glove.
That slack-jawed night on the sofa would begin a new tradition. Every time i shuttle back and forth
between England and Holland, i queue up Hans Zimmerâs score on my earbuds, and try to time it
juuuuust right, such that the second the jet takes off, âMountainsâ comes to its peak or
âNo Time for Cautionââs organs begin to blare. Thereâs a lot of flicks i like better these days â
Interstellar would probably barely scrape the top ten â but thereâll always be a warm place
in my heart for my first love.
(Guy who writes headlines for newspapers) I love Ben, Jerry's
