Again it’s Oscar season and I thought it would be cool to catch some of the nominees and winners in an actual cinema. Unfortunately session timings for The Shape of Water didn’t work for us so I picked this instead, a film that received a number of nominations but failed to actually win anything. It helps that we’ve already seen Saoirse Ronan in a number of roles and it’s the first feature film directed by Greta Gerwig, an actress who both my wife and myself liked in a couple of films.
I’ve done pretty much the full tour of the various sites that offer free online courses by now and this time my curiosity has led me to a site that only sells them for money: Udemy. Being color blind and not having much of a creative spark, I’m never going to be much of an artist. But as a life-long videogamer I am curious about 3D graphics so I thought I’d try and learn how to use a free 3D application like Blender. There are tons of tutorial videos for it on YouTube of course but it’s rather difficult to judge how good they are when you’re a complete newbie. So when I saw this course available on discount for less then US$10 with its over 50 hours of lecture videos and a contents page that appears to cover just about every aspect of Blender, buying it seemed like a no brainer.
Continue reading Learn 3D Modelling – The Complete Blender Creator Course
This is yet another quintessentially Japanese film that was a recommendation from our cinephile friend. Given its title and its premise, I expected it to be light fare. Indeed, though it touches on some heavy themes, it’s ultimately a very sentimental film if a very well-made one.
So this got bumped up the list a whole lot sooner than I expected. I have watched this one before and had a high regard for it back then. As with Summer Snow, finding a copy of it anywhere proved to be impossible and we resorted to watching a YouTube version. July Rhapsody is also notable as being the last film appearance by Anita Mui before her death in 2003.
So the whole reason why I put this onto my list was because I heard about it on Broken Forum and I found the idea of an environmentalist documentary that argues in the opposite direction to be very appealing. It’s about the practice of seal hunting by the Inuit peoples and while we are familiar with campaigns against it, this documentary argues in favor of it.
So I said that I’d play through Fallout 4 all over again with mods and so I did, but it turned out that all I needed was the comprehensive Horizon overhaul mod. For a while I did have Survival Options because I can’t live without save-anywhere but Horizon has this covered as well. I won’t list everything this mod does because it’s too huge and I feel like I’ve barely touched the settlement management bits but I will go into what I liked about it and what I think could be improved.
This film has been sitting in my list for a while now but reading up news on the recent Oscar season led me to some lists ranking the most deserved winners of the award and I was surprised to note how highly it is usually regarded. Indeed this film has an absurdly high rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is considered a highly significant American film.