The 100 Best Movies of the 1970s – Far Out »

What a list! The Godfather isn’t even in the top 10 and everything above it is a banger.

These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life – Ryanholiday.net »

The rule I like is ‘one hundred pages minus your age.’ Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap.

This post comes perilously close to one of those insufferable LinkedIn “if you’re not reading Marcus Aurelius from a beat-up paperback, are you really reading?” humblebrags, but I liked this rule in particular. The older I get, the more likely I am to DNF if a book isn’t holding me.

The Gist: Capital Crimes »

Government ministers had theatrical fits of the vapours at a piece of art depicting the police attending an historical eviction. They needn’t have worried. The image was clearly too subtle.

No artist would be so crude as to simply show the police force of the state standing guard at Bank Machines, protecting money against the people who own it.

And now, no one needs to.

I usually try to avoid anything too political over here, but this whole situation is just too bonkers to ignore, and Simon McGarr’s take is spot on.

Monkey Island 2 Lechucks Revengethe Commentary Tracks »

Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer recorded a commentary for the special edition of Monkey Island 2 and now you can listen without having to play through the game. A great rambling conversation with three old friends about the process of making a classic game.

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny Blood Knife »

When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?

The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters

Pretty insane that Oppenheimer, of all films, would be the exception that proves the rule.

Life Before Cellphones the Barely Believable After Work Activities of Young People in 2002 »

It’s incredible how things have changed in the last twenty years.

Sally: You had to plan more ahead and hope it worked out. People didn’t flake as much. There’s no option to text someone 10 minutes before, because you knew they were waiting for you.

Dan: Even if you didn’t feel like it, you just showed up. If you didn’t show up, people would stop inviting you out. And then you would have fun! Or maybe it would suck, but next time would be fun.

Matt: You’d be late or they’d be late and you’d just talk to whoever was there. It was a whole skill, taking to a person you don’t know.

Searching for a Search Engine »

DuckDuckGo was encouraging for focusing on privacy, but the quality of results has been underwhelming. Google has seemingly devolved from a genuine search engine to some sort of recommendation engine with low-quality generic “answers” surfaced by scraping content from sites.

Everything has just felt either sleazy, low-quality, or both.

If you’re anything like me and have been feeling pretty bummed out at the state of search on the modern web, you should read this. I hadn’t heard of Kagi before but I’ve been getting some good results from it so far.

Robin Sloan on the 'This Is How You Win the Time War'/Bigolas Dickolas Phenomenon »

This is a good thing happening to a great book and better people — but/and, there’s something unsettling about these algorithmic lightning bolts. From afar, watching the flash, it feels like the activity of a classical god. The algorithm’s choices are exactly that consequential; exactly that capricious.