You know what I find fascinating about the Backrooms movie? How having a budget forced them to do things practically.
Think about it. On his own Kane Pixels was making backrooms YouTube videos using the free software Blender. Because he was just a 16 year old kid doing this for fun in his spare time.
But now heâs got to direct a feature length movie. And if he wants actors running through those same blender environments, thatâs going to be super expensive hiring visual effects companies to rotoscope and green screen composite and motion track all those shots. A handful of visual effect shots can cost thousands of dollars a day.
So whatâs the solution? JUST FUCKING BUILD IT.
Itâs cheaper to just build 30,000 square feet of walls and wallpaper than it is to composite 500 effects shots.
What about the monster? JUST BUILD A PUPPET. Itâs cheaper to build a puppet and hire a really tall thin guy to operate it than it is to 3D model, animate, and composite it into the film. And look! Bonus! Anytime the puppet interacts with the real world it looks REAL. Because itâs a real physical object in the set!
You need your character to run through a room of couches? Just buy (or rent) a bunch of couches and put them in a room!
And even when you do use visual effects for set extensions, you still film as much practically as possible. Like my favorite example, when Mary runs out into this alleyway⊠JUST FILM A REAL ALLEYWAY OUTSIDE and add the walls in post!
And this is all because the movie even HAD a budget that it necessitated them doing things practically and cheaply. What a weird paradoxical situation, huh?
many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think
Really wanted Catherine to win. The rookie takes it all is such a fun narrative. I mean, there's a reason Lightning McQueen wanted to win the Piston Cup so badly in Cars 1. Points to Ify though, first to lose, ultimate winner also works as a narrative.
History is Wild because 90% of the time, when something happens itâs due to incremental change pioneered by groups of people, but then thereâs that rare 10% where you can point at One Specific Person and be like âThem. That bitchâ
nimble, a border collie-papillon mix, wins the 12â class in the 2024 masters agility championship. the first time a mixed breed has won at westminster ever.
I have a friend who decided that MCR exists in her alt-Earth even tho 9/11 didnât happen in that timeline. Gerard Way was just inspired by something else. I love the implication that MCR is inevitable and exists in every universe and timeline lmaoooooo
i am dying for people to recognize harrow and gideon as the golden child/scapegoat in the locked steam cooker of several layers of institutional abuse. of course harrow's love is cramped and painful and awful, of course gideon's love is obsessed and self-negating, of course they're fixated on each other and yet blind to each other. gah.
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But Iâm a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So Iâm posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet â it just poured straight out of my fingers â so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but youâll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. Itâs often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you donât know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film â when you hear a word you donât know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things youâve already learned. Thatâs why itâs best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go âHey! I recognize that!â This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think itâs not that important⊠because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just donât worry if you donât understand everything thatâs going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you canât 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of whatâs going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but youâre not actively studying when youâre doing passive exposure. Remember the two things youâre trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff youâve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You canât learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesnât need to be the âActive Learningâ kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the âPassive Exposureâ kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you donât enjoy, because you wonât benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you donât understand at the beginning. But A) thatâs good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but Iâm not sure if itâs still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess whatâs going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (Iâve written a whole post about the latter here.) You donât need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a âYMMVâ piece of advice, but: if youâre having trouble memorizing stuff, just donât. Donât bother trying to remember anything. Remember that âpassive exposureâ bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again â but youâd be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so thereâs nothing wrong with it. But I notice that itâs often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once youâve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge youâve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone whoâs a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Donât underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether itâs narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess thatâs not technically âtalking to yourselfâ), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, itâs actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And thatâs about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
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