A lot can go wrong during the holidays, but my personal worst case scenario is running out of wine. Luckily, Walmart has a $7-Malbec available nationwide, and it is delicious.
13) They've rejected every single one of my appeals to call them Queen Cobras but I keep trying
One of the most feared and revered snakes on the planet, the king cobra is renowned for its imposing size and deadly bite. But it also has plenty of other unique qualities: a distinctive voice, remarkable nesting habits, and a name that obscures its true identity.
If youd id see, read the last bit of this interview - its fascinating!
This post contains spoilers about the ending of the film Arrival.
The masterful sci-fi film Arrival is ultimately a story about communication. It follows the linguistics expert Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) as she tries to connect with a race of aliens who’ve landed spacecraft all over the globe for some mysterious purpose. But Louise’s most crucial breakthrough isn’t with the seven-legged, squid-like “Heptapods” that have come to speak with humans. It’s with the Chinese government—in particular, the stoic General Shang (Tzi Ma), who brings his country to the brink of war with the aliens out of his fear that they pose a threat. In the film’s arresting climax, with the help of Heptapod technology that lets Louise simultaneously glimpse the present and future, she calls Shang and gets his attention by telling him something she couldn’t possibly know: his wife’s dying words.
In Arrival, the motivations of the visiting Heptapods are vague—they simply tell Louise they will need humanity’s help to avert a great crisis thousands of years right now. But their strange written language, when properly learned, allows the speaker to experience time in a non-linear way and access all past, present, and future moments at the same time. In bringing this language to Earth, the Heptapods are doing more than granting the planet an incredible new technology: They’re also seeding humankind with empathy, pushing them together, distributing their language in pieces to different countries and demanding they cooperate to assemble it. It’s an extraordinarily hopeful message for a particularly grim moment in global affairs, where isolationism and nationalism are on the rise in the U.S. and elsewhere.
That’s something Arrival’s screenwriter Eric Heisserer thought about when crafting his script, which was adapted from the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. Adding the “geo-political panic element” helped him translate that small, emotional tale into something grander, Heisserer said in an interview with The Atlantic that also touched on how he crafted the enigmatic visual look of the Heptapod language and expanded the emotional thrust of his story. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
David Sims: What was the initial spark for you after reading “Story of Your Life”?
Eric Heisserer: I didn’t get any sort of cinematic reaction from the story at all. It was a total emotional connection where I just was gutted and heartbroken, while my head was just full of giant ideas. I had learned something about Fermat’s principle of least time, and Snell’s law, and non-linear orthography, and I didn’t even know what any of those terms were before reading this story. And I wanted to share that with the world. I had a lot of heavy lifting to do [on the visual side], because the story works so well as a literary piece, and doesn’t worry about the things that make a movie work.
Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) surrounded by images of the Heptapods’ written language in Arrival. Paramount Pictures
Sims: How did you construct the Heptapods’ language when writing the script? Were you working on what that would look like from the beginning?
Heisserer: I had some of my own formally uneducated ideas about the Heptapods’language. I dabbled as an amateur language-builder, in as much as I knew what I wanted the [Heptapod] logograms to look like. I wanted that non-linear sense. So I knew I wanted it to be circular, and I wanted questions, or any other kind of intent, to be [rendered as] modified curls and loops that emanated from the circle. I did a lot of graphic work early on, and I had maybe seven or eight different logograms I designed in the script.
Sims: Did they change at all from script to screen?
Heisserer: Oh sure, yeah. They got artists and professionals far smarter than I on board, and they took the ball and ran with it. The logogramsstill remain circular, some of the founding principles I toyed with are there, but the artists made sense of them. Patrice Vermette [the film’s production designer] and his wife helped design the language, and they have a fully fleshed-out language, with 100 symbols that actually make sense. The analysis you see in the film, where the symbols are run into a scanner and translated into words, that’s Vermette making it work.
Sims: How did the film differ from the short story otherwise?
Heisserer: In the short story, the Heptapods communicate simply by dropping technology called “looking glasses,” which are basically intergalactic viewscreens, over a couple hundred places around the planet. And humans have Skype calls with the Heptapods and start to learn their language.
Sims: So it’s a little more mundane.
Heisserer: It is, and there’s a real lack of conflict or tension. And I realized quite soon that if I had this movie take place over a series of nine months to a year of them just talking on TV screens, that I was in trouble. So having the Heptapods arrive [in giant ships] at our front door gave me the geo-political panic element and the rising tension of a public that would want an answer.
Sims: The geo-political panic feels appropriate to this moment in history, where everything has to be immediate, where an answer has to come right away, where there’s an importance placed on speed in everything. The thing that’s working against Louise in the movie is not how the aliens behave, but how the human structures of power are reacting.
Heisserer: Right. And this is the essence of a linguistics expert. A linguist has this essential problem to solve with people, because patience is the only real virtue in that career, and our increasing need for the immediate understanding, the knee-jerk reaction, the false equivalence, all that happens right away, and is our downfall.
Sims: A scene that really stuck out for me was the conversation between Louise and General Sheng. It felt like the lynchpin for the film’s message of understanding and communication, because we’ve only seen him as a stereotypical figure: the stern Chinese general that you see on the TV.
Heisserer: Right! And why? Because we’re seeing it through the filter of the U.S. intelligence network; it’s their version of him. We’re not seeing a person. It’s our misinterpretation of what we think China is doing. So it falls into a bit of a trope, again, simply because we’re the U.S., the military-industrial complex, whatever you want to call it. We’re think of them as a potential enemy. And we’re taking whatever’s being said in Chinese, whoever’s translating that is taking it to the U.S. news and saying, “Oh, this is the big bad general.” No. We don’t know what’s going on with him until we see him in person. We realize he’s not the character we thought him to be: He’s really honored to meet Louise, and something really poetic and personal has happened there.
For the longest time in the script, for the scene where they’re on the phone, I had just written, “She says something in Mandarin to him, and we know this is his wife’s dying words.” And I just found it lovely and poetic, and I didn’t think about it further until [the actor] Tzi Ma calls me and says, “Eric, Eric. What does she say?” And I reply, “Well, she says something in Mandarin!” And he replies, “This is the most important line in the film, this saves the world, Eric! What is the line?” So I kept bringing him ideas, and he would say, “Eric, I love you, but this is terrible.” So finally, I gave him something, and he said, “I deeply love this, this is the line, this is exactly what should be said, I will use this.” And I finally see the final cut of the film, and we get to that scene, and she says the line, and [the director] Denis [Villeneuve], the scoundrel, does not use subtitles. So nobody knows, unless you speak Mandarin, what she says to him.
Sims: So I’m going to have to get a translator? That feels appropriate.
Kanye West seems to be recovering nicely after falling ill at his own concert earlier this month. He’s about to kick off a five-night stint in California, then he’ll basically be performing through the end of the year. Clearly, this is a man who bleeds—or at least endures nausea—for his fans and art. That kind of dedication is usually the stuff of biopics, but not for West. If and when his life is dramatized for the big screen, the Life Of Pablo rapper wants a humorous take on it. That’s according to Metro, which cites a Daily Star report that West not only wants a comedic biopic, but he wants Will Ferrell to play him in the film.
The U.K. publication’s source is supposedly a Kanye West insider, who claims that the platinum-selling artist is eschewing a preachy rendition of his life in ...
Republican leadership in Congress asked government agencies to not move forward on new regulations during the transition period, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday.
Yeah, ok Trump's win had NOTHING to do with racism, right?
We have never deserved Michelle Obama: it’s a truth made more certain with each passing day. And we’ve been reminded anew by two grotesquely racist officials in West Virginia who recently referred to her as an “ape in heels.”
When they're being told they're shitty entitled scum (despite being raised and brought up by the same people calling them lazy and entitled) , coupled with the constant barrage of anti-women messages somehow even more prevalent in today's media, I'm really not surprised. Sadly.
More and more teens say they've had serious depression, researchers reported Monday. But more are not being treated for it.
Born in 1935, Neyman—a professional artist—was active in community theater throughout the ‘60s. His only film credit is Harold P. Warren’s Manos: The Hands Of Fate, made famous by Mystery Science Theater 3000 and deemed “The Worst Movie Ever Made” by Entertainment Weekly.Made as a result of a bet with In The Heat Of The Night screenwriter Stirling Silliphant for a budget of $19,000, Manos featured local theater actors and models and was shot on 16mm, with all dialogue and sound effects dubbed in during post-production. Manos premiered on November 15 ...
To celebrate the culmination of the race between a woman and a man who once said being famous allowed him to grab women “by the pussy,” the Washington Posthired a woman to wear a dress made out of napkins for guests to grab by the handful.
Those folks who wrote and performed intimate music that touched your soul. The Beatles, Dylan, Carole King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, etc. Folk, Rock, Country, Whatever. Folks that had an instrument and something to say that touched you.
One reader recommends Imogen Heap’s “Just For Now”:
I think looping is an interesting niche for solo singer-songwriters. Something about layered melody and beats is kind of kewl, and solo-ness of it all is very personal look into the artist’s creativity and talent.
Lyrics here. The opening verse applies to many Americans right now:
It’s that time of year
Leave all our hopelessnesses aside
(If just for a little while)
Tears stop right here
I know we’ve all had a bumpy ride
(I’m secretly on your side)
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
While I don't agree with the sentiment, how is this not a violation of his right to free speech? He was off duty at the time?
A Michigan police officer is under a criminal and internal investigation after he was spotted driving a pickup truck toting a Confederate flag during a political rally.
Officer Michael Peters, an 18-year veteran cop who was off-duty, was seen flying the Confederate flag on Veteran's Day during...
What did we decide her magic sauce is called? J’anelle sais quoi? Whatever it is, she’s got the faucet turned on full-strength. The top is VERY dust-ruffle-adjacent, and that’s not science you should try without an advanced degree. Read More ...
If you’re a fan of (or at least passingly familiar with) our A.V. Undercover series, you know that every season isn’t complete without an appearance from GWAR. The intergalactic thrash band has been a favorite guest in our studios since Undercover’s very inception, slaughtering numerous other artists’ songs and stomping through our office and calling us all pathetic worms while swinging their big rubber dicks around. And now you can own a little piece of that experience for yourself.
[UPDATE: A winner has been chosen!]
We’ve been asked by our very patient office manager to please get rid of the below section of drywall painted by artist Jay Ryan, which we salvaged from our last studio makeover, and which has been balancing perilously behind our Onion Labs coworkers ever since. We took it as a souvenir of the final time GWAR played Undercover before the ...
I love how they interview people insisting they're not bigots, and then those people say really bigoting shit
When Audrey Kaatz and Ashley Wright finally decided whom to support for president, they kept the choice to themselves.
They admired his business sense and blunt-spoken style. But voting for Donald Trump was not something the two were comfortable discussing before the election. Not with their friends....
holy crap, at least this didn't happen in the air?!
The nearly catastrophic explosion of an engine that caused a fire on an American Airlines Boeing 767 just short of takeoff in Chicago on Oct. 28 occurred when a specific part that had never before failed broke into pieces.
The breakup of a heavy metal disk that rotates in the engine core reveals...
“Quit overreacting, it’s just politics,” crow the Trump sympathizers (because truly, anyone who says that, even if they didn’t vote for him, is a Trump sympathizer). Tell that to the Muslim high school teacher who received a note from a student suggesting she hang herself with her headscarf.
I genuinely think Trump has got some issue with Chris Christie and enjoys toying with him. Its immature and bizarre.
This week is bad and this world is increasingly bad, but two spiteful little delights salve our wounds today: Donald Trump is visibly frightened and miserable, and Chris Christie is continuing to be savagely bullied by him, because that is a fitting reward for a man who sucks up to a maniac.
No. Stop this. The whole point of a bun is to offer you something non-greasy, easy to hold and appropriately soft and absorbent so the insides of your burger don't fall out everywhere. This just looks like a mess.
Shouldn’t all buns be made of hashbrowns? 📷: @andythenguyen /📍: @cassellshamburgers #forkyeah http://ift.tt/2en1tM8
The world may be mostly unrecognizable now, but at least we still have bear news
There really aren’t any words I can put here that will enhance your enjoyment of the video above, because it’s just that fucking good. So let’s hit the GIFs:
Democratic Sen.-elect Tammy Duckworth and the Republican incumbent she defeated, Mark Kirk, tried to move past their no-holds-barred campaign Friday with a joint appearance at a venerable Chicago deli, but don't expect to see the pair palling it up at lunch again anytime soon.
Reflecting an emotional—if not physical—reality that many people might be coping with this week, Facebook has been accidentally declaring a number of its users dead this afternoon. Many users of the popular social network have reported seeing a banner pop up on their Facebook profiles, reading “Remembering So-and-so” and asking their friends to “find comfort” in the things people are sharing.
(Image: Facebook)
It’s not clear what’s causing the bug—which is presumably related to the service’s “memorialized accounts” feature—but the virtual body count seems staggeringly high, ignoring such factors as fame, social status, or even whether someone is the founder of Facebook himself:
(Image: Facebook)
Luckily, we all learned earlier today that Facebook can’t actually impact anything in the real world, so we can rest assured in the knowledge that it doesn’t really matter if the service thinks we’re alive ...
Look…. I’ve often wonder what happens to the scraps of denim left over after my jeans are hemmed: I’m deeply relieved to know that they all live to fight another day….and get out to a movie now and then. Read More ...
Popeyes is offering a free regular side of Red Beans & Rice with any purchase at participating restaurants nationwide on Wednesday, November 16, 2016.
We won't see another of its kind for decades. [ more › ]
Calls to crisis and suicide prevention hotlines have increased 200 percent since Trump won. [ more › ]
What did we decide her magic sauce is called? J’anelle sais quoi? Whatever it is, she’s got the faucet turned on full-strength. The top is VERY dust-ruffle-adjacent, and that’s not science you should try without an advanced degree. Read More ...
Look…. I’ve often wonder what happens to the scraps of denim left over after my jeans are hemmed: I’m deeply relieved to know that they all live to fight another day….and get out to a movie now and then. Read More ...