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From the recent movies, I think "The Matrix" was more influential than "Blade Runner". You can split the history in movies before Matrix and the movies after.


That's a great pick. If we were going to pick a handful of candidates, Matrix definitely would have to be a part of that very short list.

Part of me wants to stump for Blade Runner over The Matrix, if only because Blade Runner had less... prior art, so to speak. It was more of an entirely new aesthetic whereas The Matrix was more evolutionary. The leap was huge, don't get me wrong, but it felt more evolutionary.

Blade Runner's look is something you continue to see today in various sci-fi and games, copied nearly verbatim. It was simultaneously the birth of a new aesthetic and maybe its apex as well. Like, where do you even go with that look? It felt fully realized, right there in 1982.

The Matrix... it wasn't really the look that influenced future works, it was more of the camera work and wild shots. Bullet time, the 360deg freeze circular panning thing, and so on. I guess you do see "bullet time" everywhere now.

There's also something to be said about the relative financial success of the movies. Blade Runner was that influential despite being a box office and critical dud at the time. It's relatively easy (and even expected) for smash hits to wield massive influence. But duds? We have to admit: that's just incredible.

Anyway - awesome pick. Rather than picking one over the other, I would say: they both belong on the Mt. Rushmore of "most visually influential movies."


> new aesthetic and maybe its apex

I watched it again yesterday. I'd forgotten how amazingly real and fully realized that world was. I don't think that movie will ever age. Love your points, agreed on all of them.


Thank you so much. That was a really nice comment to read.


eh it's aging. It'll get to the point where it's unwatchable one day. The whole grid zoom thing is the most prominent thing that aged in my opinion. It all happened on a CRT screen which is a definite sign of the times and therefore a sign of aging.


> a CRT screen which is a definite sign of the times and therefore a sign of aging

Nah, there's any number of in-universe explanations. CRTs in our world were still being sold new as of a decade or so ago. Why shouldn't Deckard have an old one still kicking around in 2019?

Or, if you think they would have been phased out earlier given that Blade Runner world tech developed differently than ours, then: Deckard is just attached to old things. (Remember he's also got a real acoustic piano in his high-rise apartment.)

Or, the entire photo enhancing contraption is produced by some legacy police equipment supplier that's still writing their software in Java 1.3 and using CRTs because...internal corporate reasons.

Or (least plausibly but most just-suspend-your-disbelief) that's not really a CRT, it's a far more advanced brand-new tech that just so happens to also have a curved screen and fuzzy pixels because <insert technobabble>.


Yeah. I'm with you. You're gonna "invalidate" pretty much literally any sci-fi movie of the past if your criteria for "has it held up?" includes "do they somehow have modern-day tech?"

I just think of a Blade Runner-ish world as an alternate path our society might've taken. Had a few things been different here and there, we might not have had LCD screens. Or we might've had something vastly better.


Makes sense. You got me.


Maybe a way to put it is like like blade runner innovates horizontally, becoming and start its own thing while matrix innovated vertixally, evolving the existing genre?


Matrix also came out much later. The kids who watched the Matrix when it came out, most of them don't even know what blade runner was because it came out before a lot them were born.

Also matrix doesn't fully hold up with time. It is a bit unintentionally campy. I was captivated by it when it came out, but when you watch it again in modern times or show it to someone who's too young to have been influenced by it, you'll actually kind of notice the campiness. If you don't, the young person will point it out.


One of Matrix's challenges maybe is that the protagonists were clearly meant to seem cool and relatable - or, at least, Neo is relatable in the beginning, trapped in his cubicle, slaving away while using only a fraction of his mind before finding out that he is so much more. We all sort of wanted to be him.

But "cool" doesn't always age well; Neo's kind of a very specific late-90s kind of cool. One decade's "cool" isn't always "cool" 30 years later.

In Blade Runner, Deckard isn't really cool or relatable. I mean, he looks sort of badass in his trenchcoat, but he's an exhausted middle-aged guy with a claustrophobic apartment in a dangerous and thankless line of work. In a way that's maybe more "timeless."


I wrap it in shell scripts or batch files.


As he said: He's a 1x developer.


The same is true in Germany. "Ingenieur" is a protected title. You need to graduate from an engineering program.


The most minimalist that I'm aware of: http://txti.es/


My understanding of WSL is that Linux software runs natively on Windows by virtue of a compatibility layer. Eg. if there is a fork() in my code it will be translated into CreateProcess() or something like that.


Right, so like what Wine does. (Remember: Wine Is Not an Emulator.)


Correct. It's an interesting architecture, if you're interested in reading more:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/04/22/windows-subs...


I have always been curious on how WSL differs to coLinux or andLinux ( http://www.andlinux.org/ )

About 10/15 years ago I used andLinux to have a Linux shell and other apps inside Windows. It was really good and it seems ahead of its time, as it was not virtualized.


Get a girlfrind from the UK, USA, Canada or Australia. That has worked best for me.


Too bad this was announced on 1st of April.


They state why they picked April 1, aka 4/1:

From the article: The only question that remained was when to launch the new service? This is the first consumer product Cloudflare has ever launched, so we wanted to reach a wider audience. At the same time, we're geeks at heart. 1.1.1.1 has 4 1s. So it seemed clear that 4/1 (April 1st) was the date we needed to launch it.


My wife wen't out first to shovel this morning and she's 54 :-).


Welcome to the future market. Now can make money on falling prices!


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