@pumkinandstorm: You are a serious specimen of incredible awesomeness. Your rapid ascent to Galaxy is mind-blowing and record-shattering!

The entire Sift universe is lucky and grateful that blankfist ever decided you should sign up here. Congratulations! We're all very fortunate to have you here.

@dag Nice song.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Ascent of man, episode 1 (BBC documentary). Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

That was really awesome, but I had a very strange experience watching it. My body actually felt like it was moving with Mario as he was jumping around. My feet and head keep feeling the sensation of quick ascent even though they remained totally still. It made me a tad dizzy if you want to know the truth.

Weird. I've never had such an experience with any kind of first-person video before. Am I just getting old or should I worry about some kind of problem with my brain?

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume you just forgot to check the sarcasm box.

First of all, it's not discrimination because it's open to both genders. The video states that 60% of participants are female, which means the other 40% are male.

I assume you're referring to the fact that no boys were ever shown in the video, which instead focused on 'girl power.' The point isn't to discriminate against boys, but instead to show the ascent of girls out of the horrible gender based discrimination that has plagued Afghanistan ever since the Taliban took over. Most homes were forced to blacken their windows so that women and girls could not be seen from someone walking by on the street. Schools for girls still have their water wells poisoned for providing girls education. Little girls have acid thrown in their face just for going to school.

But under the Taliban, boys never lost any freedom. They can wear what they want, go where they want, do what they want. They always could and still can. Most importantly, they never lost educational rights. Rape wasn't even considered that bad for a boy to commit if a girl was "asking for it" by what she wore.

So I don't think this video is meant to demean or discriminate against boys. The institution (or whatever it is) caters to both boys and girls. But the point of this video is to show that a place like this exists which is helping to undo discrimination. Boys aren't the focus because they don't need to be. Boys aren't being put down, girls are being brought up.

>> ^kymbos:

Spoiler alert
Am I the only one who is just a tad let down by this season? Breaking Bad is the best TV since Deadwood in my opinion, but previous series have had me constantly on the edge of my seat. This one, I'm just kind of watching play out. I mean, season 4 - come on. That was gripping.
The last two episodes where Walter just becomes the kingpin and makes piles of money just left me a little empty...


I'm impressed that they like to be different. Working for Fring and the eventual high stakes is actually the kind of plot which they could have ended the entire show with the implication that White takes over, completing his ascent (or descent if you like).

If they didn't take chances they would still be stuck in that RV and we might never have had a Fring.

Season [edit] 5 [/edit] was impressive because it was about getting back into the saddle and the writers engineering the plot developments logically from what went before. I've always loved that about the show and the way they still get to focus on these characters and also extract great acting performances. Jonathan Banks was outstanding. And Dean Norris' awkward face when Walter visited his office was priceless.

As for pure gripping tension I think Dead Freight delivered in spades.

I know what you mean by "empty". I suspect this is how Walter feels after all his accomplishments, most of which seem to be about staying below DEA radar. Could they have moved him to a new location and allow him to develop into a Fring-style respected businessman with a dark secret? But then that would be close to repetition.

Saw MIB3 this weekend on impulse. It was okay, wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you want a seriously breezy and disposable movie. Definitely better than the 2nd one, which is not hard to do. If they make another one they need to open up the scale a bit. This movie's budget (admittedly with marketing) is reported at $250 million. That is insane. There are only two real money sequences: a chase to end act 2 that looks like the Obi-Wan and Darth Grievous chase in episode III, and the climax which takes place at the launch of the moon mission at Cape Canaveral in 1969 and looks a lot like Apollo 13.

This movie has some really dumb and small-scale choices. Smith's character is equipped with a device that requires him to plunge from a height in order to gain enough speed to "time-jump". The movie climaxes with Smith literally standing on top of the saturn rocket lifting off for the first manned moon landing. You'd think they'd have a money shot with Smith jumping off the rocket as it lifts off. Those things went pretty slow to start, you could survive the first 30 seconds it takes to get up to any kind of speed, and then jump off for an awesome looking stunt. Or, hell, if I were writing the movie, have him just stay on the rocket until it reaches the necessary ascent speed (something like 100 MPH or some shit.. I remember thinking it didn't sound far from 88MPH), which wouldn't take long after the rockets fire. Then Smith is transported into the future thousands of feet in the air and you have a post-climax gag where he's falling apparently to his death only to have Jones' character sweep in at the last second and save him in a flying car or flying alien bubble pod more likely. Smith's character would be like "How in DA HELL you know I was gonna falling through the air over Florida man!?!?" and Jones' character would put up the video feed that only MIB had access to of Smith riding the rocket and disappearing from 1969's POV. "We had a lot of eyes on that mission" or some shit. Do I have to write this crap for you Hollywood? It flies out of my butthole effortlessly. Instead Smith's character jumps into an evacuation basket and rides it down a zip-line... and this is not even filmed in an interesting way. A whole lot of this movie looked sort of non-commital, like 2nd unit did the whole thing.

They added a "poignant twist" to the time travel aspect which is the same problem with so many movie series these days... Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-Man.. in a sequel, everything is revealed to have been previously connected.. connected from the start in fact! Oh yawn... more than 30 years later people are still trying to re-create the "I am your father" buzz from Empire Strikes Back. Always at the expense of cheapening the overall franchise and sapping meaning from the actions the characters took in preceeding films. What's worse, they layered on some spiritual/karmic hokum to support another cliche forced by executive interference.

It's crazy to think the first movie turns 15 years old this year. I thought it would be an eternal classic, but the last time I watched it, which might actually have been when MIB2 was coming out a whole ten years ago, it did not hold up.

>> ^Gallowflak:

Congratulations! Your superluminal ascent to the highest Sift accolades scares the ever-loving shit out of me.


I know what you mean, right?? She fits in so perfectly here. Grasped the concept and shot off like a rocket. Most of the videos I upvote now are hers. She's taking over. Look out @dag!

Congratulations! Your superluminal ascent to the highest Sift accolades scares the ever-loving shit out of me.

Aside from the totally fake appearance of the takeoff and ascent the thing that really gives it away is the acting of the spectators and their framing within the shot. As mentioned above it's too perfectly imperfect. It looks like a found footage movie where the person filming seems to always be at the back of the action.

Great scene, but this is not from the final cut of the film. In this clip, the music playing when they are kissing is Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)". That certainly wasn't the track when I saw it in the cinema. However the version shown at the Cannes Film Festival did have a placeholder soundtrack, before Cliff Martinez was brought in to do the final score. So this clip is probably taken from that version.

Ace film!

>> ^Pring4:

According to the logo, this project has aspirations of sending these rails from the arctic circle to anywhere in the world. I support this.


Hate to burst your bubble, but at earth's surface escape velocity the kinetic energy of a projectile is only 32 times its weight in TNT. With suborbital flights and resistance on reentry the effect would be considerably less than that. Wind during the ascent would throw it off farther than the destruction radius unless the slug was really huge (multiple tons) or they put in some internal guidance system that can survive the biggest EMP ever.

I have no problem with polygamy, however our complex society of laws might. I'm standing by as the legal chaos of gay 'marriage' begins its ascent. This is mob rule by a mob smaller than the majority.

The real danger is what these morally-questionable decisions mean in the long run. Today the defenders of gay marriage scoff at polygamy ever becoming legal when they have no moral grounds to deny polygamists anything. Beyond both of those endeavors the moral relativists will attempt to dismantle laws protecting children (put another way, they have no moral basis for opposing the decay of such laws).

Today the liberal shakes his head and laughs at such possibilities, because presently children are legally incapable of consenting to sexual relationships or marriage. But what are laws to judicial activists who circumvent them? Just 50 years ago homosexuality was defined as a mental disorder; now it's celebrated.

You'd think prostitution would be legal before gay 'marriage'. What a shortage of proper values!



>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^quantumushroom:
When will the next Grisanti come along who 'sees nothing wrong' with polygamy? Soon.
What do you see as morally wrong or problematic with polygamy?

Personally, when I first saw this video I thought of the Hexakopter video, specifically the rapid vertical ascent part. I guess I've just been wanting one ever since I first saw it.

Interesting.

I'm not a big fan of gold so I will hang onto my silver roots.

In reply to this comment by chicchorea:
Oh...it's just that in Astrology, the metal, silver, is ascribed to the sign Cancer and sharing the attribute of silver stars....

The second relationship not long standing I hope. I see a gold tinge on your horizon. I look forward to that star's ascent.

In reply to this comment by Lann:
Go on.

In reply to this comment by chicchorea:
BTW moonchild, we share that white metal in more than one way.

Oh...it's just that in Astrology, the metal, silver, is ascribed to the sign Cancer and sharing the attribute of silver stars....

The second relationship not long standing I hope. I see a gold tinge on your horizon. I look forward to that star's ascent.

In reply to this comment by Lann:
Go on.

In reply to this comment by chicchorea:
BTW moonchild, we share that white metal in more than one way.