“What that meant was that Smith had apparently fed 25,000 books into a database without the knowledge or consent of the original authors, allowing the text to be cataloged and analyzed and broken down into parts, treating the work less like art and more like… carburetors.”

My favorite alternate timeline theory is that Scott’s brother didn’t die, and he didn’t take time off, so he chose to do Dune instead of passing. That meant that Lynch would have been free to do Return of the Jedi. And without Scott available to do Blade Runner, Kubrick would have stepped in.

IMAGINE THOSE MOVIES.

They already do — you can’t get a degree (at least in the US) in STEM at most universities without taking English and History courses — generally the same ones English and History majors take. The problem is much more in the other direction. You can get a degree in the Humanities without taking a single math course…

This whole thing seems much ado about nothing. The weirdest things of the entire drama is a line in this article: “... it’s just going to get worse until we as a society stop people and companies from doing stupid shit like this to art and culture.”

Why in the world someone think analyzing art and culture is stupid?…

It reminds me of David Lodge’s novel “Small World” written in 1984 in which an author visiting a university meets a computer scientist who has fed his novels into a computer (at the time just beginning to be feasible) and found that he (the author) used the word “greasy” more than other authors. This freaks him out…

Check out the AV Club’s latest slideshow, “15 Words People Like to Click On.”

I think we can help him get over the emotional hurt this choice caused him by fully supporting his next directorial effort, Aliens vs Predator vs Bladerunner.

You’re right, it’s not really a fair comparison, is it. He’s obviously a solid director technically, unlike Tom Hooper with Cats (and even Les Mis, from the sound of it), and Prometheus was probably an outlier in terms of bad scripts (versus most of what Bay directed starting with Transformers 2).

Agree on Covenant, but...

...oof, Prometheus perfectly solid, above 3 and 4? It is at-best mediocre. It is constantly undermined by inconsistent and inchoate characterization, things that happen only so certain scenes (mostly action or suspense) can follow and not because of any sense of logic, and trying-yet-failing…

He did The Martian, All the Money in the World...

You misspelled “Empire” and “Emprie” in one place above. I agree that 2049 is probably better than the original Bladerunner, and I also enjoyed Covenant as an improvement over Prometheus (Oram’s stupidity is the one bit that annoys me, while there’s a lot more of that in Prometheus).

Alien Covenant is a perfectly solid horror movie about killer aliens and evil Michael Fassbender, and Prometheus is a perfectly solid prequel to Alien Covenant. I’d put both of them well above the third and fourth Alien movies. They’re also the only Ridley Scott movies of the past (checks calendar) 41 years that I…

Wait, he was in demand after Prometheus? What’s next, Michael Bay to adapt The Three-Body Problem on the strength of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? Tom Hooper to remake West Side Story after adapting Cats?

You know in Trainspotting when Renton and Sick Boy are having the conversation about great artists who have it but then lose it? I feel like Ridley Scott could easily fit into that category. While his films are still great on a technical level, I don’t think anything touches golden era Scott. He arguably peaked with Gl…

I hadn’t heard about this, and when I got to the part early on about it being a “linguistic analysis of literature”, I thought oh, there have been linguists analyzing literature that way for decades. There was a guy at Mizzou years ago, for example, named Gilbert Youmans who was counting the number of *unique* words…

“every news article is just based around a list of words that people like to click on.”

This guy’s stated thought process is so bizarre to me that I actually find it kind of endearing (although I suppose it’s possible that he’s only saying it to give himself cover). Like, he wanted to write a memoir, so of course the first step is to compile a database of 25,000 books to count all the words and analyze…

I look forward to Smith’s debut novel: 75,000 Words in Order of Vividness.

Do you like my painting? I used 9.7 oz of oil paint, which is how much Van Gogh used on average in all of his paintings! It’s also on a 30 by 21 inch canvas, which is one of the most famous canvas sizes!

every news article is just based around a list of words that people like to click on.