Same here. On the other hand I think it is just how some people are. I do not appreciate art, and can live happily without music. Art in general, never gives me any profound experiences. Books on the other hand, now we're talking! Political performance art, also entertaining.
Idk if you ever shared this view with art people. It must have been hard because there is a sort of obligatory necessity that people MUST like art embedded into their worldview.
But also, there is a basic universality of art, and I wonder where it comes from, and what would make some people into it, and others, like you, not into it.
For some, it’s the sheer grandeur and architectural splendor. Strasbourg, Chartres, Cologne or Rouen Cathedrals, with their scale and delicate designs, often stand out.
For others, it’s the spiritual resonance of a place. The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela has stirred something deeper within, but maybe that was just me. I experienced the same with Lourdes and Le Puy-en-Velay in France because they carried something that felt "sacred" and transformative, not only from the buildings but the actual place.
Then there are those who value historical or religious authority. Cathedrals like St. Peter’s in Rome or the Papal Palace in Avignon have that kind of symbolic weight, and I assume some would favor them over the more "profane" work of Gaudi.
As I wrote in another comment, I think the Sagrada Familia is a worthy successor for the grand gothic cathedrals you mentioned, because Gaudí made the most out of late 19th century technology, same as the medieval builders made the most out of the technology available at their time. I mean, just look at those branching columns: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia#/media/Da... But, to each his own.
I would like to add two (former) churches to your list: the Hagia Sophia (it's really humbling to think that it was already standing for 900+ years when the Turks conquered Constantinople 500+ years ago) and the Pantheon in Rome, which despite being several centuries older, had the largest dome in the world for more than 1000 years.
St Peter's Basilica is probably the most mind-blowing for me, even just because of the scale. The intricate facade of the Duomo in Milano, the green and while marble exteriors of the Duomo in Firenze, the (neoclassical?) architecture of St Paul's, the unusualness of St Francis of Assisi, Notre Dame (haven't gone back after the fire yet), the bright golden interiors of pretty much any Orthodox church,... Hagia Sophia if I may stretch the definitions a bit :)
In my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project.
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
I also like just the idea that Neo being The One and his powers don't quite matter.
Sure, he couldn't have done the things he did in the second movie, escape the Merovingian, steal the Keymaker, rescue everyone, etc, without his powers in the Matrix, but at the same time, they don't actually solve the problem of the War.
And it isn't just a power escalation cycle, like Lensmen or DBZ -- he doesn't level up in each movie to become Even More Powerful to defeat Even Greater Threats.
Whether or not you enjoy the stories, the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films. Around the same time the LotR trilogy came out which did something similar.
I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this".
I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI.
Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.
As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.
> As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
But the visuals are The Hobbit's main selling point. People hate it because of the writing.
I was responding to the parent comment, that the CGI somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this"
I agree with that, The Hobbit looked pretty bad. You're right that part of it was the bad writing, but I think it's a vicious circle -- if you're convinced that CGI can make twenty minutes of elf-vs-goblin parkour look cool, you'll write that into the script.
If instead you started from the viewpoint of, well, we made a successful movie trilogy out of a famous book trilogy; here's another famous and beloved book by the same author, who even went back and revised it to make it fit with the trilogy -- why don't we just use all the tools at our disposal to put that book on the big screen? Maybe that could have resulted in one really good movie.
My nine-year-old seems to enjoy the Hobbit as much as The Lord of the Rings, so part of me suspects that it's just old curmudgeons like me who really dislike it.
For me, what grates are the action sequences that feel like they were written for the video game tie in -- the river escape sequence, for instance.
The parts of the Hobbit movies that have actual sets, locations and people in costume looks really good. The problem is that the CGI is just too much in most places.
> the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films
Well, the innovative scenes vary from the incredibly good highway chase to the boring and ridiculous fight between Neo and Agent Smith. Those movies were groundbreaking in "bad uses of CGI" too.
It does, most notably perhaps for things like the Ents and large parts of the battle in RoTK (e.g. Army of the Dead, Oliphaunts). It just did so much practically that it's one of those films where it might be a bit difficult to delineate if you aren't looking closely, similar to films like Fury Road.
Andy Serkis was great, but not as good at shape-shifting.
For LOTR renderfarm WETA bought a bunch of SGI 1200 dual core Pentium III 700MHz servers with 1GB RAM, 9 GB SCSI disks all running RedHat Linux. I've read at some point they had 192 SGI 1100 and 1200 servers working.
It didn't use anywhere near as much as the hobbit, but lots of things are enhanced. I have a similar problem with Avengers/Marvel which just doesn't look great to me. Avatar did look very good though. The main problem I have with CGI is if the story isn't there, which for me is definitely the case with most Avengers movies which are just a mess.
I think we're seeing a wave of hype marketing on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, where people with big followings create posts or videos full with buzzwords (MCP, vibe coding, AI, models, agentic) with the sole purpose of promoting a product like Cursor, Claude Code or Gemini Code, or get people to use Anthropic's MCP instead of Google's A2A.
It feels like 2 or 3 companies have paid people to flood the internet with content that looks educational but is really just a sales pitch riding the hype wave.
Honestly, I just saw a project manager on LinkedIn telling his followers how MCP, LLMs and Claude Code changed his life. The comments were full of people asking how they can learn Claude Code, like it's the next Python.
Feels less like genuine users and more like a coordinated push to build hype and sell subscriptions.
They’re not being paid, at least not directly. They don’t need to be. “Educational” “content” is a play to increase the personal profile as a “thought leader.” This turns into invitations to conferences and ultimately funnels into sales of courses and other financial opportunities
Hype marketing can look spontaneous, but it's almost always planned. And once the momentum starts, others jump in. Influencers and opportunists ride the wave to promote themselves
In retrospect, it was the limitations that made it so fun. The system was so simple that it was entirely knowable by a single brain, which has become enormously more challenging nowadays.
I recently ported my teaching raytracer to the Spectrum [0], not even using assembler, but the horribly slow native BASIC. It was a ton of fun! It's super slow especially when run on the original hardware, but even then I can't remember something like this from back in the day (and I'd bet something like Microhobby would have listed this as some kind of curiosity); makes me think the Spectrum's limitations weren't even fully explored. Raytracing people were probably working on beefier machines and more serious projects.
I was never into the Spectrum or any vintage computer like that, but the pico-8 fits that same gap of having an (artificially) limited system, so your code is ugly and uses two-letter variable names because you can only fit 40 characters on screen and the graphics are pixelart. But you can make something and since there's simply not the space for it, bikeshedding is discouraged.
No one is reading until someone is... I published both Computer Graphics from Scratch[0] and the Fast-Paced Multiplayer series[1] for no concrete reason, they went unnoticed for a long time, and then both led to things I couldn't have planned.
I've also published stuff that gets little attention and leads nowhere, like Emulator-Backed Remakes[2] or ZX Spectrum Raytracer[3], and I'm totally fine with that. I make these things primarily for my own amusement ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know how many people visit my website. I have analytics, but I rarely check them.
"Piano piano" does mean "slowly slowly" in a literal way, but I guess she meant it as a reference of the full saying "piano piano si va lontano", meaning "slowly slowly you get far". You were commenting on the amount of work ahead, and she was telling you "it's a marathon, not a sprint".
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