The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

What an absolute gem. Thank you for sharing this.

ETA: he did eventually learn how to read music:

“I learnt to read music after I bought the Roland MC8 Microcomposer, because it then became essential for me. … I learnt music by ear and have picked up most of my technical knowledge through the sessions and gigs.”

https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/ronnys-electro-music-caba...

Music before recordings was much closer to jam-band style than people realize; and in the Middle Ages you could hear substantial differences in the same song just by traveling a few tens of miles.

I find such a striking difference between notation that just swims in front of my eyes:

https://musescore.com/user/14835636/scores/6186772

And a bar graph which I can hear when muted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o

I have a similar issue with algebraic notation, the signifier and signified never connects. So much misery spending hours with a mass of punctuated greek in a cs paper to discover it describes a triangle. The decryption is not even sticky, I look away for a second and it immediately re-encrypts back to soup.

I don't understand why since programming languages having always felt natural and something I learned as a pre-teen just by being left alone with a BBC micro and a "type in a game" book.

Improvisation goes back as far as music and even some classical music has improvised elements (cadenzas were traditionally improvised before they became commonly notated, Baroque music scored for continuo essentially provides a bassline and chord changes, albeit the chords given in an archaic form (figured bass) that is not widely known by contemporary musicians.

The most amazing improvisers, it turns out, are professional church organists (think the ones who work for the largest churches/cathedrals, not the grandmas playing a church warbler at the corner parish, but sometimes them too). When I auditioned for the Holy Name Cathedral Choir, I wanted to sing a piece by Massenet, but I had lost my original sheet music halfway through trying to transcribe a cleaner copy so I had a melody line and only a few parts of the piano accompaniment. The (assistant!) organist who accompanied me at my audition site-improvised an accompaniment for the piece that was, in my opinion, actually better than the written accompaniment I had lost.

That said, being able to read music can be a sort of superpower. So many times on church gigs, I’ve had guitar players be astonished by my ability to pull chord changes out of piano/organ parts without notated chords. Certainly, some aspects of music are hard to convey in notation. Swung rhythm is a particularly notable case where you’re playing something halfway between a triplet rhythm of ♩♪ and a dotted rhythm (insufficient Unicode to write a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth). The early transmission of jazz music to European composers by way of sheet music led to them missing out on the rhythmic aspects but picking up some of the harmonic novelties. A common injunction to musicians is to play the music, not the notes.

PSA: the si, as well as the pp, parameter is a form of tracking. If possible, consider trimming them after a copy-paste.

Then, with the opening stab of music, I knew it was going to be great.

Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.

I think there was a case of a movie reviewer for some newspaper panning LOTR because of how "generic" and "derivative" it was. I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, though, but I can see it happening.

I also think its going to be a problem for the upcoming Neuromancer series. Unless they change a lot of things, the plot as written is practically cliche at this point, and a lot of it doesn't even make sense outside of the specific technological and political context of the time.

Third category, behind a crafty LLMs.

I don't follow this one little bit. I frequently read stuff about interests that I don't share (this is a good way to find new interests, btw), and I much prefer when the people who are excited by something express that excitement. I wouldn't even click on a link titled "X is Well Executed" because it sounds like a dry document written by a disinterested engineer analyzing something they don't care about. "X is Amazing" is going to be written by someone who actually gives a shit about X, and therefore is much more likely to be interesting.

Enthusiasm is a good thing and not to be avoided. Clinical language is a turn-off, only to be used when clarity is more important than anything else.

It's not writing for people exactly like you to express enthusiasm and interest in something niche. That's good writing for people not like you.

Who am I supposed to write for?

As an example on the other side of the spectrum, there may be plenty of bad and forgettable movies with incredible and unforgettable performances from a very small part of it (the sound recording or design, one of the actors, a single superb scene, one of the scenerys) while the rest is mediocre to bad.

Only the final cut is available on UHD or an in-print blu-ray (and I would guess streaming as well).

I remember the voice over the first time I saw the movie, possibly in a cinema. I liked it, and was surprised with the general level of dislike it has received. The film was meant to be a mid-20th-century film-noir detective drama.