Early video game designer: Okay, we’re just about done with this level
Video game designer’s manager: Great! Did you figure out what to put at the end?
designer: Yeah, we put this tough, nasty, mean, ugly monster that the player has to beat. We made sure killing the monster feels as rewarding as possible.
“One of my favourite Steve Jobs stories was the time the engineers working on the iPod brought their finished prototype to him in his office. He said it was too big, they needed to make it smaller. They said it was as small as they could make it, it couldn’t be made any smaller. So he took the prototype over to his aquarium and dropped it in. The iPod sank to the bottom, and as it did, tiny little bubbles came out. ‘See those bubbles,’ he asked. ‘They’re air inside the iPod. Make it smaller.’
“Another story about Steve Jobs was when they brought the prototype for the iPad 2 to his office. The engineers told him it was faster than the first iPad. He took it over to his aquarium and dropped it in. ‘Look how slowly it sank,’ he told them. ‘Make it faster.’
“One time a newly hired intern had been sent out to get Steve a sandwich. When she brought it to him, he looked at it. ‘I thought I ordered the beef on rye,’ he asked. She told him it was indeed beef on rye. He took it over to his fish tank and dropped it in. ‘Does that look like beef on rye?’
“He was always dropping things in that fish tank. We couldn’t stop him. We told him he had to stop, he wouldn’t listen. It was full of stuff that shouldn’t be in an aquarium.
“The fish had all died years ago. One had been crushed under an early generation iMac. The others were all poisoned. He didn’t care.
“It got to the point where there was no room for anything in the fish tank. When we emptied it after he died, we found a body in there. We never found out who it was.”
remember when the gossip girl writers literally pulled a fast one on us and made the poor characters actually less likeable than the rich snobby characters??
Remember when gossip girl tried to convince us dan and his sister was “poor” even though they definitely were not, they simply had less money than the waldorfs or the van der woodsens
and then they got even more money when rugus married lily and they became even more unbearable to watch.
me, the first palaeontologist to dig up a triceratops skull, whispering softly: what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuckkkk
fun fact: modern paleontologists and archaeologists have pointed to some greek vase art of mythological monsters as being evidence that the greeks dug up dinosaur skulls and were like “what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuckkkk”
and then they did the Greek Thing and painted naked men fighting the monster
or, well, a deeply flawed representation of what they imagined the fossil had looked like while alive, an early form of paleoart.
but sometimes they also just. drew the skull and slapped a black blob monster onto it? anyway i love the greeks.
shrek two: the funniest movie i have ever seen. literally one of the funniest comedies of all time. incredible pacing and dialogue. reference jokes that were actually funny. surreal world that was so modern fantasy it actually worked. rocking score. awesome scene set to “i need a hero” being sung by the villain unironically and completely played straight. a bar of villains. just overall the best concepts ever.
