It was only a few months back that I found out that Vangelis couldn't read or write music notation. He would just improv play and record on a tape, recording additional parts and mixing as needed. If he needed to have other musicians involved, then he would hire someone to listen back and write down the notation.

Considering he recorded something like 35 albums, he was doing something right.

As good as that track is its literally his only good stuff. Try as I might, and as eager as I was to like him his library of music just falls flat.

That soundtrack is absolutely perfect.

Came here to say the same thing.

I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/

You're not wrong, but part of the core problem with LLMs is that they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner.

What’s sort of funny about that is there’s a normal thing whenever anyone who hasn’t seen it watches Blade Runner for the first time - often they come out feeling it’s kind of derivative, when the truth is that it feels that way because everything after Blade Runner copied Blade Runner.

Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.

Thematically appropriate for it to be difficult to tell something human-created from something generated by a computer.

Almost a bit too on the nose.

Will just been seen as one of those things that just happen be to accurate to the future by mere chance.

The other was in Terminator 2 with how agreeable LLM's will be regarding new information.

Terminator/T-800 tests his foster mother's identity with a phone call.

Terminator impersonating John - "Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie?" (using a fake name instead of the dog's real name, Max).

T-1000 "Wolfie's fine," the Terminator hangs up and tells John "Your foster parents are dead."

Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.

Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.

I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.

Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.

There's a lot of em dashes in the article as well, along with some phrasing that is very LLM. I think this was written with a mix of LLM and human.

I mean back in the day, those kinds of titles involved film editing, not video editing. As in, physically filming title cards with a camera (and then maybe optically compositing them on top of other elements). It's easy to see how things could get slightly misaligned.

Looks like the misalignment is less than 1 degree. It's the kind of thing that stands out very noticeably in an image on a web page, when there are lots of perfectly horizontal edges to compare it against (e.g. the edge of the viewport). But I think it would be much harder to notice if projected onto a movie screen in a dark theater.

Whoa, great catch! I can't unsee it.

Love small caps. Rarely used and encountered, I really enjoy seeing them in the wild.

Yeah, I was gonna say that. The proportions are pretty different. Though I rarely use them inline… I’ve used them in a few logos when the uniformity of the letterforms just clicked in-context.

Why?

While what you’re seeing is almost certainly a compression artifact or digitization difficulty (keep in mind, theater screens were the target media,) it was almost certainly a product of phototypesetting, so it would have to be inverted at least once. In phototypesetting, you’d load a large dark negative with a typeface developed into it into a phototypesetting machine. A typesetter would enter the text and whatnot into the machine, and the machine would locate the appropriate letter on the film using some kind of timing mark (the machines were all different) and as the letter passed over the target area, it would shoot light from xenon bulb through it to develop that letter, in the correct place, onto the target film. This is how a lot (most?) typesetting was done in the decades before digitized fonts were a thing. That’s how they got such nice clean lettering on posters and things like that.

I don’t know for sure, but they probably shot a negative of the completed type with a red gel behind it to get the final frames.

IIRC early copies of BladeRunner in the digital era, like the original DVDs of this, really suffered from the lack of detail on red, specifically, from the 4:2:0 color space encoding ( https://spearsandmunsil.com/portfolio-item/choosing-a-color-... ). So some level of oddity around red could come from that.

Nope. It might improve readability for individual words, but for blocks of code with similar features at irregular lengths, uniform kerning provides structure and a bunch of clean edges that help you visually orient yourself. Just like title text and body text generally need different kerning, so do body text and code.

(As a full time developer for over a decade that got a design degree, I have experimented with it a lot!)

>And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp?

It really is for me a pinnacle. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to be part of something like this. Do you even know? I’m just some random fifty something among billions and your comment resonated because it was a shared experience. I have no idea if my grandchildren could watch the movie and come away with that but my cumulative nature and nurture sure as hell did.

Asterisk the director's cut is amazing.

I feel like I should have my eyelids taped open strapped into a chair in a very dark room with this being projected on a screen with a loud sound system as part of the resting period between waterboarding sessions because I refuse to telling my inquisitors the answers they are asking.

It's a classic malicious compliance. "We're obligated to put these credits on the screen" even though it's impossible to read all of it without stopping.

I think I was too sober to really enjoy it though

The em dashs are a callback to the silent film title cards days –– they represent a pause in speech.

Creating the title cards is a process that involves a thousand different decisions, all of which feed into each other. Design of this isn’t any different than design of software or design of anything else. The “feeling” comes from all of those decisions harmonizing together into a coherent whole, same way a well-crafted codebase feels correct.

It's probably an AI-written article. I was curious enough about the premise, but there wasn't any intention in there, it sort of wanders about going 'ooh'.

I think Rands had too much coffee.