The 2016 film Maudie, which tells the biographical story of the remarkable Canadian artist, naturally takes a number of creative liberties. Films like this are never shot exactly as events unfolded in real life - otherwise the story would be dull to watch.

However, I was intrigued to learn that Richard Nixon actually bought paintings from Maud Lewis. The film highlights this fact twice. First, Maud Lewis (played by Sally Hawkins) says she received a letter from Vice President Nixon:

Next in the film, journalists film a news report near Maud Lewis's house. And the reporter says:

There are places on Earth where nature truly tests human endurance. The village of Oymyakon in Yakutia is one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet, where winter temperatures drop below -50°C, with a record low of -67.7°C. On the other side of the world, the Danakil Depression near the Dallol volcano in Ethiopia is one of the hottest places on Earth, with an average annual temperature of around 34-35°C, while daytime temperatures can often exceed 50°C.

Oymyakon

Can you read the text in the video? You'll need to actually play it.

I uploaded the video to Claude and asked it to read the text. All settings were left at their defaults.

We spent a long time comparing hotels in Belgrade based on price versus quality, and Mona Plaza turned out to be the best fit. We stayed four nights in a Standard Double Room.

The area is quiet - no traffic noise, no restaurants or bars nearby, and it was silent at night. It's a 15-minute walk to the tourist center.

The bed is wide and long. I'm 6'1" (1.85 m) tall, and I was very comfortable. The bedding is excellent.

There are theories that sound like nonsense at first, and then make you rewatch a beloved movie notebook in hand, checking every little detail. One such story concerns the popular film "Fight Club." It's the idea that Marla Singer isn't a separate character at all, but another personality of the Narrator himself.

It sounds wild, since in the plot the main character's split personality gives rise to Tyler Durden, a charismatic character and ego who lives life to the fullest while the Narrator himself suffers from insomnia. But if you look closely at the details, the parallels between Marla and Tyler start standing out too insistently to be dismissed as coincidence.

Let's start with the small external details. Both Marla and Tyler barely ever take a cigarette out of their mouths, both dress in a similar aesthetic, both wear similar rings, and both have distinctive, slightly disheveled hairstyles. For a film where every costume and prop detail is thought out down to the millimeter, such a coincidence looks suspiciously deliberate.

Next comes the overlap with the Narrator himself. He and Marla share similar issues with self-perception, both are essentially homeless in an emotional sense and live in cheap hotels, both have a habit of simultaneously switching their wardrobe to something more worn-out, and they even attend the same support groups, pretending to be terminally ill people they aren't. There's a whole system of mirrored details here that's hard to chalk up to screenwriter's coincidence.

If you follow this logic to its conclusion, an intriguing picture emerges. Tyler Durden symbolizes the masculine, destructive, rebellious side of the hero - that image of strength and freedom the Narrator desperately lacks in his gray office life. And Marla, in this scheme, becomes the feminine side of that same personality - the chaotic, vulnerable, yet magnetic side the hero tries with all his might to suppress and keep at a distance.

Hence the strange dynamic of their relationship in the film. The Narrator either hates Marla or can't do without her, while Tyler regularly spends time with her while the hero himself supposedly remembers nothing. If Marla really is part of him, then the whole romantic storyline turns into a story about the hero trying to reconcile different sides of his own psyche, rather than an ordinary love triangle.

There's also a detail that usually seals the deal for supporters of the theory. In the plot, cars on the road literally don't notice Marla in some scenes, as if she physically doesn't exist for the world around her - just as Tyler doesn't exist for anyone but the Narrator. A small detail easy to miss on a first viewing, but one that fits perfectly into the bigger picture once you know where to look.

Officially, the creators of the film and the book have never confirmed this version, and in Chuck Palahniuk's original source material, Marla is described as a perfectly real, separate character. So this is more of a beautiful fan theory than canon. But that's exactly why "Fight Club" continues to live its own life decades after release. The film is built so tightly and in so many layers that almost any detail can turn into its own puzzle if you look at it from the right angle.

You can't really call the Kula Tower in Belgrade a skyscraper - the building has only 42 floors. Still, the observation deck is high enough for tourists to get great shots from up there.

The observation deck has a great location - you can see all of Belgrade in every direction. To get there, you don't need to go straight into the tower. We first tried doing exactly that, but those entrances only lead to the hotel and apartments. Access to the deck is through the neighboring shopping mall. Go into the mall, head up to the next floor, and walk toward the tower. The mall is connected to Kula Tower by a long pedestrian bridge - you need to cross it.

We stayed at Aspera Hotel Golden Horn, a 4-star hotel in Istanbul, for just one night, but that was enough to form a clear impression. We booked a Deluxe Double Room on the lower floor.

The room looked very nice, everything was fresh and not “worn out.”

In the British zombie flick 28 Years Later, a soldier shows the boy hero a photo on his phone - his girlfriend, all trout pout and fake curves:

For anyone who hasn't seen it: the kid grew up on an island version of Great Britain, locked down hard, zombies roaming everywhere, no real doctors around - so obviously nobody's getting lip fillers or a boob job there. Meanwhile over in Europe, life's carrying on like normal, no zombies in sight.

We arrived in Tivat from Belgrade. Although the airport is international, it's very small and can feel quite cramped. It likely wouldn't be able to handle two flights at the same time comfortably, as there simply isn't enough space in the terminal waiting areas.

As the plane approaches for landing, you can see mountains on both sides.

At a hotel, there was a sign next to the toilet that said:

Why is this nonsense?

First of all, how exactly do they expect people to flush the toilet less often? Leave urine sitting there so it can stink and create stains and buildup on the bowl?

Secondly, this kind of water conservation can actually make things worse for the environment. I once watched a TV program where sewer system workers explained that people nowadays use less water, which means there is less flow in the sewer pipes. As a result, blockages occur more frequently, waste is carried away less effectively, and maintenance costs increase. In the end, this drives up water prices for consumers. So there is no real financial benefit either.

Workers at wastewater treatment plants have made similar complaints. Because people use less water, treatment facilities receive more concentrated and polluted wastewater. It is harder to process, produces stronger odors, and can cause unpleasant smells to spread for miles around the treatment plants.

There is no real environmental benefit here. It's just the appearance of caring about the environment rather than actually helping it.

Daniel Roe (author of Nuxt) reports that a new npm package will now be used for route analysis:


https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt/releases/tag/v4.4.0

Performance improvements are always good. But what's happening under the hood? Looking at the GitHub changes:

Fans of Quentin Tarantino know that he has a foot fetish. For those unfamiliar with the term: it's when a man has a particular fascination with women's legs, and even more so with their feet. It's safe to say that Quentin Tarantino is the most famous foot fetishist in the world.

Let's start with Quentin Tarantino's first real film - Reservoir Dogs (1992). I'm skipping "My Best Friend's Birthday", as it was never officially released.

There's nothing related to foot fetishism in Reservoir Dogs: the film features only tough men. Women appear only briefly in a few background scenes. I found just one scene where a woman is shown in the foreground - the carjacking moment.

Restrictions don't always lead to something bad. Let's look at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul - it is adorned with stunning patterns, yet there are no images of people or other living beings, because this is prohibited by Islamic norms. The restriction influenced the architecture, resulting in interiors like these:

Or take Amsterdam as an example. At one time, taxes in the city depended on the width of a building's façade, so future homeowners constructed rather narrow but tall houses. As a result, a distinctive Amsterdam architectural style emerged.

In his films, Woody Allen consistently uses the same typeface in the opening and closing credits. Midnight in Paris (2011):

At work, on one of our projects, I ran into an issue in Nuxt 4 where a page component needs to perform different redirects via navigateTo() based on various conditions during the execution of the setup function. Something like this:

<template>
  Some page
</template>

<script lang="ts" setup>
if (1 + 1 === 2) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=1', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
}

if (2 + 2 === 4) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=2', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
}

if (3 + 3 === 6) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=3', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
}

if (4 + 4 === 8) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=4', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
}
</script>

This is where the problem appears: in the end, the redirect always goes to the very last URL, i.e. in the example above the navigation ends up at /?abc=4. I dug into the documentation but couldn't find anything built-in to prevent subsequent navigateTo calls from being triggered. It seems this behavior is related to vue router.

You can't write it like this either:

if (1 + 1 === 2) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=1', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
  return; // not allowed in script setup
}

In the end, the only solution that worked was introducing a boolean variable and checking it before calling navigateTo:

let isAlreadyRedirected = false;

if (1 + 1 === 2) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=1', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
  isAlreadyRedirected = true;
}

if (!isAlreadyRedirected && 2 + 2 === 4) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=2', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
  isAlreadyRedirected = true;
}

if (!isAlreadyRedirected && 3 + 3 === 6) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=3', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
  isAlreadyRedirected = true;
}

if (!isAlreadyRedirected && 4 + 4 === 8) {
  await navigateTo('/?abc=4', {
    redirectCode: 302,
  });
  isAlreadyRedirected = true;
}

Once again: this is the only thing that solved the problem for me. If you have any other solution, please let me know.

The new Naked Gun has one subtle reference that doesn't point back to the original film trilogy, but much further - to the TV series that served as the blueprint for all three movies. In other words, it's a nod to Police Squad! from 1982.

In the final scene of the new film, everyone around the main characters suddenly freezes, while the protagonists themselves are confused about what's happening - yet they're still able to move:

This is a direct callback to the endings of every episode of "Police Squad!". That exact gag happened each time - for example, here's how episode two ends:

Wind turbines keep getting bigger every year. There's one main reason for that: the longer the blades, the more powerful the turbine. But couldn't you just install two smaller turbines instead of one large one? To answer this, let's take a look at real-world data.

Goldwind is a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer. Here are photos of their operating turbines from the company website:

Goldwind GW 82 / 1500 - output: 1500 kW (1.5 MW). Rotor length: 82.3 meters, meaning a blade diameter of roughly 41.15 meters.

Goldwind GW 171 / 6000 - output: 6000 kW (6.0 MW). Rotor length: 171 meters, giving a blade diameter of about 85.5 meters.

Even here you can already see that the relationship between blade length and output is nonlinear. The second turbine's blade is 2.07x longer, but the power is 4x higher!

Vestas is a wind turbine manufacturer from Denmark (their turbines are shown in the next photo):

Did you know that there are almost no lamp posts in Copenhagen? Open Google Maps and see for yourself.

Instead of posts, the city uses lamps suspended over the middle of the road.