54. In your dreams
I.
I love Nicolas Cage just as much as I love Adam Sandler. When he really lets himself go, I’m in heaven. Cage’s big eyes, a manic laugh. The internet calls it ‘Cage rage’. The actor himself isn’t too keen on that term. He describes his acting as “very well thought out and carefully executed”.
Cage is the subject of all sorts of well-known memes. Take the GIF from Con Air, in which he enjoys ultimate freedom in the sunlight with his hair blowing in the wind. Or his sarcastic look from Vampire’s Kiss that says: oh, you’re serious? Cage knows what it’s like when the internet has a field day with you.
In Dream Scenario, he plays the staid biology professor Paul, who suddenly starts appearing in other people’s dreams. Not just in the dreams of people he knows, but also of complete strangers. He doesn’t do anything else; his dream version just hangs around. The usually boring teacher becomes a phenomenon and wildly popular in no time at all. Everyone wants something from him. Perhaps this is the moment to finally write that book he’s had in his head for years, he thinks.
It’s a brilliant concept for a film, especially when you reflect it against the present day. Because Paul, too, pays a price for his fame, as soon as people start having nightmares. Have you ever had such a bad dream about your partner doing something terrible that you were still a bit angry after waking up? Imagine what happens when the whole country does that.
In the film, a bracelet is invented that allows you to manipulate your dreams. Instead of waking up with the annoying tune of Carnaval Festival in your head, a company can ensure that you’ve heard something nice in your dream. Advertising in dreams! A nightmare in itself. (You’d think no one would buy into it, but there’s an audience for everything these days. People even pay to see Toppers in Concert.)
As I cycled home after the cinema, I listened to Talkin’ World War III Blues by Bob Dylan. One of Dylan’s wittiest songs, but that’s beside the point. The final lines reminded me of the film.
> Everybody’s having those dreams Everybody sees themselves walking around with no one else Half of the people can be partly right all of the time Some of the people can be all right part of the time But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time I think Abraham Lincoln said that Ill let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours I said that > >
---II.
Super Mario Maker is one of the few gems on Nintendo’s flopped Wii U console. For the first time, Nintendo gave players the chance to create Mario levels themselves and upload them online so others could play them. When the company stopped supporting the game in March 2021, meaning no new levels could be uploaded, there were over ten million online.
A few years earlier, in September 2017, Mario Maker player The0dark0one set himself the mission to complete all unfinished levels. Most levels had already been completed by players, but thousands remained. A huge spreadsheet was published in which he mapped out those levels. But it wasn’t until he set up a Discord server and other people started helping that things really took off.
Everyone who helped out became a member of Team 0%. The group eventually had over three thousand members. And last October, time suddenly became even more pressing when Nintendo announced it was going to shut down the Wii U servers. There was suddenly a hard deadline: 8 April 2024. After that, you won’t be able to play the levels at all. And at the time of the announcement, there were still 26,000 left to complete.
But they’ve now succeeded. Player kazeihinn managed to beat the final level with just a few weeks to go. As luck would have it (or perhaps not), that level is called The Last Dance. You can see it below. Incidentally, this was by no means the only level in Super Mario Maker with this level of madness. The game features many extremely difficult levels where actions must be executed with pixel-perfect precision.
---III.
Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood (who can also be heard on the upcoming album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) is releasing a photo book. It features photos he took of his bandmates over the course of twenty years with Radiohead. Using a small, plastic compact camera: the Yashica T4 Super. It’s a cool thing.
What puts me off is the album’s title: How to Disappear – A Portrait of Radiohead. I’d like to hold out hope that the band will share a studio again and make a new Radiohead album. But A Moon Shaped Pool (2016!) felt like a swan song. And now that Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are making their side project (?) increasingly successful, and they can take more freedom to do what they want outside the Radiohead framework, there seems to be less and less urgency to pick up Radiohead again. To me, the photo book with this title also sounds a bit too much like a conclusion.
I’m curious about the accompanying essay Greenwood has written in the book and hope for a message along the lines of: ‘here’s to the next twenty years together’. But it doesn’t feel like that yet. “I hope that everyone who loves our music gets as much pleasure from this book as I have had in compiling these memories,” he writes on X.
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---PS.
In the United States, a cinema chain sold Dune 2 popcorn buckets, where you had to stick your hand through the gaping mouth of a sandworm to get to the popcorn. Thanks to the dubious design, the internet was soon full of jokes. The buckets were on sale for $25, and savvy buyers are now trying to flog them on eBay for at least double that, though they’re also listed for $180. I wonder who’s buying them.
---X-Men ‘97 has started. The first two episodes are on Disney+ and pick up exactly where the cartoon left off in the late nineties. Just as good as you remember.
---It’s not just the X-Men series getting a sequel; everything is going through the recycling mill. That includes Beetlejuice. Tim Burton is directing this new instalment again, Michael Keaton is reprising his role as Beetlejuice, and Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara are returning.
---I’m also up for a new instalment in the Alien film series. The new film is called Alien: Romulus and the first teaser trailer promises some good old-fashioned thrills on a spaceship.
---Next year will see the release of the adventure game Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. The game centres on the heroes Black Panther and Captain America and is set in Paris during the Second World War. The story is based on the 2010 short comic series Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of Our Fathers. That’s going on my reading list. The CGI in the trailer looks stunning; we’ll just have to wait a little longer for gameplay.
---It won’t be more 2024 than this article from Het Parool: “By operating bridges and locks remotely using cameras, the municipality of Amsterdam was able to rent out redundant bridge keeper’s huts as hotel rooms. Until the remote control proved unsafe and Waternet spent tens of thousands of euros on hotel costs to station bridge operators in the huts again. Or next to them: in a site hut.”
A few weeks ago, when I celebrated this blog’s first anniversary, I explained why I started it. The algorithm-driven internet is both a blessing and a curse (but often a curse); we’re all mindlessly doomscrolling and there’s uproar everywhere. That’s not a feeling I have alone. The latest member of this small resistance against Big Tech and the embrace of the human World Wide Web is Hank Green of Vlogbrothers. He’s (re)launching a newsletter featuring ‘good and cool stuff’ on the internet. For the same reasons. Excellent explanation:
---If you fancy taking your typing skills to the next level, let me point you towards TypeLit.io. On this site, you retype classic books letter by letter. Books such as Anna Karenina, 1984 and The Great Gatsby. Improve your typing, read a classic straight away and get a feel for writing books. Kudos if you can muster the discipline for this.
This is a fun Fokke and Sukke.
Lars and I read chapters 5 and 6 of Lessons, a book by Ian McEwan. Every week we discuss two chapters on our podcast Kaftwerk. A mini book club. This time we realise that Roland is a boomer and we finally learn more about the mysterious disappearance of his wife Alissa.