All posts tagged: Ruined

How “Cars” ruined Pixar – Salon.com

How “Cars” ruined Pixar – Salon.com

Published by Sam Flores

It’s rare for a children’s movie to leave the viewer with more questions than answers. Brevity is their whole point. In a relatively small window of time, kids get a two-for-one special: entertainment and wisdom. Given their limited attention span, the last thing a child needs is a film chock-full of loose ends to distract from the crux of the story. And while some writers, directors, animators and studio executives might think that a kid won’t notice incompetence, they couldn’t be more wrong. Children can be just as unforgiving as adults when it comes to movies, which is probably why, until this week, I couldn’t ever bring myself to rewatch “Cars.” Growing up, I was a Pixar evangelist, obsessed with the studio’s excellent output. Their films dazzled me to no end and pushed my imagination past its furthest boundaries. But beyond the animation itself, the writing was always truthful. Pixar films are known for their gut-wrenching sincerity, speaking to kids with as much candor as they do adults. That earnestness was always my favorite element …

Where are all the good chippies? How London ruined fish and chips

Where are all the good chippies? How London ruined fish and chips

Published by Sam Flores

London leads the way in so many culinary fields. It can’t be beaten for fine dining. We have a sandwich game second to none. And the sushi is so good people have been known to travel from Japan for it. But Achilles had his heel, and we have fish and chips. The truth of it is, the capital is the worst place in the country to eat our national dish. I should know: I wrote The Standard’s best fish and chip guide. The best in London, sure. But if anyone told me that these were the best fish and chips in Britain, I’d feel as if I’d been slapped round the face with a wet haddock. Fish and chips at Golden Union (Caitlin Caprio) Two of my picks for best London chippies, Golden Union in Soho and Seashell of Lisson Grove in Marylebone, were nominated for this year’s National Fish and Chip Awards. Neither were eventual winners though as York’s The Scrap Box was named best takeaway and Trenchers of Whitby won best restaurant. Why …

Rupert Everett ‘Ruined’ Himself Trying to Attain Perfect Body for Roles

Rupert Everett ‘Ruined’ Himself Trying to Attain Perfect Body for Roles

Published by Daniella Wilson

Rupert Everett put in a lot of work trying to attain a perfect physique early in his career, but now he’s suffering the consequences. The My Best Friend’s Wedding star recently opened up to The Guardian about how he’s now “almost crippled” after not working out properly when he was younger. “I ruined myself,” he said. “Now I’m almost crippled as a result. I could never be bothered to do all those things, like stretching, which were necessary for lifting weights, because your tendons get tighter and tighter. So boring. I didn’t do any of that. “So now my demise will be musculoskeletal, I think,” he added. Everett broke out in the early 1980s with his role in Another Country, starring alongside Colin Firth, and Dance with a Stranger with Miranda Richardson. He later garnered more attention playing Julia Roberts’ gay best friend in 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, and then with 1999’s An Ideal Husband and 2000’s The Next Best Thing, opposite Madonna. Before the Rivals actor even started working on his buff body, he …

Rupert Everett: Rivals star says he ‘ruined’ himself trying to attain perfect physique

Rupert Everett: Rivals star says he ‘ruined’ himself trying to attain perfect physique

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Rupert Everett has said he “almost crippled himself” trying to attain the perfect body during his heartthrob days in the 1990s. The 67-year-old My Best Friend’s Wedding actor, who currently stars in Disney+ series Rivals, would frequently lift weights in the gym to build muscle, but would bypass learning the correct methods in an attempt to look bigger more quickly, as he found it “boring”. However, he’s now paying the price, telling The Guardian: “I ruined myself. Now I’m almost crippled as a result.” Rupert Everett ‘ruined’ himself trying to get perfect physique (Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images f) “I could never be bothered to do all those things, like stretching, which were necessary for lifting weights, because your tendons get tighter and tighter,” he said. “I didn’t do any of that. So now my demise will be musculoskeletal, I think.” Everett, who …

AI Has Ruined the Job Market

AI Has Ruined the Job Market

Published by Sam Flores

A few years ago, Ken Schumacher was working for a technology company. Part of his job involved assessing potential hires: hopping on a Zoom call, giving an applicant an engineering test (kind of like a crossword puzzle with code instead of words), and going on “mute for an hour” as the applicant struggled through it. Except many of the candidates weren’t struggling. The firm’s exercises were getting posted on sites such as Glassdoor. “All these savvy 23-year-olds would, of course, practice the problem three times, come to me, and crush it,” Schumacher told me. “Now the bigger problem is everyone’s using AI to write their resume.” They’re also using AI-powered chatbots and teleprompters to help them get to the next round. It’s become “really, really hard for anyone to figure out who’s real and who’s fake,” Schumacher said. (This turned out to be its own market opportunity—he now runs a start-up using AI to detect AI cheating by job candidates.) The problem might be particularly acute in software engineering. But the same dystopian phenomenon is …

Clare Balding says her suspicions of Alan Carr could have ‘ruined’ Celebrity Traitors

Clare Balding says her suspicions of Alan Carr could have ‘ruined’ Celebrity Traitors

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Clare Balding said she would have “ruined” Celebrity Traitors if people listened to her early suspicions of Alan Carr. Carr proved an incredibly successful contestant on last year’s hit celebrity version of the BBC game show, as he was chosen to be a Traitor in the show’s first episode but managed to evade suspicion throughout the contest – all while killing off his fellow stars. He ultimately proved victorious, winning the season in a nail-biting final episode. While appearing at the annual Hay Festival today (26 May), sports presenter Clare Balding said she was one of the few contestants on the show to suspect Carr of being a Traitor – but absolutely no one listened to her. “I hated the roundtable,” she said during a panel, of the setting for each Traitors episode’s climactic face-off between the show’s contestants. “Until I …

Can Concrete Molds Revive Coral Reefs Ruined by Bombs and Climate Change?

Can Concrete Molds Revive Coral Reefs Ruined by Bombs and Climate Change?

Published by Sam Flores

The small boat set off from a tiny island in the Western Pacific Ocean, its destination only a few hundred feet away. Its cargo was dozens of chunks of concrete that each weighed 60 pounds, had a textured surface and evoked a white lotus leaf. One by one, the crew tossed the pieces overboard. Then three divers descended 20 feet to the seabed with nuts, bolts and steel rods. As they began fastening the concrete pieces on top of each other, hundreds of curious damsel fish gathered around them and three green turtles circled nearby. Within an hour, the structure was complete: an artificial reef standing 3 feet tall and 10 feet wide. This construction, on a recent Thursday morning near Pom Pom Island, Malaysia, was part of an effort to rejuvenate a small section of the Coral Triangle, which covers a wide section of Southeast Asia and is the most biodiverse marine region in the world. Pom Pom Island lies off the northeastern coast of Borneo, an area where fishermen have for decades used …

Spotify has ruined mood playlists – so our critics have made some better ones instead | Pop and rock

Spotify has ruined mood playlists – so our critics have made some better ones instead | Pop and rock

Published by Sam Flores

Music might be the greatest mood enhancer in the world: it’s certainly hard to think of another art form that can so effectively tip a feeling of happiness into euphoria or create a suitably gloomy space in which to wallow in melancholy. There have always been albums designed to evoke a certain mood, from Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely to Essential Chill Out Vol 2. But in recent years, we seem to have become more interested in the relationship between music and mood. Streaming services are thick with mood-based playlists. There appear to be hundreds of the things on Spotify, from the straightforward (Happy Vibes) to the vague (All the Feels), and they appear to have struck a nerve: Spotify’s own curated mood playlists are now vastly outnumbered by user-generated ones, soundtracking everything from Friday at the Office to – I swear I’m not making this up – Losing Someone to Suicide. There are those who have detected something sinister in all this. Liz Pelly’s 2025 book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify …

A new long-distance walking trail in Wales takes in gorges, ruined abbeys and sweeping sands | Wales holidays

A new long-distance walking trail in Wales takes in gorges, ruined abbeys and sweeping sands | Wales holidays

Published by Sam Flores

Up here, the river was a mere gurgle; a babbling babe finding its way into the world. A few sheep roamed, a kite wheeled and a spring-clean wind ruffled the tussocks on the barren hills and rippled the pools. It was a stark yet striking beginning. As we followed a brand new fingerpost, skirted Llyn Teifi – the river’s official source – and picked up the fledgling flow, there was a sense great things lay ahead, for us both. The Teifi rises in Ceredigion’s Cambrian Mountains – the untramped “green desert of Wales” – and pours into Cardigan Bay 75 miles (120km) south-west. It’s one of the longest rivers wholly within Wales and, historically, one of its most significant: the beating heart of the country’s fishing and wool-weaving industries, 12th-century abbeys at either end, Wales’s oldest university en route. However, those abbeys lie in ruin now, salmon and sewin (brown trout) stocks have plummeted, and the mills are shuttered – though the factory in the village of Dre-fach Felindre now operates as the National Wool …

Has the manosphere ruined dating? | The global dating crisis: episode 1 | Dating

Has the manosphere ruined dating? | The global dating crisis: episode 1 | Dating

Published by Sam Flores

Globally, the number of single people is on the rise. Rates of marriage and cohabitation are on the decline, and in some countries, even sex itself is down. In this new series we’re on a journey around the world to find out why people seem to be coupling up less, and what could be causing this dating crisis. In this episode, we’re in the UK Source link