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Stardust
Stardust is a fairy tale for adults — based on Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s illustrated novel — and it is one of the more delightful films to come out of the fantasy genre in years. It does not take itself too...
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IE8 — We Are Not the Devil Anymore
Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 8 with a significant commitment: it would pass the Acid2 browser compatibility test in its default rendering mode. For web developers who had spent years cursing IE6 and its creative interpretations of...
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Juno
Juno is one of those films that should not work as well as it does. A teenage pregnancy comedy with a quirky indie sensibility, written by a former stripper, starring an actress then largely unknown — the components do not obviously...
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IIM Jobs
IIM placement season generates a particular kind of media coverage in India — the annual ritual of astronomical salary figures, investment banking offers, and consulting packages that prompt both celebration and anxiety in equal...
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Valu — The Wild Bull
Valu is a Marathi word for a wild, uncontrollable bull — one that has broken free of all constraints and moves through the world on pure instinct and energy, without direction or discipline. The word is used to describe people too.
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Firefox Reaches 500M
Firefox crossed 500 million downloads, and that number deserves a moment of appreciation. Not because download counts are a perfect metric — they are not — but because of what the number represents.
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Meetings
Meetings are one of the primary ways organisations convert time into noise. This is not a new observation, and the fact that it continues to be true despite decades of complaints suggests that the problem is structural rather than merely...
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NetHack
NetHack is the oldest game I still play and probably the deepest. Released in 1987, still actively developed, still capable of killing you in ways you did not anticipate after hundreds of hours of play. There is nothing else quite like it.
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Enchanted — Recapturing Innocence Lost
Enchanted is a Disney film that requires a certain kind of surrender to enjoy. You have to be willing to let it work on you rather than watching it from a critical distance. If you are, it is genuinely delightful.
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Fire the Product Placement Guy
Product placement in films has a spectrum. At one end, it is seamless — the brand exists in the world of the film the way brands exist in the real world, noticed peripherally and unremarked upon. At the other end, it stops the film...