I'm slowly losing my mind thanks to being at home all the damned time, and started a Netflix journey. I was surprised to see a literal shit ton of anime on Netflix. I had never really delved into the genre before, and wouldn't know where to start. Focus: Pick a genre and give us your top few titles to get a sense of it. For example, the only anime I'm familiar with: 1. Ghost in the Shell (honestly, one of my favorite animated movies) 2. Akira 3. Cowboy Bebop Assuming general interest, where do I go from there? Also, Amazon Prime Video is an absolute treasure trove of shitty b-movies, from "Star Slammer" to "Saturday the 14th" to all variants of Sharknados.
My go-to think to put on in the background is MST3K. The whole series is on Youtube in varying degrees of quality and a lot of them are not he at Tubi streaming service for free. Here my top 3 episodes: 1. Prince of Space 2. Time Chasers 3. Space Mutiny
1. Pod People 2. Cave Dwellers 3. Manos: Hands of Fate The short films they riff on are great too: 1. Junior Rodeo Daredevils 2. The Home Economics Story 3. Body Care and Grooming
Studio Ghibli movies are pretty crucial - Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke are the two best ones to start with. If you liked Cowboy Bebop, I'd definitely try Outlaw Star. It has very similar themes (ragtag group of misfits travelling in space looking for a quick buck) but with more fantasy elements - IE the hero has a gun that shoots bullets that casts magic spells. Also try Samurai Champloo, as it was done by the same team Gundam is pretty crucial. There are a crapton of different series. I would start with the very first series and any series connected with that (Stardust Memory, War in the Pocket) and add in Gundam Wing, which is the series that got me hooked on Gundam. Neon Genesis Evangelion is another staple. It's super weird, super dark, and a total mind screw. Record of Lodoss War is a personal favortie of mine. Basically, the creators took their own Dungeons and Dragons adventures and created a light novel/manga/anime series from those adventures. It's a straightforward sword and sorcery series, but the story/characters are fantastic. Dragonball is another staple. I'd start with the original series and then branch out further if it strikes your fancy. A few other personal favorites of mine: Irresponsible Captain Tylor - Lazy goofball falls assbackwards into command of a battlecruiser during an intergalatic war and lucks his way through a series of victories. Vampire Hunter D - Super cool sci fi/horror movies. 12,000 years in the future, vampires dominate mankind and humans are struggling to survive while living with all sorts of vicious supernatural monsters. D is a half human/half vampire hunter who helps them fight against these monsters. Bento - This a new(ish) series that I picked up a few years ago. Essentially, everytime a supermarket marks down their supply of bento boxes, giant martial arts battles break out with the victor getting the discounted bento boxes. Super goofy and super fun. Spice and Wolf - This one is a weird mish mash of fantasy and economics/politics intrigue. A traveling merchant meets a wolf god who assumes a human form to travel with him. She's trying to find other animal gods, but they wind up getting caught in currency devaluation schemes/religious extremist plots/etc. If you have specific genres you like I can delve a bit deeper. Funimation is a really good (and pretty cheap) streaming service with a pretty great library to go through too. As far as my fave MST3K: 1) Final Sacrifice 2) Laserblast 3) Pod People
Retrowave Trash Cinema: 1) Mandy (best movie of 2017) 2) Dear God, No!!! 3) Hobo with a Shotgun Modern sci-fi fantasy that for non-genre fans: 1) Arrival (1998) 2) Upgrade 3) Okja- an absolute must-see on Netflix from director of Parasite.
GearJunkie just did a 10 Best Outdoor Documentaries on Netflix. I've seen most of them, gonna watch Fishpeople tonight. Of the ones on the list I've seen, you absolutely must immediately watch: 1) Icarus 2) Dawn Wall (or Free Solo if you have amazon prime or something that's running it) 3) Losing Sight of Shore (I know someone who's spouse rowed tandem across the Atlantic -- it's fucking brutal) Then once you're done getting hyped up go and read The Pacific Alone. It's the story of Ed Gillet's absolutely bonkers voyage from California to Hawaii, the events around it and the sea kayaking craze it started.
If you like The Dawn Wall and Free Solo you should definitely check out Meru as well. Same director as Free Solo, but in Meru he is one of the climbers as well.
yup, Jimmy Chin. Great flick. Chin is an amazing alpinist in his own right. Happens to be pretty slick with the camera too. That's why he was so good with Free Solo. He understood all the technical aspects of climbing the rock. Coulda done Freerider just as easy as Honnold, but mentally Honnold is just on another level. The thinking is Honnold is somewhere on the autism spectrum (aren't we all) and that helped him compartmentalize the fear. A weakness being a strength kinda thing. What's bonkers is, the Freerider route would take a "normal" in-shape person several days to send. But Honnold chose it specifically because it could be climbed quickly and it was so well within his physical capabilities that he didn't even have to worry about it. Of course, about a year after Free Solo, Honnold went and set the speed record on El Capitan by climbing the nose in 1:58:07 along with Tommy Caldwell. Caldwell, like Chin, is another one of those amazing climbers with a massive story. Check out Over the Edge for his background.
Freerider is 3000' of 5.11-5.13a climbing. It's insane how difficult even the "easy" route is. Most recreational climbers couldn't do ten feet of a 5.13a, much less more than half a mile of it.
That guy is quite simply perfectly designed to climb shit. His fingers look and hands look like electrical wiring bound airtight, he has callouses that could deflect small arms fire.
Honnold is an absurdly good climber and even he can't match up against Adam Ondra, who is just a straight up freak of nature. Chris Sharma is a legend as well, but he's a "generation" older than Ondra, and therefore has had less benefit of the evolving nature of the sport. But if you look at historical climbs it's insane how much Ondra and Sharma stand out from their peers in their era.
Ondra is fucking insane. Here he is climbing the hardest route in the world if you wanna see what super human looks like. He put up the route in a damn bat cave.