In Case You Missed It, #2
Welcome to ICYMI 2. Let’s jump right in, shall we?
Parkour (and also Banlieue 13): Parkour is something you may have seen before, but didn’t know it was something of an organized activity with a large following. It was developed by a guy named David Belle, who served in the French firefighting response unit, but also had a lot of experience in athletics, gymnastics, and all sorts of things that basically help develop you into a goddamn ninja.
The idea of the art is to practice getting from point A to point B as fast as possible, regardless of the obstacles in your way. It involves tumbling, rolls, flips, climbing, and anything you can think of to get over, under, or through objects, instead of going around them. It made appearances in Banlieue 13, Casino Royale, and in some of Jackie Chan’s movies (although it wasn’t referred to as such at the time).
And since I brought it up, Banlieue 13 (District 13) is a French action flick I caught on Netflix one day. If you have Netflix, you can watch it streaming there. The story’s about as good as your average American action flick (which is to say, it’s terrible), but the fight scenes are pretty cool.
Let’s Play: Let’s Play has become a very popular “thing to do” on Youtube. Basically, people post full video walkthroughs of a game while commenting over it. The idea isn’t to do a perfect run – in fact, deaths and general screw-ups are included. The idea is that if someone never got to play a game, you can actually “play it” along with somebody.
They’re a great alternative to TV and movies when you want something to watch without doing anything else (or perhaps while you do something else. I did a lot of sketching while listening to a playthrough of FFX). I’m actually working on one of my own for A Link To The Past, although Youtube has given me nothing but trouble with my uploads of “Session 2,” so I discontinued the series a day after starting it. I have an idea on how to fix the issue, but it’s going to require about 6 hours of work, so we’ll see if I get around to it.
The Oatmeal: As some of you may have caught in my post about spelling and grammar on the internet, I linked to a comic found on the website The Oatmeal. This is basically one guy’s website who does a series of random comics and quizzes that are well-worth your time to read. For example, this one titled “I Always Do This At Movies”:
Many of them are often commentaries on off-the-wall, sensitive, or “we’ve all been there” topics, but they’re usually incredibly entertaining to read either way.
I think that will do it for this entry of ICYMI. Better to leave myself a couple in case I can’t think of any for the next one!
yeah, david belle is brilliant, as is Sebastien Foucan, the Founder of Freerunning.
daniel’s quite good too:
check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVL_592qmPA
There’s an older film like this one for the Parkour which is called “Yamakasi”