Tiago's brain dump

Sociology is a subject that has always fascinated me, and, had I not been bitten by the Legend of Zelda bug as a child, I would certainly be in that line of work today. I often read about the topic, however, which, other than leading to bizarre conversations with friends deep into the night over a bottle of wine, has the side effect of triggering epiphanies for me in the most unexpected of places. For instance, a couple of months ago, my wife and I went for lunch to a small ramen shop near where we live, being sat next to a young married couple and their 5- or 6-years-old son, whom, we'd overheard, they had brought along for his first "official" taste of the dish. As we ate, we couldn't help paying attention to a particular advice they gave him about how to properly enjoy his food: "You must always make noise while slurping ramen," they said, "because the louder you are, the tastier it will be, and the happier the cook will become". My wif...

With most of its factories destroyed and a great deal of its able-bodied population wiped out, the years following the end of World War I  were marked by great economical instability in Europe. With exception of the  Weimar Republic , where  UFA -sponsored cinema  was seen  as a tool to restore its people's morale after having lost the war, little to no money was being invested in the European entertainment industry as a whole. Correspondingly, most domestic film companies opted to avoid altogether the risks inherent to movie production, by concentrating their activities in the more stable motion picture distribution business instead. As a consequence, film production came to an all time low in Europe in the early 1920s, whose home market was then flooded by Hollywood. Seeing themselves unable to compete with the powerful US film industry given their meager budgets, a group of French directors decided to take an orthogonal approach, striving to dif...