But when I saw this, I just had to share it. I adore every single movie shown in this montage (except for The Golden Compass, which I haven’t seen) and the breathtaking movie magic in each and every one of them is a big part of why I like them so much.

Breaking down the bits and pieces of movie magic doesn’t destroy any of the illusion for me — it just makes me more enthusiastic about it. I love it when special effects take my breath away, showing that even in the age of CGI true innovation trumps a digital overdose. I don’t get creeped out by film gore, just annoyed if it’s gratuitous and fails to be innovative with its application of red corn syrup. I enjoy seeing quality animatronics that look so human most viewers don’t notice. I love it when an artist gets cheeky and metafictional, as Tarantino did with the closing line of Inglourious Basterds. (Which I am unworthy to review, so I’ll just say get your keister to the theater asap.) And I love it when I can see how some filmmaking wizard concocted a magic potion for wow.

Yes, I’m one of those nerds who checks the back of a DVD I’m about to buy to be sure it has commentary tracks. And I listen to them all, usually while I’m writing, in the hopes that some of that genius can drift my way. I am so lucky to live now. I honestly can’t say what I would have done with myself if I’d lived in a time when there were no movie theaters. Probably spent a lot of time reading novels and feeling that there was something terribly, horribly wrong with the universe.

Dangit. Now I want to go to the movies. Again.

When I finally finished the game I made my parents play it. Everything went perfectly until they got to “What city is Big Ben in?” and they kept getting it wrong. They told me the game was broken. I told them duh, Big Ben was in Paris, so the game was just fine. Okay, so the code was just fine but the answer wasn’t. I was nine. Quit laughing.

I didn’t major in computer science; I started out in Physics with an Astronomy emphasis, became disenchanted after I realized that our department believed that theoretical training was the only thing that mattered and I’d never get to use the telescope. I switched to a double major in Humanities and History (much to my parents’ dismay) and got a degree that guaranteed I could be an assistant manager at a very fine Taco Bell one day.

At any rate, I can now see the first major gap in my education that will no doubt afflict many of my generation. I can’t code. I’m adept at HTML and a little Java, and I can modify PHP templates in WordPress, but only very slightly. I can decipher which chunks do what and rearrange them, but this is more like arranging tiles in a mosaic than taking my own brush and painting my own picture. I’m limited. If I find this annoying now I can’t even imagine what it will be like for current high schoolers in ten years or so. They don’t teach coding at all in school, and it will become more and more critical to have some basic ability as our economy meshes ever more with technology.

They used to have typing class, and typing skills of 70 words per minute or more with over 95% accuracy used to be a standard if you wanted a lot of desk jobs. Having some ability to code, it seems, will become one of the new office standards. It used to matter that you could put on your resume that you knew how to use Windows or WordPerfect. Now it seems stupid to mention it. The new bonus items for your resume are IT skills and software fundamentals.

My lack of coding ability won’t hold me back in my career, as it’s not essential to what I do. In fact, this entry is just an attempt to distract myself from the fact that I’m really annoyed that I don’t know how to fix my WordPress theme so that it will adjust to fill out the entire browser horizontally instead of staying in the same cramped vertical layout with too much blank space on the right. Oh, well.