Fifth Element is pretty much Besson doing Valerian before he was able to get funding for Valerian, so we kinda did get a spiritual sequel of sorts.
Unfortunately, while I've grown to like the Valerian movie, when compared to Fifth Element it would seem that Besson should have been given a far tighter budget for Valerian rather than the apparent near free reign he got.
I desperately wanted to like Valerian since I love Fifth Element, while visually striking the story line was pretty meh and OMG the casting was horrible. I think I could casually enjoy it even with the bad story if they had done better job casting.
Yeah. Really wanted to like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but Dane DeHaan's utter lack of chemistry with his co-star (seemed like he was afraid to even look at her?) absolutely destroyed it in the worst way possible. :(
Money is great, and they're also looking for volunteers all the time to help out with Open Library. The website is constantly under attack from DDoS, and we're always improving, but it's a long road. I'm just a volunteer, but a very active one.
I'm a very active volunteer and can always use the help of folks that have tech experience already. We get lots of student volunteers that require a lot of work to shepherd. As such, issues tend to be claimed pretty fast but also medium sized ones don't always get through the finish line.
Anyway, if you're seriously willing to commit some time you can tag me on their slack/github (@raybb). I'm currently doing a lot of performance related work (primarily migrating their codebase to fastapi) and I could use help but don't always open issues for it because sometimes guiding a non-experienced person is more work than just doing it.
There's also quite some design work going on to move things into the modern age and more reliable. One small thing that comes to mind is getting rid of jquery where it's used casually (not where a library depends on it). We have a few files like that.
Happy to chat more with anyone who is seriously willing to spend time to tackle medium sized issues with a few rounds of feedback!
I will speculate the DDOS attacks are funded by companies and governments that benefit from not being held accountable for their past deeds. I suspect X, Google, China, PRNK, Hungary, etc
Those guys are the reason our new work laptops run at 1/3 of speed.
While back crowdstrike managed to simultaneously crash every windows computer and bring every major company to a halt and somehow are still around.
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