For your unhinged pleasure, if you haven’t yet experienced.

I love The Polar Express.

The most widely hated thing about it is the mocap. Not much to say here, I’m just straight-up not bothered by it. I think it looks fine. It’s not incredibly expressive like a stylized animated film could be, but it doesn’t look actively bad to me in any way.

The way the titular express inexplicably gains and loses rolling stock scene by scene and behaves in absurd ways like bending around the mountain are a common punchline. “BuT iT’s A mAgIc TrAiN!!!” doesn’t really solve it for me either. But on a casual viewing it’s mostly inoffensive. A silly curiosity.

Some say the plot of the film spends too much time aimlessly noodling around and throwing in needless filler scenes. Meh. If you ask me that’s where all the meat of the film is. The actual plot of the film has nothing interesting to say. “Kid doesn’t believe in Santa. Magic Christmas hijinks ensue. Kid believes in Santa now. The end.” Riveting. Nah, the so-called “filler” is absolutely the meal here.

The fact that the film literally has five named characters, and the main character isn’t one of them is hilarious. To even get to that number you have to count both the Scrooge puppet and the kid who the elves were monitoring in a single scene as characters, and after that, one of the remaining three is Santa Claus. Just more weight to my point that the story doesn’t matter, lmao.

Say what you will about the animation, but the cinematography is incredible. So many dynamic long-track camera shots from interesting angles. Especially whenever the steam locomotive is on screen. God, steam locomotives are so fucking cool. I don’t even care that it’s full of inaccuracies if you actually look up close. They put a lot of effort into it and that effort shows. It’s quite the treat.

The set design of the North Pole is fantastic. It’s admittedly kinda fucked that it’s modeled after a real world Pullman company town, but I guess it’s appropriate as a joke about the whole Santa’s workshop thing while also incorporating a neat little nod to real life railroad lore. Beyond that, it’s blindingly radiant of all that Victorian-era charm that most of the modern secular Christmas tradition is born from. The serene night snow amidst the rustic red brickwork illuminated by glowing amber gaslamps… augh, it’s so aggressively cozy!

All the pneumatic and other steampunk-adjacent elf tech is a treat as well. The film is certainly no slouch in breathing its own unique spin of whimsy into Santa’s toy factory. It’s not the most whimsical out there, but it’s definitely putting in work.

Alan Silvestri’s score is phenomenal. It’s all delightfully extra. Every single song in the film that’s an original composition is a banger and every song that isn’t an original composition for the film is part of that time-tested canon of hits from the 50s and 60s. I think a lot of people are fed up sick of the latter but, I dunno, I grew up listening to them on my Now That’s What I Call Christmas CD, and to me their sound is synonymous with that warm, nostalgic holiday cheer I get from the season. Even if I don’t get around to actually watching the movie, you know damn well I’m putting The Polar Express’s soundtrack in my December shuffle.

Genuine S tier Christmas film. Well worth every single fault.

I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.

I assume the reflowing solder in the oven trick doesn’t reliably work anymore in the era of the high temp solders that are common in laptop manufacturing these days. Bringing the whole board up to flow temp in something as crude as a home oven is almost certainly going to fuck something else on the board.

I recall trying to do a laptop repair with dinky little soldering iron I got at the hardware store and it could not melt a single thing on the board I touched it to. Definitely not a faulty iron because I used it to successfully solder other things. This was at least five years ago. If that little toy couldn’t do it, then the entire board would need to exceed that temp in an oven, which is probably a bad idea since the iron was still managing to visibly scorch things despite not melting any solder.

Invest in a proper heat gun and learn how to use it, or just give up and give it to someone else who has one, imo.