my mother is playing pikmin and yelling at them in the exact tone of voice she uses for me and my siblings so we go into fight or flight every time. we thought initially that this meant she regarded the pikmin as akin to her children, but I now fear she’s always viewed us as pikmin
I love animation history and one of the things that always baffled me was how did animators draw the cars in 101 Dalmatians before the advent of computer graphics?
Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.
Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).
But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?
The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:
They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣
That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.
That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.
I saw a production and it was fascinating: that only describes the first and second acts, and then the third is set like a hundred years later when a bunch of half-remembered memes and plot summaries have coalesced into an allegorical oral tradition retelling the nuclear disaster that ended the world, with hints of dangerous schisms forming between fans of different interpretations of the story. It’s a story about how we find comfort in mundanity and ritual in times of catastrophe but then those rituals can overtake genuine coping mechanisms, which is a good message in these times but goddamn I cannot see Disney allowing any of this to be filmed intact
waow..
Question for someone who literally grew up on the old internet: how were you supposed to find websites before the general search engine?
In the very early days, the public-facing Internet was small enough that you could just, like, remember where everything was. Contrary to the modern Internet’s rapid content churn and walled-garden siloing, early websites tended to have deep, statically preserved content archives and dense cross-site linking, so it wasn’t uncommon to set about finding previously visited sites simply by retracing one’s path from memory. Even simple bookmarking was sometimes derided as a crutch for people who were too lazy to learn how to navigate the Internet “properly”; indeed, once web browsers added built-in support for bookmark lists, some people refused to use them as a matter of principle!
Once the Internet grew to the point where this approach was no longer feasible, there was a period of a few years where various parties tried to construct human-curated, hierarchical directories of the entire Internet. This was, of course, doomed to fail, as the Internet was growing faster than it could be manually catalogued, but they gave it the old college try. Some popular search engines such as Yahoo actually started out as directories of this type, and only later added search functionality. Meanwhile, communities of interest adopted a more targeted approach, with dedicated “links” pages containing curated recommendations for other, similar sites becoming ubiquitous on personal websites, while users who lacked the time or expertise to offer curated links could participate in webrings and other volunteer-operated directory services.
(The idea of cataloguing the whole Internet according to a topical hierarchy led to some fascinating taxonomic decisions. At one point, Yahoo’s directory had a subcategory specifically for sexually explicit Dungeons & Dragons resources, or “netbooks”, as they were called at the time.)
Speaking of human-curated directories, I still have the family copy of The Whole Internet:
The bulk of the page count is concerned with how to use the internet, both on a concrete level (e.g. “here is a list of file transfer tools, how to use them, and a discussion of their tradeoffs”) and a conceptual level (e.g. “what is the internet actually useful for”, or “how do you figure out answers to questions about it this book didn’t think to ask”). However, there is also a catalogue of sites – some WWW, but many other protocols are also represented – sorted by topic.
Here’s the start of the directory of directories, listing sites that are, themselves, directories of sites:
slightly furious reminder that fish do in fact feel pain and do in fact experience fear and distress when in pain since people seem to love spreading the myth that fish don’t feel pain. what is it with people assuming a creature is incapable of feeling pain or emotion just because it doesn’t have complex facial muscles. come on gang
As my main income, I work with fish in a specialty pet store that’s privately owned (so I’m allowed to say no and be stern to customers when it’s needed).
You learn really quickly that not only do fish have individual personalities and emotions but they also have memories and recognize people! There are certain fish who will only come out for me and hide for everyone else. The pufferfish spits at me because she gets pissy that I haven’t fed her. The flowerhorn bites everyone but me and my coworker when we clean his tank. I trained a fire eel to come up and eat directly out of my hand.
Fish are beautiful complex creatures and I thank the universe everyday that I get to work in a place where I’m encouraged to tell animal abusers to fuck right off.
if horses didnt exist what would people be horse people for?
the hiveworks post-mortem makes me wish i had something to link to with some really concise work/business principles. red flags and ‘pack your bags’ flags. granted, this kind of advice can only save the willing and those who consider themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires and/or wont listen to someone because theyre right “too early” or were “too mean” about it…well. they will rationalize it all away and expect applause from their eulogy delivered from the deck of the sunken ship.
in lieu of such a resource, lets do like 3 real quick.
debt kiting is a failure state. you are not in a multinational conglomerate pulling off the epic reverse takeover. ie, if vendors are not getting paid, it’s fucking over.
where does the money come from? ask yourself this question FIRST! press for details! if you cannot understand how your contribution to a business earns you pay, something is wrong! the train (company) will run out of track (money coming in)! this will also help you figure out if the business model is based on one load-bearing sector or is something you want no part of
if the top management sucks they will literally never improve. this is less concrete but please, ask around. find me someone who had a shitty general manager backed by a shitty owner that suddenly became competent. some of them will get extremely lucky and that money can paper over fundamental problems with the business, but if/when that dries up? youre back to being at the mercy of their stupidity.
these are things you can think about even if you like your job!!
A biologist talking about nerdy shit and also reblogs of stuff that's neat. I complain about things with the #gripes tag and I post personal life stuff with #diary, if you want to filter those.
