Well, Here We Are.

I'm Allie, general menace, gerblin about town space__buns on AO3 She/They, Bi & Nonbinary. 18+ only

[kisskiss-where-is-season-two]

My ides tiramisu, if you even care

[recklesslyinfatuated2]

Oh, my word we care.

[femgineerasolution]

Et tiramisu, Brute?

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

I think bread is a super underrated invention. I am very grateful to the ancestors for bread. I bet it was a lot of work to figure it out and everything.

Everyone's always like, "The wheel! Masonry!" But what about fucking bread, you know? 15,000 years old and arguably better than ever.

[medievaljournalist]

so you know that cursed sword that slowly drives whoever wields it mad & causes mysterious illnesses? you guessed it: scabbard was absolutely loaded with black mold

[respocked]

you know what always bugged me. that in star trek characters in command talking over comms just do it with their bridge in the background. even with their enemies. like. isn't "a picture of my ship's bridge" kind of classified? a tiny bit? and it's not even that no one mentions it but sometimes they do. like when in janeway talks to still-maquis-chakotay that one time and she makes eye contact with tuvok behind his back? in the very literal sense.... why are you showing your crewmen to her chakotay??? maquis is like a semi covert organization why are you advertising tuvok to janeway. are you proud you have him tis much. this happens constantly and i don't know why they won't move their ass a bit so they're facing a blank wall or at least get one if those green screen ms teams backgrounds so it looks like you're on the beach

[lady-lazarus-13]

They really needed the zoom background filter

[shutyourmoustache]

The face of a man sat waiting to annihilate:

[shutyourmoustache]

Oh…my…word. The ginger boy brought a stand mixer, and those shits are heavy.

[macabre-muses]

vader every time he came across 3po and r2 during the war probably

[capsyst]

In the 80’s as computer animation was on the rise one of the thorniest problems was “how do we get this thing we made on the computer… OFF the computer?” There were a lot of unique solutions, but the one I’m fascinated by most is Disney’s solution of using a plotter.

A plotter acted as sort of a 3D printer but for 2D images. There was a ball point pen that could move up and down, and the paper underneath could be moved in and out. Using CAD based programs you could plot points in 2D space and the plotter would draw the lines between them and even do geometric shapes!

When it came time to do The Great Mouse Detective, the animators at Disney wanted to do more dynamic shots for the climatic battle inside Big Ben. Drawing all those gears and cogs would be a nightmare for the animators, so they experimented with using 3D animation.

But this was still the early 80’s. There was no digital ink and paint program, no way to merge the 2D animated characters with the 3D animated backgrounds digitally. So how did they get the 3D animated backgrounds out of the computer?

By drawing each frame on the plotter.

Every frame was printed out on the plotter, and then xeroxed onto animation cels, and then hand painted like traditional 2D animation cels are.

But why the plotter? If they were gonna have to export every frame anyway, why not use a printer? Well… because printers back then just weren’t very good. A plotter uses points and physically draws the line between them, much like how vector graphics work. It yielded a much smoother and higher fidelity line than if they just printed them out.

This was still a massive undertaking, but it was probably the best solution to getting the dynamic camera moves they wanted out on paper. 2D animation was drawn over top and then both layers of animation cels were filmed frame by frame.

And that’s how you got dynamic shots like this in the mid 80’s! 3D animated backgrounds, printed with a plotter, xeroxed onto animation cels, hand painted, and then re-photographed with the 2D animation on top!

This technique would be the standard way Disney got their 3D animation out of the computer for their 2D films… right up until The Rescuers Down Under which was the first fully digital animated feature. That movie used PIXAR’s proprietary CAPS System (hey that name sounds familiar 😉) to combine everything digitally. But that’ll have to be a story for another time!

[radwolf76]

"drawing all those gears and cogs would be a nightmare for the animators"

Yeah, about that. Seven years prior, this was all drawn by hand:

[capsyst]

I had a feeling someone was gonna bring this up, and I debated talking about it in the original post. But I decided against that because as much as I absolutely adore Castle of Cagliostro the actual animation behind it in comparison to what Disney wanted to do with Great Mouse Detective is so vastly different I felt it would detract from the point of the post. But since where here now let’s get into it 😃

The key differences between the two are camera movement and shifting perspective. In Cagliostro the backgrounds remain static 2D, meaning the animators aren’t trying to redraw every frame with a moving shifting perspective. They aren’t doing the sweeping dynamic camera moves Disney wanted for Great Mouse Detective. That reduces a lot of the work load on Cagliostro because they only need to animate the gears on 3-4 frame loops per scene.

Disney wanted more dynamic movement, where the camera could sweep in and around the scene. That places a HUGE amount of work on the animators to ensure that everything is being drawn in perspective while it’s moving. I can’t even begin to think about how much work and effort would’ve had to go into this sequence if it was done entirely by hand. It would’ve been a nightmare!

Please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely LOVE Castle of Cagliostro. It’s an amazing movie, especially knowing its history and the crunch they were under to get it made in such a short time. But it’s not exactly a 1:1 skill check comparison. Cagliostro used the fact the camera wasn’t moving much to reduce the work load and relied heavily on looping animation.

But if you’re looking for a 1:1 comparison skill check I’ve got you covered!

See, the purpose of this post was to talk about how the computer was making it easier on animators by not making them have to draw every frame in perfect perspective. If you wanted a comparable skill check then I would instead suggest comparing the clock tower sequence in Great Mouse Detective to the airplanes in Porco Rosso.

Every single shot of the planes in that film was done by hand. Miyazaki famously refused to use CGI for the longest time on any of his films. If Porco Rosso had been animated by anyone else, those planes would’ve been CGI planes. So every shot, every dogfight, every moment of these planes flying around and turning slowly in perspective was done meticulously by hand, and it looks absolutely AMAZING! That’s a technical marvel in and of itself!

Oh and if you want more examples of animators being absolutely INSANE and doing everything by hand, I strongly recommend the works of Richard Williams. Not only was he instrumental in making Who Framed Roger Rabbit look so convincing, he’s also the insane artist who animated things like this:

You wanna talk insane skills? How about animating every single card in a deck of cards as they fly about the screen? The guy was a technical perfectionist!

I get wanting to compare the clock tower sequence from The Castle of Cagliostro to the Big Ben sequence in the Great Mouse Detective. Story wise they are doing very similar things: having the hero fight the villain on giant moving gears. But the execution of how that was achieved is so VASTLY different it’s really not fair comparing them at all on a technical level. And I hope me pointing that out doesn’t make anyone think I’m being dismissive of Cagliostro either.

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

[dinovelvet]

[sharkinablanket]

[thefoolishkat]

and they are the bestest of friends

[foldingfittedsheets]

My beloved wife got super into baking during the pandemic. We have always loved and bonded over Bake Off. These two things culminated in my beloved being gifted with Paul Hollywoods cook book on bread. He’s the bread king, right? Must know how to make good bread?

Readers. Paul Hollywoods cookbook.

I don’t know if it was laziness or mistranslation but when converting the units to our stupid empirical measuring system someone done Fucked Up.

It doesn’t help that Mr. Paulywood is already very spare with his instruction and method. It called for an absolutely absurd amount of yeast, first off. About three times as much yeast as a reasonable person would need to make bread rise but perhaps Mr. Hollywood is compensating.

Next it wanted an egregious amount of salt. Both of us paused over the measurement, hesitating to get on board with such a high salt content. But he’s Mr Bread so we went with it, opting not to tweak the recipe until we’d tried it his way at least once.

It. Was. Awful.

Truly the most repulsive bread either of us had ever had. The loaf was dubbed Paul’s Salty Mess and lives in infamy to this day.

It took two more bakes for my beloved to actually find a proportion of ingredients that was actually agreeable to consume. This involved researching the difference between UK and US yeast which I think we can all agree the editor should have done, as well as finding the the metric recipe on Paul's website to compare. Even the non-fucked up one was still egregiously salty.

The recipe is now highly annotated and the rest of the book regarded with suspicion.

[sleepy-seal]

im being so serious when i say this but we need to bring back the "my genitals are none of your business" "if gender is whats in my pants then my gender is some loose change" mentality from the late 2010's because too many people on here are openly flirting with exclusionary people who spout enbyphobic rhetoric. stop caring about what people's agabs are you assholes. they literally mean nothing. they're not a zodiac sign or indicative of people's character. you are not wholly pure or wholly evil because of your assigned sex. you're just a person.

[ash-and-art]

"what genitals do you have?" Is sexual harassment regardless if its from a security guard or a chronically online furry

[animentality]

[unhappy-sometimes]

just hit two thousand followers so i drew yor topping loid

used this sylvix post my roommate found as reference 🫣 everyone say thank you roommateeee

[chimaerakitten]

One under-appreciated breed of fic writer are the ones who hyperfocus on logistics to the exclusion of all canon shortcuts, and thus usually strike upon an awesome way to flesh out the worldbuilding or characters.

Like, I’m not necessarily talking realism here since often it’s still pretty far from realistic, but more like, “someone has to be running spies in this fantasy kingdom, and we’ve seen the whole royal court, so which background character is it? How does that change these three major interactions?” Or “real life historical nobility did in fact have some things to do that were like jobs, how does this human disaster cope with running an estate?” Or “there’s no reason for a sci-fi robot detective to know how to whitewater kayak, where’d she learn?” Or “if this guy is serving the emperor directly he has to be way high up in the space empire servant hierarchy, why is he doing this menial task for someone else? What’s his motive? Does he perhaps have the secret space telepathy?”

Anyway I’m always DELIGHTED to find a fic or writer who asks these questions because the fics themselves are universally bangers.

[ocean-again]

person who knows how logistical things works has picked up the cannon, hefted it thoughtfully, and put a single chalk mark precisely on the problem.

[megamindsupremacy]

first rule of storing tupperware is have fun and be yourself. second suggestion is slam the cabinet door quickly and don’t worry ‘bout it.

[problemnyatic]

"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys

[problemnyatic]

I know this might be a bold take but maybe teaching everyone from a young age that ever making a mistake will be met with unimaginable pain and misery doesn't actually encourage learning or correct behavior. If anything it creates a sense of terror so powerful it completely suffocates curiosity and exploration, thus leading to people knowing absolutely nothing but whatever is brought directly to them, which is a big problem in a world where information is so tightly controlled that a very small number of very powerful people basically have complete power over what people see and hear on a day-to-day basis when not actively seeking new and rigorously verified information from diverse and trustworthy sources.

[problemnyatic]

if any of this sounds like you, start by looking up the definition of words you've heard and are pretty sure you know what they mean, but haven't actually double-checked for yourself. Just like, whenever it occurs to you. Great first step

[problemnyatic]

This post goes out to the "we need to bring back bullying" crowd. Just because you aren't hitting someone physically doesn't mean you aren't being punitive. Maybe it isn't actually healthy to believe it's necessary to harass and humiliate anyone who makes you upset or uncomfortable. That sounds like a you problem actually.

[problemnyatic]

Anyways, breaking the cycle of abuse starts with you and how you treat yourself. You have to give yourself grace and room for error or you'll never be able to cultivate a healthier mindset than your trauma left you with. It's not easy, but you have to trust yourself that whatever seems kinder than however you usually treat yourself is probably a good enough start. Doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be The Correct Answer, just needs to be a step in the right direction, y'know? We'll figure out the details along the way.

[lamignonette]