Lazy Attentions

Us: speak only limited German

Lady: barely speaks English

Us:

Lady:

Lady: Czech? Slovak?

Us: Czech

Lady, to herself: Czech, that's a Slavic language right

Lady: understand Yugoslavian?

Us:

Waiter: Germany?

Me: No, Czechia.

Reminds me of the time when we were in Poland and I tried to order a burger using a truly unholy mix of Slovak, Russian and Ostrava dialect (which in itself is like an unholy mix of Czech and Polish).

*Each of us talking in their mother tongue*

Me: Bla bla bla.

Russian: I don’t know this “bla”.

Czech: Oh, we have “bla”! We also call it “that”!

Russian: Oh I know “that”! It’s a very old version of “this”.

Me: Oh, we have “this” too, but it means something slightly different.

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.

eating disorder recovery is just getting angry over and over again because food is treated like some horrible necessary evil instead of one of the great joys of life. eat some nuts because they taste good and you are a living thing that thrives on pleasure and calories. you need both.

When I bought my latest laptop, which coincidentally is already losing functionality in multiple keys, I noticed that the right Control button was no longer a right Control button. This was a bad sign for me, someone who fairly frequently used the right Control button. Worse still, it now bore the Microsoft Copilot logo and would open, when pressed, Microsoft Copilot. Not having personal interest in that particular robot, I was now in the market to rebind that key to something else.

I initially considered setting it up as my dedicated The Sims 2 button, but not only do I not yet have The Sims 2 installed on this computer, the way I play that game, it takes upwards of 15 minutes to boot up. I knew I would be constantly accidentally hitting this key, and I did not want to be constantly accidentally opening The Sims 2.

My partner immediately suggested that I set it to open "a jpeg of a fish." I Googled "carp," found an image, and set my right Control key to open a tiny browser window with a link to said fish. Though it is a .png file from pngtree labeled "pngtree-rohu-carp-fish-png-png-image_4022775.png", in an effort to display matrimonial piety, I dutifully labeled it "fish jpeg."

I now accidentally open this link multiple times a day, which is great, because it means I have a lot of opportunities to see a fish. Sometimes I accidentally hit it several times in quick succession, which means I get to see several fish! When I close all my open programs to shut down my computer, I usually find at least one forgotten fish. Things are working out beautifully, and everyone is happy.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.