Just a kid with his hair slicked back and a knife tucked into his belt. Loosely themed around adventurecore and exploring the outdoors but also just a main. He/him/long lost soul in the wilderness alone. For book-related posts as I used to have a lot of, check out @Cedarbookhs. I also run @projecthipster, where I try to be a hipster, but, like, barely.
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It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.
In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.
Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 yearsβlikely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.
The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.
When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.
It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.
That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.
I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?
That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.
You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.
The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.
Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.
But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.
Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.
Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.
And where does that silt come from?
Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.
The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.
You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.
All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.
Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.
I live right next to a state park that has some of the oldest forest stands in the Eastern part of the country, with the tallest trees in the state. I grew up with stuff like this basically in my backyard:
It was shocking to me to grow up and realize how few old-growth forests are left. It was very easy for me to feel like there are no truly natural places anymore outside these few protected parks, and that was depressing to my forest-loving self.
But like the previous person said, we can have this again! In a couple hundred years, all the forests that were clear-cut 200 years ago will be mature as long as we protect them. People in the future will get to experience huge trees and spongy fertile soil and carpets of moss softer than blankets, because nature will always regenerate. The world is not a desolate echo of what once was. The world is still full of beauty and magic and it will continue to be in the future.
the secret to continuing Despite is to set aside time every once in a while to allow the aching, screaming, exhausted toddler in your chest to have a full blown tantrum and make half a hundred promises about never ever taking any shit ever again and walking into the ocean or running off into the woods and becoming a hermit. and you watch it and you wait for it to calm down and then when itβs sniffling on the floor you offer it a lollipop and go βalright buddy are you ready to keep walkingβ and itβll be like βyeah :(β and off you go again
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For everyone into rangercore/solarpunk/adventurecore and all the related outdoorsy/adventure vibes, if you have not already, please go and check out geocaching. It's basically like free quests everywhere in the world where you search for a hidden item at particular coordinates and sign your name/handle in the log once you find it. Can be done by yourself or with a group, at any time of day, and you sometimes get little trinkets!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
Gertie the Dinosaur: A Behemoth Experiment in Character Performance
It's kind of exciting to imagine what it must have been like for the film audiences of the 19-teens to come face to face for the first time with such a gargantuan personality like Gertie the Dinosaur. This big, booming belle of a brontosaurus surely captured the imagination of the entire theater as she interacted with her "trainer". But, what no one really knew at the time was that she was training the audiences to suspend their disbelief that a moving series of projected drawings was really a living, breathing creature on the screen.
Before we take a look at the marvelous dinosaur, we have to acknowledge the prior accomplishments of the man who gave her life.
As mentioned in my previous animation history post, the earliest film animators were originally illustrators, many of whom worked on newspaper comics, which were also seeing a rise of popularity at the time. The "Funny Pages" were the home of titles like The Katzenjammer Kids, Mutt and Jeff, Bringing Up Father, Krazy Kat, and one very relevant to my discourse, Little Nemo in Slumberland, created and written by a prolific and mostly-self-taught-illustrator named Winsor McCay.
McCay, who never completed grade school, had enjoyed drawing from an early age. "I just couldn't stop drawing anything and everything," he, himself, once said. McCay left his hometown of Spring Lake, Michigan to take more formal art lessons and a job in graphic design in Chicago at the age of 17. When he moved to Cincinnati in 1897, he began his career as a newspaper editorial cartoonist for the Cincinnati Times-Star, then the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, then the Cincinnati Enquirer. At the Enquirer, he created his first Sunday color comic strip, A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle in 1903. Before the final two strips were even published, he moved to New York City and worked for The New York Evening Telegram, Life Magazine, and The New York Herald. He made a few short-lived comics, but readers and his editors agreed that his draftsmanship skill was better than most. He was fast and accurate in his renderings, which were very much inspired by the Art Nouveau movement. For the Herald, he created Little Sammy Sneeze in 1904 which ran until 1906. McCay also had a brief stint as a vaudeville entertainer in 1906, drawing on chalkboard (aka a "Chalk Talk") before live audiences.
McCay's longest-running series was Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, a dark, surreal, avant-garde fantasy, and it is from this comic that many of his earliest animated shorts were born. Arguably, his more famous and beloved of his comic series was Little Nemo in Slumberland, a more light-hearted fantasy comic about the adventurous dreams of a young boy. It was through these strips that he pioneered the animated cartoon, secretly dreaming of ways to bring his illustrations to life, but also not ashamed to take a bet from his fellow comic artists that he couldn't produce enough drawings for a four-to-five minute animated short. Not surprisingly, he was inspired by the flip books his son brought home. McCay's ambitious endeavors spawned:
Little Nemo (1911)
The animation starts at roughly 08:08.
CONTENT WARNING for outdated racial stereotypes because of the character of Impie.
How a Mosquito Operates (1912),
Bug Vaudeville (1921), and
The Flying House (1921).
Because of his high level of technical skill, early audiences were skeptical of his work. His anatomy, use of perspective, and smooth, realistic movement of his characters left viewers convinced that what they were seeing was trick photography with real actors. In an effort to squash these rumors and maintain his artistic integrity, McCay created Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914, because a living dinosaur couldn't be found in real life. Gertie was a groundbreaking film, making huge strides with the concepts of "shared space", its technical mastery, and for Gertie, herself, who could even be considered Animation's First Diva.
Please take a moment to enjoy our Featured animated short: Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) with a brief introduction by famous film historian and buff, Leonard Maltin---
For all the vaudevillian charm of Blackton's The Enchanted Drawing, Gertie and McCay pushed the boundaries of the illusion of interaction in their film. What could be considered a fun, magical "gimmick" in The Enchanted Drawing, McCay turned the act into a true multi-media performance. He would be standing off to the side of the screen, donned in a tuxedo, and interacting as the trainer of this massive dinosaur who would come on-screen and perform. We can consider this to be the ancestor of any live-action/animation hybrid, ranging from Leon Schlesinger negotiating Porky Pig's contract in You Ought to be in Pictures (1940), Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry Mouse in Anchor's Aweigh (1945), all the way to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). When McCay throws an pumpkin to Gertie, he is creating a shared spatial logic, insisting that Gertie exists in a 3D space that follows its own rules and physics. His interaction with Gertie was more than a trick; it was a staged dialogue between himself and the beast.
Gertie's lifelike interaction could only have been possible because of McCay's attention to detail and masterful draftsmanship. It is technical genius. It consisted of well over 10,000 drawings. He rendered out an actual drawn background environment for Gertie to live in. He was a perfectionist who understood anatomy. He had to invent what brontosaurus movement may have looked like; even paleontology was still a curiosity at the time. Gertie had weight to her footsteps. Her chest expanded and contracted with her breathing. The movement was fluid. She was alive. McCay created his own system of drawing the major poses to ensure his timing was perfect, then drawing the in-betweens, as opposed to drawing straight ahead. This is the origin of keyframing. He also employed the use of registration marks on the paper to keep the images realistically stable.
Gertie was a marvel because she seemed so real. She had emotion with a subconscious. She was shy, but also moody. She felt shame and cried when her trainer chastises her. She was distracted by things in her environment. McCay wanted to prove that a drawing could do more than just move. Gertie could act! Contrasted to the metamorphosis of drawings in Γmile Cohlβs Fantasmagorie, whose lines changed shape simply because they could, Gertie moved because she wanted to. This was the moment that animation stopped being a science experiment and started being performance art. By giving Gertie human-like flaws and emotion, McCay was training the audience to empathize with a drawing.
How fascinating and apropos that the ancestor of modern animation characters is a dinosaur! The mother of all character animation. Without Gertie's mostly-gentle giant personality, who knows how long it would have taken to achieve the "star power" of characters like Felix the Cat, or the emotional depth of a Disney short. Gertie and Winsor McCay's legacy live on in all the relatable, realistic characters that have graced the big and small screen. Even though she's over 110 years old, Gertie still feels more real than many modern digital characters because of the love that McCay drew into every frame.
Did you know that you can visit Gertie as a larger than life ice cream stand at Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida? It's called Dinosaur Gertieβs Ice Cream of Extinction. A rather sweet way to pay homage to the big, lovable girl who paved the way for animation to be seen as something you can have feelings for rather than just be entertained by.
Thank you so much for visiting my archive and reading my blog. My thanks, also, to the hosts of the animated shorts accompanying this essay post. I hope you're enjoying the history of animation that I'm sharing with you. Come back again soon, hopefully with a curious mind and a dinosaur-sized appetite for more animation appreciation!
Decided to finally let this one go. I have a thousand ideas for bears, stars and snow so I am sure I get to revisit this topic in the future, and I'm very much looking forward to it!
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