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These are photos taken by Robert Landsburg of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. He realized he would never get to safety in time, so he kept taking pictures of the ash cloud for as long as possible. Then he put the camera securely in his bag and lay down on top of it to protect it before being engulfed in the pyroclastic flow. When they found his body, the recovered the pictures were invaluable to geologists because no one had ever been able to document an eruption that close up before.

#Barbie (2023)

guess what? this is flash!

this is also flash!

THIS is puppet animation:

the funniest part is that most puppet animation isn’t even done in flash anymore. people use after effects instead because it has MUCH more sophisticated and useful tools meant specifically for puppet animation.

the technique can be used well, however. my little pony does it so fluidly it looks practically seamless.

homestar runner doesn’t focus nearly as much on fluidity, but instead on constructing strong, expressive key poses and making every frame really count.

puppet animation isn’t even limited to digital mediums. in fact, it’s not new at all.

the adventures of prince achmed is the world’s oldest surviving feature-length animated film - that’s right, predating snow white by over 10 years - and it was done entirely using puppet animation; black paper cutouts atop illuminated backgrounds. and it’s truly fucking breathtaking.

Renaissance(distinct lines, stability and the individual man):

Baroque (bold, chaotic, dramatic):

Romantic(romanticize the simple hard working life):

She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’.

And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult.

When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it.

This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.

The more I see this happening–and the more I learn about the past and how hard people did fight to stop Hitler from initially rising to power, or to point out the humanity of slaves–the more apparent it becomes that we have always had these choices, and they’ve always been the same.

And then you’re in your mid twenties watching a food show on Netflix and you learn that because Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, they led the nation in emancipation and if an enslaved person was in Philadelphia for more than six months, they automatically became freed. And the young nation’s early capital was in Philadelphia, where Washington brought his household of enslaved people with him. And he took them back to Virginia every five months for a time so as to start that clock over and keep them enslaved.

There’s a trend with historians to want so badly to maintain the prestige of George Washington and an exceptional and morally pristine figure. And true, there are many instances in his writing where he sounds like his opinion on slavery as an institution is turning and that he knew slavery was wrong. But his actions. He literally had to do absolutely nothing to free his household staff, and took great pains to keep them enslaved.

It’s important to remember that too. That there were people in positions of enormous power, who know what they’re doing is wrong, and choose to do it anyway.