hey guys jsyk the results of this poll are gonna be fucking shit if you just vote and dont rb. since it has only 3 notes LOL

Eating toast for dinner instead of cooking is better than not eating anything at all.

Using mouthwash instead of brushing your teeth is better than not taking care of your teeth at all.

Wiping yourself with a damp cloth or baby wipe instead of showering is better than not bathing at all.

Doing only one out of five assignments you need to turn in is better than not submitting anything at all.

Talking to a loved one on the phone is better than not talking to anyone at all.

Playing your favorite video game, listening to good music, or reading a book instead of "grinding" is better than not doing anything at all.

Don't beat yourself up for not being "productive enough". A little productivity is still productivity.

Complimenting someone’s content:

Getting complimented back:

let’s be real he really didnt do anything wrong❤

That's insane

The 'A'

AND THE KISSES

🥺🥺💜💕💖💜🙈🌸🥺🥺

They are wicked smart. And a valuable alarm tripwire out back: any time there’s a hawk visible in the sky, they make a distinctive “alarm” ruckus and my ladies immediately freeze in place or, if it’s close enough, scurry into the shelter of their run. 

ian mckellen directed these movies actually

so.

i guess fanfiction wasn’t a phase….

anyway tag how old you were when you got into fanfiction, and your first fandom, and how long you’ve been stuck in the trenches with all the rest of us

happy ace day everyone!!!!

I keep forgetting when these days are, but if you're ace, you're cool

Tea gown ca. 1875-80

From Cora Ginsburg

Unmute! Unmute!!!

I just want to love you

great tag addition by sepulchritude

Girl Scout Cookie Time!

You can buy cookies online from any troop with a page set up.  People bought so many cookies from troop 6000 (who is based out of a homeless shelter in NYC) that is broke the counter on the website.

Here’s six troops from high poverty areas that may struggle to reach their goals. Individual troops list on their page what they’re doing with funds. for many of these its simple things like badges or craft supplies. Get yourself some cookies.

You can also just donate cookies on there and they’ll be distributed to the local community. (I work at food pantry here and clients are always excited to see cookies on the shelves)

You can look up your local troop by zip code on https://www.girlscouts.org/   If they’re similarly struggling to raise funds, reblog and add ‘em on to the chain.

Troop 9626 Hopi Nation is ONE GIRL.  Her goal is to sell 3,000 boxes of cookies.

ONE GIRL.  Show her some love.

The Mississippi and Georgia ones haven’t hit their mark. Want to share some love their way?

Troop76316 North Eagle Butte, South Dakota (Lakota Nation)

Hot Fuzz (2007) dir. Edgar Wright

Things Ableds have happily thrown disabled people under the bus for:

Empty boxes

A rack of mugs

A dish cart

One more parking spot

A few more cards

10’ less far to walk

Advertising

Inventory

Shopping carts

Remember folks, the Ableds do not care about you! Literally any excuse will do. :D

This fucking heavy ass hospital door to the rheumatologist office

I had help exiting, but not entering

The last time I had to fight one of those was the door to the disabled bathroom in a hospital.

I had help entering but not exiting. Which means yes, I got stuck in there. Luckily I managed to get it about a foot open and holler for help until someone came and opened it but I injured myself in the process.

A hospital.

Another addition to the list:

Snow

And this after I had to drive from my on-campus apartment to the on-campus library because they didn’t plow the sidewalks well enough for me to navigate them. At. All.

I had to use the road to wheel myself from my apartment to the parking lot, because the road was the only thing properly plowed

Don’t forget trash! I had a job that had a lift that I had to share with the TRASH. (Because an abled bodied person didn’t feel like carrying the bag of trash themselves. When I called the store out on it I was told I was being too unfriendly, unfair, and mean.)

This is so important for abled people to see and start recognizing. Because guess what? Most places don’t listen to disabled people. I have worked on 2 med school campuses. TWO. And do you know the worst offenders of blatantly ignoring disabled people were? The fucking emergency rooms, next was the cafeteria and cafes!

I can’t use stairs if its more than a couple of steps, my knees will give out and now I’m sprawled on the floor. With documentation of this, I was denied access to the elevator in my building during a fire drill. I had a coworker help me the rest of the way down because my left knee refused to support my weight. Someone else that worked in the building who uses a wheel chair was also denied the elevator and when the fire Marshal was doing his sweep, he found her on the 5th floor by herself. Wtf. Only reason I know is because when he was talking to us, I pointed out that I was denied the elevator and he brought that up. Unless the fire is effecting the elevators, they are to stay on during a fire. Period. And there’s multiple elevators through out the building so there was no reason for them all to be off.

At the most recent campus I worked on, I went to the ER for paperwork because of an exposure, and there was someone trapped outside the elevator room because the door was stupid heavy and they had crutches. I was able to get it open and we went up together, I talked to maintenance about it and they got a work order put in.

Or automatic doors that close to fast that dint have sensors!

Or ramp grip/indicators that are large and get caught on wheels.

Or building ramps that are too steep.

Or disabled parking spots without ramps.

Or blocking spots.

Or locking elevators.

Or door threshold for sliding doors being taller than needed.

Or stupid heavy doors.

Or my absolute favorite one, a step at the bottom or top of a ramp.

Marvel movies have completely eliminated the concept of practical effects from the movie-watching public’s consciousness

Not just practical effects just like. Basic set design lol

How… How do they think sci-fi was done before CGI?

Really badly? Do you remember sci-fi before CGI? It was shit. And don’t say Star Wars because they went back and fixed that with CGI later.

*big sigh* *puts head in hands* heathens who’ve never watched pre-MCU sci-fi movies OR the unedited Star Wars movies, my beloathed

So first of all, most people agree that the majority of the “CGI fixes” in the Star Wars original trilogy (excluding minor visual/sound effects like lightsaber colors and blaster sounds) are unececssary, extremely conspicuous, and/or bad. This is not news to literally anyone older than about 20 who has consumed Star Wars content on any level. There are quite literally two very famous ‘despecialized’ fan projects explicitly dedicated to un-doing all of the shitty “fixed” CGI effects while simultaneously restoring the OT in HD.

And yes, I do, in fact, remember sci-fi special effects before CGI was the foundational cornerstone of moviemaking. It was not, in fact, shit:

Also, ironically I can show you by….*gasp* using fucking Star Wars, of all things. Welcome to the Tatooine pod race set of The Phantom Menace, which was not, as popularly believed, CGI’d but was instead a fully-built miniature set:

Yes, they built the entire set as a minature, built life-sized pod racers for the actors, then spliced the two together using digital effects. Yes, they did such a fantastic job that people think the entire set and scene sequence was basically completely CGI’d to this day. You’re fucking welcome for undervaluing the time, effort, and talents of set designers by implying that set design and practical effects inherently mean things will look like shit.

CGI also ages really poorly. What you think looks incredibly realistic now is going to look terrible in a few years. Just look at the original vs remastered Star Trek. They “restored” Star Trek around 2006 and replaced a lot of the practical effects with CGI, and maybe it looked ok in 2006, but it looks so bad and fake now.

You can see a video comparison for one episode here: https://youtu.be/ruPVTPCavdM

In the 60s they built a whole model of the Enterprise, complete with blinking lights and beautifully sculpted/painted details. It looks stunning! Then they replaced it with that horribly smooth and fake looking cgi ship.

Just look at this beauty

You can see the model at the Air and Space Museum in DC

Unfortunately the remastered version is the only version available to stream, but you can still find DVDs with the original effect.

made in 1968 and still stunning 2001 A Space Odyssey

the designers worked with engineers at NASA to make realistic futuristic special effects using models and matte paintings no computer effects at all! - and incidentally inspired David Bowie to write Space Oddity, later performed in space by astronaut Chris Hadfield

The CGI of the original Jurassic Park may not be aging well (though arguably still better than some), but the practical effects will always look stunning. 

I want to talk fantasy.

This shot was achieved with splicing and green screen.

This wild-looking shot (and similar manipulations) was famously achieved by having a professional juggler in a duplicate of Bowie’s jacket and gloves sitting behind him, basically with Bowie in his lap, doing the handwork while Bowie kept his arms behind the juggler. You may have seen a game based on this on Whose Line Is It Anyway.

This? Wires! Splicing! THE CGI TO DO THIS DIDN’T EXIST YET! (The juggler is hidden under the cape. If there’s a scene where he’s wearing a cape, that’s actually probably why.)

And this? This heartstopping shot?

This does appear to be from the version with CGI—

—CGI THAT WAS USED TO ERASE THE SHADOW FROM THE PRACTICAL EFFECT.

The shot itself hasn’t changed. The lift itself was done with wires and Bowie was given some propulsion with an air cannon so he could make that turn at speed. A minor amount of CGI was used in the 30th anniversary to “touch up” the work done in 1986, and one of the things they did was to remove a shadow on the wall from one of the wires.

How about this?

You don’t know it, but you’re looking at a practical effect. In real life, the Ruby Slippers are almost orange. That luxe, rich ruby color showed up on the film as black when the shoes were the correct color, so the costumers adjusted the actual costume to give the color they wanted.

A MODEL OF A HOUSE SHOT INSIDE A NYLON STOCKING ATTACHED TO A FAN.

MAN IN A COSTUME.

HORSES DUSTED WITH COLORED GELATIN.

And this? This is where it would’ve been useful to have CGI. Margaret Hamilton got really badly burned on the steam doing one of her entrance/exits, and ended up in the hospital. THIS is what you use CGI for.

You come into my house and insult practical effects?

I’ll just finish off by reminding you THIS IS ONE, TOO.

That last one, iirc, was there was a double in a sepia-toned costume, and the interior door and wall there was painted brown, so when it was lit and shot it all appeared to still be in the sepia tone of the Kansas scenes, and part of why Dorothy stepped back out of the frame was so the double and Judy Garland (in the proper blue-and-white costume) could swap.

You are correct. The double’s name, by the way, was Bobbi Koshay.

#this is also a purely personal opinion but aged practical effects are charming #in a way that aged cgi is not (via @glorious-spoon)

Another movie that was made without CGI:

There are so many practical effects in Mary Poppins that it’s unbelievable. Ranging from the big ones (popping through pictures, tea parties on the ceiling, flying with an umbrella, etc.) to the incredibly little details, there’s a big reason why Mary Poppins won the Oscar for “Best Visual Effects” in 1965

I can’t find a list of all effects used, so this is just going off my memory of a documentary I watched once, so bear with me here; some of these things might be misremembered. But, some of the practical effects used in this film:

- Actors suspended on wires

- Scenes filmed front of a white screen lit with sodium vaporlights (early cinema’s “greenscreen” before greenscreen was invented)

- Matte paintings on glass for the cityscape scenes (rooftops of London, St. Paul Cathedral, etc.)

- Animatronics (the robin that whistles with Mary Poppins is an animatronic controlled by a wire, and the movement and sound you see on-screen was what it was actually doing on-set. The talking parrot umbrella head was also an animatronic.)

- Moving set pieces (every time they slide up or down the banister, they’re riding on a mechanized chair-lift hidden from the camera)

- Padded stairs (when they climb up the staircase made of smoke, the actors actually were climbing up a staircase padded with thick styrofoam, so that their feet would actually sink in some. The children found it particularly challenging, prompting Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews to offer extra help in keeping them balanced, thus really selling the idea that they are two kids walking on smoke with assistance from their guardians)

- Scene splicing (When she pulls impossibly large items from her carpet bag, she’s pulling them through a hole from under the table. The scene was spliced with footage depicting the table with nothing underneath it - except for Michael, who crawled underneath to ‘examine’ for a hole)

- Hidden compartments in bottles containing liquid of different colors (this one is my favorite lol; the children were not told that the medicine would come out of the bottle in different colors; they were just supposed to complain about taking it. Their reactions of shock and amazement are 100% genuine)

Even tiny details that you wouldn’t normally even think of as “special effects” were paid careful attention to, in order to help sell the story. Such as, during the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious scene, while Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke are dancing and acting their hearts out, the children are supposed to sit on a fence and eat candy-apples. However, after filming for a long time, the kids were sick of the candy apples they’d been eating. So, Disney called for candy-apples made in tons of unique and delicious flavors, just colored to all look the same. It became the children’s favorite thing about the scene: they just got to sit and listen to fun music and watch the adults sing and dance while they tried a hundred different candy-apples, which is why they’re devouring them like little lions every time you see them on-screen.

(Also not so much a practical effect but just cute to note while I’m talking about Mary Poppins: the kids kept actually falling asleep during filming for the scenes in which Julie Andrews sings them lullabies lol)

CGI has its uses, to be sure. But it ought to be used to ENHANCE practical effects, not REPLACE them.

tbh that’s what Coraline is. And pretty much every movie by LAIKA Studios. It’s all filmed with practical effects and then enhanced with CGI.

Practical effects are actually amazing, and the overreliance on CGI makes films look far more ‘fake’ and causes them to grow outdated far more quickly than modern producers want people to admit.

Mainly because set designers and practical effects specialists are UNIONIZED but computer animators are not, making their labor easy to exploit and often leaving them massively overworked and underpaid.

I know I was already here, but since @plushchrome1212 made this incredible addition, I just want to point out this is a gold standard of practical effects work. Like. What I wrote above probably clued you in that I love looking for the man behind the curtain and going “oh, THAT’S how they did that!”

Mary Poppins is my favorite Disney movie. In 33 years, it has never once occurred to me to question how any of it was done. The illusion is so complete, I’m a grownass adult who just. Accepted that they disappeared into the sidewalk.