I have been learning about Lotus. Here are some things I have learned about Lotus.
Lotus likes to cuddle but also likes to chill out on the floor or in her crate
Lotus has yet to have any accidents in the house
Lotus will sleep through the night
Lotus will let me sleep until 10 AM
Lotus is not big enough to get on my bed yet but will sometimes come to the bedroom in the small hours and put her front paws and head on the bed until I pet her and tell her she’s a good girl and then she’ll wander off
Lotus likes toys that squeak
Lotus likes gnawing on bones and antlers
Lotus has a blankie
Lotus likes following Mont Blanc
Lotus would like to follow Binghe but she keeps startling him and then she’s startled because he’s startled
Lotus is concerned about large vehicles
Lotus is concerned about people shoveling snow
Lotus is concerned about those large dumpsters you can rent
Lotus can fit under the bed
Lotus will follow you into the bathroom if you let her and stare at you while you use the toilet and put her head on your knee
Lotus gets scared by spooky sounds in shows and videogames
Lotus does not know if strangers she meets on walks are scary monsters or exciting new friends
Lotus does an excited spinning dance when it’s mealtime
Lotus likes chasing puffs of snow and blowing leaves
While the pain and suffering persist despite all the promises of de-escalation, families in Gaza remain without security, without medicine, and without the basic necessities of life.
Regardless of the differing narratives, the undeniable truth is that civilians are paying the heaviest price.
Today, more than ever, we need your voice and your help because we are living in tattered tents that offer no protection from the cold, because we lack access to clean water, and because we go days without food.
Please donate to Ahmed and share if you cant. He is in a very desperate situation, living in a tent with Gaza’s weather. His brother is injured and they need funds to pay for his treatment and eventually leave Gaza to escape Israel’s occupation
Ahmed and his family still need support to afford basic needs like food and water and shelter from the cold and the rain, so please do what you can
this morning i noticed my cat was freaking out more than usual. he’s an anxious kitty (he’d been a stray for 3 years when we got him, then we had two moves with a very rough period in between). usually he has a routine that i do with him that helps him calm down but today it just wasn’t working and i couldn’t figure out why he was so stressed out. he kept bapping me on the head and waking me up and running around and eventually i realized what the issue was.
on monday i had a skin biopsy that left a pretty sizeable wound. yesterday i spent pretty much all day feeling like shit and laying around, and today i was supposed to clean it and change the dressing. he was panicking because he could smell the wound, saw me laying in bed all day, and he wasn’t sure if i was okay. i got up, and as i removed the old bandage he started WAILING. just completely losing it when he saw it. he clearly understood that something like that wasn’t good. i made sure he didn’t touch it, but i let him smell me and see that i was okay, and he watched me clean and re-bandage it and pretty much the second it was done he immediately calmed down.
ten minutes later and he’s purring and snuggly and ‘guarding me’ from such scary things as Loud Noise Outside and Blanket Moving Weird. this cat is better at taking care of me than i am some days.
Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?
not gonna lie that still looks intimately real
I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.
Fucking witchcraft, man.
fucking look at this shit though
Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:
THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.
amazing
And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.
They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.
The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.
One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?
Motherfucker randomly started moving.
So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.
Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.
So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.
And i just googled malfunctioning t-rexand was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside thet-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.
So of course, the power goes out.
And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.
Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.
And this guy hoped for the best and got it.
Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.
This is getting better and better.
I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI
I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.
The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.
Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.
So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”
The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”
He called up film of a chicken walking. Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”
Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.
This is actually a great example of one side of the historians triangle, which consists of 3 sides: practical, academic, and re-enactment. These 3 things help us understand what, why, and how respectively. When people hear the word re-enactment, they tend to think of war re-enactments, but it’s not just a bunch of nerds glorifying and romanticizing mass murder. Re-enactment is an important part of the study of history. For example, when discussing Titanic, many people are proud and eager to proclaim that “if I was there, I’d be one of the FIRST ONES in the lifeboats!” This was put to the test during the filming of James Cameron’s Titanic. For the movie, they built 75% of the ships exterior in a set that was actually on the water and could “sink” that was over 700 feet long. James Cameron, being the perfectionist that he is, wanted total accuracy. The company that made Titanics lifeboat davits is still around today, and he commissioned them to make fully functional replicas for the movie. However, one compromise had to be made: for safety, the steel had to be much much thicker and extremely reinforced. But whatever, no one would notice this in the movie. The effect of this is that the davits in the movie were significantly stronger and safer than the ones that existed on the real life Titanic. The replica lifeboats also shared this quality. When it came time to shoot the sinking scenes, they found it quite difficult to get the extras into the lifeboats. It was a 90 foot drop to the water, and the boats and davits would bob and shake and shudder VIOLENTLY as the boat was lowered. People were genuinely scared, even though these boats and davits were safer than the ones used in real life. And suddenly James Cameron realized: THIS is why so many of the lifeboats were launched half empty! It wasn’t that the officers were incompetent or launching them too hastily! They just couldn’t get people to step off of the nice, big, warm, safe ship that they were convinced wasn’t even sinking, just to get them into a tiny, cold little rowboat which could be accidentally dropped from the height of a building if the crew made a mistake. It’s easy to say with hindsight that you would have been one of the first ones in the boats, but when you’re face to face with that boat and the 90 foot drop it’s dangled over, you might feel differently, even WITH the benefit of hindsight. This is why re-enactment is so important. There’s just so much about any given historical event that only becomes obvious when you see it with your own eyes. The production of James Cameron’s Titanic RADICALLY changed our understanding of both the ship, and the sinking. Just like how Jurassic Park revolutionized our understanding of dinosaurs.
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