Guys. This is what a national chain store trolling Trump looks like. A bunch of dystopian novels with a sign (I presume) meant for the travel section.
Support your local disgruntled bookstore manager with a dark sense of humor.
The best part of this is it isn’t just one disgruntled manager that made this happen. I used to work at B&N and I can tell you what goes on those promo tables is dictated by corporate headquarters, not just one pissed-off employee. Like, the instructions for assembling that table came from on high and had to pass through whole echelons of marketing and management personnel and everyone along the way had to go, “Yep, that looks good and not at all inflammatory,” before it actually appeared on bookstore floors so may I just say to the B&N chain of command BRAVO
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.
That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.
today i have been quietly worrying about who would be a dragon in the black sails temeraire au.
having finished the show i am no nearer to a solution, except for the practically useless knowledge that charles vane would definitely be a dragon in the temeraire au.
i’m no nearer to an answer, except that
in the BORGIAS au it would be easy.
Micheletto “I was a masterless dog once, but no more” Corella is a mad unharnessed dragon and Cesare is supposed to get eaten by him as part of an assassination plot but then silvertongued Cesare starts talking to him and after about three minutes Micheletto abruptly decides to devote his entire soul to him, and to the horror of his enemies Cesare becomes a dragon captain. and at some point Cesare is imprisoned by Pope Julius and Micheletto goes wild with grief and rage and Lucrezia has to temporarily become his captain so he doesn’t raze Rome to the ground/get murdered by the papal armies, and then Lucrezia and Micheletto form a political alliance that becomes an emotional alliance that becomes an uneasy undefined quasi romantic alliance (and also Micheletto is a Catholic dragon who quotes St Paul and grimly assumes that he doesn’t have a soul), but anyway yeah the Pope’s daughter probably burns down Naples while very publicly flirting with her dragon and making everyone uncomfortable and when they eventually DO get Cesare back and raze most of the Romagna to the ground, Burchard dutifully writes down that the most evil family in history were also a bunch of dragonfuckers, and the historians argue incessantly about whether or not it was true or whether Italy just hated the Borgias that much.
me, an intellectual: video games provide tactile and visual stimulation and are designed to have a balance between reward (for completing your goals) and challenge (in difficulty of the game) with music designed to motivate the player without being distracting. all of these components work together to create a positive feedback loop that adhd people are more likely to be engaged by and enjoy compared to longer tasks with relatively smaller payoff like chores or even something like maintaining the focus to complete long books and projects
Quite a few have been saying:”But what about laughing?”, in the comments of my ‘Weird Human Reactions to Fear: the Singing Edition’ post. My question is: do you know why humans laugh when shit gets real?
Laughter is our brain’s Blue Screen of Death.
Where a computer would throw up an error and possibly crash, our brains go:”well, shit”, and hit the big red button labelled: ‘LAUGHTER (and possibly applause, but probably not applause)’. Since we need our brains 24/7, we don’t have the luxury of error messages. So our brains buy some time to figure out what’s going on by making us laugh in the weirdest situations.
Imminent doom? Laugh.
Absolutely livid? Laugh.
Distraught? Laugh.
Pretty sure you’re gonna die? Laugh.
I mean, we can’t be sure the aliens don’t have brains that work the same way, but seeing as other animals on Planet Earth don’t really have that either… that’d probably freak them the fuck out too.
Not only do the gangly bipeds sing when they’re scared, they could just as easily start laughing.
