Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

nicolauda:

nicolauda:

#tbt that time two brothers bought their own planes, learnt to fly them and disguised them as soviet planes so they wouldn’t be questioned and then flew into east germany to rescue their third brother from a park and recorded the entire operation and got away with it

no but legit this is one of my favourite stories from the 20th century it just sums up human ingenuity and how walls just don’t fucking work when people will do anything to cross them

the first brother and a friend paddled over the Elbe on inflatable mattresses in the middle of the night to escape the east. they got picked up by a Wessi police officer, who said something like “bit cold for swimming, ey boys?” and the brother says “not when you’re trying to leave the East.” because all East Germans were automatically citizens of the West too, they were taken into town and established themselves there. 

the second brother scoped out a particularly dark stretch of the wall. He escaped over it to the west by getting into a high building and shooting an arrow with a steel cable attached over to another building in the west. He then ziplined over. In response to his escape, the Stasi and the Wall designers built another guard tower in the middle of the stretch so no one else could pull the same stunt. 

the two brothers met up and heard that their who was still in East Germany also wanted out. So, they learnt to fly planes and disguised them as soviet planes. This was so, if the border guards saw them, they wouldn’t fire on them - they’d have to ring up the Kremlin and ascertain whether they were actual soviet planes on an organised fly-by. they flew into East Germany at dawn (recording it all on camera because you’ve got to do it for the vine even before vine exists), landed in a park where their brother was hiding in the bushes, loaded him onto one of the planes and flew out of East Germany, laughing all the way.

other great moments include - the guy who broke out of the GDR by driving a very low-slung sportscar under a barrier, the family who built two hot air balloons with their bare hands, the guy who managed to windsurf out of East Germany, the man who stole a tank (my hero), the people who removed the petrol tanks from cars so people could squeeze into the gap where the tank should have been, and of course, one of the most famous photos of the 20th century, with Eastern border guard, conrad schumann noping the fuck out of there when he was meant to be on duty guarding the wall when it was under construction in 1961

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

down-sizing:

markruffalwhoa:

My favorite thing about Victor Hugo is that the Notre Dame Cathedral was a huge eyesore on the verge of collapsing and was planned to be demolished but Victor Hugo was like “hey :( I like that building” and wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame to save it. and it worked

In the book he described the cathedral in the state it was in but also in comparison to what it looked like in the 15th century before it got all fucked up in the French Revolution. His book got translated into a fuck ton of languages and was distributed all around Europe. Tourists who were fans of him would go to see it while in Paris and were appalled to see just how bad of shape it was in and it started to become stain on paris’ reputation.

So finally the king funded the Hella expensive restoration which I imagine was one really fucking gnarly project, the structure it’s self being the tip of the ice burg because of how many religious artifacts and statutes and junk that had been ruined.

So thanks Vicky that’s one hell of a beautiful tower.

So you’re telling me that we still have the Notre Dame Cathedral because of fanfiction?

(Source: wild-zamboni, via littlestartopaz)

moonsandstar-s:

That said, here are some Hamilton facts for y’all that are all true to life (picked from Chernow’s biography, which I read far too often) 

• Hamilton’s ship caught on fire on the way to America 
  

• Burr was the lawyer for Maria Reynolds in her divorce from James Reynolds
  

• At a ball prior to Hamilton and Eliza’s marriage, of which Angelica, Hamilton, and Peggy were attending together, Angelica dropped a garter and Hamilton, like a chivalrous hoe, swoops in to pick it up and Angelica teased him, “haha you’re not a knight of the garter” and peggy goes “nah but he’d be a knight of the bedroom if he could”
  

• I am deadass not making this up. she said that in real life (albeit with different wording) 
  

• One time at a debate, Burr was so pissed off at how Hamilton would never shut the fuck up, so he successfully tried to predict all the points he would make and countered them all, making it the only time Hamilton was ever left embarrassed and speechless 
  
  
• maria reynolds was a blonde
  
  
• hamilton was a ginger. dude had BRIGHT red hair and total mary-sue eyes because people described them as “violet-blue.” WHO HAS VIOLET BLUE EYES
  
  
• Hamilton BLASTED Eacker in the press after he killed Philip & roasted the shit out of him. dude was ANGRY 

• After his duel, when Hamilton was rowed across the Hudson, he was the one and only person to be calm, not panicked & not grief-stricken at the prospect of his death  

• Burr deadass wrote to the doctor tending Hamilton AS HE WAS DYING and said “yo i hope he’s okay” (again, different wording of course) 

• Prior to his death, one of Hamilton’s sons lawyered for Burr’s second wife, coincidentally named Eliza Jumel, in her divorce from him 
  

• Madison was pretty guilt-ridden after Hamilton died (he spread a lot of rumors about his treasury funds) and he went to visit Eliza & try to compensate her for Hamilton’s nonexistent money, as she was in a financial hole, & she goes “nah fuck off” (WORDING DIFFERENTLY OFC) and told him off for being a dick 

• Theodosia Burr died overseas a few years after Philip & Hamilton’s deaths
  

• When James Monroe came to apologize to Eliza later on in life, after Hamilton’s death, for how shitty he treated him, Eliza - a seventy year old woman at the time - basically said the 18th century version of “fuck you” and roasted his soul out of his body 
  
  
• what im trying to say is that lin portrayed everyone in the musical fuckin amazingly like Got Damn . there was A Lot of irl drama with these eighteenth century ninnies 

(via permets-tu-not-permettez-vous)

very important

ichuzou:

asphodel-grimoire:

casual reminder that this is what some founding fathers (+ other important peeps) handwriting looked like

george washington:

alexander hamilton:

thomas jefferson that fucking dickbag:

lafayette precious child w/ fine ass handwriting:

james madison aka what the hell is even:

(lawn merriot? jaws merlin? THAT DOES NOT LOOK LIKE HIS NAME)

john laurens aka his handwriting weirdly looks like his personality:

AND THEN THERE’S FUCKING AARON BURR:

HIS SIGNATURE LITERALLY LOOKS LIKE A HANDWRITTEN VERSION OF

fucking aaron burr man god d ammit

:^U

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

bastlynn:

prettyarbitrary:

senkirowolf:

witwitch:

adinfinitumxx:

2p-germanys-blog:

spinosaurus-the-fisher:

funkylittlefang:

spinosaurus-the-fisher:

perspectiverelativity:

buddha-fett:

red-dirt-roads:

alessariel:

brainsforbabyjesus:

alessariel:

bitter-bi-witch:

datneeks:

socialjusticeichigo:

shadowthorne:

mizushimo:

mauridianhallow:

fangirlingoverdemigods:

drtanner:

suicunesrider:

uneditededit:

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.

And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not.

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.

(link to said post about malfunctioning t-rex)

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-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-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.

@spinosaurus-the-fisher is this the kind of content you love?

Realism comes at a cost, it seems.

i mean ok but why has nobody posted this:

It’s a three piece raptor suit.

Old movies had the best special effects

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.

@jurassicparkandrecreation

@shepfax

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Padian

(via lupinatic)