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Watching the world go down in fire and flame

@gwenstacyismyicon / gwenstacyismyicon.tumblr.com

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My 90yr old Irish Catholic grandpa doesn’t miss with my gender. He’s never gotten my name wrong, or my pronouns, never even faltered over it.

It’s all so natural too: son, big man, young man…

We’ve never talked about it. He’s the only one who hasn’t pushed for details. He just accepted it and carried on because it’s not a huge deal.

It’s so comforting.

My dear that’s called Alzheimer’s

I wasn’t going to respond to this, I looked at your blog. Your irrational hatred and bile directed towards trans people is palpable and pathetic. This was intended to upset me. 

But I now have a chance to talk about who my grandfather is. 

You see, I find it interesting that you claim the only way my 90yr old grandfather could possibly be so accepting is if he was dying of one of the most horrible diseases known to man, a condition which eats your brain from the inside out and turns you in an angry, scared shell of the child you once were while your family has to grieve you long before you’re dead. 

You find it easier - and evidently prefer - to believe that to accept me, my grandfather must have Alzheimer’s rather than any other reason. 

Why is that easier to believe than a man who lived through (not was born during, not was around for, lived through) the Second World War and the aftermath, seeing footage of the concentration camps and meeting refugees would be accepting? 

A poor builder and a farmer who worked alongside queer men and deaf men and the few people of colour in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and was himself barred from many places of employment and education due to his religion?

This man, whose oldest son was born the year the British army began occupying his country, who lived through the Troubles and was automatically considered suspicious and dangerous through an incident of birth? A man who helped raise six children - most of them boys and therefore in great danger of the army turning their guns on them for playing kid-games - in a time of civil war where it didn’t seem to matter which side you were on, the bombs and shootings could get you either way? A man who once was taken hostage by the IRA? 

My grandfather’s oldest son - my dad - was the first in his family to go to university and there he met and fell in love with a Protestant woman. This was before the Good Friday Agreement, when the civil war was still happening, and if my grandparents had a problem with it - they never let said to my mum. 

(My grandpa and my mum don’t really get along, but that’s more to do with me being a premature baby and tensions over my survival and disagreements on how to look after me. My mum and my Nana? Thick as thieves.) 

They certainly never let it slip to us when we came along because it wasn’t important anymore that we were something many people in Northern Ireland would have preferred to not exist. It didn’t matter. 

He voted in the Good Friday Agreement in hopes of stopping the conflict. He spent a lot of time listening to me about the bullying I was facing for being - unbeknownst to me at the time - queer and disabled. He just told me that being happy was far more important. 

Being trans? It does not matter. Of course it doesn’t matter to him because he’s seen worse things in the world. 

He’s ninety years old. He’s still out on the farm, he’s still studying history, he’s still sharp as fuck. I’ve seen someone die of Alzheimer's. I know every bit of it and it’s not him. Besides, I’ve not medically transitioned in anyway yet. He’s only seen me presenting fully masc for six days in person. Two years in total. If he had Alzheimer’s he’d be calling me by my deadname and using she/her. 

And he’s not unusual. Outside of your echo chamber, most people are fine with trans people. Most people don’t care. Most people are accepting. They may not understand, they may not use the right words, but they’re accepting. 

I do find it interesting that once again the TERF tactic is try and wrestle autonomy and self-control away from people who don’t follow your bigoted stances. Autistics must be being manipulated. Trans men are clearly confused little girls. Children obviously can’t understand their own minds and bodies. 

My grandfather must have Alzheimer's. 

Of course my view of a world I’ve seen in a Tumblr textpost must be more correct than the reality everyone else lives in. 

Have the day you deserve. 

@foropinionssake what on earth made you think that reply was even remotely ok?

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.

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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.

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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-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.

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.

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That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.

This post just gets better and better with time

@lgbtqcreators​ creator bingo — [4/10] lgbtq characters → dani clayton from the haunting of bly manor (2020)

I should have said something sooner. Yeah, you think? I didn’t wanna hurt you…or your mom. Or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. Jesus Christ—I just…thought I was being selfish. That I could just stick it out, and eventually, I would feel how I was supposed to.

concept

a beaded curtain, but instead of beads they’re worms on strings

you know… these guys

Hi op I hope this satisfies your needs.

Needs more worms

I wanna make one of these that is like a literal curtain of worms

No clear strings available to get caught and tangle, I want them nose to ass like some kind of horrible human centipede of worms, covering my doorway

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@fanotastic more worms

Aw fuck. Nothing makes you assholes happy.

Fuck you guys.

My fellow fuckers, I present you-

384

Happy Pride Month

The worm curtain is GAY

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The flute glass full of worms…

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5K CELEBRATION - top 10 tv shows (as voted by my followers) 2. Brooklyn Nine Nine (2013-2021) ↳ “That’s right, Terry. This is happening every year. We’re in each others lives forever, whether you like it or not. So what do you say, Captain? Are we doing this?”