Help a robotics team of minorities make it to FIRST State Competition
So to make this quick, my robotics team recently placed 1st in the FRC Southfield District Event and we’re on our way to states, but we need 5000 dollars to pay for our entrance in the competition… We don’t have any money besides what was donated to us so far since we used our budget to pay for our limited resources to fix our robot and improve it since our last competition.
Considering we’re a very small team of thirteen middle eastern teens (7 girls, 6 boys), this is a big deal! Except our district won’t give us any money despite this, which makes the issue of not having money all the more pressing.
Please consider donating! We’re doing all the fundraising we can but we need YOUR HELP to reach our goal. Our deadline is April. If you can’t donate, please reblog this, we need all the help we can get! ^^;
You can check pictures of the competitions out at Daniel Ernst’s Flickr. If you want to spot us, we’re the Robotractors (grey shirts, I use my legs as tables in one of the pictures)
Please do not repost those pictures without his permission! Here’s his Flickr, check him out.
I’m sorry for the lack of pictures on this posts tumblr wouldn’t let me upload it with the pictures.
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.
Listen. I’m gonna level with you. I’m gonna be straight with you. I’m gonna be up front about this.
I already don’t know what Overwatch is. There’s a gorilla and some lesbians and guns but yall never play the gorilla I don’t know. And then sometimes if that wasn’t bad enough sometimes you go and just invent new Overwatches. Like just when I’m getting a handle on what “Junkrat kin discourse” is yall show up with “This is my new OC her name is Grandma Sniper” and then SHE’S part of the Overwatchers. “This is Swedish Beefcake” could yall? not?? I still don’t know what a Hanzo is. I know it’s an insult but I don’t know what it means.
“This is my new doctor OC she hangs out with Angela Mercy her name is Moriarty” yall are just making things up now. no one’s explained the gorilla yet. put the doctor away yall already have like a fucking half angel or something. stop just adding characters to the cast i still dont know what the plot is. whats the plot?? no one ever talks about the plot i just know Soldier 69 and his best friend Anakin Skywalker had a fight about something. is there a plot??? i dont think there is!
I’m pretty sure yall are just playing Super Smash Bros and you’re like “yeah uh huh theres a plot theres lore see Grandma Sniper used to be part of Overwatch the Prequel” but then yall just play 10,000 hours of SSB with 18 Grandma Snipers on the field and two Junkrats going “yeah deep lore”
Whos. Whos even the Turgbjorn guy? What did he do??
people act like unfollowing and blocking are these big statements that only hard ass bastards do
i promise you they arent. Ive blocked and unfollowed people for saying they thought toaster strudels were bad. you shape your own online experience. you domt need that negativity. nobody online is worth shit
Me: I wonder if there actually are long-term mental health and societal harm being done with how ubiquitous the internet and digital communication has become
Some Artist: Here’s a picture of phones sucking out people’s souls
Me: y’know what if there are we’ll just all have to die cause I am not throwing in with you
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