COVID Film: Animating the Skull Toss

Posted on by Thor

In the previous version of this shot I only animated the skull arching towards the crowd.I decided I need to animate the former president throwing the skull as he slowly walks the stage. In the previous animation I did I moved the skull in After Effects. The trouble is that there is little opportunity to change the timing of the animation. I got it to move on the arch but with very even timing.

I tried animating the skull in Callipeg using the transform tool but a very similar problem arose in that the timing was too even. Computers seem to insist one even timing. I finally decided I had to animate frame by frame repositioning the skull for each position so I had control of the spacing between frames.

I am half way finished with animating the former president. His arm moves fast but the walk is ponderous and slow. I am assuming the audience will only have time to see the skull movement and will not pay attention to the walk. I am debating about some tie movement. That will be subtle if I move it at all. For now the idea of animating the crowd or flags is overkill.

COVID: Two More Walks to Animate

Posted on by Thor

I finished three walks in Callipeg yesterday and have two more to do today. One of the men waves his wand faster than anyone else but it isn’t an impossible movement so I am going to live with it. Two frames in one of the layers shifted out of position with no prompting from me, so the possibility of a random crash seems imminent.

The background will have a parallax effect added in After Effects as the camera pans downward. Once this scene is done I might move on to animating a shot of the former president tapping on his cell phone as he sits on a golden toilet. I will only animate his hand tapping the screen and leave the rest as a held cell. It is a much easier scene to animate than the hazmat walkers above.

I also need to re-render a few scenes which have artifacts from applying too much parallax. I need to assemble a full list next time I view the film. The COVID film now has animation scattered throughout, so it coming together nicely.

For those who are interest a late summer-fall COVID surge has begun. The only way to know this now is through wastewater testing. All other testing has been halted. The nation is going into the next surge blind. COVID has risen by 50% in wastewater nationally and it is estimated that there are now about 350.000 cases a day. Of course an exact count is impossible. Biden has declared the pandemic over, and most Americans a glad to believe him, yet it is still raging for anyone who is paying attention. Arrogance and ignorance are a deadly combination in the ” new normal”.

 

Let it Burn!

Posted on by Thor

Since the start of the pandemic three years ago the United States had embraced a policy of allowing widespread infection to occur in low-risk groups, like young people. This has resulted in the highest death toll of any country in the world with well over one million deaths. The hope in all this mass infection was that the country might develop herd immunity. However herd immunity is impossible since the virus keeps mutating into variants that break through past waning immunity from past infection and vaccination.

The vast trouble with this mass infection strategy is that children are getting very sick and repeat infections are resulting in worst outcomes. Over 96% of children have been infected in our country so far and those kids then infect their parents and grand parents. Children are the primary way the virus is burning through society.

The United States is riding on a plateau of about 500 deaths a day due to COVID-19. That has become the new normal. At the start of the pandemic 500 deaths a day would have been unheard of, but after experiencing spikes or deaths in the thousands, 500 deaths a day seems low in comparison. Americans want to wish the virus away while taking no basic safety precautions. Wishful thinking and ignorance is not a public health solution.

Pandemic fatigue has become pandemic burn out and most people have given up all hope. The only way they can cope is to pretend that the pandemic is over. All evidence to the contrary will be ignored for the sake of imagining that life has returned to normal.

The 45th president knew the virus was airborne and highly infectious. Despite this he downplayed the potential dangers. The 46th president isn’t much better, in that he publicly proclaimed the pandemic is over while thousands or people needlessly die every week. Gaslighting the public and convincing them that mass infection is in their best interest seems to be the one thing that straddles party lines.

There is nothing you can do to stop a wildfire!

Posted on by admin

The Joe Biden administration has decided to let COVID-19 rip with no mitigation other than advising people on occasion to get vaccinated. He said, that there is “nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months” — which is the exact opposite of what presidential candidate Joe Biden promised voters during the 2020 campaign. Back during the election, he said “the trajectory of COVID-19 in America is headed in the wrong direction,” and only he could fix it. In a Oct. 23, 2020 speech, Biden pledged to “immediately put in place a national strategy that will position our country to finally get ahead of this virus and get back our lives.” He never delivered.

Right before July 4th 2021, Biden again claimed the pandemic was over, and we should all celebrate by gathering in large groups to watch fire works. I was in Saint Augustine and the maskless crowds were insane. It is as if a word from the president acted as a mass hypnosis, convincing all to unmask and breath in each other’s faces. We were some of the very few who wore masks. At the time Delta was ripping across the country. In July of 2021 1,208 Americans died due to COVID-19.

On January 20, 2020 when Biden was inaugurated, there were 396,837 confirmed COVID deaths. As of February 5, 2023 there have been 1,073,693 deaths due to COVID. That is most contently an under counting. That means Biden’s bungled pandemic response is so far responsible for 676,856 COVID deaths as opposed to Trumps inept response which resulted in 396,837 COVID deaths. The media is strangely silent on Biden’s horrible handling of the pandemic.

Biden remarked about the pandemic saying, “I mean, look what’s happened, and I think we, I sometimes underestimate it because, I STOPPED THINKING ABOUT IT, but I’m sure you don’t: we lost 1 – over 1 million people in several years to COVID.” Biden warned that, “there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic.”

Biden informed Congress on January 30, 2023 that he will end the twin national emergencies for addressing COVID-19 on May 11, 2023. Sure 500 people are dying every day, but that is the new normal. The United States public health emergency was first declared on Jan. 31, 2020, under the Trump administration. Lawmakers have refused for months to fulfill the Biden administration’s request for billions more dollars to extend free COVID vaccines and testing. The administration has surrendered and they have left you to try and survive as they gaslight you to make you think the pandemic is over. News flash, the pandemic is not over.

The Incredible Shrinking Brain

Posted on by Thor

A new study based on data gathered by UK Biobank, found that COVID-19 survivors suffer from grey matter loss in the brain.

The long-term experiment, which involved 782 volunteers, compared brain scans of individuals before the pandemic. For an analogy between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic brain scans, researchers then invited 394 COVID-19 survivors to return for follow-up scans, as well as 388 healthy volunteers.

Researchers saw significant effects of the virus on human cerebral matter, with a loss of gray matter in regions of the brain. This incredible shrinking brain syndrome is particularly evident in the incoherent ramblings of the former president (45) who held a rally last weekend in Ohio. It has been nice not having to think about this psychopath for the last six months since Joe Biden was sworn in and oversaw a epic vaccination effort which surpassed several of it’s goals but might fall just short of the 70% hoped for by July 4, 2021.

Even die hard MAGAts got bored with the ramblngs of the ex-president and decided to leave the rally early while he was still droning on about the past. He was infected by COVID-19 in October 0f 2020 and clearly his brain has shrunk.

QAnon Zoom

Posted on by Thor

On social media during lockdown I was amazed to discover how many “Friends” who I thought were smart, sentient, reasoning individuals were actually QAnon conspiracy theorists. The art work I have been creating would ignite their remaining brain waves, turning them in to vicious trolls.

My Facebook accounts have been hacked and shut down so I haven’t been following the insanity online as much this past month. The promise of a vaccine leaves me feeling like I might soon wake from a year long coma. People seem to have too much time on their hands and with no creative outlet they turn into mindless zombies who prefer conspiracy theories to science.

Q is a fictional mysterious figure whose cryptic, evidence-free posts  are accepted by many as gospel. They promote the idea that there is a satanic cabal of pedophiles that runs rampant in government and Hollywood. The former president, was supposed to expose and defeat that cabal. Instead he lost the election and has been reduced to crashing wedding parties at Mar-a-Lago to spread his lies.

After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the social media platforms that had long allowed the falsehoods to spread like wildfire — namely Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — got more aggressive in cracking down on accounts promoting QAnon. Hollywood. QAnon has continued to survive in the darker corners of the Internet. In these fringes white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups continue to flourish.

QAnon podcasts are available through Apple and Google. There is big money to be made from the mindless. Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently defended QAnon adherents. QAnon has even gained a foothold in the halls of Congress, where two Republican members have openly supported some of the movement’s baseless ideas. The zombies are roaming the halls of the capitol long after the insurrection.

COVID-19 Outbreak at Mar-A Lago

Posted on by Thor

Disease and pestilence follow the ex-president anywhere he goes. Mar-a-Lago the former president’s residence in Florida has an outbreak of COVID-19. It has been partially closed after some staff members tested positive.

The club said in a statement that the Beach Club and a la carte dining room were closed, but did not specify how many people had tested positive. Banquet and event services remain open. It seems insane that banquets which are by definition large gathering of people would remain open.

In January, images surfaced from a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago that showed a number of guests not wearing masks. The resort was handed a formal warning by Palm Beach County which said the event had violated coronavirus regulations. The ex-president has always snubbed basic health precautions like masks and social distancing.

Palm Beach neighbors don’t want Trump living at Mar-a-Lago. A demand letter was reportedly delivered to the town of Palm Beach asserting that Trump lost his legal right to live at Mar-a-Lago when he converted the estate from his private residence to a private club in the 1990s.

News of the closure was first reported by the Associated Press.

 

Nursing Home Numbers

Posted on by Thor

At the beginning of the pandemic I was impressed by Andrew Cuomo‘s power point daily briefings about the COVID-19 crisis. He seemed a voice of reason and the former 45th U.S. President was pushing bleach and hydoxycloriquine as miracle cures. They are not cures they are deadly distractions.

In the early days Cuomo required nursing homes to accept Covid-19 positive patients when New York’s hospitals were overflowing. There was a statistically significant increase in resident deaths in nursing homes that accepted hospital transfers.

Now he has admitted to hiding data about deaths of New York State nursing home residents. He obscured public health data for political gain. The state’s official COVID-19 death count in nursing home is roughly 8,700 right now. A 56 percent increase on that count would bring the total deaths to well over 13,000.

The Cuomo administration managed to keep much of that nursing home data under wraps until late January, 2021 when the dam broke. The Democratic state attorney general published a bombshell accusation that the administration under counted nursing home deaths by more than 50%. The Associated Press showed more than 9,000 recovering Covid-19 patients were transferred from nursing homes to hospitals, which was 40% higher than the previously disclosed number. The New York Post then reported that one of Cuomo’s top aides claimed the administration hid data on nursing home deaths to avoid political retribution from Trump.

It remains unclear what level of accountability Cuomo will face. Even if Cuomo dodges criminal or civil liability, he will still face political accountability at the hands of voters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is touting his success battling the virus but the state has surpasses 10,000 nursing home deaths as well.

Florida Insurrectionists

Posted on by Thor

The January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol as clearly a superspreader event gone wild. Jonathan Fielding, a professor at the schools of Public Health and Medicine at UCLA, told the Washington Post, “If you wanted to organize an event to maximize the spread of COVID it would be difficult to find one better than the one we witnessed,” he said.

CDC Director Robert Redfield said “The storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Trump on Wednesday was probably a superspreader event that “will have public health consequences.”

Contact tracing will be nearly impossible. Protesters came from all over the country and few of them were identified or arrested. This, allowing the mask less rioters to take planes and cars home to their home states spreading the virus across the country.

As rioters are arrested there will likely be outbreaks in the Washington D.C. prisons and jails. As well as prisons all across the country. Epidemiologist will find it challenging to track the spread since the anti masking MAGAts are not likely to cooperate with health experts.

There were quite a few Florida idiots were among the horde that descended on the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the counting of the Electoral votes. I included 10 of those idiots in my illustration allowing them to breath each others viral filth. Who knows exactly how many more are out there.

Bugs to the Zapper

Posted on by Thor

“In many ways, Jan. 6, was a bug light. It brought extremists from all areas. And they all came with different skill sets,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told NBC. “You have the militias on one side. On the other side, you have the merely curious, people wrapped up in the moment.”

Donald Trump lured the bugs to the light with his big lie, that the election had been stolen. He incited the insurrection with this lie even before the election that he lost. The lie was simple though not based on any facts, he claimed he had won in a landslide though hos opponent had more votes. For months he paid for an ad campaign built around the tag line, “Stop the Steal.” He still insists that his lawyers refer to him as the 45th president rather than the former president.

On that fateful day he whipped up the crowd saying, “And we fight, we fight lie hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you aren’t going to have a country anymore.” But this was only one of hundreds of comments aimed at inflaming the hate red of his followers. He had convinced them over the months that their votes had been stolen. He claimed in a tweet “Dead people voted.” He didn’t offer evidence, he didn’t need to. The lie would incite his followers. On December 30, 2020 he tweeted “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” The bugs flew to the light believing they were doing their patriotic duty.