COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 5

Posted on by Thor

I finished one Minotaur and started a second while reusing some of the keys. I have three more Minotaurs who are large in the foreground to animate. The plan then is to reuse some Minotaurs to fill out the herd charging down the street. My plan shows the tracks they travel on down the street.

Pam and I took the dogs for a walk this weekend and I spent the entire walk watching the dogs back legs to see how they worked. I am trying to replicate that movement in the runs of these mythical creatures. Since the legs are different than human legs I am having some challenges figuring out the poses. The entire lower leg is like the human foot and only the upper leg is like a human thigh and calf. The entire run then is like a human running on tip toe.

I should get the Muybridge book on animal motion. My animation might not be perfectly accurate but hopefully it is believable. I would guess that I might have three more days working on this scene in Callipeg. Oh that reminds me, last night after working on the scene all day the program froze and all the drawings in the timeline disappeared. I stepped away from the computer to calm my nerves for a bit and then came back and tried to do a hard reboot of the iPad. I had to do this over and over. I was following the directions but it turns out the timing of the button pressing is a critical issue. After the 5th or 10th try I got the timing right and the tablet rebooted. Thankfully all the drawings were there when the program was reopened. Callipeg seems to have issues with freezing when the eraser is selected. Best not to erase then, but I erase all the time while animating. I do wish Apple was smart enough to use the opposite end of the pencil as the eraser rather than having the artist select an icon to erase. Oh well tech is slow to develop.

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.