In the 1960s, book designers gave many science and psychology paperbacks glorious avant-garde and op art covers. Henning M. Lederer just released his second collection of animations of these fine book jackets! Below is the first, from 2015.
The Magic of Oz, most likely from the early 1960s, is sometimes referred to as "the worst cartoon ever." I think that is hyperbolic but I appreciate the sentiment.
Animation historian Jerry Beck had this to say about it: "The film is a real mystery... and real awful."
(via /r/ObscureMedia)
In the 1970s, legendary Disney animator Art Babbitt, creator of Goofy, worked at Hanna-Barbera directing the studio's commercial division. His anti-drug PSA above, circa 1970, is a masterpiece of psychedelic cartooning.
Ascii Cinema is a purely text-based way to record and view, well, text. Whether it's terminal sessions or gorgeous ASCII animations such as those created by MapSCII, this means you get crisp, copy/pastable 1:1 representations of the input and output in a form as easily embedded as a YouTube video.
Simple recording Record right where you work - in a terminal. To start just run asciinema rec, to finish hit Ctrl-D or type exit.
Copy & paste Any time you see a command you'd like to try in your own terminal just pause the player and copy-paste the content you want. It's just a text after all!
Embedding Easily embed an asciicast player in your blog post, project documentation page or in your conference talk slides.
Here are a few pretty examples: Read the rest
Adam Pizurny's Tumblr is an endless font of stupendous and surreal GIFs. Read the rest
In 1968, Russian computer scientist Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov and his colleagues at Moscow University created this computer animation of a cat using their Big Electronic Counting Machine (BESM). Their research, published in the scientific journal "Problems of Cybernetics, was pioneering in its use of mathematics to model complex motion. More about the research here, in Russian: Кошечка (etudes.ru via r/ObscureMedia)
When Pink Floyd took the stage on their mid-1970s "Dark Side of the Moon" tour, they performed in front of a stunning video cut-up created by British animator Ian Emes. Above are screen projections from the 1974 French tour. Below, a reel from the 1975 North American tour. (The album audio was added by someone else later.) From Wikipedia:
Emes' first major work, 'French Windows', was started while he was subsequently a student at Birmingham College of Art and finished while he was unemployed. It was set to the Pink Floyd recording "One of These Days". After it was shown at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery, it was screened on the television programme The Old Grey Whistle Test, and thereby came to the attention of Pink Floyd. The band invited Emes to give them a private screening, and afterwards to make films to be projected during performances of The Dark Side of the Moon. His animation for their song "Time" is on Pink Floyd's Pulse DVD. He subsequently worked with Roger Waters, making live action film for his performance of The Wall – Live in Berlin.
As a result of his work for Pink Floyd, Linda McCartney asked Emes to animate Wings' "Oriental Nightfish". He has also made animations for concerts by Mike Oldfield, and directed The Chauffeur for Duran Duran.
(via r/ObscureMedia)
(NSFW language)
Funny: In Florida, it's unlawful to have sex with a porcupine. Sad: In Russia, it's illegal to tell minors that gay people exist. (Sam O'Nella)
Since 1896, the 100m dash remains the best thing at Olympic track & field apart from the weapons-throwing events. Usain Bolt dominates now, but would he have dominated then? Yes, of course he would have: by several seconds! (Not included: Ben Johnson's steroid-fueled 9.79s win at the '88 Games, for which he was disqualified. Bolt beat it in 2008 and 2012's race, and other athletes have outside the Olympics) Read the rest
In a gorgeous animation, Malin Christersson shows how much simpler it is to plot out celestial mechanics when you assume that all the bodies in our solar system are in orbit around the sun, rather than the other way around. Read the rest
Loadingicons should loop, use a constrained color palette, and be fun enough to look at that they could distract a user while a computer or network churns away in the background. Read the rest
“A chance encounter proves fateful for 2 robots mining on a desolate planet.” Read the rest
I'm too dumb to understand what the article is about, but Walter Newton's Street Fighter-style animations for "Paul Krugman Battles The Austerians" are fabulous. Read the rest
Joyce Lin, a design student at RISD, has produced a wonderful set of kinetic sculptures made from popsicle sticks and other media, produced in spare time during the semester. They're incredibly fun to watch and I'm sure they're a delight to play with in person. The rest of her portfolio is equally exciting. Read the rest
David "Davidope" Szakaly is a talented Hungarian animator who specializes in trippy, freaky GIFs that pulse and twist and melt your brain. Read the rest
I reviewed the wonderful, spooky kids' graphic novel Scary Godmother in 2010, and now I'm delighted to plug this kickstarter to fund a set of fully articulated dolls based on the series, launched by its creator, Jill Thompson. $50 gets you the doll itself, and there are a ton of smaller premiums for lower payments. Read the rest
