snow white

 

The backflow starship incense burner took about 1 month to lick, from the concepts with forced air to the solving of the melting.

Then it was back to a familiar pattern of struggling to find anything else meaningful to build.  It takes infinitely less time to build structures than it did 25 years ago.  Something like an incense burner or a mouse once entailed a very long period of testing materials, cutting wood, sanding wood.  Now we're overflowing in crap in no time after the decision is made.

There's also been a shift from toys that teach to toys that generate value.  A big part of the old days was the learning from building toys that weren't valuable.  Some of it was a lack of money.  Old lion is going to buy a programmer instead of build one from scratch & buy 3D printer addons instead of fabricate them from scratch.  Most of the knowledge is now commonly available, especially all the electronical stuff young lion had to fight to discover.  Most knowledge today can be instantly looked up instead of groping in years of darkness.  Old lion might just more often know the outcome of something where young lion would have to discover it.

There was dabbling in C64 programming, but beyond checking some boxes in unfinished childhood memories, there's no other point.  There's still kind of a desire to make a simple starship game with no real fancy programming like the graphics demos, but when would it ever be played?

There's not really enough money to make any progress in the camera trackers.  The next step isn't getting cheaper like it did 25 years ago.

The biggest need affecting lions now is a long term housing solution, but it's definitely financially out of reach. 

 The other animals seem to be similarly lost.  What they're making, if anything, seems really dry or the same thing everyone else is making.  Most often though, other animals just tweet about what someone else is making.

The headlines on slashdot are all about what governments & large companies are obtaining or making & nothing that individuals can obtain or make.  Old slashdot was audience participation material.  Today, it's all spectator material.  That's the difference lions see between 1999 & today.  Anything an individual makes now is just a tree in a forest so they've all become spectators.  Only big companies, governments, & prominent influencers with massive resources can ever hope to have their work seen by anyone.  Part of it is once again, the next step not getting cheaper like it used to.

Young lion was motivated by love & professing his love.  The tail of that extended 20 more years.

 A new music notation system really might be the biggest win.  A few Cinelerra bugs have crept up.

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 Subscription software is once again dropping the hammer. Most of their users aren't Linux hackers making hobby content in their dorm rooms like 30 years ago.  They're now gootube stars, management consultants, PR firms who don't care about the price or what OS it's for.  Monetizable content is the word.

Lions on the other paw are grateful there's a Gimp & Cinelerra but their use case is very eccentric, these days.  The thought of having to use a conventional workflow like kdenlive is pretty unpleasant.  As bad as Gimp has become, it's better than going back to Photoshop.

 Lions are a bit mystified why the internet in the 90's created the biggest job boom of all time while AI today is creating the biggest job contraction of all time.  By today's logic, the internet should have eliminated swaths of phone answerers, artists, & programmers.  There was the impact of being able to download a lot of software, graphics instead of make it from scratch.  Eventually, the internet did destroy physical media & move jobs off shore but it took much longer.  The mane limit might have been creating enough bandwidth.  Consumers didn't have enough bandwidth or the devices for significant media until way after 2008.

AI is in need of a better interface than the prompt box.  It needs what the iphone was for the browser.

 

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Some more Robotech stills.  Force of arms had the highest animation budget of all of them.  Most of it was actually new animation, especially the up armored veritech.  

 

 

 That was unreal in a daytime cartoon.

That wasn't reused footage from Miss Macross as previously thought.  Only some of the ship explosions were recycled A animation.

They left out color to reduce the cost.

The scrubbing bubbles were quite expensive.

 

There were a lot of easter eggs in that one.

 

It revives the lion kingdom's original fascination with splitting reality up into frames & being able to inspect each one.

Part of the motivation for watching those shows was having to watch everything to see just 1 sequence.  Nowadays, you can just seek directly to any frame & inspect just that.

Unfortunately, mospeada doesn't really do it like it did 40 years ago.  It was young lion's favorite series because the robots looked the best.  To old lion, Scott Bernard sounded like a corporate commander & the cyclone was too unrealistic.

The cyclones weren't really transformers as young lion believed.  They were separate armor pieces which flew apart & snapped together.  It was really disappointing to see what gootubers had to go through to transform the toy.  Lions still believe there must be at least 1 robotech model which could be realized in a fully animated structure, with bearable compromises.

Watched from the 1st day KBHK changed its 3pm lineup in 1985. It really was a WTF moment, something bigger than a normal cartoon. They pre-empted a lot of episodes for sports.

Force of arms had the most new A animation of the series, so it looked really good. Young lion recorded it to try to draw the robots but discovered the resolution of paused VHS was too degraded. Also discovered they didn't really animate every frame but new frames alternated between 2 & 3 frame advances. It was the lion kingdom's 1st encounter with 3:2 pulldown & in fact they did animate every frame.

It was kind of disappointing that the lines were thinner & it didn't look as gritty as Star Blazers but the disappointment was short lived. 

The thicker lines were from a cheaper animation process in the 1970's.