Some have asked me to make a post regarding gay men being rounded up in Chechnya. Now, let me just clarify that details are very slim because the government is denying this (obviously) and there are a lot of posts on tumblr with misinformation. So I’ll do as best I can here:
An independent Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, and human rights activists have been providing this information. “In Chechnya, the command was given for a ‘prophylactic sweep’ and it went as far as real murders,” the Novaya Gazeta reported.
According to the newspaper, dozens of men between the ages of 16 and 50 have mysteriously disappeared off the streets. Reports say that authorities aided in these roundups by posing as men looking for dates online. They also say that some of these men are well known religious leaders and/or popular faces on local television.
The Russian LGBT Network has set up a hotline for those seeking help and evacuation from the region. They told the media that they have received reports of what’s been happening in these prisons. “Gay people have been detained and rounded up and we are working to evacuate people from the camps and some have now left the region. Those who have escaped said they are detained in the same room and people are kept altogether, around 30 or 40. They are tortured with electric currents and heavily beaten, sometimes to death,” Svetlana Zakharova from the Russian LGBT network said.
A spokesman for Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s leader, is claiming that the reports are “absolute lies and disinformation,” and said that “You cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic. If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.” They are even claiming that these reports were nothing more than an April Fools joke because the Novaya Gazeta article was published on April 1st. The Kremlin is also denying any knowledge of these reports.
The Human Rights Watch in Moscow told the media that they’ve gained information regarding these attacks that include torture, humiliation, and at least three reports of murder.
Note that it’s very difficult to get much information on this because almost no independent journalists or rights activists are able to work in the region due to restrictions. A journalist from the Novaya Gazeta has spoken out against Kadyrov before and was murdered only days later.
A Chechen activist who claims to work on human rights in the republic (and works on Kadyrov’s human rights council) has denied the claims. She told a Russian radio station “In our Chechen society, any person who respects our traditions and culture will hunt down this kind of person without any help from authorities, and do everything to make sure that this kind of person does not exist in our society.”
Novaya Gazeta said they have been able to confirm their information with an “unprecedented large number of sources in the Interior Ministry of the Chechen Republic, in the administration of the head of the republic, the FSB Department for Chechnya, the Chechen prosecutor’s office finally local LGBT activists.” They are also saying that a former military headquarters is the site of the camp.
I don’t really know what people generally call this method of sigil making, so I’m just calling it “Letter Shaping” because you’re using the basic shapes from certain letters. This is the most common form of sigil making, and it allows the most creative influence. As you see above the sigils are for nearly the same thing, yet the sigils came out completely different. Not because the purpose was different, but because I approached them both a different creative way, and that’s what I like so much about this method. There’s a lot of freedom and personalization involved.
draw fast. it’ll look messy for a long time but you’ll improve faster than if you spend 4 hours on every drawing
if you draw in pencil and have a habit of erasing all of your mistakes, try drawing in pen or marker. i know it’s scary but it’ll help in the long run (i’m speaking from experience)
try different methods and mediums but don’t worry about mastering any of them, just have fun
if you’re not rich, buy art supplies from the dollar store, not the art store (seriously. i go through a sketchbook about once a month and i’d rather spend $4 on one than $15)
there’s no wrong way to learn. you can copy other people’s art if you want to, just don’t post it
DO NOT worry about having a consistent style. do not. just draw however you want
if you want to make original characters then do it. don’t worry about if they’re original, or a good design, or if they have an accompanying story. make sonic ocs. do it. it’s fun and it’s not hurting anyone
try not to kill your back. stand up and stretch once in a while
make a folder and save all of your favorite arts for inspiration
draw from life. draw your dog. draw your teachers. draw your desk. draw your own hands (seriously that’s the best way to get better at drawing hands)
in general, drawing from life or a photo is better than drawing from a diagram
draw whatever you want. draw youtubers if you like youtubers. draw undertale if you like undertale. when i was a kid i drew nothing but shadow the hedgehog and horses. everyone deserves to draw what they want without being mocked, and if people start making fun of you, block them and keep drawing
don’t expect to get any notes at first. don’t let it discourage you. if you want validation go show your art to your mom or your friends or your teacher or your grandma
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.
Plus, you know, Jurassic Park had a plot and well-written characters? So you weren’t even that surprised the dinosaurs were there – suspension of disbelief at its finest.
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