With the incredible cold experienced
recently (and still) by many and more snow on the way for the mid-Atlantic and
ice forecast for the deep south, today’s post is just something light and
frivolous and yet historical! A nice
distraction from mother nature.
An article in Wired back in December bearing the title
These Incredible
Animated GIFs Are More Than 150 Years Old starts out with ...
More than 150 years before Buzzfeed uploaded its first cat GIF, people were already captivated by looping animations. In those days, of course, there was no photoshop or screen grabbing, no Tumblrs and Twitter to help craft and share the perfect GIF. Rather, artists relied on optical tools—things like zoetropes, phenakistoscopes, thaumatropes and other gadgets with very strange names to bring their illustrations to life.
Check out these
interesting and sometimes almost disturbing animated images (equivalent to
modern-day GIFs) as enjoyed by our ancestors.
I did a Google (TM)
search on phenakistoscopes and there are quite a few images to be found if you
feel you need more distracting!
... and here are thaumatropes ...
... and zoetropes ...
Are there other forms of entertainment enjoyed by our ancestors that we might want to take advantage of when winter weather keeps us indoors?
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