Have an awesome Christmas
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 16 years ago, in 2008, on the World Wide Web.
This short film is 110 years old and now you can watch it on YouTube. That makes it awesome. I mention this partly because awesome things, being awesome, are worth appreciating for their own sake. And also because you’re awesome, and though the world is cold and dark right now but we’ve set aside some time — all of us, people in every nation, every creed and every age, whenever we’ve been able to — at about this time of year to light the lights and make hot drinks and to gather celebrate goodwill, peace, comfort and joy. It is a time to remember that we can be awesome, that though the world is big and empty and dark and cold, there is also warmth and light, and it can come from us — from the desire and the will and the craft that you, each of you, have for making marvels never before seen, and for projecting them with the light of a magic lantern to the wonder of your fellows; and from the solidarity and admiration and love that we, all of us, can share with each other for what we have together, comforting and inspiring and driving each of us to become our most awesome selves. You’re all awesome, really, and you deserve to be reminded of it, and I hope you all will be.
Happy Christmas, y’all.
Follow
Awesome!
I think these moving pictures are going to really catch on.
Merry Christmas! Charles.
Sweet! A Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
I hope it’s been wonderful, Charles. Mine has been.
I Googled around a little to find out a bit more about the filmmaker, G.A. Smith.
Sounds like he was a pretty interesting guy. He was a performing hypnotist prior to his filmmaking career and claimed to be a genuine psychic. Smith was one of the earliest pioneers in special effects for film.
But to cut to the chase, one historical fact about Smith may be of particular interest to libertarians: Smith developed “Kinemacolor,” an early coloring process for motion pictures. Seems that someone else claimed to have already had a patent on a similar technology and sued Smith in 1914, which effectively ended Smith’s filmmaking career. The inventor who brought the suit, William Friese Greene, went bankrupt some years before, and apparently at least a couple of his inventions were duds. But he held a lot of patents.