(Roughly) Daily

“The more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size”*…

From the annals of animation…

A Boy And His Atom earned the Guinness World Records record for the “World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.”…

What you see on screen are individual carbon monoxide molecules moving around. The film was zoomed in 100 million times. The actual plot of the film is about a boy who bounces his atom around and watches it morph into different forms such as clouds and the word “THINK,” which has been IBM’s slogan since 1911…

And as to how it was made…

A Boy And His Atom is the world’s smallest movie,” from @BoingBoing.

* Aristotle, Poetics

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As we muse on the micro, we might lament that fact that it was on this date in 1944 that the final installment of George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat appeared– exactly two months after Herriman’s death. The strip– aguably the best ever; inarguably foundational to the form– debuted in New York Journal (as the “downstairs” strip in Herriman’s predecessor comic, The Dingbat Family (later, The Family Upstairs).  Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup stepped out on their own in 1913, and ran until 1944– but never actually succeeded financially.  It was only the admiration (and support) of publisher William Randolph Hearst that kept those bricks aloft.

The final strip

source

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