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Big Buck Bunny is an animated short, released under the Creative Common Attribution license.
The film is about “a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself. When one sunny day three rodents rudely harass him, something snaps… and the rabbit ain’t no bunny anymore! In the typical cartoon tradition he prepares the nasty rodents a comical revenge.”
The film is a project of the Blender Foundation. Blender is a free open source 3D content creation suite.
This “open movie” project had as main targets:
Developing tools in Blender for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass
Improve character animation tools for cartoonish motion and deformation
Test Blender with giant outdoor environments, with large grassy fields and many trees with leaves
Further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite
And secondary:
Create a great and good looking animation short, licensed freely as open content
Provide content for other artists to learn from or to re-use, including documentation and tutorials
It’s a cool project - and it’s an animated flick that’s free for you to remix and reuse!"
The reality of "Peak Oil" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil ] is almost upon the world. (If it hasn't happened already, but we're still waiting for the news from politicians, [people who have a worse bedside manner than our neurologists.])
In 242 pages + end notes, a bibliography and an index, Mr. Heinberg manages to deflate the accomplishments of the past century and a half and depress the hell out of anybody who thinks that its just going to go on the same as it has been.
Its not a particularly fun read. (Sort of like my diagnosis was not a fun read.)
But after spending the first 5 charters and 200 pages establishing how oil got into our lives over the past one hundred and fifty years and altered almost every aspect of our power structures, the books launches into how we're going to have to manage the collapse of those power structures.
If we do this with a modicum of intelligence, the changes don't have to be the equivalent to Afghanistan under "Mullah Omar". (Shoot me now, because its just a question of time before he'd order his zealots to do it.)
The questions are myriad and the answers are always going to be "yes!"
Yes, we're going to have to do everything in a sustainable manner and
yes, we're going to have to factor in things like the energy required at every step of a product's life cycle, and
yes, we're going to have fond memories of airline travel, private travel and even rapid travel, and
yes, we're going to hate to commute and share the rides,
yes, we're about to say goodbye to living in the suburbs, except for retirement communities,
yes, we're going to have to recycle because we're no longer able to afford the cost of hauling away trash, and
yes, we're going to have to deal with the resentment of everybody on the planet,
yes, we're going to wave bye bye to fruits and veggies from everywhere on the planet,
yes, we're going to get used to eating locally grown varieties, (which tends to be an oxymoron, variety will be limited to whatever you can order from a seed catalog and grow in farms and co-ops like the one my wife and I belong to,) and
yes, we're going to have to get over having the kinds of hospital expenditures we've got now, (the HMOs are going to be absolute Hell to deal with as prices rise,) and
yes there are all kinds of things that are going to have to change and,
yes, we're looking at a few major plagues and other ecological disasters that we won't be able to avoid, (floods in low lying areas, typhoons and hurricanes leaving more cities like New Orleans and leaving entire countries like Myanmar/Burma, earthquakes shattering economies like in China's south...)
The list goes on, but basically you're going to be left to rely on your own physical resources.
But, and this is the biggest and heaviest "but" we're ever going to have, we'll have a wealth of information at our fingertips since, while the schools may have to move because there's no more "energy in the budget", we've still laid down the foundations of the next economy, the next world order, in shining glass strands,
We're looking at hydro-electricity and bandwidth becoming becoming essential to life in the post-oil world.
Basically, we're fucked. No ifs, ands or buts. We're "screwed, blued an' tattooed".
I hope you enjoyed the past hundred and fifty years because, like the man wrote about: "The Party's Over".
"The Fat Lady done sang".
"Les bons temps on roulés."
(I could do the whole "Monty Python, Dead Parrot" skit, replacing the word "Parrot" with "Way Of Life" but, as part of conserving my own energy, I won't bother.)
Oil was called a non-renewable resource for a reason. And now, there ain't no more. In fact there only "less and less".
Its just going to go from expensive to difficult to impossible to maintain this current lifestyle as the scarce resource gets fought over more and more trying to get at the shrinking slick.
Before you give up the ship though, remember, there is "a realistic hope".
Not the optimist's "blind faith", (Your politicians are not asleep at the switch but, not only are they not dealing with a full deck, they're trying to play a different game, and hoping that nobody'll notice,)
not the pessimist's "bitchy semi-resignation", (We're all fucked, its all [insert name of world leader]'s fault, screw 'em all anyway,)
but the "realist's assessment" ("Okay, what do we need to do to salvage whatever we can possibly salvage".)
Its "not" all "going to hell in a hand basket", but it will "change".
Things will require adaptation to a more measured and carefully paced life style.
We MSers are quite used drastic change.
Its a question of our condition, which may go from bad to worse and back again in a matter of hours.
Uncertainty is our existential condition.
The future belongs to those who can hold their heads while others all around will be losing theirs (in many tragic cases, quite literally.)
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