So thing is about Raymond is that there are a lot of factors as to why he is so popular and it’s getting really out of hand with people trading him
The fact that he’s a new interesting looking cat villager isn’t least among them. Cat villagers have always been pretty popular, and so it’s not surprising that a new one would get a lot of love. He is also smug, which is probably the male personality type that bothers people the least. The fact that he is very anthropomorphized, has glasses and heterochromia only makes him more of an interesting looking villager.
And of course he fits the cartoon twink aesthetic a la onceler that large parts of fandoms like
But it’s not just his appeal that has lead to this whole Thing. It’s also his rarity. Raymond is actually the most rare villager in the game, which a lot of people probably don’t realize.
You might think you get an equal chance to get any villager when you go to mystery islands, but that isn’t the case. See, when the game decides what villager will be at your island, it rolls two factors. First it rolls for the species of the villager. So here, there is an equal chance of any species. After it figures out the species, it rolls for the specific villager. Here is what makes some more rare than others. There are more cats than any other species, so your chances of getting the specific cat you want are much slimmer than, say, getting the specific octopus you want.
Now you don’t have a slimmer chance of getting Raymond than any other cat, so what makes Raymond more rare? Amiibo cards.
Raymond is the only new cat, which means that he is the only cat that doesn’t have an amiibo card. This means that the only way you can get Raymond with 100% certainty is by trading him with someone else but also means that more Raymonds aren’t being introduced into the ecosystem like character with amiibos are.
And people might not realize this, but there IS an ecosystem when it comes to the pool of villagers available. When you let a villager leave without someone taking them, that villager doesn’t just disappear. They will go into a queue of villagers and then move into an empty space that someone on your friend list has if it’s left open too long. So once a villager exists, it exists for theoretically all AC players and can jump from friend list to friend list as long as they aren’t allowed to leave while you have no friends or aren’t connected to the internet.
So villagers with amiibo cards can be introduced into this ecosystem all the time, but Raymond and the other new villagers can only be introduced when they’re found, and Raymond is the one least likely to be found.
So that is basically why this Whole Thing with Raymond is happening. There is a scarcity of Raymonds that doesn’t exist as severely with any other villager. But the good news is, this will calm down. More people will find more Raymonds over time and introduce him into the internet ecosystem and his value will decrease when more and more become available. Nintendo is going to print amiibos for him eventually which will mean there will be a code to introduce him, which will probably cause the Raymond market to collapse. Raymond is an investment that will decrease over time, so if you want him, just wait. Don’t spend real money on him or trade a thousand NMT. He will become much less scarce over time. He may stay popular, but the scalper market will shrink for him.
Do not invest in the Raymond markets. His stock value will plummet.
Raymond is a lesson in artificial scarcity
Very fitting considering he looks very business-like.
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.
That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.
Hey maybe people should actually just get free treatment to begin with? 🤔🤔
Maybe we should also ask - why was the wheelchair priced at $20,000 if a high school robotics team could make one for, if not free, within the school budget for materials?
