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Literally just print paper. Glue it on cardboard and a cardboard stand. Its the simplest diy project. You need scissors and glue, primary school supplies. This is very cheap, very easy arts and crafts. Its not just primary school supplies, but its primary school arts and crafts level skill required. Its quick, its quicker than earning the cash to spend on a standee. Consider paper. Paper has it for you.

Paper is also biodegradable.

FAQ:

Q: I dont have a printer at home!

A: An office store or library has it.

Q: But will they let me print copyrighted shit?

A: If the printers are self serve, they dont know. Unless its something absolutely socially unacceptable, nobody is going to glance over your shoulder and then rush over to stop you. Even if the printers are not self serve, I’ve never dealt with a business who cares.

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Legal disclaimer: Satire/Parody. This post is a joke. Do not break the law, especially because you read some dumb blog online.

You should pirate Undertale. Its a decade old, and still sells a ton of merch, meaning its creator is not at financial risk. It got DRM-free releases, meaning pirating it is fairly trivial. But its not entirely non-trivial, you will learn a lot about piracy by pirating Undertale. Its also a small game in terms of file size: if you make a misfire, you won’t lose too much in terms of download time. Just watch out for viruses! It’s a good game, too. It’s a popular game, its an influential game, its one of the Games You Should Play TM. But if you don’t want to play it, the game starts quickly, you can easily boot it up to check you did it correctly and transfer your new skills to pirating something you want to play.

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Splendidland is artist Samanthuel Louise Gillson. She is most famous for her “don’t talk to me or my son ever again” meme post, and character design for a few enemies on Deltarune Chapter 2. Her website is www.splendid.land .

Anyway her games are megaman sprite game, FRANKEN, and Formless Star. All these games are free, and none of them are long. This is a review of those three games.

Megaman (Megaman Sprite Comic Player Character)

Megaman Sprite Game

https://megamanspritecomic.tumblr.com/post/65735240451/megaman-sprite-game-released-on-october-31st

what

Hero (FRANKEN Player Character)

FRANKEN

https://splendidland.itch.io/franken

Short, fun RPG that reminds me of old GBC RPGs I used to play. A great throwback to relive retro gaming, in the space of 2 hours instead of 20 hours. The store page estimated 30 mins – 1 hour, but I am very slow at games.

I think its cute enough, and has things to offer outside of nostalgia. Its got a nice vibe and great character designs, and a fun story. This story also riffs on RPG tropes, and its not very surprising to anybody familiar with the past decade of meta RPGs, not that predictability is bad. It would have been electric if it was released ten years earlier, but its not bad now.

One detail I really like is the dissonance between the field sprites and character portraits. Although the game only has one artist, it gives the impression of a game with multiple artists and multiple visions for the same character, which feels very true.

Another detail that I like is that Cid Pollendina is here.

Anemo (Formless Star Player Character)

Formless Star

https://splendidland.itch.io/formless-star

Speaking of GBC RPGs, just by coincidence, I had played Dragon Quest Monsters 2 last year. One thing that DQM2 does is have randomly generated “worlds”, as part of its Pokemon-like multiplayer mechanics. It’s a mechanic I was thinking of when I was playing Formless Star.

Its a little exploration game about finding weird creatures. It scratches the itch of finding weird guys, and I think if that sounds good to you then you should give it a go.

There’s no point not going for 100%. You can end the game early, but the 100% ending doesn’t take long to achieve and the additional scenes for completion are the best in the game.

I had trouble finding the last creature, a UFO who’s gimmick is that only one spawns per map. The in-game hint wasn’t very helpful for this one, which is unusual, as the in-game hints are otherwise very helpful. There was probably also an element of bad luck in my experience. Oh well.

final score

Three out of 3
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I like my obnoxious footer of 88×31 buttons, and i’ve found more to add so its more annoying now.

I did add some QOL: a blue border around banners which are clickable. So now you know where to point your mouse, and where to just look and enjoy. Here are some hot links that are also new:

I probably need to do something to collate my banners and my cool links page but i probably wont.

Also I haven’t shouted out affiliate FTLFW yet, but its been there for a while. Go check it out if you like multimedia sprite comics.

vvv scroll down to see the footer vvv

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WebP Bad

WebP feels like DRM. It’s interrupting the long standing trinity of GIF, PNG, and JPEG for web images. Its not supported by many legacy programs – well-supported by programs released in the last few years, but if you have an older or abandoned image tool you like using, it’ll give you problems. It feels like it appeared overnight, and nothing supports it.

WebP is developed by Google. It is free, open source, Google don’t directly profit off it, and WebP can be implemented by anyone. Either way, it feels a step in Google taking control of what formats and technologies we use to view the web. In particular, the way WebP has been pushed to the exclusion of the competing and better (for static images) JPEGXL image format has many concerned.

Google have used Chrome, a proprietary freeware web browser based on Google’s open-source Chromium browser, to implement several controversial hostile anti-features. Google develops the browser, Google develops the image formats, and Google bad. Its a bit silly*, but I do see where the apprehension comes from. Even if so much is open-source, for now, what stops Google for enshittifying the web from the core of its file format foundations in the future? I don’t personally see the future shaking out this way, but I can empathise with the concern.

*Not the part about Google being bad. Google bad.

Unfortunately, WebP is good for animated images. It’s so good. Lets look at the competition, to argue why its time for a change:

What about…

GIF?

I love GIF! But even as I love them, I need to concede that GIF is an old, dusty image format with restrictions that seem arcane by today’s standards. 256 colours is a tiny amount. When GIF was competing with JPEG 1, it produced images that were comparatively sharp and clear. But the world has moved on, and GIF is no longer competing with image formats from the 1980s.

The only advantage GIF has had for decades is the fact its widely supported and animated – some newer web apps no longer know what to do with static GIFs. This inertia of being widely supported and animated has kept GIF around long after its been pushed to its limits. Animated GIFs were designed around short, low resolution looping images – using them to display short clips of TV shows is them at their absolute limit.

The kind of image the animated GIF file format was build around – a small cartoon with a few colours.

Web users wanted a format to display short animated clips from videos, TV and movies. And GIF was the closest fit. These push the format to its limits, with large file sizes and obvious compression artefacts.

APNG?

The compression isn’t very good. Despite what the rest of this article has me sounding like, I’m not some file format expert. All I know, with the tools i’ve used, is that these files come out huge. I don’t like that.

APNG was only recently embraced by the PNG Development Group. Although it has been supported on the web a long time, this lack of official support has left its status in the lurch from 2007 to 2023. Its a format in a really weird place, and history will tell if official support has come just in time to be superseded by WebP.

MPEG-4

Here’s where we hit a compatibility snag, with the way the web is organised by those designing platforms. This is just video. And its good, its fine. A silent video is a good, compressed way of delivering short clips – and I have done so on this website before. For a self-hosted website, using short silent video is a good way to show short animated clips.

But its all in the usage, and the people who run platforms – they might not want to support video. They want “video” and “image” file formats to be two separate spheres to support. Its useful for platform content management for video and images to be kept separate, and for this separation to be designated by file format. Since platforms are a primary way users interact with the web, mass-adoption of a video format in place of an image format is not possible.

You can’t natively upload video clips – but platforms did convert your GIFs to very compressed videos, leading to the ugliest compression known to man.

I loooove the colour banding of gifs combined with the blurry DCT artifacting of MP4. Lossy compression on top of lossy compression. This is so ugly, that the ugliness is an artform in itself. This is deep fried. This is gore, compression gore of the image format I love.

Aversion to short form video is changing for different reasons. The success of short-form video platforms has created a gold rush mania around being the next Tiktok. If you though reaction GIFs were annoying they’re making reaction images with sound now and its worse. But this isn’t an old man yells at cloud rant. This is…

A lukewarm defence of WebP.

  • Animated images in a file format with no arcane restrictions handed down to us from the 1980s. Displays animations Good.
  • When .PNG came to prominence it was also widely unsupported, so with more support WebP will come. Don’t worry. It’s fine.
  • justice for jpegxl justice for jpegxl justice for jpegxl

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Hard drives are physical media.

There’s a specific tech illiteracy that’s been deliberately engineered, where people don’t know the difference between files stored on their computer and data accessed over the internet. This is an important distinction, because drm-free files stored on your computer are physical media to the same degree an optical disc is.

A movie in your hard drive is not significantly different from an optical disc, in terms of data encoded. These are different storage mediums for the same data.

The files on your hard drive cannot be revoked, unless you let the DRM in! Don’t let the DRM in! Hard drives: they’re physical media.

Its kind of brilliant, right? Businesses control your access to movies through the cloud and always-on DRM. They convince you that your hard drive is an ephemeral item, one you can’t control. Finally, they convince you to buy their expensive premium product to remedy the problem they’ve created. You aren’t sticking it to the man by “returning to discs”, you’re falling for their marketing campaign!

And what can you do about it? I mean, you can pirate

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A lot of netizens nowadays consider their email more private than they may in the past. Email is niche social networking, more a place for business.

I don’t consider my email address sacred, and do hand it out often, but I don’t like handing it out to comment boxes. Weird boundaries yeah.

Handing out your email lets sites notify you of replies. I mean, maybe you don’t care.

It can also be used as anti-spam. I mean, its not hard to invent a fake address. I use a captcha to prevent spam here anyway. I also invent fake email addresses myself as a human.

Its the default option in WordPress, to ask for users emails. But I turned it off, or made it optional. Leave a comment if i forgot!!! in the mean time Consider making emails optional for yourselves, webmasters.