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:
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
Made a page for my web graphics. Click here to enter the graphics zone. Everything is free to use, and always will be. Has all my current 88×31 buttons, as well as new ones. There are also Dragon Ball Z GIFs, and GIFs from other games too.
I will make a new blog post whenever I add major updates the page.
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
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.
‘When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.‘
bad. free (price) is vital to free (dom). where money is involved, poor people have less freedom, and in this license too. also, simply not wanting to pay for software for any reason is an example of free expression
this post is a bad idea . i should post this in four years so we can celebrate 30 YEARS OF GPL FLAME WARs BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!S
cohost didnt do anything. it was like tumblr, but less functional.
using basic website functionality was called “css crimes”.
users were in a weird parasocial relationship with the staff, which was highly unusual behaviour for people my age. This continues after the site’s demise.
We’ve reached an era of the internet where there’s a lot of reflection on old web reviwers. Channel Awesome and their ilk. I spend a week watching a shit ton of them. I was doing a no Youtube challenge and ended up watching CA shit on Archive.org, obeying the letter but not the spirit of the challenge.
These reviewers certainly have their shortcomings. Sometimes, the takes are bad. They often use slurs, which were wrong to use at the time. The angry review format is far more about righteous anger than empathy, meeting a work halfway, and understanding why media is how it is. You could call EA games fucking idiots and it feels good they deserve it, but it could be more constructive to direct rigorous anger to bigger issues than individual game devs. Granting empathy and meeting a work of media halfway can improve even the angry review. I think the more thoughtful video essay is a natural evolution, but this evolutionary shift also occurred over a decade ago – feminist media critique was in its heyday by the late 00s – but it took a little extra time to Pivot To Video. The first article I read about Super Mario 1-1 teaching you how to play it was written by feminist media critic.
Other people can handle the follies better than I can. I want to take a different critical lens: Things in old media reviews that I like.
I liked the swearing. A lot of old reviewers used swearing and slurs, the slurs fucking suck but the swearing ruled. It just wouldn’t be funny if reviewers called a game from 1989 a poo load of seggs, they need to call it a shitload of fuck. Word choice matters, and swearing is a good choice. The algorithm superstition that causes cOnTeNt CrEaToRs to hold their tongue is embarrassing. Note that I said algorithm superstition, these cowards of content creators don’t even act based on things that can be proven, if they even think the algorithm wants something they nod and obey. Its so embarrassing. Its embarrassing that I need to defend bad words on line as a concept, what is wrong on-line.
Nothing pisses my ears off like a swearing bleep, they’re always just grating and awful.
I liked how they’d use copyrighted music. It is a profound misunderstanding of fair use that any music is fair game if used as an aesthetic component of a review, even if the review has nothing to do with song choices. It’s an excellent one. I loved to learn about reviewers music choices, it said a lot about them and their interests. Just letting a song play for the fucking vibes. As with everyone else, reviewers were richer for breaking copyright law, and should continue to break copyright law whenever possible.
I liked the lack of pussy footing, and ways they treated their audience like adults. No “this is just an opinion guys” “its okawy is u think differently” padding: subjectivity was understood to be known to already be implied. These statements are added to reviews by media critics who are cowards. Or as algospeak, a form of speech to pad out cOnTeNt in order to earn algorithm points. Reviewers who make statements like these are embarrassing, and I prefer the certainty of older reviewers who didn’t bother with that trash.
I also like how older reviewers would just be mean to their viewers in some regards. Rack ’em (13 year olds sending weak flames supposedly on your behalf) instead of a weak “Pwease don’t harass anyone”. Call your comment box full of idiots, if they’re being fucking idiots. If some flamer comes at you like “thats just your opinion man”, fucking duh subjectivity was implied, get rude.
Channel Awesome itself was flawed and deserved to die, but its even slight human curation was amazing. Imagine an entire blog site telling you where the decent reviews were, instead of a machine learning algorithm slinging you slop essays. A lot of the bad reputation of video essays is due to algorithm slinging, dogshit essays with catchy titles make everyone roll their eyes at that bullshit. I do lurk forum threads which recommend videos – and that is absolutely the only way to do it.
I spoke of angry reviewers not granting empathy, so let me grant that empathy to the 10s. Most video media still believed it had to adhere to a schedule, and usually a weekly one. This encouraged the production of what can only be described as filler, to fit a schedule they convinced themselves they needed. Low effort, formulaic reviews. This would delay or outright prevent the production of more thoughtful media. I also need to point out that people working for Channel Awesome were working for Channel Awesome, which was shit.
It’s a review thats tedious nitpicking, and knows its insincere and adhering to formula. The end section is pretty much dedicated to showing that fact off. I don’t think its a very good review, it comes off as annoying and nitpicky, even if it knows itself as such the self-awareness doesn’t make it good. What I like about it is the skits, the parodies of reviewers taking soft drink sponsorships. It seems prescient in the current day.
Trespasser: Jurassic Park’s Biggest Failure? – A History | Monotonal Lizard
Ok so this is the video that made me write this article. I had these thoughts since the No Youtube challenge mentioned up top. This video contains a section talking about angry bloggers, who predate angry video reviews. Everything I’ve said here has nothing to do with the critics mentioned in this video – It’s a non-sequitur. But you need to shout out your inspirations. And this video made me want to say things.
Maybe one day i’ll write my “Old Man Murray’s popular take on the death of Adventure Games was always really bad, but it also aged like milk” post, but actually I think that sums it up.
I loathe a lot of social media sites! But you don’t! Reposting my art helps me use the web I like, and you get to enjoy sharing cool things. Please, if you like my art, repost it. The permissive license is there for a reason.
I don’t like begging for engagement like this. I like to trust my audience and not treat them like babies who need “like and subscribe” jingled in their faces to know how to interact with a fucking website. However, with the amount of fucking embarrassing web artists who scream about theft if you use the same pose or something, I thought I’d make my position super clear: I would really, really appreciate it if you reposted my art. Or used my poses, also.
