article

|

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
article

|

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

article

|

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

article

|

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.

article

|

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.

article

|

I like when these children in 1999 flame each other while writing trying out creative writing with a fanfiction about all the things they love.

http://hijola.fobby.net/ubb/Forum7/HTML/000049.html

Here’s a comic:

A special Female's Fanfic (in other words, Females only!)
All SNES RPGs are enabled, and SOME Pokemon.
Why girls only?
(BROCK, GET OUT!! DON'T ASK STUPID QUESTIONS AND ADD E-MAIL TO MY ACCOUNT FOR NOTHING. That goes for anyone else who dares to do that. That was ANNOYING, Brock, but here's you answer: Girls need their time in the light, so DON'T ASK THAT AGAIN!! Excuse the outburst, but I MUST make my point SOMEHOW.)
The end!

All rips via the Spriters Resourse and Starmen.net, of course!

Custom graphic Yuko Asou (Earthbound/MOTHER 2-style) made by Jon Gandee and shadowman44.

No additional rights reserved on this sprite comic.

article

|

The Intertidal Zone is a short comedy edutainment comic made by Stephen Hillenburg in 1989, and is considered a precursor to the Spongebob Squarepants television show. The story focuses on larger than life show anchor Rocky the Shrimp and his cohost Bob the Sponge, as they interview the inhabitants of the eponymous intertidal zone and discover their unique traits.

This comic was considered lost media, until it was scanned and uploaded to the internet archive by MasterDonut on 24/04/2024. Cheers, mate. This is a cleanup of MasterDonut’s scans, and I am pleased to present them here today.

Dropbox download | Read online here

NEW! Grab the torrent here.

I can’t seed this torrent 24/7. If I ever stop seeding it forever i’ll remove the link from the page, but as long as the link is here, I will get back to seeding it eventually. Also: Help me seed it! I could really use a hand, thanks.

GIF – Before – After

article

|

Hello, RSS Feed fans. This article is for people who’ve chosen to use RSS feeds, and picked an RSS feed reader. Those choices are outside the scope of this article. What this article is about is filling your empty feed reader, deciding what to put in there and how to surf the web in search of feeds.

However, I can’t just tell you what exactly to pop in there. I will give you a few direct recommendations in the end, but you need to find things you enjoy and add them in yourself. These are some guidelines to help you select things to add.

How do I know if a website has an RSS feed?

The common feed icon depicts the tip of an antennae, with two or three radio waves rippling out of it. The RSS Logo is typically orange, although it comes in other colours. If you see this icon, it should represent an RSS Feed.

Not all websites will have an obvious link to their RSS feed. but it will still exist.

If a social media platform debut’d in the 00s, there’s a good chance it supports RSS. There’s a bit of an RSS support gap in mainstream social media platforms which started in the 10s. But RSS is still common enough that if in doubt, you should always check and see.

It depends on the culture in which the website was developed, as well. Websites from the computer geek side of the web, open-source and GNU nerds (affectionate), have RSS support a lot. VC-funded web startups that want to be the new Facebook, the people who want to build a web silo, are less likely to build RSS support into their website. A fediverse site like Mastodon supports RSS feeds, a fediverse site like Bluesky or Threads doesn’t.

[see: Footnote 1]

My web browser automatically detects RSS feeds, and adds an icon to the address bar if it detects one. If yours browser doesn’t, there are browser extensions. Haven’t got a specific one to recommend, just look around.

Some RSS feed providers will automatically detect a feed if you put a URL in. You can also use a service like getrssfeed.com can detect RSS feeds on a website.

Search engines can help you find RSS feeds for platforms the manual way. Type Platform + RSS Feed into a search engine, and it’ll let you know if feeds exist.

About Large Platforms and Social Media

Although it might seem like an easy way to fill your feeds, just duplicating your existing social media feeds is unadvisable. Give yourself new things to look at, or you’re going to get burned out seeing nothing but repetitive notifications.

There’s probably a large social media platform full of very talented and interesting users, but you don’t really want to use it for whatever reason. And if the platform supports RSS feeds, well, there you go. As a personal example, I don’t go on Deviantart much any more. Even less, since I moved the few people I followed into my RSS feed. “But Deviantart doesn’t have RSS after the Eclipse update” says the person who didn’t search and see the first result for Deviantart + RSS Feed.

So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. Think if this person who’s posts you already like, and is using a platform you don’t. A Tumblr user you like also uses Mastodon. Now, you don’t use Mastodon in this hypothetical, but you want to see that poster’s sweet Mastodon posts. Mastodon is a website that supports RSS feeds. Add their feed to your reader, follow the posts, all without needing a Mastodon account.

Sometimes, its ok to just duplicate your existing social media feeds, if the feeds are algorithm-driven and unreliable. People question Youtube’s reliability, I think its superstitious but you can add Youtube channels to your feed reader so you KNOW you’re not missing anything.

About Small web, independent web, niche social media.

One of the good things about RSS is how you don’t need to limit yourself to notable platforms. There’s a large web out there, and RSS feeds can help you keep up with it all. I know its the harder work, but you’d be surprised at how easily they accumulate in your feed once you start. This is about exercising your web surfing skills. Be curious, and bias towards subscribing to a webmaster rather than not subscribing.

Web native media like blogs, webcomics, and podcasts very often have RSS feeds. There’s even a website just for webcomic feeds, called Piperka.

You can use RSS feeds to automate forum lurking, although even forums software from the heyday of RSS have patchy support. The best forum software RSS support I’ve found is for Discourse, which one of the newer forum softwares on the block. New as in its ten years old, but u get it. For example, PHPBB has been around twice as long and has RSS support that sucks out of the box. Webmasters can choose to extend the RSS feed support of forums with plugins, but you know, they don’t lol. Feel free to ask ur local forum webmaster to install the RSS plugin if u want. Still, if a forum is slow-moving enough, it having just the one feed might be enough to lurk it.

RSS where there isn’t usually RSS.

Kill the newsletter

Some webmasters opt for an email newsletter instead of an RSS feed. But you can subscribe to that newsletter as an RSS feed, using kill-the-newsletter.

I think experiencing newsletters as an RSS feed makes a huge psychological difference. The contents of an email newsletter feel like an Object, like A Spam, to me. Reading them as a feed just feels more natural and enjoyable. Even if you hate email newsletters, give it a go. Throw a donation to the developer if you love it too.

I do experience cosmetic formatting issues with Kill the Newsletter, but these don’t impact the readability.

Websites I follow this way are mostly normie stuff, local businesses and government institutions, and news websites.

Alternative front ends

Many major websites may have alternative front ends available. A front end is the user interface side of a website, the way a website is presented to visitors. The back end is the machine side of a website, the underlying data a website processes. An alternative front end is a way to view the back end data, in a way that’s designed by somebody who’s not the website’s owner. It’s the same contents but a different interface.[see: footnote 2] And sometimes these different interfaces support RSS feed, where the official front end does not.

So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. A Youtube user you like also uses Tiktok. Now, you don’t use Tiktok in this hypothetical, and Tiktok doesn’t support RSS feeds. But Tiktok has an alternative front end called Proxytok, that does support RSS feeds. Now, you can see all the videos just with your RSS feed.

I’ve also seen Tiktok described as unusable due to its algorithmically-generated feed being bothersome for potential users. If you do enjoy Tiktok videos and want to exclusively build your own feed, with no algorithm nonsense, you can do it with ProxyTok and RSS feeds.

My most-used alternative front end is Nitter. It’s a Twitter front end. I quit Twitter, for the normal reasons. But I can still follow all the same users on Twitter, without using Twitter. I get the back end stuff I like (microblogs from good posters), without the frontend stuff I hate. It also means Twitter can’t show me ads, or track my activity to sell to advertisers. I don’t financially contribute to Twitter’s ecosystem any more, which is great. It’s like i’m stealing Twitter, which I love doing.

There is a list of alternative front ends here. You want to click on the Main Instance or Public Instances links. The others are for advanced users, you don’t need to self-host or worry about onion links. Keep things simple unless you really, really want to make them complicated.

Not all alternative front ends support RSS feeds, though. You’ll have to research them (try using them) to find out.

Keep at it

I stopped using RSS feeds when everyone else did, when Google Reader shut down. When I first got back into RSS feeds, it wasn’t much to look at. I followed a few things. Feeds weren’t fast. This may be desirable for some people, but in the Google Reader days, I was checking my RSS feeds daily. I wanted that pace back, and was frustrated when it wasn’t. I was bored, I wanted to give up again. But now, I have the pace I want.

It must be so hard for people just starting out. It was probably hard for me starting in the Google Reader days, but I don’t remember. I went back and re-subscribed to feeds I remember having, I had a starting point. I don’t know how hard it would be for somebody with no starting point. But treat it like a project, and keep at it. You didn’t onboard to social media you like in a day, let the onboarding of RSS feeds take a while.

Here are some things I subscribe to, that a general audience might like.

  • Blenderartists.org Forums: Finished Projects. Website | Feed
    • Blender Artists is a forum for people who use the 3D software Blender. So its just a feed of indie CGI art, which is neat! A lot of artists here also have personal sites and portfolios, so it can be a good jumping off point for web surfing if this is your jam.
  • albumoftheday Website | Feed
    • It’s an album! Every day! Gonna unsub to this one, because it links to Spotify and I don’t use Spotify. u can have it instead
  • Overclocked Remix Website | Feed
    • Vidoe game music remixes.
  • The News
    • Whatever news you like here.
  • FediVideo Website | Feed
    • Curated list of variety video recommendations hosted on the fediverse platform Peertube.
  • me its me
    • blatant self promotion

These aren’t really for a general audience so much, are they. Ask me about the even more niche stuff in the comment’s if you like, ask me shit like “do you subscribe to any anime sites”. Except don’t ask that one because i’m answering it now with Jojo News Website | Feed.

Footnotes

Footnote 1. This image was taken from “RSS Autodiscovery” by Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin of the RSS Advisory Board
– https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20081106104156/http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Cheers!

Footnote 2. The explanation of alternative front-ends is stolen from:
“You Probably Want to Know About “Alternative Front-ends” by Justin Hanagan.
– https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20230522232310/https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
I just paraphrased this info to suit my post. Visit the original articles for more details and a more complete explanation, it’s a good article.