Everything got better when I became a green-haired 2D girl. I do fun and unusual things with video games and pinball.

cohost inspired me to do more. Thank you



so I'm learning about JPEG XL (JXL)! I have an image viewer that supports it now (ImageGlass) and a Firefox addon that supports it in web pages, so I can look at the JPEG XL Art gallery.

The coolest thing on that site is Iceberg by 0b5vr, the first image on my post, a 2048x2048 image that is 34 bytes. Thirty-four bytes.

I know there's tons of entropy coding or whatever going on there, and so far I've made no effort to understand it. I decided to see which bits I can get away with flipping. Most of the changes I make give me an invalid JXL file, but some of them worked!

  • Flipping bit 0xb7 from 0 to 1 messed up all the vertical lines, replacing them with weird jaggies, and generally moved things to less aesthetically pleasing locations
  • Flipping bit 0xbb from 1 to 0 turned the green channel way down, leaving moody blue gradients
  • Flipping bit 0xe6 from 1 to 0 moved one of the formerly vertical lines even further out of place

with this highly derivative start I'm ready for the JXL demoscene!



I at least understand now what webp is for. It's like png but it supports lossy compression, while keeping the alpha channel and not fucking up all the lines like jpeg would

  • of course that means we have to trust hosting platforms that use webp not to crank up the compression and ruin people's art

  • Google is pushing it really hard so that alone is a reason to dislike it. Let trans authors of published papers change names in your silly Google Scholar and then maybe I'll reconsider changing image formats

  • like 90% of my software supports webp, and y'know 100% would be nice, but until then every webp is going to be moderately irritating to work with, and I'll probably just screenshot it to get a png

meanwhile! JPEG XL is really cool! I have never seen any software that supports it but I wish I had. We've gotten way better at photorealistic image compression since 1992. I would love to see JXL get even the 90% support that webp has

  • yes this means people would come across .jxl images and be as annoyed by them as they are by .webp right now

  • end users can actually see why JPEG would need to be improved though

  • google is fighting against it so I like it

  • apparently you can make cool glitch art by hand-editing .jxl files? I want to see that and play with it

  • if google wants to make webp the next thing, they should get in line behind JPEG XL

  • why is Firefox not picking up Google's fumble here



arborelia
@arborelia

all night tonight is Awful Block on Awesome Games Done Quick! I am ready for some amazingly janky games! Also my wife @FlannelKat is in it

Here's what I expect from the upcoming runs:

Yo! Noid 2: Game of a Year Edition

Yo! Noid 2 is not actually awful. It's fantastic. It just pretends to be an awful licensed game. So you could argue that the Awful Block is not starting yet

Kirby Star Allies

This game is probably fine! It's probably here due to a scheduling constraint.

Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures

Okay we're definitely in the awful block now. This is a painfully terrible idea for a game! Instead of you controlling Pac-Man, Pac-Man is wandering around like a dingus and you manipulate his mind by shooting things with a slingshot. Excited to see a speedrun of it so that we experience as little of it as possible!

Yolanda: The Ultimate Challenge

This is what @FlannelKat is playing! It's a very arbitrary and mean platformer for the Amiga, based on a different game called Hercules. There are like two tracks of music and they sound like anxiety but they're also great

Lizard Lady vs. the Cats, Office Race, Salamander County Public Television

I know nothing about these but I'm excited to find out

Battle of the Eras

This is an amazing feat of game preservation. A bunch of teens got the idea to make a game, like you do. Amazingly, they finished it and planned to sell it. They sold 0 copies. But we can play it now!

It's a DOS fighting game made of stop-motion photos of them wearing costumes. You have to see it. Also the runner, corndan, is a great guy

I hope I can be awake to see it.

I'm going to die if I don't eat sushi!

Also not awful, just cheaply made and pretends to be bad! This game and this run are so much fun. A particular boss fight is the most hype use of royalty-free music ("Banbard" by Mozell) that I've ever encountered. It is sad that I will be asleep for this run

Morodashi Sumo, Dokkaebi-ga Ganda, Sonic Blast, Bad Guys at School

I also have no prior knowledge of these!

Steven Seagal Is: The Final Option

What a name for a game to end the block on. I don't know what to expect but I'll have to catch the video.


arborelia
@arborelia

"these didn't used to exist, in an earlier version of the game, but they were placed here to stop you from doing the thing that I just did"



mogwai-poet
@mogwai-poet

About ten years ago I saw an anonymous Wikipedia user who had edited dozens of articles about Mario, Sonic and Putt-Putt, rotating their names so that the articles about Mario were now about Sonic, the articles about Sonic were now about Putt-Putt, etc. I'm sure those changes were noticed and reverted almost immediately.

Looking deeper into this user's edit history, I found a series of edits to articles about films, changing their running times by adding or subtracting a few minutes. I have no idea whether these changes were ever noticed, but Wikipedia absolutely depends on the kind of person who'll obsessively go through their VHS collection and check each movie's Wikipedia sidebar against the info on the back of the box.

It's impossible to fact-check everything we read, and it's impossible to be aware of every kind of scam, so we rely on heuristics to guess whether to trust any given source. One of the heuristics I've found most useful is to consider what the author has to gain by lying, but sometimes I think about the guy randomly adjusting movie running times and I just have to lie down.



blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

I have my own version of this, in a sense.

November, 2003. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has just come out. I mean it's days old. Maybe even hours old. My friends and I are all congregated on IRC and talking about the game, and one of them laments that its too new for anyone to have properly done a soundtrack rip, because they want an MP3 of the battle theme.

I'm savvy enough that I know how to record the song from an emulator, but just calling it "Battle Theme" sounds so... dry. There's no official title, either. So, when I tagged the song, I just made one up:

  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga - "Let's Go!" (Battle Theme)

I didn't think anything of it.

Well, this friend had connections to a lot of game music community type people. The folks who study game music, care about game music, and remix game music for places like OC Remix. And he must have spread my MP3 around, because I have constantly run across people claiming that the Superstar Saga battle theme is called "Let's Go!"

To be clear, there has never been an official soundtrack release for Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. At best, we've had a "Sound Selection" CD, which collects a handful of songs from all three games, but none of them are the battle theme from Superstar Saga.

So, for example, if you check VGmusic.com, all of the submitted MIDIs for the battle theme are titled "Let's Go!" If you search it on Youtube, you have people to this day treating it as the defacto official title for the song. As of this writing, this upload is only seven months old:

And it was me. I'm the one you can blame for this. The song has no official title and the one I gave it stuck, and it stuck hard.

(A different version of this post I made on tumblr years ago had me saying my made-up-title was "Here We Go!", but given all the MIDIs on VGmusic.com are titled "Let's Go!", I'm pretty sure that had to be the title I made up. Especially given one of the MIDIs is by the person I originally gave my MP3 to nearly 20 years ago, correlated with the fact the song has never been given an official title that I am aware of.)


arborelia
@arborelia

this is reminding me that I should work on my website for the Dreamcast game Napple Tale, because if I want to be the one up-to-date website about Napple Tale I have to, y'know, update it.

And I want to be this person for "Disc 3" of the game's OST. There is no Disc 3 that you can buy. Then again, you can't buy Disc 1 or Disc 2 either unless you go to a used CD store in Japan and get very lucky.

But there are a number of excellent tracks in the game that they never published on a CD, and some but not all of them have in-game text indicating what they're named. If I make a good enough website about the game soundtrack, maybe I get to say what the names of these tracks are!

meanwhile the English track names of Disc 1 and 2 seem to have come from whatever they were called on KaZaa or other file sharing, at the time that someone put them on vgmdb. And the vgmdb track names include mistakes, like "Gatena Toyshop", because whoever was typing names into their CD ripper did not correctly read the kana はてな (hate na) which mean "mystery". The whole English-speaking Internet that talks about this game now agrees that the track is called "Gatena Toyshop" based on one source.

The track in game is called "Mystery Toy Shop".