Believe it or not web browsers didn't always zoom images. You could enlarge text but the photo or animation remained whatever size it was. When browsers started zooming picture content, initially the Windows and Netscape style browser used "nearest neighbor" resizing, so the creator of an HTML page could make pixel art by taking a 10 x 30 pixel gif and resizing it in HTML to "100%." (Or 300 x 900, or what have you.)
The Safari-style browser treated all images like photos that needed to be smoothed by anti-aliasing out the pixels. This sucked for your pixel art, but eventually all the browsers imitated Apple so it became a moot point.
Sometime in the mid to late '00s Charles Westerman made a page that worked well as pixel art but ran afoul of the Apple "smooth" model. In 2009 this still seemed worth griping about. The page is down in its original location so I am reposting it here. (Kind of like net art reconstruction as practiced by "art and technology" websites.)
Using an online image editing site that still uses nearest neighbor, I made an animated GIF [3.2 MB .gif] at 1000 pixels that approximates what Westerman's page looked like on Internet Explorer and Firefox before they switched over to Steve Jobs smooth jazz.
computers-R-stupid
creepy, and yet, indispensable
For a while this blog had stalkers in the form of copycat blogs, maintained by intrepid souls who thought... not sure, exactly. One of them tried to summarize the posts every day, but that got tiring so by the end it was just "July 2 - He hates Facebook, July 3 - More Facebook, July 5 Facebook blah blah." (Another blog disappeared entirely except for the ominous words "Don't trust him." As in -- he has opinions.)
Eventually the entire new media world moved to Facebook and it became irrelevant what any blogger thought. Rhizome.org opined that one simply had to use the portal for global theoretical discourse, and in fact they hoped one day to be technically adept enough to preserve chunks of this branded argumentation for posterity.
Pockets of FB hate still exist, however. Some of the noise comes from right wingers, who think Zuckerberg is a liberal and is suppressing them. A few on both the right and the left continue to object to the site's privacy quagmire.
So for today's Facebook blah blah here is the libertarian-inclined Liberty Blitzkrieg with a post titled Facebook Just Got a Whole Lot Creepier, with links to stories about people receiving friend recommendations from lists that were supposed to be confidential, such as a therapist's patients. Read, and then get back on Facebook to discuss!
