Nullsleep posts some CSS code that you could add to a web page to make browsers read your GIFs and pixel art correctly when resized. The illustration above, showing an image resized using the bicubic (smooth) and nearest neighbor (sharp) methods, is his; it gets across clearly how ugly "smoothing" can be for an exquisite design. The problem is, 99% of developers can't see this, and will continue to insist that mandatory, "on by default" edge smoothing is what we all want and need when we surf the web. ("Smoothing" doesn't just occur when you zoom, it happens anytime someone codes an image's dimensions to appear larger than the image.)
Dragan Espenschied had told me a while back about a Firefox Add-on for crisp resizing. That's designed to customize the individual's browsing experience ("please render pages correctly kthx"), whereas the code in Nullsleep's post applies this "image-rendering" function on the publisher side, so that various browsers will read your page the way you specify.
It would be best, of course, if the problem could be solved at the source. In other words, make smoothing optional in browsers and educate people about the fundamental differences in how images are displayed on the web (see comments here). As an independent publisher, one shouldn't have to code for every contingency of how each browser is going to read your page. You can custom craft a theme and then two years later you will be prompted to update your theme, which means losing all those carefully worked out modifications. My own solution has been to size GIFs and pixel art exactly as they are meant to be seen, which even meant remaking/reposting some older GIFs.
"Monk 2022"
"Monk 2022" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]
More synthetic jazz combo stuff, with dramatic piano chords trying diligently to stay in the approximate tonal range of a quavery '60s style modular moog (not actually a Moog but whatever), while an imagined drummer with an unfiltered cigarette hanging out of his mouth keeps the thing regimented.
around the web
New York Times Tells Us Only Chinese Near Slave Labor Could Handle Steve Jobs’ Demands. A good critique by Yves Smith. Not just "near slave labor" but massive government handouts from the Chinese made it possible for factories to handle Jobs' constant last minute design decisions. Our own government, by contrast, asks Steve Jobs if Apple work is ever coming back to the US, Jobs says no (according to the Times' source), and our government sighs and says "it is the will of the market." Yet Steve Jobs is a hero to many.
Mutant Sounds was one of the innocent parties hurt by the Megaupload mob war (the Hollywood mob, using the feds as enforcers, vs what some might call the robin hood mob). MS was just using Megaupload to host music, no allegations of infringement were made against them. (On a side note, it could be said that MS specialized in what the US Supreme Court has called "orphan" works [pdf--see Breyer dissent], where it's too expensive or difficult to track down the original creator to obtain copyright permission. Many publishers won't touch orphaned work, the risk of an owner surfacing is too great, consigning a huge cultural legacy to the slag heap. There is no clear right and wrong here -- fair use is not evolved enough to tell us what is truly "illegal.")
Shutting down a host with thousands of non-infringing users just because of some bad eggs offends the most basic notions of fairness. Lauren Weinstein offers a couple of good analogies:
One analogy is the safe deposit boxes in a bank. There are certainly cases where the government seizes specific boxes, or states sell off the content of "abandoned" boxes (both controversial issues, I should add).
But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused -- not yet convicted -- of engaging in a crime.
What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.
and
You don't arrest everyone at a football game because a wanted criminal may be among the crowd. At least, not unless you're attempting to channel the old East German "Stasi" secret police sensibilities.
Everyone gets how unfair this is and the effect is a loss of any respect for Hollywood's claims to be an aggrieved party. They are a cartel, doing what they can to preserve power. We ask governments to protect us from gangsters, not help them.
Update: And if "basic fairness" isn't enough reason to rethink this, the Naked Capitalism blog also asks: Did the Feds Just Kill the Cloud Storage Model?
gif of darkness
and so ends the battle with phone arts - i have been shat upon, erased twice - and still they phone...
invasion of the giant one bit gifs
This GIF of rotating, intersecting planes made by Julapy using his code called "ofxDither," an add-on for openframeworks, looks "cool" but it's mostly about style, isn't it?
If there is a point to making 1-bit artwork at this late date it's to have an image that loads super-fast because it's effectively weightless: a neutrino in a web increasingly dominated by heavy elements.
1-bit GIFs in the 2.7 Megabyte range are like an Iron Butterfly. Or a Lead Zeppelin.