• Announcements

    • Robin

      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

HarJIT

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    367

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    3

Posts posted by HarJIT

  2. Posted · Edited by HarJIT

    11 hours ago, mlooney said:

    CompuServe office, some time in 1989.  Find the people that added animation to the Gif89a file format and talk them the [redacted] out of using it.  For the love of all things lawful good, people of the Internet stop using them.  If you have to animate some things, make a for real video file and use HTML5, with autoplay turned the [redacted] off.

    Growl, snarl, snap, grumble, etc.

    I have perhaps slightly different opinions on the matter…

    We've found ourselves in a state with the PNG group pushing MNG (Multi-image Network Graphics), Mozilla pushing APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics), Google pushing Animated WebP (animated Web Picture) and everyone using either Animated GIF (animated Graphics Interchange Format) or WebM (Web Matroska video).

    Now, GIF has been superseded by PNG in all other respects (hence in the vernacular "GIF" now implies an animation).  PNG is in general superior: it has better compression; it supports true-colour colour-depth without arcane hacks.  The GIF format should be a quaint format supported for compatibility but which noöne uses for new images anymore.  But it isn't, due to the animation use.

    Why GIF?  It was simple.  If wasn't that much work to add animation support to a GIF decoder.  Hence everyone supported it.  And noöne managed to come out in time with a replacement that everyone could agree on.

    Should PNG have come out with something akin to APNG from the start?  They had their reasons not to (wanting whether an image is animated or not to be discernable from its extension).  Should Firefox have dropped MNG support?  They had their reasons to (was the size of the other image decoders combined, and if nothing else the initial purpose of Firefox was to create a slimmed down browser based on the Netscape sources).  But the effect is that GIF is now the vernacular for a short, silent animated image, while it should have fallen out of use about a decade ago.

    Maybe MNG should have been designed to be simpler to start with, even if still nominally distinct from PNG.  I don't know, but (edit: if so) that might mean (edit: that the reason why) it failed (edit: is) for the same reason as GNU Hurd failed: failure to abide by the KISS principle.  But be whatever however, I'd say that the fact that GIFs are still in active use for anything (animated or otherwise) speaks volumes of the failure to supersede it.

    Should Google be pushing WebP?  Certainly the usage case seems to have changed: no longer are animated GIFs pixel art or simple digital artwork, they are now generally photographic footage, something which the GIF format full stop was never supposed to be used for even pre-PNG (granted MNG has JNG (hence JPEG) frame support but that isn't much use if noöne supports it).  It is, however, something that the codec used by WebM/WebP is doubtless better at.  On the other hand, it relies on WebP actually taking off much.  Something needs to take over from GIF and to do that, it needs to gain comparable momentum.  If this ends up splitting vendors between APNG and WebP, neither would be likely to take off.

    Drawing a distinction between WebM and WebP is still valuable though.  When something is a GIF, people can be confident that it will not make noise and will usually only take a few seconds.  This is not so with video files, in spite of HTML5 and WebM having removed much of the technical barrier to using videos more, and in spite of them being technically capable of fulfilling that role.

    All that being said, WebM seems to be the de facto successor as far as Gfycat is concerned.  And Imgur at least in the past, although they seem to be adopting WebP for some purpose and to some degree.  And then there's Ugoira, for the sake of completeness…

    This is of course just my ramblings at present.  This is not necessarily representative of my future or past opinion, or of the future, past or present opinion of any vertical or horizontal associate of mine.

  3. Posted · Edited by HarJIT

    Look at those tendrils though.  In previous appearances, it seemed like Sirleck merely hooked onto the nose and ears, but those would snake into the head some considerable distance.  Creepy stuff.

    RE loss of forum endorsement, it was several months after the crash, after the forum briefly stopped loading anything except the front page and then came back up with all the images missing and all the post backgrounds turned lavender (in an extended analogy (edit: albeit non-literal and of an analogy which was also literal to begin with), would this be considered an aftershock??? meanwhile **** you 2016). 

    Incidentally, that was also the last straw inasmuch as I gave up on hoping that the CSS would be fixed (when it was getting progressively worse) and wrote a script to patch it myself.

     

    Servant of Tara Gilesbie reacted to this

  4. Posted

    4 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

    I think the latest Greasemonkey update may have introduced a small cosmetic bug into the way your script functions. When a forum loads, it loads with all of the posts purple at first. After the brief purple flash, they finally settle down to the way they're supposed to look. Disturbing, to say the least. Not sure if you can do anything about it, but I thought you'd at least like to know about it.

    This is not a computer speed issue, BTW. I'm running an i7-6700HQ quad-core laptop with 16GB RAM. It's an Intel Skylake processor, which means it's got Intel 530HD graphics, switching with a GeForce GTX 970M processor.

    I've made some adjustments to try and make the colour override for the post backgrounds kick in faster, does this help?

  13. Posted

    6 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    Whoever is responsible for deciding that autocorrect should be turned on by default in any given device/OS, should be sentenced to one year of punishment wherein they MUST say everything by means of that device/OS with autocorrect turned on and not allowed to ever reject or amend autocorrect's changes.

    And if they ever start turning on grammar-autocorrect by default, make it five years.

    Or in general, that an editor should never do something to what you are typing or saving except in response to some deliberate action required to trigger it, unless explicitly configured otherwise by the user.

    I kinda wish Atom had a convenient "stop being smartarse" config option somewhere.  Good thing is that, once I track down the things to disable, most of them do fully turn off when I tell them to.  But I did say most (cough auto indent on paste cough).

  14. Posted

    On 23/03/2017 at 2:11 PM, ProfessorTomoe said:

    I took the redirect for files.catbox.moe out of my hosts file, thinking that it'd been fixed in your Greasemonkey script. Almost immediately, I got another virus warning from that same URL. Something is still fetching files from or at least trying to access that site, I think.

    (BTW, files.catbox.moe went back to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file.)

    I've went through my recent posts and rehosted several images.  Took me long enough to realise that was probably the problem.

    ProfessorTomoe reacted to this

  15. Posted · Edited by HarJIT
    clarify

    36 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    Local microbes PROBABLY wouldn't be able to infect you, but ... there will be lot of them. One might be lucky.

    Viruses basically-certainly would not be able to, being so reliant on the intricacies of cell function and the genome, hence e.g. bacteriophages cannot directly harm eukaryotes.  So we're thinking bacteria, fungi, amoebae… which would not (initially) be adapted to parasitising the extraterrestrial life, but the extraterrestrial life would not be adapted or immunised against them [the microorganisms] colonising them [the extraterrestrials] and potentially causing harm either.

  19. Posted

    20 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    You did a great job with the shading too.  How did you do that?. The shading I did for my Rhoda and Amanda redo is dreadful by comparison

    As hkmaly suggests, the trick is basically to preserve Dan's shading as far as possible whist still attaining the desired colouration and brightness.

    Mainly, this amounts to significantly limiting operations on the value channel to those which don't affect the shading (applying levels/curves/gamma/contrast/etc to specific regions (usually not the entire image) is generally fine, provided this is done in such a way that it doesn't noticeably mess up the region border).

    The hue and sat channels are a different matter, and can even be region-floodfilled, although I didn't have to resort to that here (I do when I'm e.g. colourising from greyscale though).

    My first version basically made the hair and attire lighter in colour.  The second shifted the focus to contrast and saturation, thus increasing brightness rather than simply lightness.  The final effect on the second version was to take something closer to the first version, use the levels tool to extract only the highlights, blur the result significantly and then use it as an additive layer, with a certain tuned alpha, above what I had so far for the second image.  This gives the image an additional subtle glow.

    Use of waifu2x beforehand is also very helpful, mainly because it makes selecting regions a lot less fiddly.

    Vorlonagent reacted to this

  20. Posted

    18 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

    I took the redirect for files.catbox.moe out of my hosts file, thinking that it'd been fixed in your Greasemonkey script. Almost immediately, I got another virus warning from that same URL. Something is still fetching files from or at least trying to access that site, I think.

    (BTW, files.catbox.moe went back to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file.)

    Huh…

    Well, the current version contains no references to it that I can find, so either that's unrelated or it didn't update properly.

    I did neglect to bump the version number, so I have now done so.  Still, I'd advise deleting the script to ensure that no older version lingers, checking that nothing of the sort still occurs, possibly clearing cache if it does (though I don't see why it would), and re-installing it from here (or, you know what, I'll just link the Gist preview in future so I don't have to keep posting updated permalinks…).

  24. Posted

    A first person shooter has the camera of the shooter's eyes and control of the shooter.

    A third person shooter has the camera on the scene and control of the shooter.

    A second person shooter would logically have the camera of the victim's eyes and control of the shooter.  Basically you have no control of your own actions but are mind-controlling another person to shoot you.

    Could have some interesting plot background…