The Packbats' Weblog

self link: image processing silliness - from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 21:51:56 GMT

For reasons, we wanted to play with color quantization and dithering, and we found out about command line tool ImageMagick's color quantization/dither tools. Then we came up with a very silly idea: what if we took a given starting image and, using our limited knowledge of dither algorithms and complete lack of knowledge of image size optimization, tried to make the coolest versions we could under 32 KiB? Setting the limit to be filesize and not raster resolution means that every algorithm is going to create some compromise between size and detail … so maybe Floyd-Steinberg produces a clearer result at the same resolution, but how much smaller does it have to be to fit in the size limit?

"image processing silliness – from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole explored by the Packbats, Jan 2024"

We finally finished this freaking project, and it's such a big one that it's too big for a Dreamwidth post - click through to check it out.

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toki pona: drawing a hundred and forty-five symbols

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:17:06 GMT

A little belated an announcement, but check this out - we drew a set of toki pona hieroglyphs!

( rambling about the process )

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Trusting our craft

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 17:24:57 GMT

So a friend of ours was making a funny "games of the year 2022" post, one of those that people make who have no respect for the triple-A gaming industry and want to look at cool weird obscure stuff that fails that industry's metrics and succeeds at being something else. And we love that.

And our friend put our work on that very short list. Twice.

( Read more... )

Anyway, we've been putting out a free 200-word TTRPG every month on Patreon. And there's a style of phrase-long badass mech names we enjoy, names like Boiling Water Scalding Away Layers Of Bitterness, and a good way to make one is to look at the teapot on your desk, think about how the residue of old brews can be removed with hot water and scrubbing, and then remove context and make the wording go harder until it hits mech name status.

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Packdragon musician icon comm!

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 14:49:46 GMT

Got a sketch commission from our friend Nuktibromos of Packdragon playing music on the keyboard our partner gave us!

Planning to use this as an icon for music stuff on Dreamwidth going forward.

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A bit of origami.

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 01:45:35 GMT

Nice to know we still remember how.

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Communicative and Expressive Art

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 14:05:03 GMT

A while ago, I was going through old Philosophy Tube videos and came upon one about seeing YouTube as communicative more than expressive. Which isn't a distinction I thought about, but seems useful to me.

( A kitchen sink, language evoking experiences, and functions of creativity. )

Not really going anywhere with this. Just sharing a concept.

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A Tools Definiton of Art

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 16:51:03 GMT

I don't think I'm cut out for being a professional philosopher - a lot of the job of such philosophers is to study, understand, and respond to popular positions held by other philosophers, however asinine or incoherent, and because "asinine" and "incoherent" are philosophical judgments, you can't make any agreed-upon list of works to exclude on that basis. I can deal with the stuff sometimes, but my tolerance for it is too limited to do the job in any kind of consistent way.

I do like philosophy, though, and philosophizing. And I've been thinking about how to define art lately - "art" as in the all-of-it thing, not specifically visual art - and that turned into the following.

( Content warnings: homophobia, classism, sexism and racism mentions, hospital mention, and a brief rant about 1978 made-for-TV movie 'Rescue from Gilligan's Island' )

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Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:52:20 GMT

One Chance.

Short game. No replay. No undo. Controls are the arrow keys and a spacebar.

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