The Packbats' Weblog

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.

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.

Nice to know we still remember how.

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' )

(I heard this story in a first-year art class I took as an elective.)

Once there was a great painter, renown through the land for his art. One day, a warlord visited him; he told the painter that he wished to commission a picture of a carp, and he would pay such-and-such as a fee. The painter said, "It will be ready in three months."

The three months went by, and the warlord returned. The painter told him, "It is not quite ready - I shall have it in three more weeks." The warlord was angry at this delay, but he did not wish to offend the painter, so he went away.

The three weeks passed, and the warlord returned again. The painter told him, "It is almost complete - come back in three days, and I will have it for you." The warlord was still more angry at this. "Why not today?" he asked. "You have had nearly four months!" "It is not yet ready," replied the painter. And the warlord stormed out.

The next day, he returned with a hundred men to bang on his door. "Painter, I have no more patience," he exclaimed. "Give me my painting immediately!"

The painter bowed his head, and said, "Follow me." He led the warlord inside to his desk, where he pulled out his brush, his ink, and a single sheet of blank paper. As the warlord watched, he wet the brush and painted three strokes on the page - three strokes to create the most perfect carp the world had seen.

The warlord stood speechless for a moment, then darkened with anger. "Why could you not do that when I first came?" he asked.

The painter rose, and walked to a cabinet on one wall of the room. He opened the door, and a thousand pages flew out - every one, a painting of a carp.