I'm a big fan of Nina Paley's work, especially Mimi and Eunice. Being able to distill big ideas into pithy comics is a sure sign of an experienced writer, especially concerning the whale of a tale that is copyright law. All you need to know, outside of the malicious laws that write this drivel, is that it's more of a copy privilege. The artist's privilege to create a work does not come before the audience's right to indulge in it, using it however they please, where copyright censors those who wish to use it.
In essence, copyright wants to censor this blog because it contains usages and criticisms of art that some people (mostly twats) don't like. The only thing keeping this blog "legal", though I must say that there is little correlation between legality and righteousness, is a fair–use doctrine, which is a sloppy hack that only brings more attention to the core issue of copyright: it stops art from spreading, it stops ideas from spreading, it hurts artists, it hurts audiences, and exists to serve the wealthy minority at the expense of the majority. It's a classist system, indiscriminate only in the way it's applied; what do you expect from the brilliant minds of the Catholic Church?
I came up with that one myself, but there's a lot more comics about this on Mimi and Eunice, and in this booklet. But seriously: did you have to name it "Intellectual Pooperty"?
But if you're reading this blog, you're probably already with me on this, and by extension with the abolitionist Degenerates, because anybody who didn't like the idea of free media for anyone, regardless of societal status, forever, would have closed the webpage at the idea that somebody they don't know would showcase the work of other people they don't know. I always found it interesting when people who aren't a part of the media oligarchy defend their actions. Buddy. They're oppressing you. I bet if you were a slave, you'd defend your master as giving you free food and shelter, except the food is copyrighted entertainment you have to pay for, before the DRM servers (inevitably) get shut down and it turns out you don't own anything you ever bought. Well, idiots will be idiots. Except they can vote. Fuck!
So let's talk about the image, which is licensed under CC–BY–SA even though I'm purposefully violating the license because I just don't give a hecky. It's also non–licensed under the non–license copyheart, and I heart copyheart, too. Here's hoping Nina doesn't sue me to start a landmark case about interpretation of artist's wishes in respects to copyright, though you'd have to serve papers, and frogs can't read.
You'll notice the filesize is a filthy, filthy number, and that's due to one simple principle of image compression: the bigger, the bigger. The larger you make the image, the larger, the filesize. The scaling isn't even, meaning doubling the resolution of an image won't make the filesize twice as large, which is a good thing. This also means halving the image won't make it half as large; it compresses it a bit more than that. Add in resizing algorithms like Lancoz, and the sizes will — hold on, let me put on my prolefeed gloves. This young artist opened GIMP, and found a setting that destroyed his expectations. The shocker? Nobody else figured it out!
Right. No matter how simple an image is constructed, it still falls under the simple principle of bigger images taking up more space. "What a revolution", says the disgusting, pasty–skinned axolotl coming out of the drain pipe to scratch at my leathers. Oh, sorry, I thought you'd want to hear more about how procedural generation and upsampled textures can create video games that rival a 50GB one at 0.05% of the size, but that's okay. You just sit there downloading 100GB of Overwatch or whatever the fucking meme is that will be irrelevant by the time a baby born today will be in kindergarten, while Minecraft still looks good at 250MB, as it has been ever since it started development at the same time as the first season of K–ON!. Yes, it really has been eight years.
While upsampling is a good technique for cheating with making images that appear larger, which you will notice I've been doing on my gallery a lot, the resolution will still be the same. You can't make a 64×64 image and give it a 1024×1024 resolution just by increasing the powers from 2^6 to 2^10. It's like projecting a home movie on an IMAX screen. It'll be bigger, but it'll look awful, because the original image wasn't that big. And because it would look awful, sometimes you have to keep images at a high resolution, and then post them here in their original dimensions. Hence the huge filesize of this particular entry.
Now I've said my piece, and I don't expect my audience to read every single thing I write, which is why I've been writing less as of late. And indeed I will say less as time goes by, because the concepts I demonstrate will be more and more familiar to you. If you want to find out what I've done to this image to make it as small as possible, copy off the source image, try to recreate my steps, and create one that looks exactly what I have here. If you can do that, then you're as qualified as me.
…but then try writing a blog post about it. Not so qualified now, are you? No, get away from me you axolotl scrub!
Date: 2017–02–11. Size: 9,589 bytes. Colours: 3.
Upscaled Dimensions: 900×280. Original Dimensions: 900×280.