I bet Strata thinks this title is fucking stupid. Next-day update: he doesn't. Well guess what bitch, I've been stupid since I was a baby, and I know how to do a correct.
It's eternally fascinating to throw junk at an algorithm and see just what results it can produce based on what you give it. Most programs will straight-up fall apart if you do something it doesn't expect, often with no indiciation of what went wrong. Video games are a bit more tolerant, mainly because they're self-contained universe where God is a series of conflicting rules, and when God sees something it doesn't like, it tries to make the thing work within those rules rather than just throw out the whole lot.
When it comes to something like a colour reduction algorithm, which I know nothing about and segregates me as another slack-jawed script kiddy who can't make their own tools and has to rely on prebuilts, seeing how it reacts based on the minutae of options you give it is a bit like watching an ant farm. You have a ballpark idea of what formations they're going to create, but the results are still surprising.
This piece of art by Louis Wain, more popularily known as “the man who drew cats” (no, not that one), is the end of last week's series of dominantly white pictures, if a week is five days and you ignore Gun. This week will go the opposite route and focus on pictures with too many damn colours. It's not quite a “just fuck my SHIT up” week, which Chad calls a dated meme and what I call a fresh vintage, but more of a “let's see how bad I can abuse GIMP's builtins.”
I get the feeling this isn't going to be the last work I feature from him, given just how many cats he produced and how fucked his shit can be upped, though it's a good starting point for the simultaneous beauty and misery of art. If you do something different, people think you're brain damaged or on drugs. If you stay the same, you're unremarkable. Of course, if you do the same thing for fifty years, you become the cat guy. I'm still surprised there's more than one cat guy on DuckDuckGo.
So as for how I made this piece, it was simple and sweet, which is especially helpful given my continued defiance of acceptable spaghetti intake. Resize, index colours, bosh. I normally don't employ dithering, because the more noise you add to a piece, the bigger and bigger the file size gets. After seeing the excellent results from yesterday, where I just had to make it big, I decided to try it out. Now it looks a bit like your grandmother's quilt.
I do feel some terminality for not spending more time on the reviewing of the work I feature, instead having it appear as if I am some asshole, where the real men are out there making real work, and I sit here and but talk. Though my prose when describing works is never dishonest, I feel that it is not my most genuine, and I am caught at a crossroads between describing art and describing non-art. At the very least, I am comforted by my superiority, for those that write like me are none, and those who are better than me I seek out and rarely find.
I would trust in you to come to an opinion about the work I feature, though within less than a second you have already developed one, and there is little I can do to change your mind based on your instinctual biases. What you see is what you get; it is not like any other media where you are expected to devote some significant amount of time to it, and where the time spent seeking out a competent reviewer is not time spent in vain.
But then those who listen to me are those likely just as well to be artists, or at the very least have an appreciation, and so my opinion brings you some understanding of how to make good work, the processes behind the creation of good work, and most of all an understanding of the small slice of culture I come from, and how best to appeal to people like me. There is much value in trusting in somebody, and further value in contemplating that trust.
I worry then that in abusing this trust I will become somebody who is so cocksure that what they say is gospel that they will lash out against anybody who fails to see the brilliance that they see, or call fire upon the scum of the earth. We are not homogeneous creatures. Chaos allows for differing opinions. But we must understand that having an opinion does not prevent you from being wrong, dead wrong, dead, dead, wrong, wrong, dead, wrong, wrong. Dead.
Sometimes I post a tech demo and sometimes I post what I fell in love with for but a short while. Which is which is discerned by how much I talk about the piece. This is a tech demo. I fell in love with yesterday's. And even though I have the privilege to be in love every day, I understand you may not share that privilege. What is a tech demo to me may be an infatuation to you. I pray only that I help you appreciate your infatuations.
Date: 2017–03–07. Size: 7,286 bytes. Colours: 5.
Upscaled Dimensions: 426×606. Original Dimensions: 142×203.