Our son Sam has told us that the D&D art file we use for a screensaver on various devices bothers him.
Because it makes him frustrated that he can’t look at some of them longer. He wants to know what is happening in some of them.
I told him that is one of the reasons we play Dungeons & Dragons, so we can go find out together, in our collective imagination.
Not really D&D related- but I feel compelled to add to this that not only are these GORGEOUS pixel arts- they are also in fact not animated. There are no frames used. There’s no extra pieces of art. Just one layer.
These pieces are so old that they stem from a time where animating cost way too much memory and/or only 256 colors could be used at one time, so the motion is achieved by ‘color cycling’. Half the available colors would be reserved for that very color cycling. It’s mchecking bonkers, please go watch this video if you feel like learning the technical details of how these artworks were made! They were screensavers that would match the actual time of day that you were in. Somehow. Just by cycling color palettes. Wild shit.
(Especially relevant time stamps for color cycling: 5:50, 9:55, 37:26, at 49:54 he gets into the technical side of HOW this even works)
Yup.
I’ve always enjoyed how they depicted some of the landscapes at different times of the day/weather/season.
Like these two areas. Daytime and nighttime at the village by the waterfalls.
And the high mountains hidden by rain in one and visible in the other.
yall r gonna post a man’s entire portfolio of art and not give credit?
anyways these images are by mark ferrari, a color cycling pixel art master, you can check them out in their html color cycling forms, with sound effects and ability to change the time of day of the image, here and here
After School Ghost Theory 101 with Professor Fenton
Switch to light mode or Classic Blue to get the full transparency effect!
[Image ID: A four page comic that starts with Danny Fenton standing in front of a whiteboard holding up a white cat. “Question: Do ghosts purr?”
Tucker: “Danny when was the last time you slept?” Danny: “Irrelevant.”
Danny info-dumps:
“The answer is yes, but also no. Technically, all beings that possess a core are constantly “purring”, a.k.a. Core Vibrations. Core Vibrations are a nonverbal, emotion-based communication system between Ghosts, similar to how some living species use pheromones to communicate. The exact tone of each ghost is different the same way people’s voices are different.
Humans can only hear these vibrations when the frequency passes through
their audible range (20Hz - 20KHz), hence the ‘purring’ sound. When the
range dips into infrasound (16 - 20Hz) it can cause feelings of fear and
unease in humans that they often associate with ghosts and the
supernatural. Also known as the ‘Heebie Jeebies.’”
Danny, wiping off the whiteboard: “Any questions before we move on?“
Danny’s audience consists of
Wes Weston, Tucker Foley, Sam Manson, Danny’s clone Ellie, and Dash Baxter in a classroom. Wes is seated at a desk at the front taking notes. Tucker is sitting on Sam’s lap playing on a Switch, Ellie is sitting on a desk behind them. Dash is asleep at the back of the room.
Ellie, now holding the cat: “Is this Vlad’s first cat!?” Wes: “Could you tone down the floating eyes before the next part? They’re kinda distracting.” Danny: “What eyes?” Wes: “Please stop gaslighting me.”
A transparency trick on the last page reveals dark shadows and eyes all around Danny when viewed in dark mode.
/.End ID]
An Extended Image ID is available under the read more because it’s over 1k. Side by side light and dark mode versions of the transparency trick is also available under the cut.
gaza has just been completely cut off from the world.
after increased intensity of israeli aistrikes tonight, the last cable providing communications was destroyed. telecommunications have been completely cut off. they cannot reach one another. they cannot reach paramedics. the red crescent society has completely lost contact with their branch in gaza. nobody inside can reach anyone inside, and especially not outside of gaza to tell us what is going on. this is a complete atrocity.
al jazeera has managed to maintain infrequent communication with their journalists in gaza. from their reporter wael dahdouh: “we are not fine. body parts are everywhere, missiles are targeting everyone, and the bombing hasn’t stopped for a second.”
do not stop talking about gaza. they are trying to commit genocide in the dark. do not stop talking.
Start Here, Caitlyn Siehl // The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller // The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller // Unknown // The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller // Passanger, Alexandra Bracken (a.k.a Heartbreaker) // I wrote this for you, Iain Thomas // These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever // jjk the light novel translation // The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller // The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller // Elegy, Chen Chen// the playwrights will write your names in the darkness of the sky
They’re so confident about the imaginary content-restricting version of libraries that exist in their heads.
When I was eleven, I checked out weird ass fantasy romance erotica on my library card.
I went to the library. I asked the librarian where the books were. They led me to the section. I picked out the fantasy romance of my choice. They asked if I needed help checking it out. I said no. I checked it out. I read it.
No one can stop you from reading anything at the library. No librarian will tell you not to read a certain book. They might suggest a book to you, but they won’t tell you not to read anything.
One of the questions on the job interview I did to get a job at the library was basically “the library’s policy is to let anyone checkout anything. a child comes to the checkout desk with a book with a nude figure on the cover. what do you do?”
The correct answer is you let that child check out that book.
That’s library policy. The library would back me up on this if a parent got angry at me.
As a library worker I sometimes helped kids find scary books in the adult section. Never had to deal with the hypothetical nude, haha. But plenty of times where I would have to check with a kid if it was okay if I walked them out of the section their parents left them in to take them to the adult section of the library. But other than that, I let kids read what they wanted. It was their parents’ job to talk to them about what they were reading, not mine. And I knew that some parents would be very permissive and some were very controlling. It was not my job to make judgements or parent anyone’s kids. It was my job to let anyone checkout anything they wanted to read. There are suggested age categories at the library, but no age restriction on the books in the library.
Most libraries these days have self check-out machines. It’s possible that an individual librarian might go against library policy and balk at letting a kid check out Last Exit to Brooklyn, but these days you often don’t even need to go through them.
(Looking through the notes it looks like some libraries in some states have separate kid cards, but I’ve never been in one that did.)
Librarian here! If you don’t want your kid to look at certain materials, don’t leave them unsupervised in the library! It’s not my job to parent your child. It’s yours.
I worked in a really conservative small town library and our only age policy was for R rated movies, which you could still check out with parent permission
#Also a librarian telling you you can’t read something is not the same as a block feature that’s not how blocking works
I will say that the library I grew up using had age-restricted cards for children–if you had a child’s card, you were immune from fines (you just couldn’t check anything out until you returned the late materials) and you were not allowed to check out books from the adult section.
However, 1) I had an older sibling whom I could bribe to check out whatever I wanted and 2) the process of “graduating” a child’s library card to adult status consisted of a hole punch in the upper right corner, so I basically bribed my tallest brother until I got a growth spurt, then swiped a hole punch and liberated myself.
In hindsight, this was less of an actual system of control and more of a way of filtering out kids who weren’t clever or determined enough to find a workaround. Not a bad system, imo.
Screenshot from the American Library Association (ALA) Library Bill of Rights. (I don’t know about other countries)
