(#15) Squooshing DitherPunks, BeepBox, iStockPhoto Memories and The Scissorman
+ a trip to the arts district w frens
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Well hello internet friends!
It’s been a while, so this is yet again another experiment — setting a timer to 60 minutes and shipping whatever I come up with in that amount of time.
Dangerous.
Here are some things that I’ve been enjoying / thinking about / reading / distracting myself with:
A fun retro web-based boop beep maker
I discovered BeepBox a while back and kept wanting to play with it — a simple html/css/js music tracker is just the thing to cheer anyone up.
BeepBox is an online tool for sketching and sharing instrumental music.
All song data is contained in the URL at the top of your browser.
I grew up in awe of Screamtracker listening to Purple Motion, a member of Future Crew. FC created Second Reality (youtube) in 1993 which I grew up watching on my Gateway 386DX/33 over and over because IT WAS SO COOL and imo is still the best demoscene thing ever created.
Anyway back to BeepBox… I started at 6am with the idea of just playing with it for a few minutes, but a few hours later this silly homage to American Football’s “For Sure” was BeepBox’d out.
(Bonus: An incredible deepdive into the source code of Second Reality by Fabien Sanglard.)
A child’s tale I read about
Shock-headed Peter (Der Struwwelpeter, 1845) was written in 1845 by Heinrich Hoffmann, “intending to buy a picture book as a Christmas present for his three-year-old son, Hoffmann instead wrote and illustrated his own book.”
It’s known for introducing the villainous character of the Tailor (or Scissorman) to Western literature:
Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher ("The Story of the Thumb-Sucker"): A mother warns her son Konrad not to suck his thumbs. However, when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb-sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors.
When I was 7 or 8 in a Florida YMCA kids camp, the leaders decided it would be a good idea to show Edward Scissorhands to us. I can’t imagine what they were thinking (or was just teenagers in charge not thinking?) but when I told my mom she threw a fit and from then on I was forced to sit in a chair outside the room whenever they showed movies.
I now blame Heinrich Hoffmann.
Squoosh, a tool for ditherpunks resizing images
I stumbled on a nice simple image resizer called Squoosh that was referenced in this article about Ditherpunk. I like it.
I can’t quite remember how I ended up down the JPEG XL rabbit hole, but it’s pretty cool and I read this whole comparison article on this site that I’m pretty sure is straight SEO spam but it was actually pretty interesting.
Oh! And the ditherpunk article led me to this forum post (!) about how Return of the Obra Dinn did dithering in 3D space and it’s quite fascinating. The extreme technicals start to go over my head as I’ve never been a 3d guy but I love the hundreds of hours of obsession spent on wrestling with how to make this novel technique better.
Remember forums? I miss them. Back in my istockphoto days I’d spend hours a day on there, constantly refreshing. That felt a lot more like community than current social media, in spite of all the clunkiness.
Speaking of istockphoto, I opened up my Memories folder from 2003 and found when us admins wished a happy birthday to peebert who was one of the main admins and really enjoyed his banhammer privileges (as I recall, a bit too much) so we changed the last 6 new stock images to this:
Look at me, running a beta Mozilla build with a custom theme on a Windows computer.
Those Mozilla releases would, a year later, turn into Mozilla Firefox, which would reach a peak of ~32% usage in all internet traffic by in 2009 but has since declined to about 7%. Chrome gobbled it all, reaching ~70% usage and is what I’m typing this on now.
(My bookmark of “Urchin Stats” was the best web analytics software at the time that I used for my online pet store, which was acquired by Google in 2005 and rebranded as — you guessed it — Google Analytics.)
A trip to the Arts District
On a personal note, Emily and Abraham came with me to the LA Arts District for a few hours and mostly spent their time mocking me for my love of it.
Something I’m listening to
Digging back into my online friend Chris Staples’ catalog, listening to his album “Holy Moly” which I haven’t given enough of a chance and encountered “Everybody Said” — a fun little song that resonates because I got married young for religious reasons and — surprise surprise — didn’t work out. Still, cute.
Alright my 60 minutes are up.
Let me know if you got this far.
Josh
PS bonus history rabbithole. As someone who used to think they talked to invisible beings as a teen too, this fascinated me:
Nongqawuse, a 15 year old Xhosa prophet, claimed in 1856 that spirits told her to tell her people to sacrifice all their crops and cattle. In return the spirits would “sweep all European settlers into the sea.” So they killed all their cattle (numbering 300,000 to 400,000) and 75,000 out of 100,000 Xhosa died and the British took over. :/