Letters from Somnolescent

 

Tag: art

People’s drawings and visual art.


November 21, 2020

Yerf, yerf, yerf

caby

I post once in a blue moon, but I finally have a new thing to talk about, so here I am! That thing is a little old art portal named Yerf.

Tags: anime, art,

October 27, 2020

The Clever Feat of PNG Optimization

mariteaux

A neat old PNG logo I found on the official PNG site

I’ve become mildly obsessed with how compression algorithms of various stripes work over the past year. They really do make every bit of our modern computing existence work so smoothly, from gzipping packet data to speed up slow connections to storing vast archives of high quality music on flash drives the size of a ChapStick. Some simply rearrange the data in clever ways, and others take advantage of our weak eyes and ears to throw out 90% of what was once there–and we hardly notice.

Of the lot, the humble PNG is so ubiquitous, it might not even warrant mentioning. Every format has some magic up its sleeve, however, and in the case of PNG, the way they’re encoded usually makes it possible to shrink them after the fact to the tune of up to a few megabytes with no loss in quality. If you make sites, you might wanna take notes.

I recently decided to run a battery of tests to determine just how well PNG works, on what, and what optimizes the best. I’ll give you the rundown on how it works (in-depth but no math, no worries), and then I’ll give you some hard data and lovely charts to peek at, and finally, show you how to get smaller, lighter PNGs at home, no tricks, no catches.

Tags: art, technology,

October 2, 2020

10/2 – The Ballad of the Comeback Kids

bulb

This is a little more like it! With the weather cooling down (not here though, still 60s and 70s galore, guh), the Somnolians have been feeling vital again. borb and Caby are over their Art Fight fatigue, I’m back to writing after building that absurdly big Quake level (promise you’ll get to play it this year) and feeling damn good about it, and–what do you know? More Pennyverse! Much better recap than last month–let’s get into it.


December 25, 2019

A Year Under the Bulb: 2019 in Review

bulb

And so, 1998+1 has come and gone. The first official year of Somnolescent. The first year out on our own, our own hosting, in our own group. People came, people left, projects were started, and love blossomed.

2019 was a year of change, of growth, and of optimistic unease. It was the start of us as Somnolians realizing what we had and what we didn’t need. It was the year of itemizing fears and coming to terms with realities. (You might say it sounds dramatic and pretentious, but so is life.)

Don’t worry, though. We got a lot done that people outside the group can enjoy too. If you missed anything, it’s more than likely here.


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