Added 2 new A* pages:If you happened across the site at certain times over the weekend, you might have seen that some of the recent pages had been switched from grayscale to dithered black and white; page 46, for instance, looked like this
and page 38 looked like this
and a few other pages had been dot-ified as well. I'd been wanting to try it for a while but I'd only just figured out how to make Photoshop's Floyd-Steinberg "diffusion dither" come out dark enough (Multiply the image pre-conversion until it comes out right, duh : p). I think it's a nifty look BUT after I'd then gone and converted the first 20 pages or so of episode 19 to dots locally, I realized while flipping through them that it just got too...dotty after a while. Also a very perceptive reader on Facebook pointed out that I shouldn't dot-ify the subtitle, because that made it too hard to read, which was absolutely correct; leaving just part of the image smooth did complicate the conversion process just enough to make it annoying, though, and also nullified some of the file size savings (the pages load super fast when they're just dots ;); it also left me with no excuse to use my nifty dithered "smbhax.com" URL stamp in the lower right corner, of which I was inordinately fond.
Anyway so that was how I ended up spending half my weekend. Something good did come out of it I think though, which is that I realized some of my dissatisfaction with the non-dotty pages had been that they weren't quite sharp enough; so now I'm applying a teensy bit of sharpening to the new pages after shrinking them down to web size--and in black and white that even makes some of them load faster, so, bonus. It's the smallest amount of sharpening that macros correctly in my ancient Photoshop 4... Well, actually a macroed 0.4 pixel radius 50% Unsharp Mask filter comes out equivalent to a 0.3 pixel radius 50% manually-executed Unsharp Mask for some bizarre reason, but a macroed 0.3 pixel radius one does nothing at all. ... I think PS4 was the first one with the Action macro system, so eh they were still working out some kinks, like how you can't record a lot of operations into Actions. : P
Huh I guess if I was really clever I'd make a "low bandwidth" option to show the dot-ified versions of the pages, but eh...probably not worth the work and UI clutter. : pp
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