#lossie draws

[lossie92]

motherhood

[skitterhop]

visit

[gale-draws]

wanted to experiment with some metallic gel pens i got. i decided that @skitterhop 's critter Lossy Video might be the perfect application, and so i promptly scratchified them. INCLUDED CLOSEUP TO SHOW ENHANCED TEXTURE / LIGHT SCATTERING

[lossie92]

Agreed!

I did a body comparison chart for the founders a few months ago and that's how beefy I made Madara:

I need more images of Madara being built like a power lifter. With his little belly over all that muscle.

[ahsokaisawesome]

Commissions Open!!!

Been meaning to get this out there, but yes I am finally opening commissions! Work will be small but I'll try to be consistent, and I'm malleable to styles and ideas so please consider checking my ko-fi out! I also take donations if you'd rather just drop a little something, I'm trying to make some extra cash for school supplies ie a laptop and bills I pay each month. Check me out here~ https://ko-fi.com/ahsokaisawesome/commissions

Here's are some examples of my work~!

Special thanks to @cerasusarbour for letting me draw their OC Yusei please check out their art its hot and sexy and rad as fuck and I'm so in love with all them [ALL OF THEM] Thanks again~!!

[loki-zen]

with regard to some recent discourse:

there is a skill that in LIS gets called information synthesis.

this is the skill required to condense and summarise sources in a readable and minimally lossy way.

the skill of writing in a way people actually want to read comes on top of this; perfect infosynth at best gets you ‘very readable due to its simple digression-free format and well-labelled sections which are presented in a logical order’.

infosynth does/can contain knowing your precise target audience - maybe even the precise question they want to answer - and tailoring your summary appropriately.

infosynth is pretty obviously an important skill in today’s world! there is ever more information and even experts cannot keep up with it all. Doctors increasingly rely on medical librarians to read and summarise the latest research for them, because even within a very narrow sub-specialty it is simply not viable for them to keep up with it all themselves.

And people are increasingly producing and reading infosynth-type products in other fields. However, few people get any sort of explicit training in information synthesis.

We don’t really have the notion of a class of expert/professional whose role centres around information synthesis. (the General We that accepts that most ppl think librarians just shuffle books all day.) like there are a few field-specific Types of This Guy but they’re all off doing their own things and not considering themselves Information Synthesists who might share a skill set and a professional knowledge sharing community with other Information Synthesists.

and that’s a shame. people are always reinventing things from the LIS world and failing to like draw on the LIS world’s established work about how to do them out of ignorance that we are here and do those things. sad

[canmom]

Hey, just wanted to say: a. Love your hair on that picture, it looks amazing, the color is so great!

B. I Love to read your takes on different media, I am part of the two Baru Cormorant servers and know your takes pretty well,

And; just because I just read it,

I absolutely relate to that odd feeling when you get soo many different inputs; it usually makes me feel like everything just isn’t real, some weird feeling of alienation!

hello! thanks very much i like my hair colour too ^_^

still even now don't feel like i have fully formed thoughts on the relationship between this art thing we do and the rest of life. i guess it's one of those lifelong imponderables; we humans just do shit and then try and retrofit a thousand theories of what it's supposed to mean.

we're driven to find correspondences between things - I've started thinking about that in terms of lossy compression, how it's easier for a neural net, that's only so big!, to remember something as a variant of another prototypical thing we know. which is if course a thought that is doing the very thing it describes, drawing a line from one subject - computer data storage - to two others, our experience of memory and habit of thinking by analogy.

the result is a huge mess where all the million things going on at any time can be related to everything else. should it be? well we can't do anything else lmao so we just gotta judge it case by case

[kaleidoru]

i love your art SO much, all of your OCs are so creative and unique and just oozing so much personality.. you’re very skilled and your drawings are really fun to look at & im always so stoked when you post. you’re doing a great job!!

OUUGGHH THAT MEANS SO MUCH COMING FROM YOU 😭💖 Right back at you and Lossy Video!!

[meo-htp]

Hi, how did you make the pride icons? I want to make some for myself.

photoshop 🦜 if this was deviantart in 2004 i could probably make a full-blown visual tutorial on how to do this, but it is 2024 and i am an aged, ancient thing, and there are so many graphics softwares out there i have never heard of and don't know how to use

but here is a rough software-agnostic outline of the process

square image of any size, with transparency (or "alpha channel")

copy desired pride flag from internet, drop onto the first layer, scale to fit image

place screenshot of the character on second layer, adjust brightness/contrast if it's too dark, adjust hue/saturation if the color is too yellow or otherwise weird, adjust character to fit square as desired in case there is a motif or color on the pride flag you don't want hidden

cut or mask out the background...this differs by software, i use masks and paint out the background. it's less lossy and less nerve-wracking than using the lasso tool to trace the character! google "remove background" plus the name of whatever software you're using to find an efficient or at least minimally painful method for your program, but this is the most tedious part tbh.

you can be done here!!!! or continue if you want to make the icon into a circle:

merge all layers (NOT flatten. MERGE ALL)

draw a "marching ants" circle with your selection tool over your image, adjust the position, invert selection, delete. now it is a circle

alternate method for photoshop that would work in any other software that has a "clip to layer" option: on a new layer make an opaque circle with your shape tool, then clip to the layer below. the parts within the circle will be visible and the parts outside won't, and now you have a round icon

or just leave it square, or use the shape tool to make it into a triangle or a heart or something, whatever. i'm not your dad

there is definitely a more elegant method out there somewhere, but i am extremely self-taught, which precludes elegance, at least in software 😀👍

[sarasa-cat]

Recovering and recharging after 48 hours of too much (that once per fortnight overwhelm that is every alternating wednesday-thursday).

Tired and overwhelmed with allergy hell this evening. Eyes so swollen for a handful of weeks now. t_t

JOURNALS & JOURNALING

Have been itch-blurry-eyed relaxing and unwinding from fortnightly overwhelm by gathering inspiration for different kinds of approaches to journaling. Art journaling, travel journaling, inspo-and-ideas for projects journaling, and just plain old journal journaling.

Regularly amused by videos in which people flip through their pretty journal to show off the arty pages while their cat points out the good pages and photobombs their shot.

Thinking about how:

I have journaled on and off since I was a tween. But mostly it was far more off than on.

Same with sketchbooks and other kinds of art-focused "journals" -- lots of off, lots of unfinished pages.

Even more that has been in digital format and lost to time (or lost to dead storage formats).

I only have physical journals and sketchbooks from 2004 onward. Everything before that is in landfills a zillion miles & years from here.

After looking at various people's travel journals where each page is a collage of writing, drawings/paintings, photographs, and various ephemera, plus learning about or reverse engineering some of their process for how they put these together both during and after travel.... I GREATLY REGRET NEVER MAKING TRAVEL JOURNALS IN THE PAST. (** there are a bunch of trips, long and short, that I very much wish I had captured in travel journals rather than only in photos that I may or may not still have, but I have a semi-photographic memory -- as in slightly lossy visual memories -- of places and can "view" snapshots and short video-clips in my head of being in certain places even if only visiting once ... I think this is the reason why I regret not making actual travel journals of being in those places. That weird dreamlike nature of being able to unfocus or close my eyes and just BE in some other place and see it and hear it and sort of look around, but it is a weird glitchy ephemeral sort of VR. If only I collected things and made it all into travel journals back then... anyhow). Contemplating how to remedy the past, if at all, but also very much planning for upcoming travel and making a journal out of it.

Thinking a lot about the different kinds of PHYSICAL journals & sketchbooks I want to keep right now in addition to the DIGITAL journals that I use, on and off.

Also contemplating how all of this is such a work-in-progress in which what I like to do best changes and evolves. BUT feeling a burning need to be more intentional about this going forward.

Concern over future self having regret makes me want to be more intentional. When I look at people's organized notebooks, organized sketchbooks, organized journals, etc etc, I feel a sense of Missed Opportunity for having lots of disorganized notebooks, sketchbooks, and journals. And then I'm just hmmmmmm....

[lossie92]

mdtb - early morning at an inn (ft. mdr's titty muscles appreciation)

[skitterhop]

[pspkisser]

How WebP (and JPEG XL) is saving me tons of storage

(8 minutes read)

In this article, I will cover the underappreciated WebP digital image format as well as how I found its usefulness for me to take over even less storage, and also JPEG XL to some extent. This will cover my history with it as well as its perks over the common formats found on the web, and probably give you an important efficiency advice.

So, if someone mentions you the name "WebP", how would you react? The answer I'd expect would be either:

you simply have never heard of it before;

you actually did, but you've complained about its problems at least once and, as a result, always viewed it negatively;

you are not too annoyed by it, but you just don't know its point for existing in the first place.

I actually understand all of that. Back then, when the software I used couldn't take advantage of the image, just like many others, I also had a feeling that it was useless, so I could relate. I'd just convert it into either a PNG or a JPEG, both of which were formats that I used the most back then. I felt as if they are the easiest to pick up thanks to their extremely wide software compatibility. As a result, I used PNG, for Portable Network Graphics, the lossless compression format for much of my digital drawings, and JPEG, for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the ancient lossy compression format for highly-detailed images to prevent them from taking up too much space.

Initially, these formats looked pretty fine to me, since I used to export very light images only, which meant I didn't have to worry much about storage use. The images often weighed between 100 kB and 1 MB, on a 1 TB hard disk, so I could save hundreds of thousands of them only on that disk. However, as I started exporting artwork with higher resolutions and detail simultaneously, storage use became a problem for me. Some of them began to weigh at least 10 MB when encoded into PNGs. JPEG also had big issues that I noticed later on; its very ancient compression algorithm meant that, while I also used it to compensate for large images to be able to upload them faster, they become garbled as a result of artifacts appearing from the encoding. Finally, this year is where I began to think that it was time for an ultimate change to see if I could fix them all, and indeed there were ways.

Looking up information wasn't so hard, after all

After at least five years of relying on the most popular formats, JPEG and PNG, I began thinking that perhaps they weren't actually the best. The amount of times I used them throughout my life made me realize that I should start trying out alternatives. So by searching for them, what I ended up often seeing is the main point of this article: WebP, maintained by engineers at Google.

I actually read a few times about that format before then. The only thing I learned from it back then was that it could offer better compression than JPEG, which I initially neglected because of my previous experiences with it that I already mentioned. For a few years, I never really cared about it, until my curiosity for it finally rose and I realized that I was probably underestimating its value. After I read more about it, I was thrilled to see that it could also offer a better lossless compression than PNG, but I simply kept that in mind since I needed to wait before trying it out and adopting it entirely. Alongside WebP, I came across the JPEG XL format, announced by its developers (who were also behind the legacy JPEG) to be the universal replacement for the current major image formats, which is hard to dream of, but it's indeed interesting to know how it could succeed. Sometimes I saw AVIF alongside, but I never saw any interest in it.

With that in mind, I first wanted to take JPEG XL in priority, after comparing two images encoded in the former and WebP side-by-side. and noticing that JPEG XL's compression outperformed WebP, which is a huge comparison to both PNG and JPEG. Sadly, due to the lack of support for it which may be addressed in the future, I decided to go for the more universal WebP instead. Needless to say, I still had really good times with it, even if I wanted the other alternative, which is not a big deal for now.

The perks of WebP to know

Being designed differently than PNG and JPEG, but also much later compared to them, WebP looks to address their issues and essentially become superior to them in several ways. It's actually a mix between both formats, meaning it can perform both lossy and lossless compression, with lossy meaning that artifacts will appear on the image, with their visibility depending on the compression strength, and lossless meaning that all detail will be kept on the image while still reducing its size, only less than lossy.

But it's not just that! WebP also has the following strengths:

Alpha blending, that is partial and full transparency, adopted by PNG;

Animation, adopted by PNG (did you know that?) and GIF;

Being an open format, letting anyone contribute to its development at any will (a rare Google W, by the way);

Less visible artifacts seen on lossy images, assuming that it has a similar size to the same image rendered in JPEG (demonstrated in the image above);

Stronger lossless compression than PNG (which I have bragging rights for);

A compatibility with several color spaces;

Oddly enough, "presets" (available only on some encoders), which seem to change the way images should be rendered...

...all of which can be combined together in a single image, even for animations. This is much more than what most other raster image formats offer, so with that single format, you can take advantage of its huge flexibility for multiple purposes! An amount of perks that is pretty outstanding, to say the least.

I tested this format out on a entire folder in which I kept fanart, most of which were PNGs. After converting them into WebP, and although it took a long time because of how large those images were in the first place, it resulted into about 50% of data being removed! So when considering that a collection of PNGs has a total of 1 GB of data, it's easy to notice how big of a difference 500 MB is compared to the former.

Conclusion

Despite what it seems to be for most people, WebP is a highly practical format. While its incompatibility with some popular software could be a deal-breaker for some, it still fares pretty strong with its multitude of features all combined together. While I am not convincing anyone reading this to immediately transition to that format as it could lead to some issues, it does deserve to be tested out by the average user to see how well it performs for them! Personally, WebP has helped me a lot for my main use cases, and while I was not in any tight situation before thinking of moving into it, I could definitely say it would let me avoid dealing with that for a much longer time.

If you appreciated WebP, that said, you should also check out the recently released JPEG XL format, designed with the same purposes but intended to be superior. There are still much more image formats that are meant to have their own big strengths, so you should keep looking for each of them too, in case you're interested.

This is the author of this article, Laddy, signing off now! I hope you all have a really lovely day, peace. 💙

[dailycharacteroption]

Prestige Class Spotlight 12: Mystery Cultist

The term “cult” has come to, in the modern age, refer to monstrous phenomenon in which certain persons gain power over a group by using psychological manipulation and the human desires for fulfillment and structure. However, this is not the only use for the word. It can, particularly when referring to ancient religion, also refer to secretive religions, particularly when referring to Ancient Greek and Roman faiths.

Such “Mystery Cults” were called such because they did not share their rituals and goings-on with outsiders, making them a mystery not only to the people that lived in the same era, but also the historians who have the misfortune of trying to piece this knowledge together centuries later.

Today’s subject errs on the latter side of things as it centers around individuals that follow the mystery cults of the various goodly Empyreal Lords: celestial demideities drawing from angels, archons, agathions, azatas, and the rare unclassified demigods.

Now, some of you may ask why a religion devoted to a goodly demideity would keep itself secret. This could be for any number of reasons. Some may be cults located in regions where evil gods reign, or they may simply recognize that many mortals are unfamiliar with more than a handful of Empyreal Lords, and may be understandably suspicious of those who claim to worship a being that is not a god they are familiar with.

Of course, these mystery cultists need not actually be mystery. Nothing in the mechanics requires it, after all, so you are free to use this prestige class for those that are more open about their religion as well.

On that note, however, it should be noted that this will be one of the last of the Obedience-focused prestige classes we do, as we are running out. (Faster than I thought, too. Turns out I actually have done the sentinel prestige class, so the classic “True Deity” obedience prestige classes are all done now, though I might one day redo that entry as part of my revision specials should I feel the need to.

In any case, these devotees might follow a being that is less than a true deity, but their faith is just as strong.

Naturally, this prestige class has prerequisites, requiring the subject to have considerable knowledge of celestial lore, offer obedience to one of these celestial demigods, and perhaps most important of all, have had a spiritual awakening due to direct contact with a celestial being, such as being blessed or saved by one.

Like most prestige classes with a bit of magic, those that follow this path continue to learn their magic at only a slightly lossy rate. What’s more, they learn to master the favored weapon of their deity if they don’t already.

Utterly devoted to celestial beings as they are, these beings gain a fast track to their appropriate afterlife reward upon death in a benevolent parallel to how the fiendish counterpart classes are damned upon death. What’s more, they get to meet their patron and ask questions of them, answers to which they retain if they are brought back to life.

Naturally, however, the powers of this path are bound to the obedience of the cultist, requiring them to perform daily rituals to maintain these powers.

These devotees are blessed by a celestial being, and with effort they can let that truth shine through, bolstering their confidence but also overwhelming and frightening those that look upon them.

Like all archetypes of this type, these mystics gain boons for their obedience at an accelerated rate. The exact nature of these abilities and blessings varies by the Empyreal Lord they follow, creating a lot of variance.

With a touch, these blessed individuals can heal others, leaving a mark of their deity on the recipient of their healing which lasts the whole day.

As one favored by the empyreal lords, these individuals can also count on celestials to aid them, summoning various celestials that grow in power as they do. These might be from a generic list or be tailored to the nature of their celestial patron.

They can also enter a state of fervor to bolster both their combat and spellcasting abilities for a brief while, though they can seem maddened to others as a result.

Powerful mystery cultists find their bodies are warded against corruption of the flesh, making them resistant to disease and poison. What’s more, their bodies do not decay, remaining pristine for a long while so that they might be resurrected more easily. This same protection also makes it impossible to raise them as the undead.

The most powerful of these blessed mystics earn their own private domicile within their deity’s realm, allowing them to shift to that location and back to where they were at will, creating an otherworldly safe haven they can come back to whenever they and their allies need rest, untouchable save for the most powerful and determined forces of evil.

Like all obedience-themed prestige classes, your exact build will vary based on what your previous class was and what sort empyreal lord they followed, but the ability frighten foes, heal, buff oneself, and summon celestial allies are all powerful tools for combat, and it makes for a fun, thematic take on this formula we’ve all become quite familiar with at this point.

Empyreal Lords, being demideities, are more likely to have direct contact with the mortals that worship them than a true deity, so there is the possibility, however remote, for mortal characters, especially those of this prestige class, to have a personal relationship with such entities. What exactly comes of that can be interesting to explore, depending on how things go, of course.

The devotees of the Time Warden seek to prevent others from meddling with the timestream, even traveling through the timestream to do so. However, in the process they themselves often become accused, rightfully so, of changing the timeline themselves. As such, the faith is an underground one, but they continue their holy mission regardless.

For weeks, Lukis Gemcutter has been sneaking out of the house at night. To where, his neighbors know not, but they suspect the gnome is up to no good. However, the truth of the matter is that he has been inducted into the faith of an Empyreal Lord and patron of secret protectors, though his lack of subtlety threatens to expose the cult.

The cult of the Shining Ambassador has remained a secret for many generations, but there is one witness that might break that streak if it understands what it has learned, for one member unwittingly brought a shapeshifting rope dragon to a meeting, making the curious creature privy to their secret rituals.

[hologramblue]

besides assigning purpose to purposelessness the other thing that is part of that same thought, about storytelling and politics, is like

you know how history is itself a type of storytelling. this kingdom won a war against that kingdom. this rebellion failed and that one succeeded. the people were happy in this era. such-and-so ruler built these roads.

in order to tell stories about history at that scale, you have to discard details. and those details are the actual material realities that people experienced; the outliers, the nuances, the specifics of who did what with what result, shaved off to simplify the narrative, which is all well and good because it allows you to talk about history and see the broad patterns, but when history is taught as history people don't automatically recognize its lossy quality. people will happily grow up believing the past was a sort of fairy tale where function was purpose and pattern was detail, fundamentally different from their own complex lives, if they only ever know stories of the past

(and of course, because time and space are sort of the same thing, the same thing happens with people's understanding of people and places far away from them.)

this is such an easy trap to fall into because humans like stories, they're a useful tool for social, thinking creatures in an infinitely complex world, they're far better than having no clue what's going on at all. they're also not an adequate substitute for truth.

so because stories occupy this middle ground between truth and fantasy, where we make use of them deliberately for entertainment and deliberately as a teaching tool but also accidentally to simplify reality, they're like...

some belief systems and political ideologies are fundamentally about embracing stories in place of reality. Those People are allies and Those People are enemies. why? because of some fundamental nature, they're characters in our story, they don't have internal complexity. Our People are a coherent and unified body and if you disagree you're a traitor and if you're one of us you're better off with us and if you don't feel that way the problem is you

there's an inherent challenge in telling stories that challenge ideologies like that because a large part of their draw is that those narratives tickle people's brains, they're appealing, people will keep coming up with those ideas independently and accidentally because they feel cool and compelling. so if you are telling a story that's nominally against those ideas, but you feel the urge to write something cool and compelling......watch out.

[foone]

I fully agree with this, through clenched teeth.

Long rant about technical details and user experience problems under the readmore

Because here's the thing: GIF is the worst format. It is from the 80s and it shows. It only supports 256 colors, it has very limited frame rates that are inconsistently implemented between viewers, it compresses your animations like they're pixelart drawings in the 80s, ie: very well for expanses of horizontal color, terribly for LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE. It didn't originally even support animation! That was hacked into it later, and badly.

It compresses so horribly for what it's used for these days. This is why sites hate it: why host a 1.5mb webm or mp4 when they could host a 30mb GIF that looks worse?

AND YET every replacement is worse for the users than the last, for one simple reason: repostability. All the sites are turning GIFs into other formats and hosting those altered formats instead of GIFs, and it's completely impossible to just save a "GIF" off Tumblr and post it on Twitter. They're different formats, despite both starting as GIF and both being called GIF by their platforms. (Tumblr does at least let you get the original GIF back. Twitter doesn't)

And even in the rare cases you can cross post from one to the other:

1. You'll probably need special software. On a desktop, not a phone. Try to download a GIF on Twitter mobile, I dare you. It's impossible.

2. When you repost it on Tumblr, it won't be considered a GIF anymore. It's a "video" now. Sites tend to handle "GIFs" and "videos" differently, even in the cases (like Twitter) when they are literally the same file format: mp4! (Twitter autoplays GIF-mp4s, it doesn't autoplays video-mp4s)

So while the replacement of GIF with technologically better formats makes sense from the perspective of someone running a social media site, it absolutely does not for a user, because the user experience is SO MUCH WORSE with GIF-replacements

An animation format should be:

1. Easy to save. Users like downloading stuff. Maybe they want to send it to someone on discord or a text message. Can't do that if they can't save your animation. Most replacements fail this because video-players in apps and browsers don't work like simple images.

2. Easy to modify. Honestly, GIF is pretty bad here too, but at least it's better.

3. Easy to upload. This one falls down all over the place. You can upload a GIF too Twitter and Tumblr and they'll both convert it differently, but they'll both support it. Try to download the Twitter version and post to Tumblr or vice versa, and there'll be problems.

4. Uploaded like a GIF. Like I said, even when you can post new!GIFs from one site to another, they tend to come in as videos, not GIFs.

5. Consistently clearly GIFs. So here's the thing that usually isn't a problem but totally could be: when you're replacing GIF with a video format, it isn't held back by GIF limitations anymore. This is good in some areas (number of colors and compression quality) but very bad in others. Imagine this: I make a Tumblr account called Best Twitter GIFs. I post a bunch of GIFs I've downloaded from Twitter, which are not actually GIFs but MP4 videos, because Twitter converts them. And then one day it's a screamer. You got lulled into a false sense of security because I said these were GIFs, but they're videos. VIDEOS CAN HAVE SOUND.

6. Not noticeably lower quality. So GIF has this thing called "lossless compression". It compresses every pixel like this is a zip file, and it's very important to get the original bits back out. This is not how jpeg and mpeg/mp4/webm/etc formats work: they are lossy, they throw away data in exchange for much better compression. When you're compressing a video to GIF, you're usually starting from a lossy source, and the color limit is already going to make it pretty ugly compared to the original. So then making it lossy again as a new!GIF isn't a big deal. But what if it isn't from a lossy source? What if it's a GIF from the DECADE AND A HALF when GIF wasn't yet being used for "short silent clips of movies/TV/etc", and it expects to be a pixel animation? Well, in most cases it's going to be ruined. There's thousands of GIFs that just turn into blurry mush when you upload them to Twitter, because it assumes they're video clips and compresses them as such.

Anyway the worst part about this is that there has been no end of GIF replacements (technically PNG is one!)

It's basically that xkcd comic about "There's too many standards". We've got mng, apng, webm, mp4, and probably a dozen more I'm not recalling off the top of my head. If we had one "GIF but better" we'd at least have intercompatibility, but we don't even have that.

Honestly like 90% of the problems of new!GIF could be solved by the sites not being such dicks about how they handle them. Let users save them and re-upload them, let them get the original GIF if they need it, etc.

i dont care what people fucking say we must defend the GIF file format at all costs