#youtube's started to do it too but it's just like clip comps and stuff

[bumpscosity]

instagram has decided it wants to randomly show me smiling friends posts to see if i'm interested which is fine but it keeps showing me charlie body pillow designs even tho i've never clicked one so i'll just be scrolling normally and then all of a sudden Charlie Body Pillow Jumpscare

[duhragonball]

Nanwum VII Update: 72,197

I'm starting to run out of gas, which is probably not a big deal since I already cleared 50k, but this bears out my whole strategy of building an early lead. My intention was to pull down 2k per day from the 13th to the end of the month, and I'm still on track, but on the 14th I fell a little behind and only got to 1709. It's not a problem, since I got caught up, but I need to be careful from here if I want to make it to 100k. Not that I need 100k, but I like bragging rights.

To reward myself for the insane wordcounts I put in earlier this month, I decided to watch all of the recent DBZ review videos that TotallyNotMark put up. You know, the ones with the new Team Four Star DBZA clips in them. I'd already watched the "Buu Bits" in a separate compilation video, but now I'm finally checking out the review and...

I don't know, there's a lot of good material in these things. The editing is top notch, and you could play these videos with the sound off and still enjoy it just as an hours-long DBZ highlight reel. And Mark has a lot of salient insights on the series. I particularly liked his analysis of Gohan and Videl's dynamic, and it's also refreshing to see a DBZ fan who, you know, actually likes the show. Like, he's gushing over Vegeta's character arc, or talking about how great the androids and Cell are without a bunch of qualifiers, and it's just refreshing to see that.

That having been said, the writing for these videos often ends up sounding like this:

Like, arguably, you can't do a six-hour review of a cartoon show without being a little pretentious, but there's sentences in these videos where it feels like YouTube is paying Mark by the word.

Also, he tends to make these off-the-cuff style remarks, like he's discussing creative decisions about making the video in the video. I get that too. I write my blog with that same stream-of-consciousness energy, because I really am making this up as I go. It's a blog, there's not gonna be a second draft. But he's doing a YouTube video, and there's a lot of production values involved and the work is pretty polished. I don't think it makes a lot of sense for him to talk about how the sausage is made. Just give me the sausage, which is footage of the cartoon with a guy telling me what he liked about it.

I've sort of had this fascination with the writing style throughout the series, and I think if I had to spoof it, I'd go with something like this:

"Again, as I said before earlier in this video, when I started this review, I wanted to avoid sounding pretentious, an attribute the likes of which can be disastrous for the making of a successful review. But, having established that fact firmly and decisviely, perhaps even conclusively--not withstanding earlier comments made about the length of Piccolo's cape, which is a subject for another day-- I can say with great certainty that Goku and Vegeta do indeed comprise a dramaturgical dyad, not only upon which the series depends upon, but through which we can see the true genius of one of the most influential manga authors of all time."

And while you hear this word salad, there's a cool shot of Vegeta beating up Pui Pui or something.

The weird thing is that I didn't really pick up on this in his GT, Super, or OG Dragon Ball review videos. It's almost like he's purposely writing more stuff so he has room for all the cool footage.

Right now I'm in the tail end of the Buu Saga, and while I give him credit for being diplomatic about it, Mark still falls into the same trap I see with a lot of critiques of the Buu Saga: They keep comparing the existing text with some hypothetical better story that they assumed Toriyama was planning to write instead, before he changed his mind.

I think everyone has run across this before. People saw Gohan take the main-character role after the Cell Games and assumed this was a guarantee. When Gohan gets demoted and Goku takes the lead again, they cry foul and complain about how Toriyama failed to make it work, or he just plain gave up. There's an old fan rumor about how he was "forced" to put Goku back in charge because of backlash from angry fans, but this is absurd on its face.

This leads to critiques of the Buu Saga that operate on the premise that there's some idealized "correct" version of the story, where Gohan trains really hard, beats Buu all by himself, and so on. Whenever the published version of the story deviates from this "correct" version, critics suggest that Toriyama got his wires crossed, and blame everything on the awkward pivot back to Goku.

To me, that doesn't make sense. "Gohan and the Next Generation defeat Buu" is a what-if fan theory. Maybe it's better than what we ended up getting, but it's not fair to review the published work by comparing it to a hypothetical draft that may never have existed. That's like if a food critic gave a steakhouse a bad rating because he thought it was a pizzeria and he's still mad that his sirloin didn't have anchovies on it.

When you look at the Buu Saga as it was actually presented, the throughline is clearly not about passing the torch to the kids, because they all get jobbed out and killed. So it's dumb to review the thing and complain that the Gotenks stuff is pointless, and Gohan's power up is unearned, and his loss to Super Buu really sucks the life out of the story, and gosh, this is a really terrible passing-the-torch story. Well that's because it's not a passing-the-torch story. It's a story about Goku trying to pass the torch, failing, and discovering that he still has a place in the world after all. The "torch" he was trying to pass was his identity and personal responsibility, things he can't just confer on someone else.

You can't just tell someone else they're the new protagonist of your story and now they have to go do your job and feed your pets while you play video games. Everyone talks about Vegeta going Majin as a manifestation of his mid-life crisis, but Goku's mid-life crisis was him dying at age 30 and nope-ing his way out of life to train in Valhalla for the rest of eternity. The Buu Saga forced him to accept that this was a mistake, which is why he doesn't just drink a vial full of heart-virus juice after the story ends. He's back in the world of the living and this time he knows he needs to stay there.

And when you look at it from that perspective, suddenly all the Gotenks/Elder Kai Ritual stuff makes a lot more sense as awkward farce. It's anticlimactic and unsatisfying because none of those plans were ever going to work. Nothing worked until Goku and Vegeta both got their heads out of their asses and worked together. The world didn't need martyrs or torch-passings or a 'next generation', it needed adults to put their personal feelings aside for the greater good.

[lookbluesoup]

Hey Wyn! I Just read all of your Blue Soup series! I love it all!!! Every word of it is fantastic! I've been wanting to start writing Fanfiction for Fallout for a long time, but I've always been intimidated by the prospect of writing already-established characters and "ruining them" (especially characters like Piper, Preston and Nick, who I plan to make main characters in my story). Do you have any advice on dealing with this?

Hi Anon! Thanks so much for your kind words! ;w; I’m certainly no expert and know this fear personally, but I’ll ramble here about my process and how I try to think about things. Hopefully it can encourage you, too! :D I’ll add the disclaimer that this is what works for me, and what works for me might not work for others, that’s ok! 

First off - writing is for fun. Wanting to do justice to the characters and capture their essence is a great goal, and also a learning process. You don’t have to do it perfectly, nor should you try. Perfection implies there’s nothing more to learn or grow over, which is one, unachievable, and two, the death of innovation. Just do the best you can with what you know, and let your passion for the characters guide the process. And be gentle with yourself. 

Our own experiences and preferences will effect how we write these characters, what traits of theirs stand out to us, how we define their shape, at least in small ways, and that’s not inherently bad. Just like many different artists can draw a character in 100 different styles and that character is still recognizable and familiar (and enjoyable!), writers can emphasize 100 different facets of that character, too. If you’re putting your heart into it, you won’t ruin them. Saw a beautiful LotR post the other day about that, talking about how the movies are different from the books, but the love for the story and characters shows because the people who made those movies were passionate about it, and they’re worthy adaptations of the stories’ spirit. It’s the same for fanfiction.

It’s personally more fun for me to think about the writing process like I’m exploring a character rather than making a statement about a character, which are two very distinct mindsets for me. Exploring is fun, engaging, its ok to change your mind and edit or alter your story as you get new information. It’s like a puzzle, thinking through a character’s motivation, finding ways to incorporate that into a story. Making a statement is more 'fixed’, and implies pushing a narrative as the correct one, which adds a lot of pressure. Personally? I don’t like pressure hahaha 

Still - it’s hard not to feel obligated to do something to a certain standard for one reason or another. My anxiety likes to tell me lots of little lies, and it can be very convincing. When it strikes, working through my nerves is often harder than actually writing LOL

When I first started writing Fallout fanfic, I didn’t post it anywhere. That took a LOT of the pressure off, knowing that none of this needed to, or was even intended to be, shared with others who might judge. These stories were just between me and the characters. It was safe. I could work at my own pace and enjoy the process in my little tide pool. Since deciding to share them, I’ve been really grateful for the support readers have given! It feels good, I’m glad I found the courage to post them.

As for working out that puzzle of what seems most likely for a character, how to capture the heart of them, I love voice lines! Codex entries! Compilations! The best way to get to know a character is to spend time with them. I take Piper everywhere with me, I want to know what she thinks about everything, her character really struck a chord with me and, well, cue hyperfixation hahaha I use the Windows 10 Game Bar to record audio clips and have a massive archive of her voice lines. Flipping through these is a useful tool for me to get back into her “pattern” of speaking. All the Companions have distinct voices and tendencies, which is another neat aspect to writing them. I feel more confident knowing I had access to the source material. Also I just. Like listening to her voice sometimes. Shhh

Other great resources for this are the wiki (which has text files of most, if not all, each character’s dialogue lines and conversation trees) and youtube companion reaction comps - this SOUNDS like a lot of work. But for me at least I love it, it doesn’t feel like work because I’ll be excited looking for specific lines a la “how does she talk when she’s angry”, “what does she have to say about mirelurks”, you don’t have to keep everything about each character in your head memorized - these audio and text files are great archives to find what’s relevant to a scene quickly.

When I got into Fallout, I also got interested in 1950s movies, music, and even radio shows like Johnny Dollar and Green Hornet. This gave me context around the characters, too. For example, Piper’s kickass reporter vibes throw back to a lot of old sleuthing reporter tropes, and interpreting her actions through some of those filters felt more authentic to me than applying her behavior to a modern day setting or my own inclinations. I guess along with that I’d also say, take notes! Have an observation? Write it down in a notes file, or a google doc, somewhere you can sync between your devices and add to whenever you think about it. What stuff sticks out to you as important or defining for these characters, what trends do you notice? If you have bullet points written down, these also make great quick references. Here’s a few screenshots from the terror that is my notes docs:

You can see they’re just short notes or scribbled down thoughts that I can quickly reference if I’m wondering how she might act in a certain scene at a certain time! For me getting into a character’s headspace is often more of a feeling than any kind of scientific research, having easy access to these pointers helps put me in the right state of mind to jump into the creative pool and swim around and get soaked in - character goo - okay bad metaphor. Anyway,

None of these are rules that you have to follow or things that you have to do to get the characters “right”, they’re just potential tools that can help you find information to build off of, and hopefully feel more confident. Maybe something else is more useful to you with organizing or keeping your head clear for writing, it’s cool to experiment and find out what works for you!

[kumoriyami-xiuzhen]

Hakuoki Reimeiroku Saito Final Chapter

have i ever mentioned how i’m a masochist when it comes to this stuff? like, i will freely admit how i actually don’t like translating and doing more unnecessary work, but I when I do something for myself, I tend to want a certain degree of quality.... which is why i decided i’d do some video editing for this... a decision that I really regret now though i can say that it’s something that i know hate more than photoshop lol. 

after i finished my yuugiroku 2 vid, i figured i might as well try to install Visual Novel Reader to see if that could offer me better visual and audio quality for this... but before I finished installing it, I went and checked what videos were available that I could use for assets and found a video made through vnr had about the same audio quality as to ppsspp... along with videos from someone other psp emulated version of this... which i then clipped for audio. 

between visual and audio quality... i’ll pick audio any day so after deciding that i’d be using some of the less grainy audio i found along with my ppsspp footage... i set to work trying to layer the tracks.... but since the audio didn’t match the visuals’ timing, I had to manually cut pieces of my screencap video up so that it matched the audio timing, while also making sure that the visuals looked like they were still continuous (damn  circle icon which wouldn’t go away and caused problems)... on top of which, i had to deal with removing a number of random black screens that would just flash on screen for less than a second when i ran reimeiroku through the ppsspp emulator.... then i also had to find the song that plays towards the ending of this cuz the audio i had cut before the end of my screencap vid which was also a pain because i couldn’t find the damn thing anywhere on youtube so i had to go find the game rip audio (thankfully i have a site for that. also in the game, that song doesn’t naturally fade out and i manually added in that effect cuz i felt like it and thought it was better than the audio just cutting off) so i could put that in and align it so that track matched the audio timing for the vita audio track.... and then i also had to do something about the interval where i had to increase and decrease volume since the end kept sounding off no matter what i did....tho i kinda think the video still sounds off in 2 places.

once i got all the damn visuals and text properly lined up, i gave up on having to deal with the the stupid circle icon in that was originally in the bottom right hand corner since i got pissed enough seeing it and cuz it was no longer continuously in motion so I decided to remove it entirely along with the auto-play icon (at this point im on about version 10 of the video).

then, to cover up the right side of the video, i figured that’d i’d just stuck up an image over top of that section.... but after several tries i gave up on that since every damn picture i imported regardless if that was a screenshot of the game or a screen capture of the video from the editing software itself, nothing would match the colour of the text box for some infuriating reason... which ultimately led to me redoing everything so i didn’t have the stupid text box then stringing together clips between those stupid bouncing icons to erase the damn thing entirely though i thankfully didn’t worry about the auto-play icon the second time around....

however, doing that in itself posed a whole new problem since what i could effectively clip was less than >0.5 seconds each time to create cropped video layers that would hide that stupid icon, and my comp reaaaaaallllly started to issues when i did more of this and when i copied and pasted too many of those millisecond clips together... it got to the point where i was waiting 15 minutes for about 4 seconds of copied hide-the-damn-icon-video-clips (or about 8 hours for 40 seconds worth)... which pretty much crippled my computer..... 

this resulted in me having insane amounts of segments that looked entirely like this^, which occurred whenever there was an icon to hide... or text shake for some reason.... which caused me to create +20 openshot files for editing...(btw this is 138 tiny clips over the span of 6 seconds)

in the end, over the course of a fucking month, which i can honestly say that me finishing this for today was a complete coincidence (i barely managed to finish Warframe’s Scarlet Spear event cuz of how bad this was lol), i lost count of many versions of this video I made sometime after I reached version #32, openshot crashed on me at least 15 times (gave up counting that too), and my laptop crashed twice.... 

after i finally finished my video, i thankfully didn’t spend that long on subtitles but it took me far longer than i’d have liked to get the damn positioning right since potplayer is annoying when it comes to single lines and i had to guess and check the positioning almost every other time for some strange reason whenever i had a single line... which was never a problem when i had 2 or 3 lines of text... but editing was a slight hassle cuz i wanted the text used to be as accurate as possible... and i checked 3 reimeiroku tls of this chapter and the JP mtl of a bunch of sentences just to be sure. 

anyway, thanks to doing all of this unnecessary torture, i am absolutely never going to ever be repeating this experience ever again even if someone pays me because video editing is a serous pain in the ass and I hate it more than photoshop (also why the hell does ppsspp have so many issues with reimeiroku when compared to yuugiroku 2)!!!

also, learned my lesson and didn’t write this post this after staying awake til an ungodly hour lol. my attention to basic grammar plummets like a rock if i stay up past 4 am.... so i decided to write out all my grievances beforehand.... and put my video for this at the very bottom cuz im terrible like that and want everyone who sees this to deal with a massive wall of text xD! suffer! suffer as i have dammit lol!

enjoy the fruits of my damn labour! i’ve passed the point of caring if there are errors in this so keep anything you notice to yourself!! goddammit i noticed something wrong that i couldn’t ignore... namely the chapter name and my credit.... fixed that now.

on a final note, it’ll probably be more than a year before I touch Reimeiroku again because of my commitment to what I am able to translate for SSL so don’t ask lol.... 

[dzpenumbra]

9/30/22

This might be an intense one. I wanna refer back to earlier tonight, a big wake-up. Maybe a memory, I know I've discovered this before, but it's like... I just sorta understand it better than I did back then? I'm being vague, let me elaborate.

I was recording for Session, trying to get some clips to put on Instagram as like... a test market before crossposting on YouTube too. I wanna treat learning how to skate with a controller in Session Hardcore mode the way I've been treating learning how to skate on a real board or snowskate. I want to document my progress, daily, weekly, whatever ends up working best. I was filming for this, and by the end of the night, ended up with a little reel which came out pretty sick tbh. About halfway through, I was thinking about music again. Here it is, I uncovered the lead-up, sick, I forgot until now!

So I was listening to MrSuicideSheep - I've been listening to his mixes a LOT over the past... like 8 years honestly. I had suggested just the day before that my brother do playlists of music, searching through Soundcloud for unsigned, undiscovered good music. That way I have good shit to play on stream, don't have to worry about DMCA and I can promote small artists all at the same time. Win across the board. Then I went... yo... why am I just sitting here waiting for him to "think about it". That's like 90% of the time guaranteed to be a "no". When I could just fuckin do it myself. I could even stream my searches for music. Digging through the bowels of Soundcloud, looking for musicians with like 20 followers that are actually really damn good, giving honest, real artistic/musical critique as I go. When I played out this scenario in my head, which was very vivid, I referred to myself by my old moniker. My old persona, who happened to be my primary musical persona.

What happened was that I took my music persona and mixed it with things that I'm not proud of. Nothing horrible, just embarrassing. In a time that I was very sad and very lonely, and attached to whatever people would take me in like a stray dog wandering in a bad neighborhood. And, to be fair, put on anti-psychotics for... help sleeping??? This has happened to me quite a few times in my life, it's a very clear recurring pattern. But this one just sticks with me. I don't feel comfortable going into any more detail than that.

When I got in my last relationship. Let's just paint the scene here first. My ex broke up with me when I hurt my leg in 2010. I dated 1 girl inbetween and went on like 4 dates. I didn't date my last ex until about 2015-2016. I don't date a lot. Because I give every candidate a full chance, not half my attention, or purely lust. Because I'm looking for a partner, not something to entertain me because I'm bored. When I started dating this last one, very quickly I had begun to plot the dismantling of my former persona. Former dominant persona, I should say. This was the nickname every friend I had in college knew me by, I was called that name more often than my real name. It was my old username for a lot of stuff, dating back very far. I had to have a viking funeral for him. I had to shut everything down, delete most of the traces that remained, and try to move on.

But I was young. I didn't know what I was doing with it. I just expected if I kill off part of my ego, that something better would just grow back or something. Maybe I wasn't thinking, or I was taking peoples' words for it that it was the right thing? Or just acting on faith? I don't know what it was. But what happened, to the best of my recollection, was that I lost my sense of self. I didn't recognize myself in the mirror. I didn't recognize the woman I was dating. I lost direction and purpose. I started feeling physically ill.

It wasn't a sudden collapse of my subpersona, it was building for a long time. He wasn't happy, he wasn't doing what he wanted. He was making compromises left and right, and the compromises always took more than they gave, by a wide margin. When I couldn't take any more, I saw the opportunity to settle down and start a family and swan dived towards it. As I stated in the last paragraph, it did not go well.

I've told the story of what happened since then before. What I really want to focus on is the impact of what happens to you when you kill off, or ask to leave, or dissolve, I don't know a good word for it... banish? Exile? Something like that. Banish works. What happens when you banish your primary identity. The person you identify as. The person that you are comfortable in the skin of, whose name spoken out loud makes your head turn. Bad shit.

I wonder if this is what they mean by ego death. Google time. What's pretty cool is the first Google search result is Timothy Leary. I have a book of his, I really should read it sometime. It's not that long. Anyway, I don't know if this that I'm talking about is full-on ego death, so I still don't know what to call it.

But that moment of burning that old life down. I guess in Tarot it would be a Tower moment, right? Tearing down the old habits, the old monument of the life before - in the card it's by a lightning strike, but I think I just kinda played god on that one and said "fuck it, it's time to evolve."

I tried to bring him back a few years later. The first time I split up with my ex for like 2 weeks, I immediately tried to resurrect him. But I didn't just bring him back the way he was, I tried to revive a spiritually enlightened form of him. It resulted in one of the best songs I've ever written. Hands down. And a massive shift in my lyric writing style, a giant growth spurt. Then, I went back to my ex. Like a big ol dumdum. And he went away. Then I left her for good. And after a few months of trying to patch my life together... and some major changes... I brought the resurrected old me back for a second spin.

This time, it got wild. This time, I tried to take my old self that was fused with spiritual self, and add in my weed-smoking hippie self from college. The combination was jarring for most. I think they forgot those old faces, and seeing them talk about spirituality out of nowhere threw a lot of them off. I mean, in hindsight, they were all self-absorbed assholes either way, because who the fuck doesn't support someone dealing with a major breakup, the loss of their purpose in life and two nearby deaths? Crazy shit.

But yeah, I had to banish him too. I clung to him for a long fuckin time. I was literally in a therapists office in a meeting in tears when I told him it had to happen. That I was grieving already and I was just so tired of having to tell this guy to leave. I love him. He's a huge part of me. But people around me keep taking offense to parts of him, I don't even see what it is anymore.

I'm tired. I'm gonna need to pass out. But I really wanted to touch on this because it had me crying a bit and apologizing to my cat for - I want to stop saying "killing", he's not dead at all, he can't die, he's a character - banishing her father. I apologized for how disorienting that must have been. She just looked at me funny, started purring and tried to go to sleep on my lap. So I'd say we reached a pretty firm understanding between us. XD

Bed time. More packing tomorrow. Hope I can get my brother involved for creative projects, I have a ton of ideas and they're gonna take up every minute of my time if I have to do all of them myself. The amount of content I could crank out if I had a good editor that knows what he's doing... it's pretty staggering to think about. Fingers crossed.

[gothrapxxx]

Ah, the GIF. We’ve all seen them. They populate the Internet on blogs and social media and are part of what makes news and entertainment sites like Buzzfeed very popular. When a GIF is used with the right content, it can go viral, which is why it has become a powerful marketing tool. Whether you are using it on Twitter, your blog, website or other social media channel, you can now create one easily. There are plenty of free and premium online tools which let you create GIF files quickly, but before you get started, what is a GIF file? A GIF (with the file extension, .gif) is basically an image file format that is animated by combining several other images or frames into a single file. This single file is encoded as graphics interchange format (better known as GIF). Unlike the JPEG image format (.jpg), GIFs typically use a compression algorithm referred to as LZW encoding that does not degrade the image quality and allows for easy storing of the file in bytes. The multiple images within a single GIF file are displayed in succession to create an animated clip or a short movie. By default, animated GIFs With Sound display the sequence of images only once, stopping when the last image or frame is displayed, although it can also loop endlessly or stop after a few sequences. But social sites like Tumblr and GIF creation tools like Giphy gained in popularity more recently and a GIF can be an effective and low-impact replacement for a video and, essentially, valuable as a business tool. GIFs are often used for bite-sized entertainment and as statements, replies or comments in online conversations. They are also commonly used online to convey reactions, illustrate or explain concepts or products in a fun, creative and succinct way, and also to make GIF art. Take, for example, this visually striking form of GIF art by Graphics artist Kevin Burg and photographer Jamie Beck, depicting a scene at a New York Fashion Week. In an interview with Time magazine, Beck likened it to freezing time and letting a single moment live, breathe. Not surprisingly, the popularity of GIFs now defines the Internet’s lexicon, legitimized by Oxford Dictionary naming it the Word of the Year in 2012. And GIF art, itself, is legitimized by contemporary art galleries and institutions like the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City that showcase the best GIF art pieces by talented young graphics artists. Abigail Posner, Head of Strategic Planning and Agency Development at Google, writing in Fast Company says animated GIFs With Sound and other such visual media like memes “reconnect us to an essential part of ourselves.” The GIF graphics file format was created by Steve Wilhite in 1987 at CompuServe. In the years since, a debate has been raging as to the correct way to pronounce “GIF”: Is it pronounced “jif” as in the peanut butter, or “gif” with a hard ‘G’ as in “gift?” Most people pronounce it “gif” with a hard ‘G’, but Wilhite, who was honored with a Webby Lifetime Achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF format, insists it is pronounced as “jif.” “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” GIF has become the calling card of modern Internet culture. Businesses — large and small — have embraced the file format and use it to liven up their messages online. Many savvy businesses, for example, edit, rearrange or combine one or more video sources to create an absurd juxtaposition designed deliberately to emphasize a minor detail or fire off a quick market commentary. Aside from using GIFs as a medium for humorous effect and to show a fun, likable company culture, many brands and creative agencies commonly create GIFs that have commercial messages and seamless advertisements, such as banners and leaderboards. A seamless product 360-rotation demo can also be a highly effective animation. It helps illustrate the product design and generate interest.

Moreover, GIF file format is supported by nearly all Web browsers and Apple’s iOS also supports GIF  but not its rival Flash. So GIF has become popular with brands marketing on social media, news media and the mobile Web. A looping GIF perfectly embedded into an article and published at just the right places can deliver your message powerfully. Several image editing programs like Adobe Photoshop, GIMP and Microsoft GIF Animator can be used to create simple animated GIFs that spread short company videos or messages across the Web. If you’d like to create and share videos longer than a few seconds, however, you might want to use the MPEG format because the GIF format is not as efficient with video clips longer than a few seconds. Social media is fun—why else would we spend so much time on it? Brands who manage to stay human and share authentically can create a deep and special relationship with their audience, and funny/weird/endearing GIFs can be a part of that. Want to give your audience a closer look at your product? GIFs With Sound can show off the kind of details and motion that can entice shoppers. Who’s using it? Marie Claire took advantage of the GIF format to offer viewers a look at a product: their killer gladiator sandals. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to explain something in an image than it would be with words. For step-by-step how-tos, following along with processes, or even quick recipes, a GIF can be exactly what you need. Saying “thank you” with a GIF on Twitter can provide an extra touch of delight. Our own Kevan Lee shows you how in this quick video: Think a GIF is too brief a vessel to get a real point across? I was skeptical, too, until I saw some of the amazing mini-presentations that can be shared in this format. GIFs can be particularly effective when you want to string multiple still images together to tell a story of motion or change over time. Got a TV or print advertisement you want to get a bit more play out of? Transfer it into GIF form! A really awesome way to use a GIF is to give your audience context into a piece of data or statistic through an animated diagram or graphic. Want to share just a tiny look at a future product, big announcement or upcoming release? A GIF can be the perfect bite-size teaser. Give your audience a peek inside your company: Who you are, what you look like, what makes you laugh and what you’re up to every day at work. GIFs can be a fun, lighthearted way to share a bit of your company culture and bring your fans closer to you. Pronounced gif or jif, the GIF file type was originally designed for graphics, but it's now most commonly used for simple animated images on the Web. It might be easiest to think of a GIF as a tiny movie that plays over and over in your web browser. This video from PBS gives a really nice introduction to the history of the GIF file format. Google has made it a lot easier to find animated GIFs. Just go to images.google.com in your web browser, enter your search term, then select Search Tools > Type > Animated. This is the image search tool we've used a lot in our office. It's been really fun to surprise each other with animated GIFs of our favorite TV shows and movies. There are animated GIFs out there for almost anything you can think of, so have fun looking for them! A Youtube compilation is a fun montage video assembled from the best parts of other videos. Compilations can be of sports highlights, fail videos, Vines, or anything else. Each clip adds to the total of the compilation and makes sense with the other clips. Think about the theme of your compilation to find videos. Do you want it to just be interviews with a celebrity? Or also clips of their acting? Do you want your music video compilation to only have the chorus? Or connect through a specific visual? You can use as many or as few as you like. To keep track of your videos you can keep their tabs open or write down a list of links. Upload the videos to the Kapwing video montage maker. You can copy and paste the links directly so you don’t have to download anything from Youtube. Once your clips are done uploading click “Edit trim” to trim them to the part you want in your compilation. You can choose the dimensions of the video using the drop down menu. Reorder the clips as you see fit. When you feel like your compilation is done, click Create! You can share the Kapwing link to your video or download the video to your device and share the file via text, email, or social media. Most of us have pretty much never lived our adult lives without the internet. It’s affected us in innumerable ways – some good, some very bad – and despite not really knowing what a world without it looks like, it still continues to surprise us. In our Extremely Online series, we explore the apps, trends, subcultures, and all the other weird stuff the internet continues to offer. Cruelly neglected by its sugar daddy Twitter, the short-form video platform Vine shut down for good January 17 2017, much to the disappointment of fans of excessive bass boosting and Spongebob Squarepants. Mourning the loss of fresh, high concept, whip-sharp fast comedy, most turned to YouTube, where people were already archiving the most iconic, face-hurtingly funny of Vines. These YouTube compilations, generally created while Vine was still alive and well, were 10-minute selections from about a given month of uploads on the app. They were heavily monetised and bookended by obnoxious movie editor stock intros and crap music. This was the digital petri dish from which the bacteria of vlogger Nash Grier and the Paul brothers festered and spread. With Vine shutting off the tap as it were, these styles of videos stopped appearing for the most part, and Vine’s breakout stars jumped ship to create their own longer form YouTube content.

But if the algorithm, FBI agent, or reptilian globalist behind your browsing habits is anything like mine, you’ll have seen another type of Vine comp in the YouTube recommended section. Videos with deadpan, cumbersome titles like “Underrated and overrated Vines that redeem me” and “Vines that get me friggin jazzed”. For the most part, the awkwardly preplanned “skits” that plagued Vine’s comedy section are gone, and instead, these compilations celebrate the head scratching, esoteric underbelly of Vine that was always there. Like obsessive DJs scouring record shops for old overlooked 12”s, introducing oddities to mainstream audiences and recontextualising classics, these uploaders have turned the Vine compilation into a different beast, unique from the platform itself, a kind of midway point between internet art and mixtape. Similar to constructing a decent mixtape for a friend or crush, there’s a few things you should bear in mind if you want to create a fire Vine compilation to share with the world. Hold on to your croissants. If you want to get some traffic rolling in, you’ll need to pick your title wisely. It’s difficult to describe the tone you should try to emulate, but it’s essentially a kind of sleepy post-irony – just scan some @dril tweets to get a flavour. There’s also a soothing familiarity and repetition to these videos, and some of the titles speak to that self-care utility, referencing how they might help assuage symptoms of anxiety or depression.

The market has been flooded in the past six months, so if you want your comp to really slap and do big numbers, you’ll have to study the competition, and do some Vine-mining of your own. The app is still running as an archive-cum-memorial of saved Vines, so if you dig hard enough, you can still find some hidden gems that no-one has seen before. This is an essential rule for most collections of art – how do your Vines fit together? Do you want to hit them with a few classics at the start to ease them in before the weird shit? Do you want your fail compilation to tell a story? Could there be a thematic link between the Shetland Pony tip toein’ in his Jordans and the old dudes in the playground yelling “I’m a cowboy, baby!”? Recording and visual artists think hard about the movement of their work before releasing an album or presenting a collection: you should too. It occurs to me now that I may be overthinking something that defies satisfactory analysis, but we’ve come this far, and you’re still reading, so let’s just power through, shall we? Shooting straight from the hip here, just so you don’t have to: I watch Vine compilations when I’m sitting on the toilet. It’s okay. We all do. It struck me during one of these trips to the WC that the length of the average bowel movement is actually a decent yardstick to consider when you’re figuring out how long to make your fail compilation. Generally, over five minutes so it feels substantial, but any more than 10 and you run the very real risk of leg cramps – sorry, boredom. If you want to take your social media strategy to the next level and really say what you mean online, it’s essential that you know how to make a GIF. You can use GIFs to create eye-catching ads, or to connect with your followers through relatable moments from pop culture. This article will show you how to make a GIF, and also explore the most effective ways to use them on social media and beyond. The Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, chains together multiple bitmap (BMP) files into a single animated image. Each pixel within a GIF can be one of 256 colors, which is why GIFs generally look low-res compared to other videos we see online. GIF have lower frame rates, too, which works to their advantage. More frames equal bigger files, and GIFs need to stay small and shareable. You could think of GIFs as the midpoint between images and videos. The main advantage of using GIFs is that you can tell a story quickly, and it doesn’t take much bandwidth to load them—making them perfect for mobile. If you’ve ever thought GIFs seem a little primitive, well, that’s because they are: the animated GIF has existed in its current state for 30 years, predating the Internet itself! GIFs have exploded in popularity in recent years. GIPHY, one of the web’s more popular GIF databases, claims to have over 300 million daily active users. Last month, Google acquired Tenor, a keyboard app and GIF archive designed to help iOS, Android and desktop users find the GIFs they want quickly. Tenor processes over 400 million GIF searches per day. GIF was 2012’s Word of the Year, and even though we engage with GIFs every day, we can’t seem to agree on their pronunciation. Is the G soft (like gin) or hard (like giggle)? In my humble opinion, it’s “GIF”, not “JIF.” Remember, GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format: that’s graphic, not jraphic. I’m willing to die on this hill, but you don’t have to agree with me. Steve Wilhite, grandfather of GIFs, initiated a storm of Internet discussion when he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Webby’s in 2013. His five-word speech expressed solidarity with the soft G camp, proclaiming, “It’s pronounced ‘JIF’ not ‘GIF!” Cue side-eyes from half of the Internet. Ultimately, there’s no right way to say GIF. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has remained neutral on the issue. The debate will probably rage on until we invent a new file type to express our feelings online.

Even if you can’t decide how to say it, it’s still fundamental that you learn how to make a GIF. Let’s check out the basic steps, then explore some tools to help you make GIFs With Sound in a jiffy. If you’re looking to make a GIF quickly, the best approach is using a GIF conversion site like GIPHY, Make A Gif, or Gifs.com. These platforms all function slightly differently, but the following steps will give you a rough idea of what to expect when you’re using them to make a GIF for the first time. 1. Choose the video you’d like to make into a GIF The best GIFs target relatable moments that apply to specific feelings or situations. Pick something that will resonate with your target audience. For example, in my article about YouTube ads, I used a GIF of someone angrily smashing their computer with a hammer. If you’ve ever had your solo kitchen dance party interrupted by an unskippable ad, you can probably relate. Find a video that captures your moment. You can use one you’ve saved to your computer or mobile device, or search online: YouTube and Vimeo are widely-used resources for clips. 2. Upload the video for conversion If you’re uploading your own video, select that option within the converter you’ve chosen, and upload the video. If you’re using a video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, paste the complete URL into the converter’s URL field. 3. Establish the length of your GIF When you’ve uploaded your video file, isolate the moment you’d like to capture by bookending it with timestamps. GIFs support up to 3 minutes of footage, but two to six seconds is more than ideal. 4. Optional step: add text GIFs don’t include sound, so you can add text for extra direction or meaning. Subtitles can provide context if you’re GIF-ing a quotable moment. Alternatively, you can use text to highlight a situation or feeling you’re hoping to express with the GIF (e.g., “Social media influencers be like…”). 5. Download your GIF If you’re on desktop, you’ll notice that if you try to open the newly-downloaded GIF file it won’t be animated, and instead shows a series of frames. Don’t panic! Simply drag the GIF into your web browser and the animation will start looping. On mobile, GIFs play instantly when opened. These are the basic steps of how to make a GIF, but there are actually several different approaches, especially if you want to use your own source material.