Gimp made this image possible. Not only did I resize it in Gimp, but I also made the sky gradient in Gimp. Both are subtle, but impossible without a very cool graphics program. Gimp stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. GNU, as you may or may not know means that it is free. Some argue whether Gimp is free like speech or free like beer. There is a debate going on that many people in the open source software are only doing it for free beer. They say that they are doing it to preserve free speech. While I may be labeled gullible for it, I believe that one can judge a person by his/her actions and words. If the person says that they are for free speech, listens to people, and develops free products of their own, they must be a proponent of free speech. A person who says that they are for free speech (except for Marilyn Manson), flames people on slashdot.org and indymedia.org, and charges a fortune for the poor software that they help develop, is a person who simply wants free beer given to them. They do not want to see those who do good prosper. They want to see themselves prosper being served by others for free. But then there are people like me. ^_^ I am poor. I am very poor. I might pawn my computers, sell all my books, give my clothes to charity, sell my DVDs and CDs, put the rest on my back, and ride my bike to Canada if I don't get $320 for my rent check in a month from now. It's one of those starving artist things, I know. Instead of getting a job, I'm making free content to appease the internet dieties... and accidentally also for people to see. Of course, there are no internet dieties, so I'm making free content for people to see. But you see, I take and I give, right? I download 600 MB, I upload 50 MB. If 12 people visit my entire site, it would work out right, right? But some people want money. That throws the equation off. When some people do stuff for free and others get paid, some people want stuff for free and others don't bother (what you get is what you pay for). Except when people put up really cool stuff for free. Megatokyo is a very cool web comic that is free. There's advertising, so everyone is happy. But that only works for popular sites that are original. Something like translated Ruroni Kenshin scans cannot be popular or original, and thus no advertising. Some people pay for the translation and some people get it free, but there's a problem. The people who are supposed to get paid aren't happy seeing their work given away for free. While they're rolling in dough, they want more because more means that they won't have to work on another manga translation in the future and achieve the same wealth. Well, IExplorer.exe just crashed and I lost the finale that was going to change your life. Sorry. Have a fortune cookie instead.
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I thought of the perfect idea for a lesson beyond all lessons. I would prove that English language is most compressed in character format. Then I would explain that sadly, compression is not the intended output of any human speech. You see, recording spoken word is very uncompressed. Recording video of a person speaking is even worse. DivX and MP3 vs. MP3 vs. Picture vs. Text vs 3D vector graphics. Who wins? It depends on the contest. If you want the one to get something on the net with the least upload and download, it's text by a mile. But what will text get you*? A person who is really unhappy about the format of your "website." Text alone is hardly a website. Graphics make a decent website, like JF. Video usually makes a terrible website. Audio annoys a person as much as an all-text website. But who would play a video game without sound and moving pictures (video, 3d, or 2d scroller)? So if your website is supposed to be a video game, you do something about the sound and video. You leave the text for paragraphs explaining stuff. Graphics make things look good and video excite people for intros etc. Audio by itself is left to non-obtrusive stuff and video. So why would mix those? Using text for your exciting intro, making a video with audio to explain stuff, and using graphics for sparse non-obtrusive stuff. You see what it leaves you, a bad-looking site that downloads poorly and doesn't make people interested.
This picture is smaller in PNG than JPEG. Why? Because there are no gradients. I could have put them in there, but I wasn't interested. I should have also textured this picture. But I don't have CorelDraw 6 on this computer. I decided that I'd leave it for another day. You might remember that last night I promised you a market. Well, this is it. It's not like Pike Place Market or Farmer's Market, it's the type of market you see in Cowboy Bebop's fun and action-packed episode where they find the data dog, Ein. How did I make it? Boxes. Everything is a box or an extruded and scaled box. Never underestimate the power of a box. While it won't do for organic stuff, you can sure do a bunch of cool stuff with it.
Hey all, what do we got here? Nothing less than a perfect lesson ripe for the teaching. I started to texture this beast, right? The first thing a person is supposed to do is to split up the groups of textured parts. For a car, it is smart to do the side, the top, the front, and the back. So I did that and I spent a lot of time getting it exact to size and stuff. Silly me when I got the top picture as a result. But it's not magic. Low res textures (256x512) will be ugly if you use them improperly. So what about the lower picture? Would you believe me if I told you it was done with boxes? Maybe not. You see, in all the geometry of this picture there isn't a single box. I made sure of that so that it'd look futuristic. There are a few lines that are pependicular and parallel to the ground, but those aren't very impressive either. So I replaced odd looking n-gons with squares and then used the texture editor to pull the texture coordinates to the form of the boxes. It works very well. In fact, I'm going to do that as much as I can. No more messing around with curves or diagonal lines, all straight perpendicular or parallel lines from now on. ^_^ It won't work all the time, but you should rely on it because it gives you about 100x as much pixel resolution.
