Timer Update #2

The first month of 2024 has gone by, and I’ve done little to make progress with updating this bastard of a website. I’d like to pledge that this is the fucking year, Taimaheads. I’m going to give this page a sick landing page and custom theming, and about a hundred thousand other features that would make this place a killer website to hang out while on drugs. No promises. We’re both along for the ride. You know about as much as I do about the future of this website.

There are some sweet posts I’m cooking up, they just need a little more time. Hang in there! Here’s some pictures to hold you over.

Preserving Transparency: The .gif vs. .webp Debate

This is a debacle I’ve found myself in only because I just love shitty, poopy gifs. I find the gif (pronounced “jif“) to be pretty cool because of their nostalgic smelliness and their extreme legacy support.

Wait, what the hell? They have squeezy sprayable peanut butter now? Next time I see that shit in ye olde marketplace, I’m getting some.

Jifs can be kind of bad sometimes, like in the following examples. Excuse Taima standing on her tippytoes, or levitating or whatever. The resource I used apparently has inaccurate animation stances, as well as some inaccurate images for clothing.

The Crimson Arcglaive‘s glow is GONE! How horrible! At least you got to see Taima’s new look. Still, let’s try that again.

Festive, but now the image is no longer transparent at all. Still, it’s a step up, and probably the only way to accurately show the Arcglaive in a .gif. One more try?

Okay, this looks kind of like shit, but it’s got some flavor to it. I’ve set the image to render every transparent pixel as fully opaque! It does indeed make the glaive look like a mean poking machine.

Uh, anyway, it might be time to move on to greener, web pee-ier pastures, because they have more features. Seriously, check this shit out!

As you can see, the gif cannot fucking handle the simplest bit of transparency above a transparent background. Every pixel MUST get fucking deleted from this Earth, or set to a blazing 100% opacity. And that’s just not good enough. Webpiss can handle the transparency AND the animation, all at a smaller filesize! Speaking of filesize, GIMP has been a real piece of trash sometimes at reducing filesize by optimizing the layers while making these Jifs. Sometimes, it just can’t spit out an optimized gif properly without mashing the layers together into one cacophony of image layers. I’ve kind of had it with that shit.

Let’s try one more cute little collection of Timers, to wash away the vomit taste.

Holy moley, adorable! To avoid the crunched up video recording look, I actually had to construct this one out of raw images from a Maple sim spritesheet plus the raw image of the polearm prone stab afterimage. But the transparent pixels of the weapon’s afterimage trail are gone, as well as the Arcglaive glow. What about the transparency threshold alpha 0 version?

AAAH! It looks like utter garbage! The afterimage trail from the weapon stab is butchered, and so is everything around it. Finally, time for webpiss~

Webpiss is bliss, what can I say? Don’t worry, there will still be a ton of gifs when I’m in the mood to make them, and most will be in Guan Yunchang’s diary. Which is not over, might I add! (Just don’t mistake that disclaimer for me actually having written any fresh GYWTD. [spoiler]I’m not there yet…[/spoiler])

Shitting Up the Joint: Ironman and Other Memes

I don’t really like to mention discord when I can avoid it. The Ironman Discord needed a little extra liveliness, and someone put out a call for more emote suggestions. Naturally, I took that to an extreme and made really dumb garbage instead of acting like a normal person.

Familiar images by now. Baby Yunchang spurtin’ up vomit, and a rabid Guan Yunchang fan! Does it get any better than that? Maybe a dump of images could come close.

Bleatiful stuff. Pretty standard, since most of these are MapleStory assets without much change. Time to get more abstract.

If you don’t understand pleleg by now, you might never understand. It’s beautiful seeing the rainbow look so horribly smudged in the full-size image.

What’s this mask all about? Well, Jonathan joined the Odd gang and friends for some Zakum. Oh, I’ll make videos of some of these runs eventually. They just deserve their own posts.

And we got a little weird after. It’s great to see an Ironman so high level that he can join in Zakum! He doesn’t join the party, obviously. He was just trying to grab an Advanced Combo Attack skill book without something fucking stupid like trying to solo Zakum WITHOUT ACA.

???

As it would turn out, there’s another freak who actually likes the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in Ironman. So I messed around a bit with making some gifs, for use as emotes by fucking nobody, because gif emotes require paying this company actual money. And honestly? Money can suck my cock.

Cao Cao is a treasure. The first two gifs got pretty beat up in the process of making them fit the teeny tiny emote image size limits, but it’s whatever. Discord just sucks sometimes, and that’s how it’s going to be.

I adore this man, and his beard. Just as I adore Guan Yunchang, and her crusty vomit-stained undergarments.

Anime? ^Anime! Anime. _Anime…

Not anime.

I wanted to make a Red Drake emote ever since I saw its scrunched up face while fighting the bastards. So there it is. But what if some twisted soul were to create other versions of it?

Snecc tongue. That’s nice, but it can go deeper. You ever see this thing in your travels?

Yeah, that. Well…

This came to be, thanks to a certain Lvl1Crook‘s suggestions. This… thing needed to be real, so here’s the full image of it. I don’t even want to describe the process of getting Impact Font to work on my system that doesn’t have it in the first place. The truth is, I didn’t get it to work, I took some weird shitty route around that where I basically used the original image’s text to holepunch through a plain white space, then artificially added a border. If it works…

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

And some body parts in full and with variations, in case some sicko wants to do something with it. Does the body only image seem familiar to anyone?

Ah, that’s about it. I’ve really got to figure out how to allow my own emotes on my website, so that I don’t need to make crap for a service I don’t even like using. Now that it’s over, care for a fresh cup of webpiss, filtered through my extra pissy video recording? These last couple images became Suboptimal emotes!

Yep. Now that hit the spot. Time for some low quality afterthoughts. Only the red one became an emote.

Fantastic.