That video didn't even explain google, facebook, twitter or even youtube. What a letdown!
Seriously, though, it brings back memories. Back when I first went to university and thus gained access to the internet in the mid-90's, and even could make my own webpage, internet was a real rarity. Almost nobody had access back then. And even the few who had, had to use it through a slow-ass modem, while I could surf the web through a blazingly fast optic fibre connection at school.
Some people here weren't even born yet back then. Man I feel old.
It is also recommended to add a -vf scale=320:240 option (or equivalent) at this point to directly scale the screenshots to whichever resolution you want to use in the article.
If we are talking about, for example, a NES game, it will originally have relatively few colors (like less than a hundred, if I remember NES's palette size correctly), which would fit perfectly into a gif losslessly, and thus without any need for dithering or other color-destroying techniques.
However, if you scale like that, wouldn't it use blinear interpolation, thus introducing enormously more colors to the result, which will thus end up being dithered or otherwise destroyed in the final gif?
(Of course unless you are using the original resolution, or an exact multiple of it, it becomes a difficult problem. If you are scaling smaller than the original, then either pixel rows and columns are going to disappear (if you use nearest-neighbor scaling, which preserves all original colors), or lots of additional colors will appear (if you use some filtered scaling). Likewise if you are scaling larger than the original, then either pixel rows and columns will be unevenly duplicated (if using nearest-neighbor) or blurred and thus the amount of color greatly increasing (if using filtering). Optimally the original resolution should be used if you want to preserve all the original colors losslessly in the final gif.)
I always thought that "echo chamber" (in this kind of context) means a group of people just frantically agreeing with each other, reinforcing what others are saying, preaching to the choir, and figuratively patting each other in the back for it. (A much more derogatory and obscene synonym for this would be "circlejerk".) Might also refer to one single person frantically agreeing with another, with no outside criticism or disagreement.
It probably depends on the context. Anyway, a total tangent that has nothing to do with this discussion, sorry.
I didn't mean that you were insensitive towards autistic people. It's just that your expression "yuppy office people, impoverished ghetto people, and autistic nerds in pony paraphernalia" sounded like you were calling all of the cosplayers "autistic".
"Autistic" has become recently a kind of generic insult (just like eg. "retard"). It just sounded like you were using it like that.
Not jpeg itself, but there's mjpeg, which is essentially just jpeg images appended to each other into the same file (much like animated gifs, really).
While major browsers support it, I don't think it's a very popular format.
In the beginnings of console TASing, there were some accusations that the videos were edited, ie. things cut out. In other words, outright cheating. While those times are long past and basically nobody thinks like that anymore, perhaps it would nevertheless not be a good idea to start now. (Yes, I understand that cutting some BIOS screen is not the same thing as cutting something from the gameplay itself, but still...)
After all, we aim for purity and perfection, and 1-to-1 correspondence between the movie and what would happen on the real console.
However, I do admit that it wouldn't be a big issue. I don't think anybody would complain either way.
Consider an outside visitor who comes to the site and wants to see entertaining runs - Brain Age is most definitely entertaining
Even at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's entertaining because it appears that the program is being fooled with the visible picture into thinking it's the correct answer. That's what makes it so awesome and fun. It's the whole idea.
The pictures are not all by themselves all that fun. It's what they (seemingly) are doing, ie. fooling the program. I honestly cannot understand why this is so hard to fathom. It's quite clear.
echo chamber
Btw, you keep repeating that expression. I'm curious to know what you think it means (because, and pardon the pun, I'm not sure it means what you think it means.)
the existing runs use aspects of these glitches under debate already and thus has already succeeded in fooling all of us.
If a currently published Brain Age TAS uses the described technique of drawing the answer off-screen, rather than fully using the visible picture for this, then that's certainly a disappointment, at least for me. (Of course I don't call the shots here, so I can only express my personal opinion. For what it may be worth.)
You're well aware that the only difference between your definition of "fooling the OCR" and what they're planning to do is the location of the extra pixels they're drawing, right? You can literally do the same thing by placing extra lines or pixels within the lines you've already drawn, from my understanding (though admittedly, that process is slightly more complicated and requires more effort). This is just a more convenient way to do it consistently...
Which part of "the fun of the run does not come from the picture alone, but from the picture fooling the OCR" did you not understand?
People are not impressed by a TAS drawing a picture. People are impressed by how a seemingly unrelated picture is interpreted by the program as the correct answer. That's the fun and amazing part of it. Once you remove that aspect of it, then the picture becomes completely meaningless. Why is this so hard to understand?
Please explain to me (because nobody seems to have done that yet) what exactly is wrong with my suggestion, ie. have pictures being interpreted as the correct answer, and then as the last couple of questions have a blank picture interpreted as the correct answer (explaining that the answer is being drawn off-screen). What is the problem you are seeing in this idea? Why does it seem to be such an unthinkable thing? Please explain.
I'm not a SJW, but dude... Don't do that. It's not cool.
As for waiting in line, that's something I hate, yet lots of people seem ready to do it no matter how long it takes. There are people who sometimes wait in a line for days. (It's especially strange when it's something that you could just as well get without any waiting a few days later. Like seeing a movie. I suppose it's the culture and the community, but still...)
The last time I almost waited in a line for hours was when a big electronics shop opened here, and as an opening offer they sold (IIRC) 50 PSP's for a significantly reduced price (this was still the time when PSP was almost new.) It was something like 90€ (when the normal retail price was over 200€.)
We decided to go there with a couple of friends, and when we arrived there, there were at the very least, and without exaggeration, 500 people in line. The line was at least 200 meters long. For 50 PSP's. (Sure, there were a few other more minor sales as well, but everybody knew that those people were there for the PSP's.)
We decided to skip it.
(Incidentally, out of curiosity, we went to another consumer electronics chain in the city that had the slogan of always selling stuff cheaper than any competitor. We didn't think they would count big discount sales, but we went to ask out of curiosity anyway. It turns out that true to their word, they sold PSP's at 87€ apiece, because that was their slogan. Always cheaper than any competitor. There were zero people lined up for that, and the entire place was rather quiet. Apparently nobody but us had thought of it. I bought my PSP from there.)
I mean, if I understand all this right, you can input the correct answer off-screen while drawing whatever you want on-screen. But the published run, essentially, does the same thing (only, it embeds the answer within the drawing). Perhaps, I'm thinking, you could get far more creative with the drawings and, say, re-create the Mona Lisa? Or some other type of compelling theme?
The fun of the run does not come from the picture alone. It comes from the picture fooling the OCR.
If you are going to remove the fool-the-OCR element from it, you could just as well switch to Mario Paint.
My point remains that we have destroyed the game so thoroughly that we can do whatever we want - why would we *ever* want to hide this?
It's not a question of "hiding" anything. It's about what is impressive and what is not.
Drawing a picture and fooling the OCR to think it's a correct answer is impressive and interesting. Drawing a picture that has no consequence on anything is not. It's pointless.
More obnoxiously, making it look like to the casual viewer that it's the visible picture that the program is misinterpreting as the correct answer, when in reality it's not, is devious, deceptive and disappointing. The casual viewer will feel cheated when explained what's really happening, and that the visible picture had nothing to do with it.
Just consider the Ikaruga TAS in the last marathon. It was a real TAS run on an emulator... but what was shown was just a video file played with a video player on a PC. This caused disappointment from many viewers and quite some negative comments.
How much more disappointed would they feel in this case, where the drawings have no consequence?
And why exactly would you want to do it the deceptive way? Why draw a random inconsequential picture on screen, and have the actual answer be off-screen? Why? What's the point? Why even use Brain Age for this? If you want to draw pictures that have no consequence on anything, use Mario Paint or something.
Edit: In fact, there could very well end up being a different kind of deception (and literally hiding information from the viewers): Even if you explain clearly that the actual answer is being drawn off-screen and the visible picture has nothing to do with it, a viewer who knows nothing about Brain Age or TASing it could easily get the impression that it's actually not possible to fool the OCR with a seemingly unrelated picture. In other words, the viewer may get a false impression of the situation. Unless you are willing to explain "we could fool the OCR with the visible picture, but instead we are just giving the right answer off-screen, and the visible picture has nothing to do with it."
I really can't understand what exactly is the problem you are having. I already suggested using the visible picture to fool the OCR for the majority of answers, and then give one or two answers with a completely blank picture, explaining clearly to the viewers what's happening. (In other words, something along the lines of: "All these pictures fooled the OCR to think it's the correct answer. However, we can go even further and give the answer off-screen, making it look like the program is accepting a blank picture as the answer.") If it's just one or two such answers at the end of the demonstration, I don't see a problem with it. As long as the previous visible-picture-answers were genuine OCR-fooling.
I could not possibly disagree more, on all sides, and I'm quite passionate about this.
What would be the point in drawing anything on screen if it has zero effect on the program? Ok, you drew a funny picture which has no consequence on whether the program accepts your "answer" or not. Then what? What's the point?
The fun is not in seeing pictures being drawn. The fun is having those pictures fool the program. It's funny to see the program expecting something like "16", but instead the TAS draws a picture of Samus... and the program accepts it as the correct answer because its OCR was fooled. That's the whole meat of a Brain Age TAS. Remove that, and you have nothing.
If you want to demonstrate in the marathon how the program can be fooled by an off-screen picture, then do it once or twice (and emphasize it by leaving the visible portion empty.) But not all of the answers. Fool the program with funny pictures, not the viewers.
So as long as the answer contains all the letters from one of the valid answers in the same order, it doesn't matter how many additional letters there are in-between them?
The fancy and interesting part is tricking the pattern recognition algorithm into "recognizing" the correct answer from a drawing that seemingly has no correlation to it.
If you remove that, then you have nothing. It would make no sense. The entire point of the TAS would be gone. You could just as well show a slideshow of pictures instead of the game.
As ais523 above says, if you were to outright mislead the viewers into thinking that it's the visible drawing that's fooling the program (but behind the scenes it's an off-screen trick, and the drawing has zero effect on the program), then that would really be akin to cheating. Even if you were to outright state how it works, it would lose all of its marvel.
I don't think using the off-screen trick is suitable either for any marathon showcase nor any publication at tasvideos.org.
"trihard stop it" -> "vacation".
Is it just me, or could you write almost anything there and it would probably accept it as some of the answers? Half of the letters in "vacation" don't even appear in the written answer (and even those that do, don't appear in the same order).
