A jpeg image is designed to hold any photograph. It can potentially display millions of colors, and needs to contain that data for possibly millions of pixels of on-screen data. Jpeg image compression does save some space compared to a bitmap which is literally 3 bytes of color data for every pixel in the image, but there’s only so optimized it can get before it can’t be used to store any possible photograph.

The image above is 500x321 pixels with 32-bit ARGB color; so each pixel not only has independent red, green and blue data, but also 8 bits of transparency data.

Super Mario Bros runs on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which has a working resolution of 256 x240 pixels. It has the capability of displaying 25 colors on screen simultaneously out of a total possible palette of 54 usable colors. It draws the background and foreground layers as “tiles” so you can store whole tiles in memory and then repeat them, and then on top of that it can draw hardware sprites which is how things that move more on screen like Mario, enemies etc. are made.

Things like the animations of the question mark blocks which seem to shine or blink a bit, that’s done by cycling the colors that the sprite is being drawn with. Big Mario and Fire Mario are the same sprite but color swapped. The bushes and the clouds are the same shape, but different colors. The super mushroom and power mushroom are the same sprite but different colors. The underworld levels are just different colors on the same sprites as the overworld.

The sound chip on the NES is very simple, it has five voice polyphony and can make two square waves, one triangle wave, one hiss-like noise, and one PCM sample sound (not used to my knowledge in SMB1; it’s how the steel drum sounds in the SMB3 sound track were made) and so what is stored on the cartridge for audio is more like sheet music than recorded sound. An mp3 file of the Ground Theme would also likely be larger than the entire game.

SMB1 is also just…a VERY primitive game. It cannot scroll vertically (SMB2, the one that’s Doki Doki Panic in Japan, it can scroll vertically OR horizontally but not both at the same time; SMB3 could do both at the same time as showcased by the raccoon tail powerup, but it required a RAM expansion built into the cartridge) It can’t go backwards because it doesn’t record the state of objects that have scrolled off the screen. It has no save system or even a password system.

Finally, the game was made in 6502 assembly with the specific hardware of the NES in mind; which saves a lot of resources compared to all the abstractions needed for higher level languages and their abstractions.

Having a pool doesn’t make it easier to hang dong, just marginally more plausible.

That’s my plan with the doctor that failed to diagnose my appendicitis. He was easily in his 60’s, I was 19. I’m gonna actuarial table his ass.

Aren’t there already? Surgeon General’s Warning: Do not drive a pregnant woman under the influence blah blah blah

Pluto wasn’t demoted. It didn’t get a pay cut or see a loss of benefits.

Our vocabulary has gotten richer and more specific as we’ve explored Pluto and things like it. As we launch missions like New Horizons out there, we’re going to need new terms to talk about the things we find. We sent a whole probe to Pluto; Uranus and Neptune had to share.

Science!

The irony is that you would think nerfing a nerf gun would improve it, because it’s more nerf per nerf.

I mean yeah that’s Battletech.

Early on they stole a lot of artwork from Japanese products, so the Phoenix Hawk, Stinger, Wasp and especially the Hatamoto-Chi are very much the Samurai with wings thing. Also, melee combat was a significant part of the game, mechs carried swords, axes, clubs, and those with fists could punch. Even the weirder 'Mechs of this time were described as more insectoid or bird-like, like the Locust.

They trended toward more mechanical, military machines as they hired artists and did their own designs, they trended in a more mechanical, angular, military vehicle direction and more often than not used backward-kneed legs. Look at the Timber Wolf or the Shadow Hawk. Even when the 'Mech was more humanoid and had forward bending knees they tended to be more angular and mechanical like the Summoner.

Pictured above is Clan Smoke Jaguar’s invasion of the Draconis Combine.

Untitled Pontiac Game.

You say that in jest but I am a former flight instructor that isn’t particularly interested in going flying ever again, not since I dropped out of mechanic school anyway.

Rats are on a rolling release model, I prefer to be on a stable release schedule.

Everyone plays up the 3310 as a snake-playing text-messaging mjolnir but I had a Motorola Talkabout that survived being spiked into the pavement once. The battery popped out but I put it back in and made a phone call.

turns out a plastic shell with some give in the structure can take abuse more gracefully than a solid brick made of glass. and aluminum.

I would agree that emoji have basically failed. They confuse communication rather than facilitate it.

Why are there 😀 and 😃 ? “Grinning face” and “Grinning face with big eyes.” Why? There are so many of them with subtle details like this that A. choosing between them is a bigger chore than it should be and B. they have to be rendered at such a high DPI that “bro just increase your font size” becomes the bullshit workaround everyone tells you to do. I can read the English text just fine, but on most screens emoji are indistinct blobs.

Emoji are subject to all the variation that fonts are. You know how there are two lowercase “g” glyphs? There’s the one you probably do when handwriting which is an O and a J, and then there’s the loop over a loop that basically no one hand writes, it looks like the font Lemmy uses has that g. Well, emoji are like that. Like how they had to add “male dancer/female dancer” the the standard because Google rendered the “dancer” emoji as a lame disco man, Apple rendered it as a woman in a red dress.

They don’t get used the way we used to use emoticons. I don’t see people say things like "I can’t go to the park today ☹️ " I see people say "Hey guys 👬 I just got back from the store 🏪 with some groceries 🥫 and took a picture 📸 of my dog 🐕 " Which to me demonstrates a failure to grow past the Sesame Street book with 6 thick rigid pages reading level.

Finally, there are so many symbols that have alternate meanings that you just have to know. Like you can send white or tan or brown faces, but all eggplants are purple and all peaches are pink.

Does the skin tone modifier work on the peach emoji?

I mean I played a lot of games where characters’ mouths didn’t move during cut scenes. We passed “good enough” over a decade ago.

If the 20th century is to be believed, with unprecedented amounts of violence.

Ritchie’s Basilisk.

No I don’t think they can; that’s how your body knows to breathe. CO2 is just the wrong gas to use to kill something if you want it done quietly. I honestly think I’d rather be strangled, there’s a chance I’d die of lack of blood flow to the brain before CO2 poisoning set in.

Yeah it’s like “Oh fuck I should be The Man by now what the fuck is going on?”

It was wild watching the next generation discover Half Life. There are Youtube essayists who were born after this happened making videos about their theories as to where the Combine came from and such and on the one hand it’s kind of fun seeing their takes on it, and how sometimes they’re missing the context of other stuff that was taking place around that time, the fan communities that are no longer live on the web like PlanetHalfLife.

It’s also weird that a lot of the Source stuff like Garrysmod and TF2 are still popular and being used to create stuff for teh youthz. When you come up with that one guy who did covers of linkin park songs and Gordon Frohman, to see that it’s still going and where it’s gone is just strange.