// by @kittenm4ster and @Minion
The GIF Gallery is a new corner of the BBS where GIFs & postcarts can be shared as separate items and live forever¹ in their uncompressed glory. Each profile page has its own GIF section, and there is a separate gallery for just the postcart GIFs:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/superblog.php?mode=gifs&postcarts=1
GIF posts don't show up in thread activity lists, so adding many separate GIFs is fine. I think it will be useful for things like tiny dev updates that are too small to be bloggy, gameplay captures, and archiving old tweetcarts. And of course some wee experimental ideas only really need to live as a gif rather than a whole cart. GIFs do show up in the superblog feed, and can be pinned to your profile page.
Click [here] to add a GIF. You can capture from any lexaloffle fantasy machine using ctrl-8, ctrl-9, or shift-ctrl-8 in Picotron to select a more squareish region.
Postcarts
Postcarts are tiny programs (300 chars or less), and can live on social media (#postcart on mastodon and bluesky), and now also the BBS: just include a code snippet when posting a gif and the code size and postcart tag are automatically added:
wish you were here
(300 chars)
::_::⧗=256for x=0,⧗ do
line(x,0,x-⧗,⧗,({12,7,8})[1+x\4%4])end
memset(25088,119,7168)pal(0,7,1)
?"\-f\^.⁘>⁘>⁘\0\0\0postcart\n\|j\-h300 chars",0,14,0
for n=0,799do x=n%40y=n\40
if(pget(x,y+10)<1)?chr(16+((y/3+x/2-t()*4)%6)),7+x*3,26+y*3,4
if(n<23)?chr(16+(n+t()*8)%8),8+n*5,20+n%2*82,6
end flip()goto _
|
// Don't worry, that code is not really meant to be readable.
I miss making tweetcarts, but don't feel particularly excited to make them for twitter anymore. Postcarts are an attempt to offer something in the same spirit, but that is platform independent and relatively eternal¹. After experimenting with a few sizes, I think 300 is fun to work with and a sweet spot in that neighborhood of round numbers. It is also nice that old tweetcarts can be reposted as-is to the BBS, and by sheer coincidence bluesky posts are 300 characters and use the same character counting as PICO-8 (🐱 is 1 char).
// by @luchak and @AndyMakes
Bluesky doesn't support uploading gifs directly but you can use something like cloudconvert to generate an mp4. Mastodon does convert automatically from gif, but the default quality is quite bad. If you are new to bluesky or the fediverse, don't forget you can find other lexaloffle folk via the superblog offsite pages: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/superblog.php?cat=-3&suggest_follows=bluesky
If you're new to the world of size coding, you might light to check out @2darray's article on tweetcart optimisations, @PrincessChooChoo's Guide for Making Tweetcarts, and @TRASEVOL_DOG's doodle insights on how to make a twister. For more examples of what kind of programs are possible, check out @Munro's cart-ized tweetcart collection.
Physical Postcards
If you squint, postcarts and postcards are a really similar format! A nice picture on the front coupled with a short message that describes it / some short text.
If the postcarts collection becomes large enough over time, I'd love to print a bunch of them to display at Pico Pico Cafe (the place PICO-8 was named after and developed inside). The postcards would be square with a screenshot on the front and code on the back, and can be viewable on a special machine that scans the code and runs it. So it would feel a bit like thumbing through vinyls and choosing one to put on a record player.
If you would your postcart to be included in that collection, there is a checkbox for that while submitting. The more postcarts the merrier!
Thanks!
These projects were inspired by @AndyMakes' tweetcart gallery at Wonderville in Brooklyn, @Adam Atomic's OG tweetjam thread, the amazing world of tweetcarts that many folks have created over the years, and @Liquidream's excellent tweetcart archival account on mastodon.
¹by modern internet standards
Such a great idea @zep! 🤓
(Yay, no more blurry carts)
Looking forward to contributing a #Postcart at some point
(if only to have some small residence in Pico Pico Cafe! 😊)
In the meantime, I look forward to seeing all the wonderful creations coming in the feed.
Postcarts FTW! 🥳
P.S. Thx for the shout-out for my tweetcart archive
(which reminds me, I need to keep posting or I'll never get get through the backlog 😅)
I love this.
But I dont exacly understand the diffrence between the Gifs section and the postcart one. Im assuming one is for devlogs and just cool gifs, the other one is for the 300 chars tweetcarts. But some are in both? How does the system work?
Thanks @Liquidream!
(idle thought: If you keep posting at the same rate they were originally published, you can finish the archive in 2032)
@cheesemug the postcarts section is a subset of all gifs (the ones with code included) so they all also appear in the main GIF section. This was not at all clear from the navigation menu, so I've updated it just now to try to make that relationship easier to see. I was expecting the percentage of GIFs that are postcarts to be lower, so might need to review that again in a bit.
I've seen numerous tweet carts flying around in the past and they've always looked like black magic to me ;) Maybe now's a good time to start delving deeper into there mysteries and see what I can conjure up.
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