B-side

B-side is a place where we'll post unwieldy or alarming amusements that don't fit well on the homepage because of file size, formatting or other reasons. It's rather empty now, but I can assure you there is no shortage of 5MB animated GIFs waiting to be posted. Here is a favorite of mine, by Jamie Beck, who was recently interviewed by the NYT.

• [Bloo]

  small correction to ‘his excellent use’ : according to the article Jamie is female.

  Question on my mind: how is an animated GIF different from posting 5 seconds of video?

• [Rob Beschizza]

  A youtube or vimeo embed is typically quite small until you play it (and some components may be shared by all embeds and cached), whereas an animated GIF will just start loading in full right away. I think YouTube has a bandwidth hit of about 200kb before you hit play, from a clear cache.

• [Jim Saul]

  Also, if you drop an animated gif into Gimp you can see how it’s done… instead of full frames like a film, for each step only the changes are painted over the first image with any non-changed areas transparent.  It makes for a pretty nice reduction in the size to resolution ratio.

  (I learned this last night, by the way, when I started adding g+ public people to follow and got Xeni’s booger-burglar monkey gif at the top of the page the whole time.  I was going to add a rough top hat to the monkey and make it a rabbit he was plucking from the nostril of his assistant, but found the task too daunting to figure out while slightly toasted at 2am.)

  • [stib]

    instead of full frames like a film, for each step only the changes are painted over the first image with any non-changed areas transparent

    That’s pretty much how video is compressed too.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression#Intraframe_versus_interframe_compression

• [soubriquet]

  The pic on its own is a nice image. The taxi reflection is neat… but as soon as it cycles, to me, it becomes an annoying distraction.

  That’s generally my thought on gifs. If only they were switchable, see it, then say, okay, been there. Off.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  If only they were switchable, see it, then say, okay, been there. Off.

  Hit the Esc key.

  Magic.

  • [soubriquet]

    Thanks.
    Truly magic.
    I feel like an ignorant luddite now.

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      You just haven’t been to enough badly programmed websites where you really needed to escape.

  • [Guest]

    antinous-sama, I stand in awe of your browser-fu

  • [seyo]

    Esc key magic not working for me. Running Google Chrome 14.0.835.186 on a Mac.

    • [DewiMorgan]

      Ah, there’s your problem.

      Oh, wait. Esc key magic not working for me, either. On Android.

• [chriscombs]

  Is there a super-secret swanky way to subscribe to B-Side updates via RSS?

• [rourin_bushi]

  Esc doesn’t work for me either in Chrome on Win7, but it does work in Firefox. I’m guessing Chrome is eating the keystroke. For some nefarious purpose, no doubt.