My dad has this very old piece of cross-stitch art in his house. Every time I see it I'm struck by how much it anticipated 1990s pixel art on 16-bit micros like the Amiga, simply because the artist was working under similar constraints: a low-resolution grid of square pixels, and a strong incentive to use as few _different_ colours of yarn as possible, with much less constraint on what those colours should be β just as the Amiga and similar machines let you have a palette of 32 colours on screen at once but they could be chosen from a much larger space.
And the artist has used the same stylistic tricks to compensate for those limitations as Amiga artists did, or at least some of them. I could easily imagine someone having drawn this in Deluxe Paint, and perhaps even used it as an interstitial image in the middle of a period-themed Amiga game, with some important plot dialogue subtitled on the bottom.
I keep thinking it would be kind of cool to digitise it back to pixels + palette. But for proper style the result would have to be stored in an IFF ILBM instead of any more up-to-date image format.
I went once to an exhibit of the Gobelins tapestries workshop. Zone women explained that they used scissors blades to get some fluff and thus blur the stitches on diagonal lines. By the XIIth century, someone had discovered antialiasing.
Beautiful, Simon! Iβve been similarly interested in seeing pixel type from the lens of cross-stitch, weaving and knitting patterns, and studying traditional patterns across scripts has been nothing short of revelatory (I even wrote a little something about it last year https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?u=00db3d2423772a3f86d6e22a1&id=4fa7cefeef).
Vaguely remembering that old X11 displays had a similar constraint: there were 256 different colors max, dynamically mapped from a much larger set. Then, when the stuff displayed ran out of those colors, things got literally ugly...
@martinvermeer yes, I started writing X apps myself when that was still a real possibility. Indeed, the GTK version of PuTTY still has code in it to handle that case β search unix/window.c for function calls starting 'gdk_colormap_'! Surely hasn't been tested in years, though.
The standard Amiga GUI (at least in the original A500 days when I had one) just said "Here are the colours you have, use them or make your own separate Screen". X11's idea of trying to let multiple apps _share_ a limited-palette display and ask for the colours they need is much more ambitious!
I remember seeing cross stitch art in the mid eighties, and being confused at how much crossover there was between the super cool futuristic demoscene graphics of the homecomputer underground, and these ultra dorky grandma things.
@pixelambacht I think that this is actually tentstitch or another tapestry stitch rather than cross-stitch.
There were many adaptations of European tapestries onto canvas needlework patterns available from a firm in France in the 1990s. For those, one chose tapestry wool oneself rather than having it come in a kit.
Cross-stitch isnβt the only one thatβs natively pixelated.
Even some of the rug hooking patterns that are trending again are very pixelated.
As you've probably already guessed, I'm not remotely an expert on tapestry or any other kind of stitching, and my interest in this kind of design is focused on its relevance to computers, so I just had to make my best guess out of types of stitch I'd heard of.
The use of long (horizontal) threads for the half-tones (as opposed to dithering patterns) also has parallels with compression under RLE (run-length encoding). Not sure if computer artists ever changed their style just for a few bytes under RLE, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ahoySoundtrack is available on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/6P6RP2Ad0L4klna5GdiBlIalso on Bandcamp:https://xahoy.b...
there were companies selling these images as kits, and designers working for these companies; it would be great to investigate their choices and processes..
I said in that post that it would be cool to digitise it back to a paletted image suitable for actually loading into Deluxe Paint. I didn't get round to doing it β¦ but someone else did! https://kaberett.dreamwidth.org/ put in a *lot* of effort (more than I would have dreamed of asking for) and sent me a PNG.
I thought the only reasonable thing to do with that was to convert it back to IFF ILBM, transfer it on to an Amiga floppy image, and load it in _actual_ Deluxe Paint. Tada!
But even given a starting PNG, getting it into DPaint was a challenge. (1/8)
My prediction for 2025: A bump for digital security engineers as AI slop code gen writes a bunch of difficult to understand or diagnose exploits. 2026 a bumper crop.
@rey the question came up because the only non-furry in the chat (is associated with the project in some capacity) said something about letting everyone else beta test the new zigbee2MQTT release first before he switched x3
π΅Wolves love their meat. Bears love their honey. But on the dancefloor. We are all the same. We're gonna move our paws to the rhythm of the beatπΆ - Vulpines in Heat - Baxxter & Burr
Poster for the Frolic Party, happening every second Saturday of the month, starting in February, in San Francisco, CA. USA
Check out their webpage for more information: frolicparty.com/
Digital. Procreate I shared a time-lapse process video that you can watch on the first comment of this submission on my art Telegram channel: https://t.me/panda_paco But if you want to see the full video, with the full resolution version of this picture, WIPs of my future works and to see my art before I post it publicly, support me either at Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco) or Ko-Fi (https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco). Thank youu!!
I've wanted to do this dance for such a long time! It sure was tricky getting these big bappers to move fast enough, and doing footwork on carpet, but we made it work!
One dancing wolf, just for you! β€οΈI've wanted to do this dance for such a long time! It sure was tricky getting these big bappers to move fast enough, and do...
A 40 second long video will be re-encoded to around 7MB. This is plenty for a short clip with mostly static camera, though might be insufficient for high motion videos such as recordings from video games. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/#media
@PupShadowNH @kakurady thank you! I don't suppose you know where the server side admin setting is to make use of the new 99Mb limit instead of 40? I checked a few config files but haven't found it or any useful articles online.
@thumper I am not sure on that one! I've somehow managed to avoid setting up my own mastodon instance so far, so my experience with mastodon is client side only at the moment π
In about five billion years, when the world dies by fire as the Sun in it's death throws engulfs the Earth, only half of the radioactive material in Chernobyl's damaged reactor 4 will have decayed.
It's only when you see someone you've known your whole life gradually losing the ability to operate a knife and fork, and watch them while they try, that you realise how much of a technical skill it is to use cutlery. It does require coordination and fine motor control, but I suppose most people learn it at such an early age they don't realise how much work it took. #dementia
βPresident Carter was four decades ahead of his time.β― He championed the single largest conservation effort in history, protecting millions of acres of Alaskan lands to be experienced as national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and wildlife refuges.
He put solar panels on the White House and climate change on the agenda. Had the nation, and the world, listened to him then, the future would be far brighter now.β
Manish Bapna, president and CEO of NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council)
I just fiiiiinally got round to sending an email to a potential transit supplier with cabinets right next to mine (so the cabling might be easier/cheaper than otherwise). Less than 8 weeks to go until my current main transit supplier turns my port off because they are getting out of the transit business. I am spectacularly bad at actually contacting people I've never talked to before.
@Phil M0OFX And a different one to the illegal occupant? π Since I moved into this house last August I've had several to "the resident" or "the occupier", at least until the local council, utility companies and so on got themselves sorted out!
In the club tonight all the men in the washroom were complimenting each other on their clothes, makeup and tattoos and it was the most wholesome wonderful thing ever. β€οΈ
Into the rabbit hole. From the official photoshoot at ConFuzzled 2015. This was all done practical - I remember being directed to look into a tube filled with miniatures. No greenscreen AFAIK. The CFz photoshoot is always so well done. #FursuitFriday
Itβs the last #FursuitFriday of 2024. Good riddance. While a lot of good changes have happened and I did things n went to places I had never been to before, itβs been a really rough road to get here and this summer was a heavy low point in my life. I still have a lot of healing to do. Hopefully 2025 goes better? π€· πΈ - Spark Plug
β
Typographic EyeΒ β 12 / Pixel Type & Needlework
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www.instagram.com@martinvermeer yes, I started writing X apps myself when that was still a real possibility. Indeed, the GTK version of PuTTY still has code in it to handle that case β search unix/window.c for function calls starting 'gdk_colormap_'! Surely hasn't been tested in years, though.
The standard Amiga GUI (at least in the original A500 days when I had one) just said "Here are the colours you have, use them or make your own separate Screen". X11's idea of trying to let multiple apps _share_ a limited-palette display and ask for the colours they need is much more ambitious!
@pixelambacht
I think that this is actually tentstitch or another tapestry stitch rather than cross-stitch.
There were many adaptations of European tapestries onto canvas needlework patterns available from a firm in France in the 1990s. For those, one chose tapestry wool oneself rather than having it come in a kit.
Cross-stitch isnβt the only one thatβs natively pixelated.
Even some of the rug hooking patterns that are trending again are very pixelated.
#needlework #tapestry
@AlsoPaisleyCat @pixelambacht thanks for the correction!
As you've probably already guessed, I'm not remotely an expert on tapestry or any other kind of stitching, and my interest in this kind of design is focused on its relevance to computers, so I just had to make my best guess out of types of stitch I'd heard of.
https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1755140565/dutch-interior-woman-looking-out-window
@delcj apparently it is, thank you! I found this, with a photo of the box. Penelope Needlework, and the design is called "Dutch Interior".
https://picclick.co.uk/Unopened-Vintage-Penelope-Needlework-Tapestry-Kit-Dutch-126797616830.html
(The eBay page it links to is long gone, but at least this confirms your identification.)
Unopened Vintage Penelope Needlework Tapestry Kit - Dutch Interior (B 5721) β’ Β£43.00
PicClick UKhttps://youtu.be/i4EFkspO5p4
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