Few people like being out late at night and working, but a job is a job. One particular man finds himself breaking into what should be an unguarded warehouse to secure an item of great interest for his client.

It was one of these afternoons, the kind that had the gray of the clouds matching the gray of the streets. The air outside was thick with exhaust fumes; the air inside was thick with cigarette smoke. I was about to drown another stray thought of happiness in whiskey when it came into my office. A damn fine-looking game. 2D sprites in a 3D environment, an immersive sim tailored to the twisted desires of any good-for-nothing detective, making a cold case of good games to play suddenly getting very warm again. By its looks alone, this game was bad news for my free time.

Slay the Spire 2 is a good game, and more people should play it. Rogue-like deck builders today may be as common as diarrhea-inducing food in the USA, but this game has a claim to being one of the best ones as a worthy successor of the first Slay the Spire.

Ever wondered how to pass secret messages to one another via GIFs? Wonder no more, and read what is possible and what is likely going to fail.

After its orientation towards AI, Google has decided you need something to talk to. The tech giant that owns the largest online search engine has decided that it would much rather tell its users what is going on itself, rather than serving them relevant links without commentary. For that purpose, a prominent AI box, and even a whole AI mode, have been added, all so that users do not have to spend any of their valuable time to actually go through links for whatever they are searching for.

In order to squeeze images into GIFs, we need to make sure they only have 256 colors or less. How do we achieve that and what problems might we encounter? Read on to find out.

Say what you will about Sauron, but he knew how to close a deal. And in order to learn how to be as goal-oriented as the creator of the One Ring, I played through the entire Lego® The Lord of the Rings™.

Move over, WebP; step aside, PNG; look out, VP9: a new and improved format for image sharing is coming soon: GIF 2.0 (GIF 26a, really, as that will be the new version in the header).

A consortium of geeks and old format heads seems to have taken a big sip from their “let’s show the youngins how it’s done” juice, and word is that a specification for a brand new GIF version is making its way to being published rather fast. There is, however, some bad coming with the good. While there are tons of improvements and exciting new features that you can read about below, the new specification is unlikely to be backwards compatible, as key GIF concepts are fundamentally changed. This, of course, means that even if the specification is out soon, the implementation and overall adoption could take a while.

A feature I thought would be cool for my GIF editor at some point was the possibility to directly draw on the images. Changing the contents of an image within a GIF is one of those things that normally is a bit of a hassle and comes with problems, as we will see in a bit. Of course, being able to change the images on a pixel level calls for a way to get the image data out of the GIF and, after changing it, putting it back. This decompression and compression I already had implemented at some point, and my last post was a rather long explanation of how the LZW algorithm on which these procedures are based works.

A milestone in my GIF editor, and something I first had left as a problem for future me, was the compression and decompression of images. Because of the way that GIFs work, a lot of information is easily manipulable; changing colors or reordering images in general was not a hard thing, so I simply saw no need to actually implement the LZW algorithm that GIFs use early on. But eventually the need to display images and also me wanting to actually change colors of specific pixels was there, and so I had to read and understand how one of the more important parts of GIFs works.