After the first entry was a bit of a downer, let us have some cool GIF-related fun this time. And by fun I mean a discussion on how we can achieve a thing and the inevitable realization why it won’t work.

As you might know, GIFs are not made for very color-rich images. This is because a singular image within a GIF can only have up to 256 individual colors, leading most programs that convert a graphic or video into a GIF to somehow reduce the number of colors in the process. But what if we want more? What if we are not content with our lot in this world and strive to defy the very machine gods some people are trying to build? Can we do it? Can we achieve a GIF that has more than 256 colors on-screen at the same time? YES, WE CAN!! But it is not a great idea.

After letting my little GIF editor rest for a while, I thought that maybe some writing about GIFs and why they are cool is in order, intermixed with maybe some retrospective posts about the editor itself. So this is hopefully the first of many GIF-related posts!

Let us start this series with a sad fact to keep the mood low enough for the current media climate: GIFs are not living up to their full potential, and you probably did not even know it. What I mean by that is that there are features in the GIF specification that are really cool and not supported by a lot of programs displaying GIFs.

As you might have heard, X’s very own chatbot, which was given the power to post and alter pictures, is being used to create indecent pictures of children. This seems to stem from the fact that Grok, the chatbot, can manipualte uploaded pictures and do such things as replacing clothes with bikinis, without much of a check on who is depicted. And now users on X are using Grok to generate what probably falls into child porn territory.