Randomly found this 2014 Dribbble from Jamie Nicoll and it made me smile:
For context, Save For Web was a popular export function in Photoshop at the peak of its use for web design, but assigned a rather unpleasant ⌘⌥⇧S shortcut. Using it often turned your hand into a… claw of sorts.
There was a Tumblr cataloging real and humorous photos of people pressing Save For Web. You can still find parts of it on Internet Archive, and here are some choice photos:
This is funny, but I actually found it enlightening – and lightly frightening – to ask coworkers how exactly they press common shortcuts like ⌘Z, ⌘C, ⌘V, and so on. There was a lot more variety than I expected.
(My basic heuristics say: three-modifier-key shortcuts should not be assigned to anything used often.)
I want to tell you about something that might seem oddly specific and perhaps too technical, but a) at the end of it you will have a useful phrase somewhere in your brain that will pay off one day, and b) I swear I will make it worth your while.
Have you ever seen this problem?
The screenshot on the left is fine. But there is something wrong with the one on the right. In light mode, the shadow is wispy and weird. In dark mode, things are even stranger, and the shadow is almost… a glow?
I stumbled upon this problem occasionally for years now – there are a few screenshots on the blog with this weird problem, even – but it was never feeling like a deal breaker. However, I finally sat down to figure it out today.
Turns out, there are two kinds of approaches to alpha channel/transparency. The normal one we all know well is called “straight alpha.” But on the right, we were looking at “premultiplied alpha” – something entirely more complicated, where the background is baked into transparency for… reasons. Premultiplied alpha is conceptually – and often literally – dirtier, but it also has benefits: more flexibility, better filtering, sometimes better performance. As far as I understand, premultiplied alpha exists primarily in the world of video and vfx, but occasionally it rears its unconventionally attractive head in our boring static 2D world of screenshots, too.
In my case, I finally figured out this was happening whenever I’ve pasted the screenshot from the clipboard to Photoshop instead of Preview – for some reason, a screenshot then got an alpha channel premultiplied against white background. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens to some of you under other conditions, too.
So, “premultiplied alpha.” That’s the useful phrase. What was the other thing?
Captain Disillusion (or, Alan Melikdjanian) is one of my favourite YouTube educators. His work is mostly debunking fake videos – his most well-known one is about the Cricet bracelet, although my personal fav is one about laminar flow – and they’re just constantly interesting and hilarious at the same time.
Disillusion also occasionally does a more straightforward “let’s talk about some technical aspects of video production” episode which he bundles under a “CD/” umbrella. Here’s a handy list of all of them:
I am sharing this list because you should watch them all. Most are <10minutes, they are consistently entertaining, and even though none of them are about UX design, there is enough overlap between the two universes that you will come out of it all a lot smarter.
Pragmatically, in my case, I searched for [premultiplied alpha] + [Photoshop] and quickly learned of a new-to-me menu option: Layer > Matting > Remove White Matte. It turns premultiplied alpha back to straight alpha, and fixes the screenshot.
Non-pragmatically? If you want to really understand premultiplied alpha, the last thing I can do is suggest another great internet educator, Bartosz Ciechanowski, who has a more comprehensive interactive web explainer. There will be math. There will also be sliders. You decide.
Multibowl is one of my favourite emulation projects because it’s a rare example of using emulators creatively, rather than for nostalgia or research.
It’s a 2016 game by Bennett Foddy and AP Thompson that reimagines older existing games as smaller pieces of a new, Super Mario Party-like experience. Two players randomly join one of 300 games – sometimes in medias res – with a small explicit goal that can be accomplished in about ~30 seconds, after which a point is awarded, another game is loaded, and so on.
All of this is done through actual emulation and fast switching of games’s original code:
Regarding the game choices, at the outset, I wanted to curate a list of moments of gameplay that would be meaningful if played for just a short period of time. Sometimes it’s obvious – you can take a moment from a fighting game where both players are low on health, or play a sports game from the start until the first point is scored. So that’s where I started. Over time, I figured out that you could make exciting moments in games that are not otherwise interesting for a competitive duel. For example, in Dodonpachi (a bullet hell game) we take away the player’s guns and challenge them to stay alive in a huge hail of bullets.
For games that were designed as cooperative experiences, I eventually gravitated toward the structure ‘score more points but do not die’, which forces the players to calibrate how much risk they take relative to the other player.
This excerpt is from a 2017 interview of Foddy by Seb Chan from ACMI. There are many interesting moments in that interview, such as the issue of curation:
Multibowl is not a very precise historical curation like you might make for a museum exhibition, where you can only show a couple of dozen things at most. It’s a huge driftnet of games. There is no quality or historical significance standard, and no attempt to balance out the games in terms of nationality or gender. The only curatorial instinct that it follows is to find the most diverse set of game ideas. With each piece distilled down to a randomly-selected 30-second slice, there’s room for an infinite number of them.
In fact, contrary to a museum curation, the point of Multibowl is to have too many games for a single player to see. It’s best when it feels too big to grasp. I think, now that there are 300 games in there, it’s starting to feel that way.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to actually play Multibowl outside of special events, given copyright issues. In addition to general emulation copyright murkiness, Foddy adds, “I don’t think the actual bits of actual games have ever been used as the fabric of a larger game before.”
However, a really fun introduction to Multibowl is another art project from a now-defunct comedy duo Auralnauts, who actually played Multibowl pretending to be Kylo Ren and Bane, to hilarious results:
If I remember the story correctly, this was neither a bug, nor an Easter egg, but instead a joke’y punishment for not delivering the correct asset on time.
A wildly fascinating 12-minute video from the always-hilarious YouTube channel Map Men about the reason for a surprising black spot that could be seen on Google Earth until 2012.
Reading the Wikipedia entry after watching the video adds extra color to the mystery, turning it more squarely into a “software quality” story:
Some scientists were initially skeptical that such an error could exist, since a signature was present in various global terrain data sets, such as the bathymetric data from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, which reported an elevation of 1 metre (3 feet) over the location of Sandy Island. Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land.
Perhaps the only ever musical that’s about a buggy piece of software. From the inimitable Cabel Sasser, this 2006 video about Saints Row, with three songs and a goddamn reprise at the end.
It’s very good.
my car door’s freaking out
it seems to be forever in the concrete barricade
I wonder how I’m ever gonna drive away
this really is isn’t my day
the sparks are flying
people dying
metal frying
and I wonder if there’s more to life
or if I’ll find that this is really it
this game is a piece of work
