
8-bit GIFs of Japanese life - jpatokal
http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/illustration-icon/tumblr-gifs-of-japanese-life/
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bemmu
This is apparently the artist's own page:
[http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/](http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/)

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Raphmedia
The color scheme of this website is really smart. I love how everything is
dark except for the GIFs. It gives the "cinema" feel.

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teamhappy
> The color scheme of this website is really smart.

Was a little difficult to find the "next page" button though.

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sjwright
Didn't even realise there was one until you pointed it out.

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Kenji
The magic of pixel art like that is that they define a picture but leave the
details up to your imagination. Because of that, you subconsciously
interpolate in a way that appeals to you, which makes it that much more
perfect than high resolution imagery. Well, that's my opinion at least.

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yoklov
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new
> medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of
> digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and
> emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much
> modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing
> to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of
> something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer
> with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the
> throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out
> black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for
> the medium assigned to record them.

\- Brian Eno

This is my favorite quote to bring out when people are discussing the merits
(or demerits) of pixel art. It's really spot on.

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Kenji
I knew someone would bring that up. I actually thought about whether I should
treat it shortly to prevent someone from parroting it _again_. No, I feel like
pixel art is different. I grew up with cassettes and CDs, even some disc
records, but no. I hate the lack of quality and distortion so much. I think
the quote is superficial and condescending and I do not like it.

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arfar
Obviously this is just your opinion, but I think Brian Eno completely on point
here, for music at least.

The best real-world example I know is the resurgence of cassette tapes.
Whenever I go to see a not-very-popular (indie, for want of a better term)
band, the merch stand, without fail, has cassettes and vinyls and sometimes no
CDs or optional Internet downloads. Is there a practical reason? No, not
really, it's all marketing. Making tapes and vinyls is hard, burning CDs is
easy, but people want the nostalgia of the more interactive process of
flipping tapes and vinyls.

I guess they could be moving to those mediums for the "grit" of the sound
produced. But that sound can easily and effectively be reproduced with an
equalizer, sound filters and effects.

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antod
CDs mean out of touch old fogeys. Cassettes and Vinyl means consciously and
fashionably retro.

Yes - I am an out of touch old fogey.

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diego_moita
It feels like if Edward Hopper was Japanese and born today this is what he'd
do.

Like Hopper paintings[1][2], it captures a daily life where lonely people are
just part of a landscape, nothing more.

[1]
[http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/street/](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/street/)

[2]
[http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/interior/](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/interior/)

~~~
nlawalker
Absolutely. I think that these kinds of scenes and the feelings they evoke are
actually the core component of "8-bit" art. Portraits, still life, most bare
landscapes, and many other subjects don't really gain anything from the
pixellation effect and perspective that 8-bit art uses.

Also (anecdote incoming), I could show these to my wife and she'd just say
they're "cute." They won't evoke the same feeling in her that they do in me,
and I'm pretty sure there's exactly one reason - I grew up through the 80s and
90s playing video games, and she didn't. Ask anyone who did they same I'd bet
that they'd all immediately say that these look like locations in a JRPG, all
of which are generally designed to evoke the feeling that there is real,
recognizable life happening in the locations that mostly serve as bus stops
for your character's momentous story. That life is generally calm, to offset
the stress and momentum of your quest, and the contentment and happiness of it
is what makes the world worth saving. It's also got a comfortable routine: the
old lady feeding the birds in her yard is always there; the train always comes
every 45 seconds; the dog is always chasing the cat; the pretty waitress is
always serving coffee. The environment doesn't heave, it gently breathes, and
the animation loops forever and ever - the simple machinery of the background
never breaks down, unless of course it's always broken, in which case the
brokenness is a fixture of the local environment that one really minds.

Also, most of these particular scenes are desaturated and "cold", even rainy
or snowy. The feeling of sitting in your warm house looking out the window at
the snow or the pouring rain is easy to connect to.

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liveoneggs
How do I play this game? "pick up dog" isn't working.

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defen
I've never even been to Japan and these gifs make me feel nostalgic...I guess
for childhood games that used this art style? Very nice.

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beebs93
Wow - way too many feels. I lived in Japan for ~3 years and this brought back
so many awesome memories.

I second the notion that keeping it in pixel art form invokes a childhood-like
nostalgia.

If someone made a series showing children's progression through the various
computer + gaming consoles over the last 30 years I'd probably lose it.

~~~
creamyhorror
You'd probably enjoy this documentary about the evolution of videogame music
in Japan over the last 3 decades (and how it's influenced a bunch of
contemporary musicians):

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7244859/rbma-diggin-in-
th...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7244859/rbma-diggin-in-the-carts)

Stuff like Pac-Man, Sonic, Street Fighter, & Streets of Rage really is a
nostalgia bomb.

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beebs93
Awesome - thanks for the link!

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kactus
Are there any 8-bit games that use nice color palettes like this?

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carrja99
While the pixel resolution is 8-bit the palettes used remind me more of 16-bit
games of the early 90s.

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veli_joza
There's no "8-bit pixel resolution". The 8-bit means there's only 2^8 = 256
colors in single image. Depending on console, those 256 colors were either
pre-selected or you could define your own colors (even modify them in real
time).

Those concepts are loosely carried over to modern pixel art. In most cases 256
colors is enough for static pixel art, especially if you avoid gradients (as
most artists do).

~~~
wk_end
When talking about graphics that's correct, but I think in this kind of
context the "8-bit" refers more to (nostalgic, rose-tinted memories of) the
visual style of so-called 8-bit consoles, in particular the NES/Famicom, and
most consoles that we consider 8-bit didn't allow for anywhere near 256
colours on-screen. Here the 8-bit qualifier refers to the 6502 CPU's word
size; the NES in-particular only had a total palette size of 54 colours [1],
and additional colour limitations meant that in practice you'd rarely see more
than around ~25 at a time.

Or take the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, a 16-bit console; its colour capabilities
didn't give anything close to 2^16 = 65536 on-screen colours. Instead you got
a 9-bit palette with only around 64 on-screen colours [2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_pal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_palettes#Famicom.2FNES)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_pal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_palettes#Mega_Drive.2FGenesis)

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fiatjaf
I don't know why this is so great.

~~~
puranjay
It makes you want to visit Japan, doesn't it? Somehow, everything in these
images feels at peace.

What would be an easy way to hook these up to a simple display and make
'movable' wall art?

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fiatjaf
Yes, it does.

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partisan
Unrelated question:

Some of the pictures show people on their digital devices, at work or
otherwise. Has the quality of customer service dropped with the ubiquity of
smart phones?

I believe it has here in the US, but I think that there is a general culture
shift driving the drop in quality as well and that the phones are just
enabling the problem.

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kubiiii
Very beautiful pieces of art. *Hacking a digital picture frame to make it
daily cycling through them is now #9 on your todowhenyouhaveafewhourslist

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noonespecial
Reminds me of "Another World" so much I had a flashback of the feel of my old
Slik Stik. Amiga games that should have been?

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tempodox
Are there other GIFs than 8-bit?

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creshal
GIF has 256-colour palettes, but they're not restricted to 8-bit colour depth,
and you can have a dedicated palette per tile, so you can, theoretically, use
full 24-bit colour depth.

If you don't mind the resulting image file being bigger than a BMP.

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alanh
Huh — is the ability to use a separate palette per tile often done in
practice? I have used quite a few gif creation tools over the years, and they
all seemed to support only a fixed palette...

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creshal
No, because it's inefficient as hell (I wasn't joking when I said "less
efficient than uncompressed bitmaps", it really is), and not all viewers
support it.

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ameesdotme
Yep. We used up its bandwidth.

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kissickas
It didn't add much perceivable value to the artist's own page anyway, other
than not being a tumblr site.
[http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/](http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/)

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tantalor
> not being a tumblr site

You mean, not being a site that can tolerate the load when linked from a
popular link sharing site.

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solocshaw
I know I've seen this before. Maybe /r/cinemagraphs.

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kdamken
I love these, they have such a comfy feel to them.

