The WebP Rant

Google announced their webP format in 2010 as an alternative to other image formats. webP, based on Google’s VP8 compression, offered much smaller image file sizes for images of similar quality, and was pushed by Google as a way to save on bandwidth and storage by using webP on websites instead of other image formats. webP would also later support animation, which meant it could also be used as an alternative to GIF animations, which were traditionally quite large in terms of their file size, whilst still being of low quality.

Many sites and services have adopted the webP format, and most people have the ability to view the images as support has been built into all major web browsers for quite some time now.

One of the companies that has adopted the use of webP images include Google themselves and YouTube.

Google uses the format on some of their sites, and allows users to upload images in the webP format to google photos. You would expect that Google, the creators of the format, and an organisation that uses the format itself would make the format compatible with more of their services. If I want to use a webP image in a Google Doc, and I drag a webP image into the doc, it will give me an error saying that it is an unsupported image type. To be able to use a webP in a Google Doc, I need to use a program such as Microsoft Paint to first convert the image before inserting it. You heard that right, even Microsoft Paint has been updated to allow you to work with webP images. If I want to copy a webP image from a website, it is even more difficult. I need to download the image first, then convert it, then upload it. This is becoming more of a problem as more websites are beginning to incorporate webP images into their sites. There is also no way to tell if an image is a webP without checking, so I don’t know whether I even need to download an image in the first place unless I try to insert the image, download it, or copy and paste the image url. Google Drawings, Google’s simple cloud image creation and editing tool has quite a lot of the features you would need to quickly mock up an image, or even make a simple YouTube thumbnail even if it isn’t a full featured photo editing program. The app however doesn’t allow you to insert webP images, and doesn’t give webP as an option to export your drawing. The program does however allow you to export a drawing as a PDF, which is a document format, but doesn’t even allow you to export Google’s own image format.

The YouTube site itself uses webP, both for thumbnails, as well as the video previews that are available when hovering over thumbnails. To save on bandwidth, YouTube has begun to encode uploaded thumbnails as webP images for supported devices. The animated previews take advantage of the ability to create animated images to allow a single image to be used as opposed to multiple to create a video preview. In one video from YouTube, they even try to convince other site owners to start using webP images for their sites. Despite the fact that YouTube uses webP images for their own thumbnails, YouTube does not allow you to upload thumbnails which are in the webP format.

Don’t get me wrong, webP images are quite good due to their relatively small file size, even if they take slightly more processing power to decode. Taking images from a camera and converting them to jpeg, PNG, GIF, and webP using ImageMagick at 80% quality, the webP image consistently has the smallest file size.

Well that’s all for this video. If you have any other problems you’ve noticed with other products, consider leaving a comment about it down below, and maybe I’ll make it into a future video.

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Did This New Anime Steal a Character?

‘Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate’ is a classic highschool anime series from 2012 based on a visual novel, and involving ‘yaoi sticks’. The protagonist’s childhood friend, and fellow member of the ‘Food Research Club’, Chisato has a relatively distinct design.

When I saw the poster for ‘Kinsou no Vermeil: Gakeppuchi Majutsushi wa Saikyou no Yakusai to Mahou Sekai wo Tsukisusumu’ on MAL, I immediately noticed the character of ‘Lilia Kudelfate’ and initially thought it was Chisato, although I then realised that it was completely unrelated.

Comparing the sources, they don’t appear to have been designed by the same artists, but the characters in both seem incredibly similar. Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate was originally a visual novel by Sprite, and later adapted into a manga, and anime series. The Kinsou no Vermeil manga was written by Amana Kouta and illustrated by Umezu Youko, and as far as I can tell, neither of these people were involved with Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate.

Let’s compare the characters to see just how similar these characters’ designs are. To start off, let’s compare their physical appearance. Both characters have a pale complexion, thin eyebrows, and large blue eyes. They both have long, flowing, pink hair with a bunch of hair, or faux twintails on the sides. The school uniforms worn by the two characters are also very similar. Both wear a blue school uniform, with a white dress shirt beneath. The uniforms both have long sleeves, covering the whole arms, and the chest area is left exposed by the jacket, revealing the dress shirt beneath. Both uniforms also terminate with short skirts, either connected to the uniform itself, or as a separate piece of clothing. Around the necks of the characters, they both have a tie. Lilia wears a more traditional necktie, whereas Chisato wears a ribbon in a bow. For Lilia the ribbon appears to have moved from the neck to be used as hair ribbons for her twintails.

One difference that I need to point out about the two characters is that they do have slight differences and differing art styles. This doesn't discount the fact that both characters appear very similar, as differing art styles are common between different studios, and even different releases of the same property.

I don’t want to accuse anyone of plagiarism, but I just wanted to point out that I noticed that both characters’ designs seem to be very similar.

Also, there is a rhinoceros beetle called François.

Who Actually is Marie? (Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs)

Hello and welcome to another video. In this video we will be having a look at the anime series ‘Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough For Mobs’. This video will of course contain spoilers for the first season of the show.

‘Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough For Mobs’ was an unexpectedly popular isekai series from the current cour (クール). The protagonist is forced by his sister to complete routes in an otome game she is playing, so that she doesn’t have to go through difficult or monotonous parts of the game, and for an unknown reason wakes up after being reincarnated in a fantasy world matching the game as a character ‘Leon Fou Bartfort’, a character who does not appear in the game. The game’s main character is supposed to be a girl called ‘Olivia’ who the male characters at the academy are supposed to become romantically involved with. When he arrives at the academy, Leon finds that Marie has taken her place at the academy.

As a character who wasn’t at the academy in the original game, Leon has to use his insight about the world he was in in order to raise his rank and standing so that he would be able to attend the academy in the first place. Similarly, it is implied that Marie was also reincarnated into that world, and that she has also been able to replace Olivia by using knowledge that she has brought from playing the game in her own world. In scenes from Marie’s perspective throughout the series, Marie also comments on aspects of the game such as characters’ weaknesses as the series progresses, and there are scenes where she tries to find the saint items that the protagonist normally collected over the course of the game. To go beyond all doubt as to whether she is a reincarnate, Luxion, Leon’s AI assistant actually references her as being a reincarnate and using her knowledge, when talking to Leon near the end of the final episode of the season.

So who is Marie, and why does she appear to be the only reincarnate other than Leon in this world?

It is entirely possible that there are other reincarnates in this world, and that the series only focuses on these two who happen to gain success in the new world, but if there were others, it would make sense that more things in the world would be different as a result of these mob characters, as opposed to the storyline of the actual game that the world is based on. Even if other people were reincarnated as mob characters, you would expect that at least some of them would end up in high-up positions, and that some of them would tell others that they had been reincarnated. If this were to happen the characters in the series would likely have heard about some people claiming to have been reincarnated. Because of this, it is likely that the only two people that have reincarnated into this world are Leon and Marie.

Because of this, Marie and Leon being the only ones reincarnating, must have some significance. Marie is probably actually Leon’s sister from before he reincarnated, the one who made Leon play the game. So what is the reason for believing that Marie is actually Leon’s sister?

Marie in the series knows things about the plot of the game and the world that it is set in. Because before the reincarnation, Leon’s sister was playing the game, it would make sense that she would have this knowledge about the game. If it was just some random person, they would be unlikely to know about the game, especially in depth, so Marie would likely be a younger person, and someone who had played the game.

If two people were to reincarnate together, it would make sense that they had some sort of connection, rather than them just being two random people. If Marie is Leon’s brother, they would definitely have a connection to each other. At the time of their reincarnation, they weren’t just two people who were related to each other, they were constantly in contact with each other, as Leon’s sister was making him complete the game for her, and their relationship at that time happened to be very strained, and they were not getting on well with each other.

Another huge piece of evidence that Marie might actually be Leon’s sister is that Marie came from a very similar scenario to what Leon’s sister would have come from before they reincarnated. As expressed by Marie in episode 4 of the series, Marie also had a brother, and she also had him play monotonous parts of the game for her. Even if she wasn’t Leon’s sister, it could still be possible that she had a brother in her past life, although a sister having a brother would eliminate a lot of people from being able to be Marie. This is because the average number of children in Japan per mother is less than 2, meaning that a random girl in Japan having a brother would have less than a 50% chance. What’s more is that it would be incredibly unlikely that a random girl with a brother would have forced him to play the game in the same way that Leon’s sister did. This lends great credence to the fact that Marie is actually Leon’s sister from before he reincarnated.

None of this actually guarantees that Marie is Leon’s sister, but it definitely supports the idea, and would make sense from a writing perspective. Because of this, it can reasonably be claimed that Marie actually is in fact Leon’s sister.

None of this actually guarantees that Marie is Leon’s sister, but it definitely supports the idea, and would make sense from a writing perspective. Because of this, it can reasonably be claimed that Marie actually is in fact Leon’s sister.

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If you want to watch more anime-related videos like this check out some of the other videos on the channel.