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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • The photos are the contents of the “CV” and “Reports” (basically resume and qualifications) folders she brought.

    Per TV Tropes on Jucika:

    This strip references the comic’s change of ownership [trope page] from Érdekes Újság to Lúdas Matyi, presenting Jucika as a job-seeker trying to prove her qualifications to the titular Matyi and his goose [trope page].

    Looks true, except “change of ownership” is definitely not what happened, Wikipedia says it happened after

    in 1959, Érdekes Újság was merged with the Ország-Világ magazine

    so the party was doing media restructuring, and Lúdas Matyi became the only explicitly satirical periodical allowed (and very popular as a result). This is the first Lúdas Matyi Jucika strip, marking the transition to color. Don’t ask me what kind of contract Pál Pusztai signed or how much say he had, I’m neither Hungarian nor have lived before 2000. And Hungarian is Hungarian to me, the only bits I recognize are új = “new” and ország = “country”, plus Erde is “Earth” in German so perhaps Érdekes Újság is “World News”? My qualifications are basically just knowing basic research techniques and the xkb Combine key for diacritics.

    See also Wikipedia: Mattie the Goose-boy


    I really like how the boy looks in the third image, reminds me of the 1973 Polish popular math book Przez rozrywkę do wiedzy: Rozmanitości matematyczne (“Science through Fun: Mathematical Curiosities”) by Stanisław Kowal (no illustrator credited so presumably also him), inspired by Martin Gardner, which I’m very nostalgic for as one of my first “nerdy” books.

    I’m sure this was a reasonably common style but I haven’t read that many books from that era that used this kind of printing press so this is the reference you get.

    The book’s not as good as Ian Stewart’s similarly-titled 2008-9 collections, there’s some tedious exercises (optional, obviously, but “here are factorials of 1 to 20, will you please fill out 21-25 if you’re good at calculating” feels like overly cheap content), but the translator did a great job, his notes are like 10% of the text.




  • It’s 18 MB because it’s GIFs, about 16 frames each… at least the palette of is optimized by panel. There is some charm to the dithering as opposed to DCT (JPG/WebP block) artifacts. Also, she only started using WebP in 2021, it wasn’t viable much earlier. Technically, the static background and low-color foreground could be separated (JPG + GIF with very small palette, maybe rotated to compress streaks horizontally (GIF uses basic lossless LZW compression of the palettized image that handles high run length very well); too early for APNG) and overlaid with CSS to achieve about the same signal-to-noise ratio at about one half to one third the size. However, the noise would be different…

    The falling drops that indicate loading of each image are very cool but I wonder if something similar, plus the fade-in of all images at once, could have been done with just HTML and CSS, broadening accessibility to noscript users.


  • There are actually two interpretations of N/A:

    • N/A (not available): There is lost media so it can’t be evaluated.
    • N/A (not applicable): The show is in sign language so evaluating that is outside the scope of this string-matching program.

    Meanwhile, undefined seems to mean the value has not yet been evaluated. Maybe null is really the best.