Here's some way more pixelated, color-limited, and dithered artwork. Would you blur or median filter it? Would you paint over it, vectorize it, turn the dithering into generic gradients?
I play emulated games with those filters, and the reason is simple: it makes them look more how I remember them when I played them as a kid. After all, old CRT TVs caused the sprites to get smoothed back in the day, so it's not like perfectly blocky pixels are really the "original" form. Beyond that, playing SNES games unsmoothed makes my eyes water, and HQ*X looks better than other smoothing algorithms.
In any case, judging and mocking people for how they like to enjoy their games is pretty shitty.
But I also appreciate pixel art that is designed for modern displays, and I agree that the medianed version of the Lucha Lawyer looks horrendous.
Not at all. Who said all opinions could be equally respected? Some are just plain ignorant and stupid, even when they pertain to personal choices.
(I'm sure for example you'll find my opinion above stupid).
The thing is personal choices are never personal. They aggregate with the total number of persons and structure the society everyone has to live in.
Somebody enjoying "Scary Movie Story 3" is a personal choice. Until you get millions of people enjoying "Scary Movie 3", and suddenly you have to suffer from an avalanche of shitty movies like it coming from Hollywood in order to watch something decent. Shaming them beforehand ("it's a bad movie, and you should feel bad") might spare you...
Certainly not me. But there's a difference between criticizing an opinion and shaming someone for holding that opinion. I also think those sorts of movies are terrible, but shaming people for enjoying them is unnecessary and immature.
And please spare me your claims of "suffering" because Hollywood makes crappy movies. First of all, the suffering you will cause a single person by shaming them for enjoying a movie is probably greater than the net suffering you will endure from your awareness of every bad movie you hear about in your entire life. Secondly, no number of snotty assholes who shame people for their cinematic taste will ever make a dent in the number of bad movies produced in Hollywood. The most impact you would see would be that at some point everyone else might backlash against the snotty assholes and watch more crappy movies in defiance.
Finally, what analogy are you trying to draw, exactly, between bad movies and smoothing filters in emulators? What negative impact are 2xSaI users going to have on people who set their emulators on simpler scaling modes?
Not to sure. One of the basic ways to forge a better culture is to shame people for BS choices. For example, would you let a racist (even if he doesn't hurt anyone) without shaming him? Maybe you would, I wouldn't.
>And please spare me your claims of "suffering" because Hollywood makes crappy movies.
It was meant as a humorous example, but I can defend it if you insist.
>First of all, the suffering you will cause a single person by shaming them for enjoying a movie is probably greater than the net suffering you will endure from your awareness of every bad movie you hear about in your entire life.
This takes for granted that a bad movie just stops there (at the bad cinematic experience). That is not the case. Any kind of art and entertainment, and movies in particular, shape minds, opinions, tastes etc. Bad movies have many cultural, societal and even financial results. A movie can even justify war and hatred (as any state propaganda department can attest).
To his face? I would tell him why his specific views were racist and harmful. Telling someone that they're racist isn't helpful. Where do they go from there? The only self-identity preserving options you've given them are to ignore you and believe that their views aren't racist (which is what usually happens), or to embrace racism as good and correct. Whereas if you get someone to reëxamine their views, you might get them to change their mind.
In fact, this is exactly what has happened with well-intended but misguided racism education. We've taught people that racism is shameful, but we haven't really taught them how to identify their own racist views. As a result, people think "Well, racist people are bad, and I'm not a bad person, so I must not be racist." And that's how you get people saying things like "I'm not racist, but I think Asians are bad drivers."
And that's the whole thing: shaming people hurts them and doesn't work. I have never changed someone's mind by making them feel bad about what they thought. I've felt self righteous for doing so, but never actually made a difference. But I have changed people's minds by engaging them in discussion. It's hard, and it's not as fun, but it sometimes works.
The pixel art of the time, especially that in console video games, was designed with color bleeding, scan lines and other CRT TV artifacts in mind, which is why it can look "wrong" (oversaturated, overly sharp or lacking in detail) on a modern LCD screen. CRT scan lines are especially good at creating an illusion of detail since they add texture to large areas of flat color typical of NES-era graphics. For those reasons some console emulators today include so-called "NTSC filters" that simulate what a CRT TV would do to raw pixel data. See http://web.archive.org/web/20120313013017/http://www.slack.n... for what's probably the most popular implementation to date.