GIF 2021

I've previously made some use of GIFs (for example, see "Dead WS Video").

This blog post is just an attempt to display a large (17.1 Mb) GIF on Blogger. 

Image source: Empress of Starlight - Animated Version

See: Empress of Starlight by EldarZakirov.

I've previously blogged about a dream I had soon after I began reading printed science fiction stories (almost 50 years ago). In that dream, I held a book that had an animated cover image. The book's cover was thin, like a piece of paper. I hope to see such books in stores before I die.

Here (shown to the left) is the Analog Science Fiction and Fact cover from 2018 where Eldar Zakirov's "Empress of Starlight" was used to illustrate a story of that name by Gerald Nordley.

Related Reading: illustrations for science fiction stories

Next: the Notteng robots of Triskelion

Exodemic

Video options

I made a simple animated gif for the Wiki fiction stew collaborative fiction project. The wiki stew story includes some science fiction themes such as an extraterrestrial arriving on Earth. The animation is just a little teaser with a barely visible spaceship seen near a building. The animated gif can be seen here.

I often find myself making animations with unusual dimensions. I was wondering how the Blogger video upload feature works and if it might be customizable for unusual video shapes and sizes. When I tried to upload a video using the Blogger interface, it indicated that it was contacting Google video, but the first time I tried it, my FireFox browser crashed.

Searching online, I found some indications (also) that there are range of options for the Google video embedded video player, including automatic start for videos and endless looping, which are two features that I like and use for animated gifs. I uploaded a video direct to Google video and pasted the embed HTML code provided by Goggle into this blog post (see to right). Since I am using a Macintosh computer, I had to use Gears. After I had Gears on my computer I was able to upload a video (see below, with the Blogger icon on the player).

The original videos were QuickTime format 216 pixels wide by 278 pixels high. The default for the Blogger player was 320x266. As you can see, I have not found an optimal way to customize the width of the player windows to match these narrow videos, but the auto play and looping do work! For some reason the video uploaded via Blogger by default only shows a black image before the play button is clicked.