During development of my application to help draw comics balloons & things, there were interesting missteps. (I’m from the 1980’s, where we used to call these “Bloopers”.)

I took screenshots of a few of them. For example, here are some thought bubbles that bugs caused the software to botch.

It was a while ago, but I think the problem here was some kind of off-by-π/2 Bezier segment orientation issue.

I found these images to be kind of appealing after the fact, and wished I’d had the presence of mind to record more of them. So when I started writing Spirited Array (a macOS application for de-pixelating and then whimsically re-pixelating small animated GIF’s), I resolved to document oddities the software generated on its journey to release.

During development, my test GIF was the venerable Nyan Cat. Here is an animation output from it by the finished software.

Initially, I hadn’t yet implemented support for complicated tiles like the LED ones shown above. So I just re-used the source key frames.

Eventually, Spirited Array would allow configuration of tile aspect ratios, and I would have had to lock it at the aspect ratio of the source frame to make this "feature" work. The bigger problem was that things quickly got out of hand for larger animations, and I wasn't sure where to draw the line.

(Also, I notice the weird blip that appears intermittently in upper righthand of the margin void — I hope that's fixed now! 😀)

I had my picture taken at Cedar Point in the 1970's and received this cool printout of the photograph with typewritten characters for pixels. I experimented briefly with "Line Printer" tiles based on that. But the text glyphs generally didn't match match the configured tile aspect ratios either, resulting in a lot of whitespace when the tiles were large.

Images are stored in computer memory by two-dimensional arrays of primitives that represent pixels in what often turn out to be fairly counterintuitive color spaces. The act of transcribing these values is called “Blitting”, and I found it easy to mess up.

There were a lot of unplanned textures that ended up looking kind of cool. Like these inadvertent “Ultima IV” style tiles:

Or this MacPaint-y one:

Or this “Number of Days Left in Prison Countdown” one:

Occasionally I introduced bugs into my re-sampling algorithm. Small changes would often produce unexpected, disastrous, and polychromatic results.

In addition to blitting issues, there were also problems encoding frames to video files. Like this vaguely “Video Olympics” looking one:

Or this “e-sports fans in the bleachers waiting for Yars Revenge to start” one.

Or this “Near-sighted Frogger” one.

Needless to say, these do not resemble Nyan Cat.

One prolific source of mistakes: the vertical axis doesn’t always point the same direction in different graphics formats!

Or perhaps inevitably, sometimes most or all these things were wrong at the same time. Like this one where Nyan Cat's soul appears to be departing his or her body, after all the cumulative indignities.