The Internet Hates Ponies

So I made a bunch of gifs from the latest episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and I was going to upload them to Tumblr tonight so everybody could rejoice in pony wonder.  It was going to be magical.  Magical, I tell you.

Unfortunately, it turns out my internet hates ponies.  I can tell, because it has decided to become the slowest piece of shit that has ever been slow.  Seriously.  It's slower than the first Star Trek movie.  Yeah.  That bad.

But because I am apparently a masochist and enjoy nothing more than tearing my hair out while trying to get useless pictures onto the internet, here are a couple of pony gifs.  Fuck you, computer, I'm doing it anyway. That's right, I don't care if you are being slow and stupid.  Suck on THESE.

Pumpkin Scissors and more adventures in gif-making!

Pumpkin Scissors is one of my favourite animes of all time.  Granted, I'm not into anime as I used to be, so I don't watch as much of it any more.  So maybe there are better series out now that should also be loved by me?  Feel free to suggest any, I'm trying to get back into watching the stuff.

But Pumpkin Scissors is amazing, for super serious.  It avoids a lot of those irritating flaws that made me mostly stop watching anime in the first place.  Not all of them, mind, the series is subject to some irritating filler and that obligatory "lovable" super-creepy womanizer.  But on the other hand, FUCK YES ALICE MALVIN OMFG

One of these days I'll have to write a proper blog post on how fantastically amazing she is.  And the series in general.  I haven't watched the series in full in a year or two though, so I'll watch it again to re-familiarize myself with it before I start publicly fangirling.  

The reason I bring it up now, though, is because I'm still making gifs!  Except I got bored of Pirates after that weekend, so I've been trying to think of what other movies or shows I could make gifs out of.  And, of course, Pumpkin Scissors!  Duh!  Why did it not occur to me sooner.

The show desperately needs more love, and there is a depressing dearth of PS fics, gifs, and fanart online.  One of those things I can help with!

Well okay technically speaking all of those things I can "help" with.  But gifs are the thing I choose to help with, on account of my being a lazy bastard.  I've learned my lesson on how terrible Blogspot is with photodumps, so now I'm posting the gifs I made of Pumpkin Scissors on my Tumblr, which will hopefully co-operate.  Look here, here, and here.  I only did gifs of the first episode, but I might do more of later in the series later if I don't get distracted.  Won't post them here, though.  To Tumblr!  Mostly because hey, I can actually use tumblr now, that's new.  I've had an account there for a while but ignored it because I had no idea what to post lol.

Learning to make a gif, and also pirates

So I watched the four Pirates of the Caribbean movies over the weekend.  I'd seen the first two and the last one -- well, the last one for the moment, I hear a fifth is in the making.  I don't mind.  Some people online think all of them past the first one are awful, but they're not that bad.  None of the follow-ups turn out as well as the first one, but they're all fairly endearing.  Though I developed a sudden love of Davey Jones over the weekend and have always had an undying devotion to mermaids, particularly creepy/evil mermaids, so I may be somewhat biased.

SO GOOD 

Anyway, my sudden love of Davey Jones and his betentacled face (though not so much his bescrotumed back-of-head) started from him doing that one thing in Dead Man's Chest, where he's talking to Jack the first time and goes, "Price? (plupt)" and I replayed that scene like a dozen times because it looked just so hilarious.  I realized that I desperately needed a gif of that scene, just looping for eternity.

I looked all over Tumblr for ages (ok fine it was for like five minutes but on the internet that's a really long time ok) and couldn't find it, so I decided I'd look up a tutorial or something online and find out how to make my own gifs.

I downloaded Freemake Video Converter because I was pretty sure I didn't have a program on my computer to cut videos with.  I played around with it for a while and figured out how to do it easily, since the program is nicely simple and straightforward.  So when I had a few video clips to gif-ify, I went online looking for a tutorial on how to make it go from video to animated gif.

I found one tutorial that was supposed to be on how to make an animated gif with Windows Movie Maker.  I checked my computer and went, "Oh!  I have that! I didn't need to download the Freemake one at all!" and read on.  The first part was all about cutting the video -- it looked a little more complicated than it was on Freemake, so I figured it was still worth downloading.  "Okay," I thought.  "So the first half of this is all about cutting the videos to size, right.  But I've already done that...let's skip to the end and see how to make the gif in Movie Maker, not just cut the video."  Turns out, you can't make gifs in Movie Maker, despite the tutorial being "make gifs in Movie Maker."  Well that was annoying.  The last step was, "oh by the way you can't actually do this in this program, surprise!  But here's a link to a completely different program to download that will do it."  Kind of annoying but hey, whatever.  So I download the program, Movie to Animated Gif.  It was crap.  I tried to use it a couple of times and it kept crashing.  Thanks a lot, useless tutorial.

So I looked at an online program or two, but all of them put their website's logo on the gif.  One of them offered to remove the logo if you paid money.  No thank you, website.  I'll just find some software to download after all.  I ended up getting Free Video to GIF Converter 2.0 and it was pretty good.  Again, a very simple easy-to-use program and the GIFs I made work fine for the most part, but sometimes they seemed to delete the last frame or two which made a few GIFs not as complete-looking as I wanted.  But still, I am delighted!  LOOK AT ALL MY PRETTIES!!! Warning, a ton of GIFs.  Also, um, spoilers for Pirates, I guess?

I'd hide these under a cut, but I have no idea how to do that and am too lazy to look it up, so I guess you'll just have to deal with a dozen GIFs loading and possibly spoiling you for these films that came out a couple of years ago.  Sorry about that.

Edit: Looked up lj-style cuts for blogger, found some halfway promising ones, they turned out to be useless.  I'll just cut a bunch of gifs and post them on my tumblr or something later, I guess.  And make the ones posted here a little smaller.  Maybe that will help a bit.