Distortions of Perspective; or, Why I Love Ditherpunk.

Ditherpunk has overtaken my artistic vision in a big way as of late. Since getting my Sony Mavica up and running, I've been absolutely obsessed with editing my photos with the explicit purpose of making the compressed PNG export look nice. I've been doing the same to video game screenshots that I upload to my Bluesky account. I could just export these image files as a normal lossless PNG or a low-compression JPEG, but where's the fun in that? But then again, where's the fun in this? Why do I do things this way? Firstly, I love ditherpunk. From games like Critters For Sale, Who's Lila and Return of the Obra Dinn, there is this out-of-time vintage flair in the ditherpunk style. Dithering - noisy, pixelated distortions that help blend one colour or value into the next, almost like crosshatching - creates enough of an abstraction away from what is trying to be displayed for the mind to fill in the gaps. In horror games, this can effectively create a sense of paranoia, finding disgusting…