Makeagif is NOT working again!

While I didn't exactly lie, I was premature in saying Makeagif was working again.

It still don't work worth shit.

So I am stuck with Imgur, which is quite a bit trickier to use and makes HUGE gifs that are harder to download/manage. But on the plus side, the resolution is much better. It seems to crop the gifs rather oddly however. I have no control over that. And the maximum you get is 15 seconds, which means my favorite Lloyd reaction from this movie (Never Weaken) is shortened. The entire reaction shot lasts nearly half a minute, one of the longest I've seen in any comedy, and yet more proof that Harold had the best acting chops of any of them.

But no more 20-second gifs. Makeagif appears to be permanently fucked.

I've made this gif over and over again, and never quite get it right. This one has a bit of the street below in it, which I both like and don't like. This one was actually probably made with Gifsforum (do I hear taps playing? I used to love them, then they disappeared.) It's hard to tell the difference, though the Imgur one is, like, 700 pixels wide or something. Oh, who gives a fuck!

Gifsforum: where art thou?

This is one of the best film leaders I've giffed in a long time

But I'm still not satisfied with it.

Want to know WHY??

Because Makeagif, the program I use now, only makes a straight gif in a small size (or a grainy larger size). The time limit on them is 20 seconds.

Gifsforum, the beloved site I used for years, had all sorts of options: forward and reverse; color into black-and-white or sepia; captions top and bottom; three different speeds; and in olden times, all sorts of different effects so that your gif could look something like a film negative or an impressionist painting.You could also set it to tenths of a second and make gifs from full-length movies. The time limit was 30 seconds.

Then one day, my beloved Gifsforum simply disappeared.

What is even more frustrating is that I can't find ANY information on this. I don't know what happened. Gifsforum has a Facebook page, but it is three years out of date. Usually you'll get something on somebody's forum somewhere. I don't know why people aren't complaining or at least saying something, but they're not. There's nothing, and that never happens on the internet, does it? This was, as far as I know, the most popular and user-friendly gif site, was easy and fast to use and produced a great result. Then it disappeared and nobody said anything.

There are plenty of other sites, and most are shitty or impossible to use. Makeagif has improved quite a bit from its abominable beginnings. Makes me wonder if Gifsforum somehow melded together with Makeagif like Jeff Goldblum and the fly in the teleporter.

Anyway, though this is a superb film leader and one of the best I've ever found, if I still had Gifsforum I could run it on fast, normal or slow speed, run it backwards, and run it in sepia tones. Damn.

But they're cousins

Brain-dead because it's summer, deeply unhappy over the state of the world and the people in it (for my jolly satire is mostly a pose to cheer myself up), I nevertheless discover I can still make a damn good gif. Anyone who ever watched The Patty Duke Show (meaning anyone over 100 years old) remembers her insane boogaloo in the opening credits, which is unlike any dance ever seen before or since. "Our Patty loves the rock-n'-roll, a hotdog makes her lose control," went the lyrics. You will lose your mind.

By the way, I am in mourning over the apparent passing of Gifsforum, the best of all the YouTube-to-gif sites. It had the most flexibility and allowed you to adjust speed, colour and many other things. You could go to tenths of a second and make gifs from movie-length videos. Sometimes features disappeared, probably from causing too many problems. Now I use makeagif, which is almost as good and certainly improved from what it used to be. Most of the others are atrocious and impossible to figure out. Makeagif supposedly allows you to make 20-second gifs, which is really long, but after about ten seconds they are too jerky to be watchable. 

Gifsforum has been down for a long time now, at least according to all those "up or down?" sites. So I don't think it's just me. I wonder if it will ever be back.

New giffinator?