Episode 6, Delectable Mountains, in which our heroes learn about digital colour. geniwate.com/admin/mipandmop

1. Delectable mountains 6
Please note: images will be progressively added to these slides during the course of semester.
geniwate.com/admin/mipandmop
Concept based on The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan,
and written for Networked Media, a course at RMIT University
(www.rmit.edu.au).
c. geniwate 2012

2. They were walking along a narrow defile
when a strange, vast, flat creature
approached them. It might have been a
tortoise, but it was so squashed, inflated
and mis-shapen it was very hard to tell.
The creature lurched and groaned.
‘What’s wrong with you?’, asked Mop.
‘I’ve been pixellated’, the creature
replied, and came to a lurching stop. Mip
tried to give it some water, but the water
leaked through the side of its mouth, the
cheek had become too thin. ‘Is that a
disease?’, she asked solicitously.

3. ‘Sort of. The guy who uploaded my image decided he wanted me to be bigger than the actual
dimensions of my image, so he made the computer display me bigger. But the bigger I get, the
less resolution I have, the less resolution I have, the less sharp I am. What’s more, he made my
width much greater than my height, so I display in this squashed manner.’

4. Mip took a close look at the tortoise’s shell. She could see it was
comprised of rectangles of colour. She’d never noticed that before.
‘Everything you see here is comprised of rectangles of colour - pixels -‘,
explained the tortoise. ‘Only you usually don’t notice, because they are so
small. I’ve been blown up, so you can see it’. And the tortoise groaned.
‘But I thought everything was made out of code?, Mip asked.

5. ‘It is. Even colour is code here. Every colour has something called a
hexadecimal code - a series of numbers and letters - which the browser
interprets into colour.’
‘Is there anything we can do to help you?’, Mop asked.
‘Nope. You could try texting the guy, but I doubt he’ll listen.’
Another piece of corral appeared. After a while, Mip and Mop walked on.
‘I’m going to blog about this’, Mop said.

6. hexadecimal