https://solaria.neocities.org/gifpausetut ended up following this tutorial for pausing gifs and it's exactly what i wanted. perfect! i just need to figure out a convenient way for me to make static pngs using a frame of a gif

(using this post as a rubber duck) i should probably use imagemagick, but my first guess was `magick filename.gif filename.png` and that gave me a still png *and* a series of pngs isolating the moving frames of the gif. VERY cool but also unnecessary for this and will generate One Million Files. so i'm gonna have to dig into imagemagick's documentation later.

i could also just open the gifs in aseprite and export a frame as a png; this is what feels most natural to me, as someone who will always be infinitely more comfortable with digital art programs than a command line interface. but i am trying to teach myself to learn CLI tools when i can lol.

@platinumtulip would it be part of your use case to just make animated pngs instead? then you don't have to swap between formats and can just work in pngs

@vn not really. a lot of these gifs are from geocities archives and it would probably be just as annoying to convert them. generally i despise working with apngs because opening them in art programs generally does not work properly, so i avoid using them at all costs lol