@vas images are now 77kb altogether, thanks for recommending mozjpeg. I'll still fiddle around with the quality parameter, though.
I can really relate in relation to twitter. it's best to just avoid arguing with randos on twitter (or even viewing replies, often), but it's not easy. good luck to you
Yes, I know this and I'm honestly sorry about it. Problem is: it's only 500px on desktop. My phone has a portrait width of 1080px so I adapted for that. And even then I ran everything through guetzli on quality=87 for the (in my opinion) best trade-off between size and quality.
These images are very high in detail and running them through shitty encoding settings makes my heart ache. Having visitors download 1MB for the frontpage also makes my heart ache, but just one percent less. it's a dilemma :/ (but I'll try to decrease the size and see if it looks acceptable on the phone™)
Still, thank you very much for your valuable input. It means a lot to me when people notice these details.
I only noticed cause things usually load instantly with neocities' crazy CDN lol. It's okay. Seriously, just try mozjpeg. You save 50+%, and all you lose (from what I see in my monitor) is a tiny bit of luminocity in certain parts of the image which IMHO don't affect the image negatively.
I rewrote it completely, and used the opportunity to do it in Ruby (which I didn't know before). The code is already on a git repo, but it's private because it has parts I'm really ashamed of.
:D