#General Purpose HTML

[sktthemes1]

Create Professional Websites with Bright Multipurpose HTML Template

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[arolesbianism]

Oh god is that a comicfrin drawing where they have whimsy quick someone throw that guy into a decades long timeloop

[furiouszealot]

UPDATE: As of 25/04/2025, 4chan is back up and running again. This post and its addendum will be kept as is, and will no longer be updated unless it goes back down again. If you were on /ghost/, it was a pleasure shitposting with you.

All right, I know no one gives a shit, but let me give you a recounting of the fall of 4chan from the perspective of someone who was there and has been lurking both 4chan and tumblr for a few years now.

I'll try to provide as much context as I can, but a lot of images were either lost or im too lazy to look for them in the +5000 reply thread in soyjak party.

Anyways, info below:

So, necessary context: a few years back, 4chan had a board called /qa/, which if you know little about the page, you may think every board is like /b/ or /pol/, which means a containment cess pool of grifters, (you) baiters, incels, and other deranged individuals. The thing is, /qa/ was somehow worse. The entire board was plagued and infested with soyjack edits, board culture was a nuclear disaster, anons were incredibly hostile in there, you know the drill, the big bad 4chan, but this time its actually true.

One day, moderation deleted /qa/, anons that posted there got mad, tried to raid other boards, failed, and then moved on to an altchan called soyjack party, which entire purpose you can guess from its name alone.

Apparently, the boards that allow pdf uploads (paper and origami, for example) didn't check if the uploaded file was actually a pdf file, so postscript files could be used to get access. This is as far as my understanding of web backend goes, sorry.

The hacker claims to have been working on this since 2021, and that he had access since about a year ago, but was recopilating data.

Now, what actually happened when the hack ocurred? Well, a banner of miku dancing with a song that played automatically was placed on top of every board, with the text "/QA/ IS BACK", this was possible because apparently no board was ever deleted, they were just hidden from the public.

A thread was then made on soyjack party, claiming authorship over the hack, and shit went south from there. Anons went en masse to talk there, a lot of weird discussion happened, the thread got the bump limit removed and got pinned, more than 5k posts were amassed on the first night alone. Keep in mind this happened at about 8 pm and most of the stuff went on through midnight.

So, the hacker leaked some things, first of all, the html files for the entirety of /j/ and the email address for every moderation member (important note: the pressence of .gov mails was disproven by the hacker themselves, so i guess there were never any feds), what is /j/? the board exclusive for jannies and moderators to discuss actions taken on the website regarding spam, ban evaders, threads spiraling out of control, etc. Among other things, some of the inner workings of 4chan got revealed, such as the web extension for jannies that allows them to do their job easily, how reports are handled, and other stuff. (Anecdotically, some guy got permabanned for calling anons jews or n-words over a 100 times in the same few threads)

Then, the source code got leaked. Important to say, the hacker removed the part of the source code related to the captcha, as to not facilitate bot attacks on the future, and all information related to email verification or 4chan pass users information also got removed, so all in all users are safe.

What was found on the sourcecode? That it was old, mostly. Most boards used code that hasn't been updated since about 2016, and /flash/ used the exact same code from when it was created back on 2011.

From there, desuarchive, a site that archives threads that die from bump limit, opened a dragon ball general on ghost mode, and thus began what later got called /ghost/, a solely text based thread with well over 20k replies as of right now, where a fraction of the 4chan population took refuge and is currently discussing random things with no particular topic. Kinda hard to read, but its comfy.

What does this mean for other sites? Not a lot, really. A lot of anons already crossposted in 4chan and tumblr already, and the ones that din't most likely wont come here. Some of the bigger/most dedicated groups, like /vt/, migrated to other boards. Various altchans are trying/tried to catch some of the flock of users that got lost, but i doubt it will get anywhere, since soyjak party for example was struggling with just the influx of users that came for the hack thread given its poor infrastructure. Kiwifarms saw a surge of new accounts apparently, but a lot of anons kinda loathe the idea of having to register, so theres that.

Smaller communities, such as generals that didn't get a lot of traffic, or boards on the slower end (say, /ic/, /lit/, etc) will probably vanish or disseminate until (or if) 4chan comes back up. I'd say give it a month, don't get your hopes up whether you want it to stay dead or want it to come back.

Given how many anons are staying on places like /ghost/ or other similar archives with the same ghost posting feature, i doubt it will be as bad as people are making it sound. Besides, the communities that are most likely to migrate to places like tumblr are either /co/, /vg/ or /lgbt/ refugees, which aren't THAT bad. Not every board was like the main cesspools (/b/, /r9k/, /pol/).

From now on, either 4chan comes back up in a few weeks (somewhere between 2 weeks to a month is expected), altchans capture the migrating anons, or a brand new imageboard rises from the ashes to become the new go-to site for old 4chan posters.

In conclusion, nothing ever happens, but also don't worry, chances are this won't affect tumblr in the slightest. If it does, you can cash in your "you were wrong" ticket whenever you want, i'll take the L.

As a footnote, keep in mind: NO users were compromised, if you ever posted there and are worried for your safety, physical or digital, you are safe.

Edit: Forgot to add, if you are a 4chan refugee, im BEGGING you to dm me and tell what board you were from and where are you migrating, if at all.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[ominous-faechild]

Hey how do you do the color gradient thing for your dialog tags?

Assuming you mean these things, I've actually been meaning to make a guide of my own for a while lol.

For one, you can only do this on computer/the website of Tumblr! There's no option to select this stuff on the app.

STEP 1: CREATE A NEW DOC / GO TO SETTINGS

It opens a dropdown menu/whole screen full of options!

From there, select the "text editor" dropdown, which starts as displaying "rich text".

Select "HTML"

And it should change how the entire post looks!

STEP TWO: CHEAT

Yeeeeeaaaaah, so I use a website for this lol

I inserted my colors for faeries (#30853C) and Cloud (#6DC1B4) for my example of "these things" earlier. To make this easier, I most often have two windows open at a time while working on uploading my scripts to Tumblr.

To get colours to insert into the Text Colorizer website, you can use any kind of hex color picker or even this one website I've used to yoink "thematic" colors from photos!

Personally, I've developed a massive library of colors over time for this exact purpose lol. Using my old colors as a "base", I can change it accordingly to the kind of "new color" that I want for a specific character or thing!

(I'll use the website to also make gradients for "in-between" colors lol)

STEP 3: INSERT TEXT / DESIRED COLORS

To make Nova's gradient, I start with #A600D9, my color for Magic, and end with #F56745—their individual color. However, being as it's short, I'll use a quote from them instead lol.

Once you've inserted your text and colors, you will click in the text box I highlighted in red, ctrl+a and ctrl+c to copy it all, and go back over to your new tumblr post tab!

From there, you'll ctrl+v to paste the entirety into the HTML area, which pastes the code into your post!

AND VOILA!

You have gorgeous gradient text!

However, I want to give a fair warning and a bit of advice! If you didn't notice wayyyyyyy back when...

Tumblr warns that this all can break your formatting!

It doesn't do it too often, but take it from someone who does an obscene amount of formatting... it's 100% true.

STEP 4: CHEAT SOME MORE!

For this reason, I personally have a whole separate draft post full of my characters' colors (and names lol) that I use to copy-paste them in from rather than using the "html" text editor on every post!

I mentioned earlier I often have multiple windows open while editing? Here's what that looks like!

Additionally, I'll use a separate tab off on the left (my "current wip post" side) with the "html editor" enabled for me to copy-paste stuff!

(Also here's yet another example of how many colors I have)

Once again, you can ctrl+c these things to paste them into another tumblr post with the correct colors!

And it's ONLY possible to do on the website!!!

EXTRA INFO!

WARNING:

Tumblr will only allow each "paragraph's html to be so many characters long, so you can't have too big of anything in a gradient!

And by "anything"... I mean you really can't have that big of a gradient in general. RIP lol.

It straight-up won't save the post so long as you have that "overflow" in the character block! MAKE SURE YOU'VE FIXED IT, OR YOU CAN AND WILL LOSE ALL PROGRESS ON YOUR POST!

SINGLE-COLOR TIP:

You don't need the website for a single color! If you'd like, you can just change the "color code" within the html editor to change specific colors!

MAKE SURE COLORS CAN WORK ON DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS!

On desktop, you can use shift+p while not on any sort of textbox to change the color pallet! I always do tests to see which colors work best before settling on any!

(Tho, the blue background SPECIFICALLY is nightmarish to work around. So if that's the ONLY thing I can't make work, I often ignore it and let you guys who use it suffer lmao)

(Hopefully this'll give you guys some respect for me and how much I do to make my posts aesthetic af lol)

Also hopefully this all helps???

divider by @cafekitsune

[ominous-signs]

So I’m the guy who mentioned trying to reinstate that safety sign generator, and I figured I’d give an update here since I’m unable to dm you.

Based on what I’ve been able to find, the page was likely left unattended for years, up until the certificate expired. The faculty member credited on the site hasn’t worked at the school since 2017, but I’m tempted to try shooting him an email on the off chance he remembers any of it.

If none of this ends up working, I may very well learn HTML purely for the purpose of remaking that website, because I really want it to exist and I feel it would be better as an independent project if the school doesn’t wanna bother keeping it up

This would be so awesome?? In awe of how far you´re going to get the website back and I am in full support

[luvwich]

tools & widgets

-> an index of posts for various things i’ve made

ao3 / fanfic

luvnotes comment notepad — a handy floating composer right inside ao3

text threads — styled text threads between your blorbos to add to your fics (or just share as images)

styled dividers — fancy horizontal rules to use as scene separators

ebook prettifier — create covers & add some basic formatting to your downloaded fics

footnote helper — easy footnote html

cyberpunk workskins: text threads, shards, emails

general purpose

gradient text maker — for that ~aesthetic~ touch

last updated: may 18, 2025

[hikakaomybeloveds]

FELLOW TUMBLR USERS WHO ARE ALSO WRITERS WHO HATE GENERATIVE AI BUT USE GOOGLE DOCS DESPITE ITS AI SCRAPING AND CONSTANT PUSHING OF GEMINI BECAUSE THEY DON'T KNOW A GOOD, FREE ALTERNATIVE

I NEED TO PUT Y'ALL ON SOMETHING

MEET ELLIPSUS.

IF U WANT AN ALL-AROUND FANTASTIC, COMPLETELY FREE, WEB-BASED GDOCS ALTERNATIVE. USE ELLIPSUS.

SERIOUSLY, IT IS BETTER THAN GOOGLE DOCS IN LITERALLY EVERY WAY.

PROS:

-DRAFTS FEATURE CAN BE USED TO STORE NECESSARY INFORMATION SUCH AS EXCERPTS U PLAN ON PUTTING LATER ON IN WHATEVER UR WRITING, CHARACTER NAMES AND BACKSTORIES, ETC. EVEN IF U AREN'T USING THEM FOR COLLABORATION PURPOSES. I HAVE A DRAFT TO PUT ALL MY AO3 TAGS IN FOR EVERY FIC I WRITE

-THERE'S A TIMER BUILT-IN. WANT TO START CREATING A HABIT OF WRITING FOR A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF TIME EACH DAY? OPEN UP ELLIPSUS, CREATE A NEW DOC, START THE TIMER, AND GO.

-FOCUS MODE. OH MY GOD FOCUS MODE. I USE IT EVERY TIME I PROOFREAD ANYTHING. GETS RID OF THE WHOLE MENU, LEAVING YOU JUST THE TEXT. ICONIC

-THERE'S SO MANY THEMES. LIGHT, DARK, ULTRA DARK (MY PERSONAL FAVORITE), SEPIA, NATURE, THERE'S EVEN PRIDE THEMES CURRENTLY (LIGHT AND DARK). LIFESAVER FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO HAVE SENSORY ISSUES AND HATE WHEN SHIT IS TOO BRIGHT

-WAY BETTER DEFAULT FONT THAN GOOGLE DOCS. I'M SORRY I AM FRANKLY SICK OF ACTING LIKE ARIEL IS NOT ONE OF THE WORST FONTS EVER. ELLIPSUS USES THE GENUINELY GORGEOUS "LITERATA" AS ITS DEFAULT FONT

-COLLABORATION! U CAN COLLABORATE! U CAN SHARE DOCUMENTS, U CAN COLLABORATE IN REAL-TIME JUST LIKE IN GOOGLE DOCS, EVERYTHING.

-GUYS. GUYS THERE'S AN EXPORT TO AO3 OPTION. U CAN CONNECT UR AO3, AND WHEN U'RE FINISHED WRITING, CLICK THAT "EXPORT TO AO3" BUTTON, AND ELLIPSUS WILL COPY UR ENTIRE WORK IN HTML AND OPEN AO3 IN ANOTHER TAB. A FUCKING LIFESAVER

-THERE'S A FOLDER SYSTEM. U CAN CREATE FOLDERS, AND THEN SUB-FOLDERS WITHIN THOSE FOLDERS. GENUINELY AMAZING FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO WRITE A LOT BUT HATE HAVING A CLUTTERED WORKSPACE. I LITERALLY HAVE 140 WORKS ON ELLIPSUS BUT YOU KNOW WHAT MY DASHBOARD SHOWS? MY 8 FOLDERS.

-IT AUTOMATICALLY SHOWS YOUR WORD COUNT. U DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO SEE IT EXCEPT SCROLL UP. AMAZING.

-AUTOMATICALLY CREATES AN OUTLINE WHEN U PUT HEADINGS ON YOUR DOCUMENT, ALLOWING FOR EASY NAVIGATION BETWEEN SECTIONS.

-NO GENERATIVE AI. EVER. NO AI SCRAPING, NO AI ASSISTANT SHOVED IN YOUR FACE, NOTHING.

CONS:

-IT'S WEB-BASED, SO NO APP ON MOBILE (ALTHOUGH IT DOES RUN INCREDIBLY WELL ON MOBILE) AND NO DESKTOP APPLICATION. THAT'S IT. THAT'S LITERALLY THE ONLY CON.

MAKE AN ACCOUNT. TRANSFER YOUR STUFF OVER FROM GOOGLE DOCS. USE IT INSTEAD. U WILL NOT REGRET IT

[livwritesstuff]

Ok so I feel like Eddie would have Tumblr. He’d be an absolute menace, he just gives off that Vibe, y’know?

Would any of their daughters have Tumblr? Would they know about each others’ accounts? Would they follow each other/interact? Or do their interests differ enough they leave each other alone?

i seriously think you live inside my head or something bc i’ve literally thought about this so many times

So when I imagine Eddie as an author, I’m really picturing him as kind of like a Neil Gaiman-esque figure, both in terms of his genre/style of writing and the way he engages with the general public. The only difference to me is that where Gaiman has put a lot of focus on TV/movies, Eddie sticks a bit closer to novels.

Neil Gaiman very notably has a Tumblr account. He’s been on Tumblr for ages, and I feel like Eddie would be the same way. 

Eddie is definitely a total disaster on Tumblr in the 2010s. He says whatever he wants, engages in political discourse like nobody’s business, and probably spoiled his own writing on one occasion or another. His agent didn’t know what to think because on paper it’s bad news behavior, but Eddie’s primary audience actually seems to enjoy the transparency, so on the whole he leaves him alone.

The older Eddie gets, though, the more he mellows out, and by the 2020s he mostly just uses it as a running Q/A. Still, it’s definitely the platform he’s the most genuine and himself on (because he probably also has a Twitter and an Instagram, but only out of business obligation and he practically never uses them).

As for their daughters, if anybody has a Tumblr, it’s 100% Robbie. Robbie is definitely the pinnacle of a late-2010s Tumblr girl, for better and/or for worse. She knows about her dad’s account (and forever curious about how many followers he has even though Eddie refuses to tell her). She doesn’t follow him, but occasionally one of his posts still ends up on her feed and she is so upset about it every time.

Moe could have a Tumblr – maybe in her late middle school and high school years. I feel like she’d be the kid who taught herself fairly complex HTML coding purely for aesthetic theme purposes. She’s Steve through and through though so as she gets older, the novelty of social media in general wears off and she decides it really isn’t her thing.

I feel like Hazel’s interests wouldn’t lead her down the Tumblr path. She’s a YouTube/TikTok/Insta girlie true and true. Maybe Robbie tries to bully her into making one, but she doesn’t really get how it works so it just never happens.

(And Robbie definitely keeps her Tumblr on lockdown. That shit is hers and hers alone).

[prokopetz]

By request, the random character generator for Eat God has been updated to allow individual parameters of each generated entry to be rerolled. This turned out to be an interesting challenge, because by-the-book character creation in Eat God leaves a lot of stuff to human judgment that a computer needs to have explicitly explained to it, like "if you have a Trait that swaps two of your Facets when activated, and then you re-roll your Facets, keep rolling until you get a Facet array in which the Facets to be swapped are not equal"

I think I've caught all the weird edge cases – but then, that assumes I've thought of them in the first place! I'd appreciate it if folks could give it a spin when they have a moment and let me know if it does anything strange. I've also made a few adjustments to the HTML which should make it easier to copy-and-paste results into Tumblr's post editor, though you'll inevitably lose most of the formatting.

Known issues:

If you generate a full slate of six results, trying to re-roll any result's Creed will produce no response, because the generator enforces uniqueness across multiple results and there are currently only six entries in the random Creeds table.

For similar reasons, if you generate a full slate of six results and one of those six results has "Bottomless Belly" as a non-dependent Trait, then re-roll every inventory slot for every result until they all come up as food items, the generator will crash, because you've got nineteen inventory slots to fill and the random food table currently only has eighteen entries; the odds of this scenario occurring by chance are on the order of a billion to one, but it's not terribly difficult to do it on purpose if you have some time to kill.

[astercontrol]

Hey! Question for anyone out there who

is working on archiving stuff in case it gets lost, and

is more familiar with coding than I am.

---

I've been backing up my Tumblr regularly for years now. I'm trying very hard to get into the habit of saving everything I create that's of value to me and NOT relying on a website I can't control to keep it saved…

And the problem with Tumblr's innate "download-a-backup" function is that once you've downloaded it, it seems you can't fully access it unless your Tumblr blog still exists and you have an internet connection capable of viewing it.

Which, like, defeats the whole purpose of a backup?

???

And there is no reason that HAS to be the case! The backup does download the text of all your posts, and a copy of every image you've ever posted! You CAN look at all these things individually, on your computer, in the backup folder you downloaded, without accessing the internet at all.

But for some incomprehensible reason, the backup doesn't create real links between them!

At least, not the images.

It does give you a whole lot of individual html documents containing the text of your posts. And it does give you a big "index" html document with links to all of those.

---

---

And as far as I can tell, all of THAT works fine, whether you access it on your own private computer, or upload it all to your own self-hosted html website, or whatever.

But the images embedded in those posts are NOT the copies that you have in the big, huge, giant image folder that you went to all that trouble to download with your backup!

They're the copies that Tumblr still has stored on THEIR website somewhere.

And the images will not show up in your downloaded posts, unless 1. Tumblr still has that content from your Tumblr blog up on their site, and 2. you are connected to the internet to see it.

So… the whole Tumblr download thing feels kinda useless. Unless we can fix that.

---

There are apparently other methods of downloading one's Tumblr blog. But from what I've read, the reliable methods that actually produce a usable archive with embedded images?... are methods that require using the command terminal on your computer.

I am not enough of a programmer to feel comfortable with that.

Maybe, if someone could give me good enough instructions that I could trust not to mess up other stuff on my computer in the process, I might try it.

But right now, I'm just focused on trying to fix the archive I already downloaded.

---

The closest I get to being a programmer is editing html documents in a code editor. (I have BBEdit for Mac, the full paid version.)

And I've made some progress in learning GREP (regex) commands in there. Because that's basically an extra-specialized version of doing search-and-replace in a document, and the logic of it makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.

Anyway. To illustrate what I'm saying. Here is the link to a post of mine on Tumblr with 2 embedded images.

It is a slightly hornyish post, and LGBTQ-focused, and contains an image from a movie copyrighted by a very litigious corporation.

And I'm not saying any of that, in itself, is enough to fear for its continued existence on Tumblr.

BUT, I'm not saying I 100% trust Tumblr with it, either.

So.... because of that, and the fact that it contains two embedded images with different extensions.... it's a good example to run my tests on.

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like on Tumblr:

---

---

Here is what the post looks like in the folders generated by the backup:

---

---

The "style.css" document in the folder is what it uses for some of the formatting. Which is pretty, but not necessary.

Html documents stored on your computer can be opened in a web browser, same as websites. Here is what that html document looks like if I open it in Firefox-- while it's that same folder-- with my internet connection turned on.

---

---

Here is what it looks like if I open it after moving it to a different folder-- internet connection still on, but no longer able to access that stylesheet document, because it's not in the same folder.

---

---

Either one of those looks would be fine with me. (And the stylesheet doesn't NEED the connection to Tumblr or the internet at all, so it is a valid part of a working backup.)

But here's where the problem starts.

These are the two images that this post uses. They're in another folder within the backup folder I downloaded:

---

---

But the downloaded html document of the post doesn't use them in the same way it uses the stylesheet.

It doesn't use them AT ALL.

Instead it uses whole different copies of them, from Tumblr's goddamn WEBSITE.

This is what the downloaded post looks like when I do NOT have an internet connection.

(First: from the same folder as the css stylesheet. Second: from a different folder without access to the stylesheet.)

---

---

Without internet, it won't show the pictures.

There is NO REASON this has to happen.

And I should be able to fix it!

---

This is what the code of that damn HTML page looks like, when I open it in my code editor.

---

---

First, it contains a lot of stuff I don't need at all.

I want to get rid of all the "scrset" stuff, which is just to provide different options for optimizing the displayed size of the images, which is not particularly important to me.

Which I do using the Grep command (.*?) to stand in for all that.

---

---

This, again, is basically just a search and replace. I'm telling the code editing program to find all instances of anything starting with srcset= and ending with a slash and close-caret, and replace each one with just the slash and close-caret.

This removes all the "srcset" nonsense from every image-embed.

Which makes my document easier for me to navigate, as I face the problem that the image-embeds still link to goddamn Tumblr.

---

---

My goal here is to replace those Tumblr links:

img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/887612a62e9cdc3869edfda8a8758b52/0eeed3a3d2907da3-7c/s640x960/8fe9aea80245956a302ea22e94dfbe2c3506c333.jpg"

and

img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/67cdeb74e9481b772cfeb53176be9ad8/0eeed3a3d2907da3-c6/s640x960/785c70ca999dc44e4d539f1ad354040fd8ef8911.png"

with links to the actual images I downloaded.

Now, if I were uploading all this backup to my own personally-hosted site, I would want to upload the images into a folder there, and make the links use images from that folder on my website.

But for now, I'm going to try and just make them go to the folder I have on my computer right now.

So, for this document, I'll just manually replace each of those with img src="(the filename of the image)."

---

---

Tumblr did at least do something to make this somewhat convenient:

it gave the images each the same filename as the post itself

except with the image extension instead of .html

(one of the images is a .jpg and the other is a .png)

and with numbers after the name (_0 and _1) to denote what order they're in.

This at least made the images easy to find.

And as long as I keep the images and the html post in the same folder--

and keep that folder within the same folder as a copy of the stylesheet--

---

---

--then all the formatting works, without any need for a connection to Tumblr's website.

---

---

Now.

If only I knew how to do that with ALL the posts in my archive, and ALL their embedded images.

And this is where my search-and-replace expertise has run out.

I know how to search and replace in multiple html documents at once. But I don't know how to do it for this specific task.

What I need, now, is a set of search-and-replace commands that can:

change every image-embed link in each one of those hundreds of html posts-- all that "https://64.media.tumblr.com/(two lines of random characters).(extension)" bullshit--

replacing the (two lines of random characters) with just the same text as the filename of whichever html document it's in.

then, add a number on the end of every filename in every image-embed-- so that within each html document, the first embed has a filename that ends in _0 before the image extension, and the second ends in _1, and so on.

I am fairly sure there ARE automated ways to do this. If not within the search-and-replace commands themselves, then some other option in the code editor.

Anyone have any insights here?

[commodorez]

Hi! I'm so sorry if this has been asked before, but I'm completely clueless on computers, but I want to learn about them. Any places you'd recommend starting for bare bones beginners? I'm also interested in early-mid 90's tech particularly too. I'm guessing I have to figure out the basics before I can move onto specific tech though, right?

You're really knowledgeable and nice so I figured I'd just ask. Any help at all would be appreciated. Thank you! :]

That's an excellent question, I don't think I've been asked it before in such a general sense. I was raised with the benefit of being immersed in computers regularly, so providing a solid answer may be a bit difficult since for the basics, I never had to think about it.

I had computer classes of various types throughout my school years. We learned how to use a mouse, typing, word processing, programming -- and that was all before middle school. We got proper typing, html, and general purpose computer science courses in middle and high school, and you can bet I took those too. I also have the benefit of a bachelors of science in computer science, so you'll forgive me if my answer sounds incredibly skewed with 30+ years of bias.

The biggest suggestion I can give you is simply to find a device and play with it. Whatever you can get your hands on, even if its not that old, as long as it's considered past its prime, and nobody will get upset of you accidentally break something (physically or in software). Learning about things with computers in general tends to have some degree of trial and error, be it programming, administrating, or whatever -- try, learn, and start over if things don't work out as expected the first time. Professionals do it all the time (I know I do, and nobody's fired me for it yet).

Some cast-off 90s or early 00's surplus office desktop computer running Windows would be a good start, just explore it and its settings. Start digging into folders, see what's installed, see what works and more importantly what doesn't work right. Try to find comparable software, and install it. Even the basics like old copies of Microsoft Office, or whatever.

I recommend looking through the available software on winworld as it's an excellent treasure trove of operating systems, applications, games, and other useful software of the time period. I'd link it directly, but tumblr hates links to external sites and will bury this post if I do. If you're a mac fan, and you can find an old G3 or Performa, there is the Macintosh Garden's repository of software, but I'm not the right person to ask about that.

Some of you might be like "oh, oh! Raspberry Pi! say Raspberry Pi!" but I can't really recommend those as a starting point, even if they are cheap for an older model. Those require a bit of setup, and even the most common linux can be obtuse as hell for newcomers if you don't have someone to guide you.

If you don't have real hardware to muck about with, emulation is also your friend. DOSBox was my weapon of choice for a long time, but I think other things like 86Box have supplanted it. I have the luxury of the real hardware in most cases, so I haven't emulated much in the past decade. Tech Tangents on youtube has a new video explaining the subject well, I highly recommend it. There are plenty of other methods too, but most are far more sophisticated to get started with, if you ask me.

For getting a glimpse into the world of the 90s tech, if you haven't already discovered LGR on youtube, I've been watching his content for well over a decade now. He covers both the common and esoteric, both hardware and software, and is pretty honest about the whole thing, rather than caricaturish in his presentation style. It might be a good jumping off point to find proverbial rabbits to chase.

I guess the trick is to a find a specific thing you're really interested in, and then start following that thread, researching on wikipedia and finding old enthusiast websites to read through. I'm sure there are a few good books on more general history of 90s computing and the coming internet, but I'm not an avid reader of the genre. Flipping through tech magazines of the era (PC Magazine comes to mind, check archive dot org for that) can provide a good historical perspective. Watching old episodes of the Computer Chronicles (youtube or archive dot org) can provide this too, but it also had demonstrations and explanations of the emerging technologies as they happened.

There are so many approaches here, I'm sure I've missed some good suggestions though. I also realized I waffle a bit between the modern and vintage, but I find many computing troubleshooting skillsets transcend eras. What works now can apply to 10, 20, 30, or sometimes even 40+ years ago, because it's all about mindset of "this computer/program is dumb, and only follows the instructions its given" . Sometimes those instructions are poorly thought out on the part of the folks who designed them. And those failures are not necessarily your fault, so you gotta push through until you figure out how to do the thing you're trying to do. Reading the documentation you can find will only take you so far, sometimes things are just dumb, and experimentation (and failures) will teach you so much more about the hard and fast rules of computers than anything else. I'm rambling at this point...

So, let's throw the question to the crowd, and ask a few other folks in the Retrotech Crew.

@ms-dos5 @virescent-phosphor @teckheck @jhavard @techav @regretsretrotech @airconditionedcomputingnightmare @aperture-in-the-multiverse -- anything big I missed?

[sunflowerquill]

Reclaiming the Web & GenZ Comfort

I love witnessing the recent wave of people (mainly Millenials and especially Gen Z) rejecting social media and trying to recreate the more 'Personal' Web of the early days of the internet. I am Gen Z myself, and though I had social media for the purpose of promoting my books and keeping in touch with people, I seldom use them now because I am so enamoured by the idea of the Personal Web. Deleting social media apps has been tremendously helpful to my mental and even physical health; it just feels great.

The Personal Web movement mainly relies on creating your own website (with Neocities, for example), forums, blogs, etc. I am planning on learning HTML & CSS, so hopefully in the future I'll be able to join the club, but for now I think Tumblr is a good platform for simple blogging like this. Sure, it has social media aspects, but that disconnect it has from celebrity culture and short-form content really makes it a good start (not sponsored, haha).

So yeah, let's reclaim the internet and push away celebrity/corporate culture and AI brainrot. This movement makes me hopeful for the future generation. I can only speak of Gen Z, but I think a decent amount of people have realised/lived the consequences of the internet from a young age, also referred to as 'internet trauma' by many. So here's hoping we reinvent the internet to make it more human again (and protect children from it, especially at its current brainrot state). I believe in us.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Object permanence

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

#20yrsago Phone DRM cartel lowers fees from outrageous to merely ridiculous https://web.archive.org/web/20050413205335/http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/mobile/0,39020360,39195029,00.htm

#20yrsago Bush’s iPod filled with infringing goodness https://memex.craphound.com/2005/04/13/bushs-ipod-filled-with-infringing-goodness/

#20yrsago Felten: Why the RIAA is suing Internet2 users https://web.archive.org/web/20050413223053/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000797.html

#20yrsago BBC Creative Archive launches, without DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20050413173407/https://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/archives/what_is_the_creative_archive/project_faqs/index.html

#15yrsago Horrifying stationery https://web.archive.org/web/20100419065151/http://www.behance.net/Gallery/13th-Street-_quotStationery-of-Horror_quot-(Design)/440850

#15yrsago BITTER SEEDS: Alternate WWII novel pits English warlocks against Nazi X-Men https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/13/bitter-seeds-alternate-wwii-novel-pits-english-warlocks-against-nazi-x-men/

#10yrsago HOWTO make a working Apple ][+ watch https://www.instructables.com/Apple-II-Watch/

#10yrsago NSA declares war on general purpose computers https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/as-encryption-spreads-us-worries-about-access-to-data-for-investigations/2015/04/10/7c1c7518-d401-11e4-a62f-ee745911a4ff_story.html

#10yrsago Exploding the Phone: the untold, epic story of the phone phreaks https://memex.craphound.com/2015/04/13/exploding-the-phone-the-untold-epic-story-of-the-phone-phreaks/

#5yrsago Quantifying Boris Johnson's body-count https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/13/control-c/#the-nasty-party

#5yrsago Virginia's election-day holiday https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/13/control-c/#ralph-northam

#5yrsago Fighting the EU Copyright Directive in court https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/13/control-c/#control-c

#5yrsago Trump will deliver killing blow to the USPS https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/13/control-c/#art-1-sec-8

[wipbigbang]

Round 2 Of Artists Claims For The Regular WIPBB Are Open! Round 2 lasts until July 31st! You may claim 3 fics this round!

This is one of the fics open for claiming...

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) #093 Title: The Tyrant of Mystacor Pairing/Characters: Castaspella/Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner Rating: Mature | M Warnings/Tags: No Warnings apply Summary: What if Light Spinner had never joined the Horde after her corruption? What if, true to her initial desire, she had instead used her new powers to fight them? What if, for that purpose, she had taken over Mystacor and the Sorcerers' Guild? Shadow Weaver, the Tyrant of Mystacor; an uncanny ally to the Princess Alliance… After years of ruling with terror, she could have never imagined what looking for fresh blood would result in: her newest asset, her most important one, she would change everything. How could a single young sorceress shake the very foundations of the Tyrant's beliefs? Shadow Weaver would never know…

#094 Title: Heart'Bit'-Burner Pairing/Characters: Castaspella/Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner Rating: General | G Warnings/Tags: No Warnings apply Summary: In an overly connected world, where everything seems to have become electronic and artificial, nothing ever feels natural anymore. People install augmentations to enhance their bodies, provided by factions that have become the new ruling forces of the world, and all it takes is your memory. A “moment of respite”, some call it; a “soft reset”, to be precise. The closest to feeling natural again. It’s a moment of innocence; a blank slate before the artificial world sucks you back into its never-ending chaos. And so, a woman wakes up with no clue as to who she is, where she is, or who the man in front of him could possibly be…

#095 Title: Intermittent Glow Pairing/Characters: Adora/Catra and Bow/Glimmer Rating: Teen | T Warnings/Tags: No Warnings apply mind control (Prime's chips), tertiary character death (villain who also dies in canon) Summary: When Catra fails to save Glimmer, Horde Prime chips them both. She-Ra manages to save the cat, but her best friend's not so lucky. Now the rebellion's on the run from Prime's killer queen and no where on Etheria is safe as long as Glimmer's chipped. Catra and Adora fight to free their friend from Prime's mind control while trying to keep Bow out of her path of destruction. The archer resents being babied, but this is Glimmer with the safeties off and Prime at the wheel and his friends aren't going to let him get ripped apart by the woman he loves when she's clearly way too far gone for someone to remind her she's one of the good guys. (aka AU where Glimmer gets chipped and fights Catra, Adora and Bow in turn)

The list of remaining fics and the link to sign up are below!

[japanesedoramaandanimelover91]

My translation of an article from "News Zero". 240 What is the purpose of publishing a composite image of "Papa Trump"?

Sakurai:- "Image of a muscular President Trump holding something that looks like a lightsaber from the film Star Wars."

In the early morning of the fifth of May Japanese time, the U.S. White House

It was posted by the U.S White House on the official "X" website.

And President Trump in his "Pope" uniform posted the photo on the morning of the third of May.

Both of these photos look like they were synthesised by a generative AI.

The first image is in the style of Star Wars.

It appears to have been posted in honour of May - Star Wars day.

Fujii:- Does the red lightsaber have any significance?

Sakurai:- According to the official website, ‘red lightsaber’

According to the official website, many characters from the dark side use ‘red lightsabers’.

But there's been a lot of talk on social media about whether the red lightsaber was chosen because he's a Republic character or not.

I don't know if this is relevant, on the fourth of April, President Trump said that the American film industry was ‘rapidly dying’ and that he had ordered a review of imposing a ‘100 per cent tariff’ on films produced overseas.

The controversial appearance of "Pope Trump" comes at a time when the pope has died and the election of the next Pope, the "conclave", is set to begin on the seventh of May.

On 29 April, reporters asked President Trump, "Who do you want to be the next Pope?" ‘I want to be Pope," he joked …. Former Italian Prime Minister Renzi called the image "an image that offends the faithful" and Catholic bishops also criticised it.

-Fujii:-At first I thought someone had posted the images as a prank, but it turns out the White House is officially posting and distributing the images.

-Sakurai:- Exactly. We spoke to Professor Tetsuo Kotani, an expert on US politics. These posts are mostly made by the White House PR department and approved by President Trump. Half of them are "jokes", but the other half make President Trump look like a "hero and saviour", which his supporters like. That's the message for Trump supporters.

-Fujii:- Perhaps the current Trump administration is making it official in the government.

-Sakurai:- (According to Prof Kotani) ‘It's "impossible" in a normal administration, but the Trump administration is focused on pleasing its supporters." The White House "doesn't take it seriously," and when criticised, it "turns the situation around," saying "it's funny that people believe such a joke."

-Fujii: - Putting that joke aside, what are you really interested in right now?

-Sakurai:- According to Prof Kotani, the number one issue that Trump is concerned about at the moment is ‘the economy’. ���Trump's tariffs have led to an unexpected deterioration in the economy, He believes he is losing the confidence of the market. No wonder he is in a hurry, but on the other hand, he also has ‘confidence’ which is unknown where it will come from, and he wants to reassure the market by quickly concluding tariff negotiations with Japan.

Source: https://www.ntv.co.jp/zero/kikikomi/articles/bgtxy8oiqicb76c6.html

The translation may not be done correctly. If anything, feel free to correct.