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mtariqniaz · 1 year ago
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The 20 Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2024
In this article, I’ll share the best programming languages in 2024. Choosing the best programming language can be tricky. Plus, when you consider that the Stack Overflow developer survey alone lists more than 40 different programming languages, there’s a lot to choose from! So, if you’re curious about the best programming language to learn, I’m here to help! Perhaps you’re interested in data, and…
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olivergisttv · 7 months ago
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Top Free Websites to Learn Coding: Become a Developer Without Spending a Dime
Learning to code has never been more accessible, and the best part? You can do it for free! Whether you’re dreaming of building websites, apps, or diving into data science, coding is a skill that opens countless doors. But where do you start? With so many resources out there, it can be overwhelming to choose the right platform. Don’t worry; I’ve got you covered. In this post, we’re diving into…
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tofupixel · 1 year ago
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⭐ So you want to learn pixel art? ⭐
🔹 Part 1 of ??? - The Basics!
Edit: Now available in Google Doc format if you don't have a Tumblr account 🥰
Hello, my name is Tofu and I'm a professional pixel artist. I have been supporting myself with freelance pixel art since 2020, when I was let go from my job during the pandemic.
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My progress, from 2017 to 2024. IMO the only thing that really matters is time and effort, not some kind of natural talent for art.
This guide will not be comprehensive, as nobody should be expected to read allat. Instead I will lean heavily on my own experience, and share what worked for me, so take everything with a grain of salt. This is a guide, not a tutorial. Cheers!
🔹 Do I need money?
NO!!! Pixel art is one of the most accessible mediums out there.
I still use a mouse because I prefer it to a tablet! You won't be at any disadvantage here if you can't afford the best hardware or software.
Because our canvases are typically very small, you don't need a good PC to run a good brush engine or anything like that.
✨Did you know? One of the most skilled and beloved pixel artists uses MS PAINT! Wow!!
🔹 What software should I use?
Here are some of the most popular programs I see my friends and peers using. Stars show how much I recommend the software for beginners! ⭐
💰 Paid options:
⭐⭐⭐ Aseprite (for PC) - $19.99
This is what I and many other pixel artists use. You may find when applying to jobs that they require some knowledge of Aseprite. Since it has become so popular, companies like that you can swap raw files between artists.
Aseprite is amazingly customizable, with custom skins, scripts and extensions on Itch.io, both free and paid.
If you have ever used any art software before, it has most of the same features and should feel fairly familiar to use. It features a robust animation suite and a tilemap feature, which have saved me thousands of hours of labour in my work. The software is also being updated all the time, and the developers listen to the users. I really recommend Aseprite!
⭐ Photoshop (for PC) - Monthly $$
A decent option for those who already are used to the PS interface. Requires some setup to get it ready for pixel-perfect art, but there are plenty of tutorials for doing so.
Animation is also much more tedious on PS which you may want to consider before investing time!
⭐⭐ ProMotion NG (for PC) - $19.00
An advanced and powerful software which has many features Aseprite does not, including Colour Cycling and animated tiles.
⭐⭐⭐ Pixquare (for iOS) - $7.99 - $19.99 (30% off with code 'tofu'!!)
Probably the best app available for iPad users, in active development, with new features added all the time.
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Look! My buddy Jon recommends it highly, and uses it often.
One cool thing about Pixquare is that it takes Aseprite raw files! Many of my friends use it to work on the same project, both in their office and on the go.
⭐ Procreate (for iOS) - $12.99
If you have access to Procreate already, it's a decent option to get used to doing pixel art. It does however require some setup. Artist Pixebo is famously using Procreate, and they have tutorials of their own if you want to learn.
⭐⭐ ReSprite iOS and Android. (free trial, but:) $19.99 premium or $$ monthly
ReSprite is VERY similar in terms of UI to Aseprite, so I can recommend it. They just launched their Android release!
🆓 Free options:
⭐⭐⭐ Libresprite (for PC)
Libresprite is an alternative to Aseprite. It is very, very similar, to the point where documentation for Aseprite will be helpful to Libresprite users.
⭐⭐ Pixilart (for PC and mobile)
A free in-browser app, and also a mobile app! It is tied to the website Pixilart, where artists upload and share their work. A good option for those also looking to get involved in a community.
⭐⭐ Dotpict (for mobile)
Dotpict is similar to Pixilart, with a mobile app tied to a website, but it's a Japanese service. Did you know that in Japanese, pixel art is called 'Dot Art'? Dotpict can be a great way to connect with a different community of pixel artists! They also have prompts and challenges often.
🔹 So I got my software, now what?
◽Nice! Now it's time for the basics of pixel art.
❗ WAIT ❗ Before this section, I want to add a little disclaimer. All of these rules/guidelines can be broken at will, and some 'no-nos' can look amazing when done intentionally.
The pixel-art fundamentals can be exceedingly helpful to new artists, who may feel lost or overwhelmed by choice. But if you feel they restrict you too harshly, don't force yourself! At the end of the day it's your art, and you shouldn't try to contort yourself into what people think a pixel artist 'should be'. What matters is your own artistic expression. 💕👍
◽Phew! With that out of the way...
🔸"The Rules"
There are few hard 'rules' of pixel art, mostly about scaling and exporting. Some of these things will frequently trip up newbies if they aren't aware, and are easy to overlook.
🔹Scaling method
There are a couple ways of scaling your art. The default in most art programs, and the entire internet, is Bi-linear scaling, which usually works out fine for most purposes. But as pixel artists, we need a different method.
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Both are scaled up x10. See the difference?
On the left is scaled using Bilinear, and on the right is using Nearest-Neighbor. We love seeing those pixels stay crisp and clean, so we use nearest-neighbor. 
(Most pixel-art programs have nearest-neighbor enabled by default! So this may not apply to you, but it's important to know.)
🔹Mixels
Mixels are when there are different (mixed) pixel sizes in the same image.
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Here I have scaled up my art- the left is 200%, and the right is 150%. Yuck!
As we can see, the "pixel" sizes end up different. We generally try to scale our work by multiples of 100 - 200%, 300% etc. rather than 150%. At larger scales however, the minute differences in pixel sizes are hardly noticeable!
Mixels are also sometimes seen when an artist scales up their work, then continues drawing on it with a 1 pixel brush.
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Many would say that this is not great looking! This type of pixels can be indicative of a beginner artist. But there are plenty of creative pixel artists out there who mixels intentionally, making something modern and cool.
🔹Saving Your Files
We usually save our still images as .PNGs as they don’t create any JPEG artifacts or loss of quality. It's a little hard to see here, but there are some artifacts, and it looks a little blurry. It also makes the art very hard to work with if we are importing a JPEG.
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For animations .GIF is good, but be careful of the 256 colour limit. Try to avoid using too many blending mode layers or gradients when working with animations. If you aren’t careful, your animation could flash afterwards, as the .GIF tries to reduce colours wherever it can. It doesn’t look great!
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Here's an old piece from 2021 where I experienced .GIF lossiness, because I used gradients and transparency, resulting in way too many colours.
🔹Pixel Art Fundamentals - Techniques and Jargon
❗❗Confused about Jaggies? Anti-Aliasing? Banding? Dithering? THIS THREAD is for you❗❗ << it's a link, click it!!
As far as I'm concerned, this is THE tutorial of all time for understanding pixel art. These are techniques created and named by the community of people who actually put the list together, some of the best pixel artists alive currently. Please read it!!
🔸How To Learn
Okay, so you have your software, and you're all ready to start. But maybe you need some more guidance? Try these tutorials and resources! It can be helpful to work along with a tutorial until you build your confidence up.
⭐⭐ Pixel Logic (A Digital Book) - $10 A very comprehensive visual guide book by a very skilled and established artist in the industry. I own a copy myself.
⭐⭐⭐ StudioMiniBoss - free A collection of visual tutorials, by the artist that worked on Celeste! When starting out, if I got stuck, I would go and scour his tutorials and see how he did it.
⭐ Lospec Tutorials - free A very large collection of various tutorials from all over the internet. There is a lot to sift through here if you have the time.
⭐⭐⭐ Cyangmou's Tutorials - free (tipping optional) Cyangmou is one of the most respected and accomplished modern pixel artists, and he has amassed a HUGE collection of free and incredibly well-educated visual tutorials. He also hosts an educational stream every week on Twitch called 'pixelart for beginners'.
⭐⭐⭐ Youtube Tutorials - free There are hundreds, if not thousands of tutorials on YouTube, but it can be tricky to find the good ones. My personal recommendations are MortMort, Brandon, and AdamCYounis- these guys really know what they're talking about!
🔸 How to choose a canvas size
When looking at pixel art turorials, we may see people suggest things like 16x16, 32x32 and 64x64. These are standard sizes for pixel art games with tiles. However, if you're just making a drawing, you don't necessarily need to use a standard canvas size like that.
What I like to think about when choosing a canvas size for my illustrations is 'what features do I think it is important to represent?' And make my canvas as small as possible, while still leaving room for my most important elements.
Imagine I have characters in a scene like this:
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I made my canvas as small as possible (232 x 314), but just big enough to represent the features and have them be recognizable (it's Good Omens fanart 😤)!! If I had made it any bigger, I would be working on it for ever, due to how much more foliage I would have to render.
If you want to do an illustration and you're not sure, just start at somewhere around 100x100 - 200x200 and go from there.
It's perfectly okay to crop your canvas, or scale it up, or crunch your art down at any point if you think you need a different size. I do it all the time! It only takes a bit of cleanup to get you back to where you were.
🔸Where To Post
Outside of just regular socials, Twitter, Tumblr, Deviantart, Instagram etc, there are a few places that lean more towards pixel art that you might not have heard of.
⭐ Lospec Lospec is a low-res focused art website. Some pieces get given a 'monthly masterpiece' award. Not incredibly active, but I believe there are more features being added often.
⭐⭐ Pixilart Pixilart is a very popular pixel art community, with an app tied to it. The community tends to lean on the young side, so this is a low-pressure place to post with an relaxed vibe.
⭐⭐ Pixeljoint Pixeljoint is one of the big, old-school pixel art websites. You can only upload your art unscaled (1x) because there is a built-in zoom viewer. It has a bit of a reputation for being elitist (back in the 00s it was), but in my experience it's not like that any more. This is a fine place for a pixel artist to post if they are really interested in learning, and the history. The Hall of Fame has some of the most famous / impressive pixel art pieces that paved the way for the work we are doing today.
⭐⭐⭐ Cafe Dot Cafe Dot is my art server so I'm a little biased here. 🍵 It was created during the recent social media turbulence. We wanted a place to post art with no algorithms, and no NFT or AI chuds. We have a heavy no-self-promotion rule, and are more interested in community than skill or exclusivity. The other thing is that we have some kind of verification system- you must apply to be a Creator before you can post in the Art feed, or use voice. This helps combat the people who just want to self-promo and dip, or cause trouble, as well as weed out AI/NFT people. Until then, you are still welcome to post in any of the threads or channels. There is a lot to do in Cafe Dot. I host events weekly, so check the threads!
⭐⭐/r/pixelart The pixel art subreddit is pretty active! I've also heard some of my friends found work through posting here, so it's worth a try if you're looking. However, it is still Reddit- so if you're sensitive to rude people, or criticism you didn't ask for, you may want to avoid this one. Lol
🔸 Where To Find Work
You need money? I got you! As someone who mostly gets scouted on social media, I can share a few tips with you:
Put your email / portfolio in your bio Recruiters don't have all that much time to find artists, make it as easy as possible for someone to find your important information!
Clean up your profile If your profile feed is all full of memes, most people will just tab out rather than sift through. Doesn't apply as much to Tumblr if you have an art tag people can look at.
Post regularly, and repost Activity beats everything in the social media game. It's like rolling the dice, and the more you post the more chances you have. You have to have no shame, it's all business baby
Outside of just posting regularly and hoping people reach out to you, it can be hard to know where to look. Here are a few places you can sign up to and post around on.
/r/INAT INAT (I Need A Team) is a subreddit for finding a team to work with. You can post your portfolio here, or browse for people who need artists.
/r/GameDevClassifieds Same as above, but specifically for game-related projects.
Remote Game Jobs / Work With Indies Like Indeed but for game jobs. Browse them often, or get email notifications.
VGen VGen is a website specifically for commissions. You need a code from another verified artist before you can upgrade your account and sell, so ask around on social media or ask your friends. Once your account is upgraded, you can make a 'menu' of services people can purchase, and they send you an offer which you are able to accept, decline, or counter.
The evil websites of doom: Fiverr and Upwork I don't recommend them!! They take a big cut of your profit, and the sites are teeming with NFT and AI people hoping to make a quick buck. The site is also extremely oversaturated and competitive, resulting in a race to the bottom (the cheapest, the fastest, doing the most for the least). Imagine the kind of clients who go to these websites, looking for the cheapest option. But if you're really desperate...
🔸 Community
I do really recommend getting involved in a community. Finding like-minded friends can help you stay motivated to keep drawing. One day, those friends you met when you were just starting out may become your peers in the industry. Making friends is a game changer!
Discord servers Nowadays, the forums of old are mostly abandoned, and people split off into many different servers. Cafe Dot, Pixel Art Discord (PAD), and if you can stomach scrolling past all the AI slop, you can browse Discord servers here.
Twitch Streams Twitch has kind of a bad reputation for being home to some of the more edgy gamers online, but the pixel art community is extremely welcoming and inclusive. Some of the people I met on Twitch are my friends to this day, and we've even worked together on different projects! Browse pixel art streams here, or follow some I recommend: NickWoz, JDZombi, CupOhJoe, GrayLure, LumpyTouch, FrankiePixelShow, MortMort, Sodor, NateyCakes, NyuraKim, ShinySeabass, I could go on for ever really... There are a lot of good eggs on Pixel Art Twitch.
🔸 Other Helpful Websites
Palettes Lospec has a huge collection of user-made palettes, for any artist who has trouble choosing their colours, or just wants to try something fun. Rejected Palettes is full of palettes that didn't quite make it onto Lospec, ran by people who believe there are no bad colours.
The Spriters Resource TSR is an incredible website where users can upload spritesheets and tilesets from games. You can browse for your favourite childhood game, and see how they made it! This website has helped me so much in understanding how game assets come together in a scene.
VGMaps Similar to the above, except there are entire maps laid out how they would be played. This is incredible if you have to do level design, or for mocking up a scene for fun.
Game UI Database Not pixel-art specific, but UI is a very challenging part of graphics, so this site can be a game-changer for finding good references!
Retronator A digital newspaper for pixel-art lovers! New game releases, tutorials, and artworks!
Itch.io A website where people can upload, games, assets, tools... An amazing hub for game devs and game fans alike. A few of my favourite tools: Tiled, PICO-8, Pixel Composer, Juice FX, Magic Pencil for Aseprite
🔸 The End?
This is just part 1 for now, so please drop me a follow to see any more guides I release in the future. I plan on doing some writeups on how I choose colours, how to practise, and more!
I'm not an expert by any means, but everything I did to get to where I am is outlined in this guide. Pixel art is my passion, my job and my hobby! I want pixel art to be recognized everywhere as an art-form, a medium of its own outside of game-art or computer graphics!
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This guide took me a long time, and took a lot of research and experience. Consider following me or supporting me if you are feeling generous.
And good luck to all the fledgling pixel artists, I hope you'll continue and have fun. I hope my guide helped you, and don't hesitate to send me an ask if you have any questions! 💕
My other tutorials (so far): How to draw Simple Grass for a game Hue Shifting
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thecodezoneuk · 2 years ago
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Are you ready for the ultimate gaming experience? Introducing the best gaming club for kids where the fun never stops! Join us and level up your gaming skills! 💥🎉
🔥 Immerse yourself in the world of gaming and connect with fellow young gamers who share your passion! 💪🎮
🌈 From thrilling multiplayer battles to exploring virtual worlds, our gaming club offers a variety of exciting games that will keep you entertained for hours! 🌍✨
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agoldengalaxy · 8 months ago
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a headcanon about every gravity falls character I can think of off the top of my head:
- dipper’s chewing pen habit came from his mother, who tried to get him to stop biting his nails by handing him a pen instead. he doesn’t bite his nails anymore, but he’s uncomfortably used to the taste of ink now
- mabel learned how to knit out of spite. an adult at school told her it was probably too hard for her and she learned it all by herself out of pure rage. she can and will knit nearly 2 sweaters per week now
- stan keeps a journal to document all the things he begins to remember. sometimes he’ll be talking to ford and cut himself off mid-sentence to jump up and rush to grab his journal excitedly. he jokingly calls it journal 4
- when visiting a new city, ford decides to get a tattoo to match stan’s. finally he has a tattoo that he actually likes
- soos is BELOVED as the new mr mystery. sales are even better than when stan ran it, but he keeps that a secret from stan so as to not hurt his feelings
- along with all of the obvious stuff wendy is good at like cutting lumber and climbing trees, she also holds a world record in cup stacking
- melody is trying really hard to beat wendy’s score. they have a friendly competition. soos doesn’t understand why they can’t BOTH hold the world record. he loves them both and can’t root for either and it’s stressing him out
- once the therapism took away his arts and crafts hour, they gave bill a piano. he’s surprisingly good at jazz
- when fiddleford moves into the northwest mansion, he adopts two raccoons and one opossum from the junkyard to bring with him. he is very good at taking care of them and they adore him
- pacifica collects pokémon cards. she’s very secretive and very territorial about them. no one she battles can beat her. her favorite pokémon is drifblim
- when robbie hit puberty his hair actually started getting curly, so he straightens it every day. it is completely and utterly dead from all the heat but he keeps telling himself it’s a later problem
- gideon is coding his own website to blog his journey of becoming a better person. it’s slow-moving and frustrating but he thinks he’s…having fun??
- grenda and candy have been friends since candy moved from korea at age 6. grenda saw she was sitting alone at school and had no problem going to ask her if she liked boys. to this day candy is so grateful that grenda has always been more direct than she is
- abuelita just adores melody. she affectionately calls her mija whenever she visits
- blubs and durland have their honeymoon at disneyland. durland likes the teacups the best. they make blubs sick but he does it for him
- lazy susan’s home is full of home goods decorations like “I like cats more than people” and “autumn leaves and pumpkins please!”
- toby determined finds himself settling well into his role as bodacious t. although shandra jimenez still doesn’t like him back, she’s nicer to him now. she even introduced him to a friend of hers, whom he has taken on several dates
- mayor tyler still likes to gossip and encourage fighting whenever he can, even within his own office. he insists upon a good natured rivalry with the neighboring towns, which results in some destroyed property. his approval rating is through the roof
- blendin blandin finally discovers xanax
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ao3commentoftheday · 1 month ago
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I just wanted to drop in and commend the work you do on your Ao3 skins. 🏅
As someone who has been writing CSS for... god, 20+ years??? (like... professionally, as in I am the resident CSS expert at my company) even *I* find the AO3 stylesheet daunting and a hassle to work with. The specificity of a lot of the selectors and the lack of styles that actually 'cascade' without me having to slap "!important" on them gets really tedious for me really fast 🥲
So... you know. When you say "oh I'm just tinkering around/still learning/barely know what I'm doing/etc" please understand that you're genuinely doing impressive work that I KNOW must take a ton of time. It's been yeeeaars since I tried making an Ao3 skin, but know you got me feeling inspired 👀
*hits that kudos button*
Thank you so much 💗🥰 they're a labour of love and I'm glad to know that it's noticed and appreciated!
I play down my CSS skills for two main reasons:
I want people to know how accessible it is to you if you want to learn some basic code and make some wild looking skins with it and
I want people to know that I'll help as best as I can, but there are MANY QUESTIONS I will not have an answer for 🤣
My way of going about creating a site skin is probably pretty divergent from yours exactly because I don't have professional experience with CSS. I have zero expectations when it comes to style sheets and selectors. AO3 is the only website I've ever tried to style (other than my own), so to me all websites could be that arcane. I've never checked 🤷‍♀️
I basically go into a new site skin with an aesthetic and a prayer and then get rabidly obsessed with figuring out how to do One Cool Thing (tm) - like drop cap letters or images in borders or gradients or... - and then I do it in that one skin and promptly forget how to do it before I even get to the next one.
But that's because I find making site skins fun. I love doing wacky things with them. I love taking a fairly basic website design and making it look as complex as the back end really is. I love AO3 and my site skins are a little love letter, I guess. And a way to be creative when other creative wells are kind of dry. And they're a way I can give back to a community that has given me a lot. And they're just a cool fun thing that I want more people to know about and enjoy.
Anyway, not to get all sincere on a post about putting cute outfits on a fanfic website, but that's why I do it. And getting this much attention for it is kind of stressful because I'm always wary of the Attention Beast and not wanting to feed my desire for more of it.
I hope you do decide to make a skin of your own, and if you ever feel like sharing it out with an audience just at me in the post and I'll reblog it 😀 I'd love to see what you come up with!
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ellascreams · 1 month ago
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Twisted Wonderland Tumblr (Twstblr, if you will)
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👻outofthisworldprefect
No Twstblr I will not be adding tags I’d really rather people didn’t find most of my posts, thanks.
👻outofthisworldprefect
Ace what did you do
♥️one-heart-that-beats-as-one
A little trolling
♠️blastcycle-enthusiast
nrc-heritage-posts I know it’s only been a week since it was posted but
🖋️nrc-heritage-posts Follow
Official NRC heritage post
👻outofthisworldprefect
How dare you
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♦️kk-cay-cay
I haven’t been active on here in years but I love checking in sometimes just to see that it’s still thriving. Keep it up everybody! Never let Twstblr die!
#I’m still suuuuuuper active over on Magicam btw #if any of my old moots wanna follow me there
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🦇muscle-red
History classes always confuse me. They’ll talk about something like it’s the distant past when it was only 250 years ago, and it feels like it’s only been 10.
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💎magestoner Follow
Bots are the worst part of twstblr, except for Ortho bot, who’s the best part of twstblr
🛜ortho-bot
<3
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👟hahagetsqueezedidiot
anyone else just get tired of having legs sometimes? like theyre cool and all but why do they gotta be so heavy?
🎮gloomerai
Mood
🎮gloomerai
OH WAIT YOU MEANT BECAUSE YOU’RE MERFOLK NVM
👟hahagetsqueezedidiot
no wait explain
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📷night-raven-photography
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👑vil-schoenheit-offical
I always look so radiant in your photos! Thank you for taking them!
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🖤overitandoverbloted Follow
Hate how many straight people celebrities are on Twstblr now. This is supposed to be the neurodivergent gay website, Vil Schoenheit has no right to be on my dashboard
🪼malevolent-river-wizard Follow
Ain’t no way you just said “straight” and “Vil Schoenheit” in the same sentence
🔥the-situation-is-direbeast Follow
FYM VIL IS A STRAIGHT PERSON CELEBRITY!?!?? THAT BOY IS THE LITERAL POSTER CHILD OF QUEER CODED VILLAINS!
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🛜ortho-bot
Exciting news! Not only have I been declared the first truly sapient android, but I’ve also been officially enrolled as a student of Night Raven College! I’ll have a slightly odd class schedule as I can’t exactly do magic the same way other students can, but luckily, there’s precedent for that sort of altered course work.
I’m so very grateful to have this opportunity. I’m hoping I can make lots of friends, learn a ton, and share as much of my journey as I can with all of you! I’m a bit nervous, but I think it will all work out in the end. Thank you night-raven-photography for the incredible picture of me in my new dorm uniform!
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🔔nobelravenacademy Follow
WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WHAT
📖reincarnatedasanisekaifan Follow
As a scientist who specializes in technomancy, I NEED you all to understand just how incredible it is that there’s a fully sentient robot. This is HUGE. This raises so many new questions, creates the potential for entirely new fields of research, it’s quite possibly the biggest advancement in technomancy since its discovery.
And he just so happens to be a Twstblr celebrity. The odds of that are so impossibly low, and yet, here we are.
💿technerdmancer Follow
Congratulations, Ortho. We’re all so proud of you.
🍄‍🟫jade-leech
Official NRC heritage post
🍄‍🟫jade-leech
Oops, wrong blog. Give me one moment.
👻outofthisworldprefect
YOU
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hms-no-fun · 4 months ago
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you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?
cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.
first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.
cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.
but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!
the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.
i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.
all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!
what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!
like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.
uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao
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physalian · 10 months ago
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Fuck Grammarly
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Okay I need to rant about Grammarly. A program I never used before and never will now. Doubly pissed because their ads keep interrupting my peaceful 4-hour Minecraft music session with their fake-ass influencers.
Guys. Gals. Nonbinary pals.
“As a corporate girlie—” learn how to write a proper concise email.
“I used to spend hours proofreading—” enjoy the process, and then the product.
If you hate proofreading, to the point where you’ll consult a robot to do it all for you, then you hate writing. If all you care about is the end product, sorry to say but ‘writing’ is like, 30% of writing. The other 70% is editing, by design. You’re supposed to like it.
Of course I’d love to have beautiful artwork of whatever’s in my head, but I’m going to love whatever I make a whole lot more than whatever I type into some garbage generator. Because I love the process of creation.
Do I think editing is tedious as hell? Absolutely, but it’s still a tedium that I enjoy. I like fixing my mistakes, I like improving my sentence flow. I like thinking about patterns and connections that I didn’t see before and revising and reworking until I’m satisfied.
For the humdrum day to day work emails that some of us have to write—if you’re sending out whole essays to your coworkers that you need a robot to write for you, you’re doing it wrong. Corporate emails are boring and trite, but I can type out a “hey please do this thing for me” faster than I can load up ChatGPT or Grammarly, type out my prompt, make sure the result is what I actually want to say, and then send it to my coworker. If you can’t, learn.
Apparently, Grammarly used to be a helpful way to check for spelling and grammar errors. I don’t have any issue with the AI that runs spellchecker whatsoever. I type so fast and miss typos constantly and when the spellchecker is absent, like on this website, it’s annoying af.
But that’s not what Grammarly is about anymore, and that’s not what the above ad was trying to sell you, either.
You won’t get better if you don’t practice. You won’t get better if you aren’t the one making, seeing, and fixing your mistakes. Especially if you write fiction where grammar rules are a suggestion at best. My published novel is littered with flagged words and sentence fragments that I know are technically improper English, but I sacrificed an MLA-proof paper for something fun and entertaining.
AI does not understand nuance and flavor text and aesthetic choices. It never will.
If you train yourself by using a crutch you don’t need, you will end up needing it because you’ll be too afraid to act without it.
Fuck up. Make a mess. Make mistakes. You won’t make them for long once you see them. You do not need a robot to do it for you. We’ve been writing books for hundreds of years and all the authors who came before did it just fine without a robot.
This isn’t even about writing novels, it’s about communicating in the written medium. Fucking. Learn. It’s not rocket science, it’s not coding in C++, it’s not brain surgery. It’s stringing words together in a comprehensible sentence.
And obligatory disclaimer: To anyone who has an impairment and needs these tools, this is not about you and you know it.
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selineram3421 · 1 year ago
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🎩
You're Off-key
Prologue
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Reader X Gravity Falls
Warnings ⚠
⚠ The Book of Bill SPOILERS HERE! Do NOT read if you don't want any spoils of the book. Other than that, enjoy. -mentions of madness, blood, cryptids, italics= thoughts, ya know..the usual. Oh! And for our old pal Stan, some swear words. ⚠
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You missed this.
Being one of the weird kids who loved the supernatural, interested in solving puzzles, uncovering secrets. Of course you ended up watching Gravity Falls.
Never really growing out of it, you'd still watch videos about ghosts or getting a heavy duty flashlight and a pair of brass knuckles for whatever made a noise in your apartment.
Ghost or not, they'd learn not to mess with you!
At some point you got The Book of Bill.
It was so cool! Little funny and silly at times. There was also the triangle's descent into madness. Man those pictures were good.
Also an axolotl?
You don't know but it looked cute.
As you kept reading, the more you wanted to experience everything you didn't get to when you were younger.
So you decided on a road trip!
A road trip to all the places that inspired the creator of the show and the final stop would be Bill's statue!
Best friend in the passenger seat! Sun glasses in the glove boxes! And snacks to last you a while before the next gas station stop!
You even brought a camera!
"Ready for the time of your life?", you asked excitedly.
"In this heat?", your best friend fanned their face with the paper map. "It'll be meh but yeah, I'm ready for the car AC."
You both were in the car, ready to begin the adventure to Oregon, but you were just double checking before it actually began.
"Ok, ok. I'll start the car.", you said and put the key in the ignition, turning it and starting the car.
Immediately putting the AC on high, both of you were ready and you slowly backed out the driveway.
"Let's get that fucking pie!", you said and put on the sun glasses.
It was really bright today.
First you went to the famous diner with the pie. It was a give in, honestly but the pie was really good. Next to the Oregon Vortex. Now that was a really weird shack! Everything was leveled but you were standing slanted a bit. Then you both went to every roadside attraction that you could and got some key chains for souvenirs. It's been really clear weather since you started the road trip, which was a bit of a surprise. It was supposed to sprinkle at some point.
Finally, the last thing on the list arrived.
Playing the song "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn as you drove to the parking area and both of you were singing along to it before you had to turn off the car.
You brought The Book of Bill for fun.
Deciding to joke around, you bought some spaghetti to go and went to park the car before venturing into the woods where Bill's Statue was.
"Are you seriously gonna try it?", your best friend laughed.
"Why not?", you smiled while putting a water bottle in your pack. "It's ok to be silly. Mabel says so. Trust the silliness!"
"Yeah, ok.", they agreed with a smile. "If we get mauled by a bear, I'm sacrificing you first."
.....
"Fair."
Camera, spaghetti, book of Bill, and water! (Also a flashlight.) You were ready for a photo shoot with the oh so famous Dream Demon!
Looking back to see the sun, you guessed that you had about two hours to find Bill's statue before it got too dark. Your best friend had a map they downloaded off the internet that would lead you straight to it. Of course, with you having some attention issues, you'd get sidetracked by anything you found interesting, hence needing the two hours.
You were right!
The two hours were needed because you were still trying to solve one of the codes in the book, while also getting distracted by some cool looking bugs around the area.
"Did you try the Caesar cipher?", your friend asked.
"Yeah, but this is new. It's something else.", you sighed. "I should have tried the website before leaving.", you grumbled sadly.
"Hey, it's totally fine!", they said and patted your back a few times. "You'll get to do that when we go back home.", then they pointed towards the right with their thumb. "By the way, Bill statue is next to us, over by those bushes."
"WHAT!?", you screeched and ran over, whispering a few ouches as the branches of the bush scratched your legs.
That's when you saw it.
In all of its odd glory was the Bill statue with its hand out, waiting for a hand shake.
"Eeeeee!", you cheered as you got closer, hearing your friend laugh behind you as you did so. "I gotta give him spaghetti!"
Opening up your bag, you took out the take-out box that held the noodley deliciousness and took a quick forkfull for yourself before putting it in front of the stone triangle.
"I really thought you were joking.", says your friend as they watch you take out the book and camera from your backpack.
"Nope!", you smile, snapping a quick picture of the statue with spaghetti. "Ok, now for the silliest part."
You take out Parmesan cheese and a cheese grater.
"Oh this is fucking hilarious.", your best friend says and takes pictures of you with their phone.
The sun hits the horizon and the sky is slowly darkening, you start grating the cheese and when you think it's enough, you stop.
"Hey, take a pic with me shaking his hand.", you say and get closer to the statue, reaching out to touch it.
"Sure thing jellybean.", they say and lift their phone up. "It's my turn after you."
"Ok!", you say and put a thumbs up as you put your other hand on the statue's.
As you look to where your best friend is, all you can see is darkness.
You call their name in confusion. "Are you there?", you ask. "Turn on the flashlight, its really dark out here."
But you get no response.
And then you hear something odd.
Kinda sounds like someone with a weird sound filter over their laughing.
"Ok, ha ha.", you roll your eyes. "Quit playing the Bill audio and take the picture already."
When you try to get a better hold on the statue, you realize you weren't holding anything at all.
"What?", you say and look at your hand. "Wait.. Why can I see my hand perfectly fine when everything else is-"
"Well, well, well!", says a familiar voice from behind you.
What?
Turning around you see a floating, glowing Dorito chip with a fancy bow tie and a top hat.
Holy shit.
"Here we are at last! I've been waiting an eternity to meet you."
How is this happening? Was one of the snacks you ate expired? Did you eat the wrong brownies!?
"Thanks for reading my best seller kid!", Bill says and twirls his cane into existence in his hand. "And for the handshake.", he blinks. Winks?
"Wait, hold on! I-!", you start.
"See you in Gravity Falls!", the triangle snaps his fingers and suddenly there's a hole beneath your feet that reveals a cartoon animated forest.
"Wha-"
"Don't break your neck on the way down!", the one eyed demon waves.
And you begin to fall.
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ZKDW D QLFH VXQQB GDV
~Seline, the person.
Part 1
Taglist@
@+?
YO-🎹 | GF List🏞️
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snewdraws · 2 years ago
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if yall want to have fun on the internet while feeling like apart of a community you should join neocities and make your own personal website im so srs.
you’ll need to learn html coding but there are loads of free templates you can use! this layout generator is a great place to start, and neocities also has their own starter guide. i promise coding is not as scary as it looks, once you learn the basics it is rewarding & fun!
having a personal website on neocities is like having a little virtual house that you can freely customise how you want then you can go and visit other ppls virtual houses. it’s comfy, slow-paced and very welcoming compared to current social media.
if you don’t want to join, i still recommend checking out peoples websites ^_^ they are interactive works of art! keep in mind most are best viewed on a computer rather than mobile.
here is my website if you’d like to check it out :3
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magneticallyyours · 1 year ago
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Seeing how you are interested in writing Matrix pics, you won't mind writing some relationship headcanons for Neo (I love this hackerman so much)
Thanks btw!
Of course!! Sorry for the extremely late response, I die on this website quite often ;-;
I hope this is what you wanted, I did both red and bluepill Neo!
As you can probably tell after reading, I've never written headcanons in my life
✰✰ Neo relationship headcanons✰✰
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->Bluepill
Neo would be too absorbed in his double life as a programmer and as Neo for a relationship, at the start. But then he met you.
It was nothing at first, but as time went on, he noticed you were always on his mind, one way or another. Being lectured by his boss, writing code? Anything? He wondered what you were up to. It drove him crazy.
He would try to deny his feelings. Definitely not the one to confess first. He'd sit around wallowing until you confessed, and even then he'd be like a deer caught in headlights.
If you weren't a hacker like him, he'd be more worried. Now he had to factor in his actions causing you harm, in some way.
Worry or no worry, that wouldn't change what he felt about you. He'd be attentive whenever you talked. He would ask about your day. If you were tired, he would rub your shoulders without hesitation.
He would almost always be the little spoon, unless you wanted it otherwise.
Sometimes he'd surprise you by renting movies to watch together at home. Blankets, microwave popcorn and snuggles should go without saying.
Once he warmed up to you, he’d be very needy. He'd love morning kisses and hugs. His love language? Words of affirmation.
Slowly, he would start taking better care of his clothes, hair, appearance to impress you.
He'd try his best to be a good partner, searching for “cute gifts for valentine's day” and the like because my man is CLUELESS.
His work being as it is, you might find him sleeping at his desk more often than not. He would be flustered in the morning, noticing the blanket you'd put on his shoulders.
Sometimes when you do that he wakes up. But he keeps his eyes closed anyway, just barely holding back a smile.
He'd be willing to learn and try new things, just for you.
->Redpill
Outside of the Matrix, Neo would more or less be just as loving as he was inside of it.
Only he'd be much, much more protective. He wouldn't want you to run into trouble. It was always an uneasy feeling he had.
He would train with you when he could manage it. Neo always learnt things from you, and taught you things in return.
Don't be surprised if you wake up and find him holding you tight, he'll be doing that a lot more now.
You're one of the many reasons he wants to end the war and save humanity, he would never want to see you hurt.
Whenever he slept, he slept with the hope that he could wake up to your face the next morning.
Forget being The One-
He wants to be the one for you more than anything.
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abigailmoment · 5 months ago
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Hi! I'm Abigail. I write stories and games.
All of my work can be found on my website. Below there's a sampling of stories that are good places to begin.
I have a discord that's very friendly and I'm very responsive on it. I have a mailing list that goes out when I make new things.
I have an Ao3 account of fan fiction that is, at the moment, almost entirely dedicated to vampires from Baldur's Gate 3 being bad at communication. My most active story on it is currently: The Last Will and Testament of Cazador Szarr.
(Note--Cazador is dead and does not appear in the story.)
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A visual novel game in development.
You are John Watson. You're very worried about your best friend, Sherlock Holmes. You're right to be worried. Left to his own devices, he'll destroy himself with overwork and cocaine. Don't let him do that.
Wishlist here.
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I have a Patreon that is a new experiment. It is very low pressure Patreon. I inevitably, create things. I will put many of them there. If you are interested in subscribing, please think of it as supporting my ability to create in general rather than purchasing monthly entertainment.
If you are in any way financially vulnerable, please don't give me money. I am stable and safe. If you want access to the stories here but can't afford a subscription please message me and I'll give you a free subscription.
That is a general rule. If you can't afford anything I've created, please ask me for it and I'll give it to you.
Read things here.
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A text-based videogame. Cost: $3.99
Open Sorcery follows the development of an Elemental Firewall: a fire elemental bound with C++ code to protect a network of people and places. You guide her as she makes decisions and grows. She can learn things, develop relationships, and even gain sapience. Or she can burn everything with fire.
Play on Steam.
Play on Android.
Play on iPhone.
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A text-based fangame of BG3. Cost: Free.
Art by @cymk8
There's a monster made of dreams. It has its teeth in your companions. It builds nightmares out of their worst memories and drinks their pain. One of your companions has a very bad worst memory. A long, text-based video game.
Play online.
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A text-based videogame. Cost: Free
You're a vampire hunter on your night off. You're getting a manicure, seeing a movie, and eating fast food.
But there's a vampire in this McDonalds. If you don't do something, then in one hour it will eat the cashier.
Play online.
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archivlibrarianist · 3 months ago
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"Bots on the internet are nothing new, but a sea change has occurred over the past year. For the past 25 years, anyone running a web server knew that the bulk of traffic was one sort of bot or another. There was googlebot, which was quite polite, and everyone learned to feed it - otherwise no one would ever find the delicious treats we were trying to give away. There were lots of search engine crawlers working to develop this or that service. You'd get 'script kiddies' trying thousands of prepackaged exploits. A server secured and patched by a reasonably competent technologist would have no difficulty ignoring these.
"...The surge of AI bots has hit Open Access sites particularly hard, as their mission conflicts with the need to block bots. Consider that Internet Archive can no longer save snapshots of one of the best open-access publishers, MIT Press, because of cloudflare blocking. Who know how many books will be lost this way?  Or consider that the bots took down OAPEN, the worlds most important repository of Scholarly OA books, for a day or two. That's 34,000 books that AI 'checked out' for two days. Or recent outages at Project Gutenberg, which serves 2 million dynamic pages and a half million downloads per day. That's hundreds of thousands of downloads blocked! The link checker at doab-check.ebookfoundation.org (a project I worked on for OAPEN) is now showing 1,534 books that are unreachable due to 'too many requests.' That's 1,534 books that AI has stolen from us! And it's getting worse.
"...The thing that gets me REALLY mad is how unnecessary this carnage is. Project Gutenberg makes all its content available with one click on a file in its feeds directory. OAPEN makes all its books available via an API. There's no need to make a million requests to get this stuff!! Who (or what) is programming these idiot scraping bots? Have they never heard of a sitemap??? Are they summer interns using ChatGPT to write all their code? Who gave them infinite memory, CPUs and bandwidth to run these monstrosities? (Don't answer.)
"We are headed for a world in which all good information is locked up behind secure registration barriers and paywalls, and it won't be to make money, it will be for survival. Captchas will only be solvable by advanced AIs and only the wealthy will be able to use internet libraries."
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geoledgy · 6 months ago
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your oc website is SO SO SO SO INCREDIBLY COOL how the hell do you even start learning how to do this ?? if you learned how to do this by yourself online, are there any tutorials or resources you can share with us? was making this website free??
omg THANK YOU SO SOOOOOO MUCH!!! It makes me so happy to hear that folks like my little site. I code my site with Phoenix Code (for the live viewer and number dials) and I host my site on Neocities - it is all free. Phoenix can be used in browser or on desktop, but I like having it on desktop more for big projects in case my files get deleted. I use the browser version when I just want to test something quickly.
The 2 videos I use and can not recommend enough to anyone who asks me are this HTML tutorial and this CSS tutorial. They are simple and easy to understand, but I recommend watching it the first go, and then following along the next few watches until you get the flow of basic parts to a website, how they're organized, and what order they go in. At this point, I've memorized exactly where everything goes, and it is all thanks to these 2 videos.
If I am being honest, I learned how to code by myself, not quite even with online tutorials but just from being stupid and messing around myself (1, because I was a kid, and 2, because I didn't understand English very well to know what tutorials are saying.) I used to do html coding for Neopet pages when I was a kid with too much online time, first by just editing the default petpages and adding info and images, and then just doing trial and error with the html. I'll just try something and then if it doesn't turn out the way I want it, I try to find out why it didn't work and also get inspiration from other similar sites to figure out where things go or how they coded (with this nifty thing called right click > inspect page or right click > view page source). And BOOM, working webpage.
It was rudimentary, white blank background without any boxes or anything, you just scrolled down the page and sections were separated by a horizontal bar. OH and every text was centered! I had no idea how to make scrolling boxes or fancy assets, but damn I still had so much fun working on it every weekend. When you find authentic selfmade sites from the 90s and 2000s, most of them aren't super fancy either unlike what modern nostalgia makes you think. So I hope you don't feel discouraged if you begin making a website and feel it isn't "fancy", you're already doing a first big step which is making a webpage and learned your first set of html code!
It was over a decade later before I coded webpages with html again. I've gotten lazy and started relying on site builders, but nothing was quite as versatile as html. I wanted to try coding my own OC site again, so that was when I started working on OutKrop (the site I posted). Until I started coding again, I had literally no idea what CSS even is (and let me tell you, it's a game changer!)
Personally, I work best when I can do things hands on. I don't read through tutorials, I code first then go back and read through coding help sites like w3schools when I find myself stuck and unable to figure something out. Sometimes I grab existing codes and play around with them to see what changes and what I can do with it, cuz having visual context is what helps me a lot.
I can also share my process:
Once I gather up some ideas, I make a sketch, including what boxes (divs in css) should approximately go. It is very rough, but shows me exactly what I need to know.
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Next I load up my coding app (Phoenix Code in my case) and "sketch" the layout. Nothing fancy going on here, just putting things where they need to be, and fixing size of boxes and margins if needed. I give my boxes all a background color so I can easily see how big they are and where they are located.
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After some adjustments like moving stuff around and adding assets like backgrounds and images, and changing colors of the boxes, rounding off corners, etc., we get this!
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so recap + additional useful sites I use:
Coding app: Phoenix Code
Site hosted on: Neocities
Video tutorials: HTML and CSS
Sites for learning code: w3schools, also lissa explains is a great site that is written for kids to learn html so it's easy to understand. Finally, sadgrl has a lot of great resources for coding as well!
I recommend looking through these sites AFTER you tried taking a spin at coding - it doesn't have to be anything fancy just follow the HTML video tutorial I linked!
Thanks for the ask, and I hope this helps you and many others out there who are interested in building a site with html/css! Don't be afraid to get things "wrong" or have an "un-fancy" site. This is how you learn to code, and it'll become so easy once you get the hang of it.
Anyone is always more than welcome to reach out for coding help and advice :-]
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sun4kiss · 1 year ago
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Hihihihi this isn't a request, is like a question, how do you put different colors on the texts? I saw you have pretty colors and I just can't do it bc I just have the 7 predeterminated colors 😭😭😭
Okkk I'll try to teach in an easy way.
it took me a long time to learn because each site i visited said something different and it never worked. in the end, i had to seek help from my brother who graduated in IT😭
I don't know if it's possible to do this through the app because most of the time, I use the website to publish my works
the secret of this is html code.
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step by step:
firstly find the color code you want here
now create a new post > configuration button in the top right corner > text editor > change rich text to html
then you will use this code:
<span style="color: #000000"><b>write your text here</b></span>
and... tada! :
memorabilia album of the year.
code that I used
<span style="color: #8B0000"><b>memorabilia album of the year.</b></span>
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you can also make a gradient effect. to do this, you will have to change the color of each word or letter, depending on how you want it to look.
like this:
heeseung best all-rounder in kpop
code that i used
<span style="color: #ffefd5"><b>heeseung</b></span>
<span style="color: #ffe4b5"><b>best</b></span>
<span style="color: #ffe4b5"><b>all-rounder</b></span>
<span style="color: #EEE8AA"><b>in</b></span>
<span style="color: #EEE8AA"><b>kpop</b></span> </p>
notice that I added one word at a time and changed the colors in the code? In fact, I'm still learning how to mix colors for a gradient effect, this one didn't look so good but I just wanted to show you how to do it
I hope you understand, with time you'll get the hang of it
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when I finally discovered how to change the colors, I spent a whole day just playing with it was so much fun😭
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