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Bulk downloading tools for images
I've been obsessively bulk downloading Twitter artists because of how uncertain the future of the platform is. I've also gotten into bulk downloading images as a faster alternative to my usual saving methods. I figured I might as well share the tools I use! I'm a Mac user, so all of these tools are both Mac and Windows accessible.
WFDownloader
An absolutely excellent bulk downloading tool. This app handles many more websites than gallery-dl, and it's particularly good for downloading entire Twitter pages. What's more, you can still download images from sites that aren't technically supported via the crawler feature. WFDownloader also gets major points for having highly detailed tutorials and a very responsive, helpful dev you can email for assistance.
Gallery-dl
This is a command line program, so it requires a bit of tech savvy. Most of the steps are outlined on the Github page. This program allows you to bulk download things like Pixiv pages, Tumblr blogs, Deviantart galleries, Instagram pages, etc. Some websites (like Pixiv) may require user authentication; the GitHub page outlines the steps each authentication process requires.
ESUIT
A Chrome extension that lets you bulk download Facebook galleries (something the two aforementioned tools don't do). The only drawback is that the free, basic version only lets you download the first 300 pictures in an album; you'll have to upgrade to a paid membership if you want to bulk download more than 300 photos. However, it's still a very helpful tool, especially if you're only planning on downloading smaller albums.
These are the 3 bulk downloaders I can personally vouch for, although many more exist. Feel free to recommend your own.
#data hoarding#bulk downloader#recommendation#software recommendation#software#archiving#archival#data preservation#computer programs
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If your Microsoft 365 Subscription Price went up, this is relevant to you:
youtube
Hoping this saves someone some $$$$. In short, Microsoft auto-upgraded people on the Basic tier of their 365 subscription to the middle tier that includes copilot (with no option to turn it off), renamed the middle tier to Basic, and renamed the original Basic tier AND hid it from the subscription types options, in hopes that people won't realize they've just been auto-"upgraded" to a more expensive tier that also allows them to train their AI on your work. If you contact Microsoft support and are stubborn, or possibly (according to some of the comments on that youtube video) if you turn off auto-renewal and then look at options for re-subscribing, you can still get the original Basic tier that you had before, for the same price as you had before. Given that they are obviously not trustworthy has a subscription service, though, I'd recommend instead trying the LibreOffice (my personal favorite) or OpenOffice software suites (including Word Processor software, Spreadsheets software, etc) - both of which are 100% free. And both of which can save documents in Microsoft 365 formats so that others can still open and read your documents using Microsoft products.
#recommendation#microsoft#microsoft 365#late stage capitalism#eat the rich#open source#libreoffice#openoffice#Microsoft Word#ms word#microsoft excel#ms excel#word processor#spreadsheets#software#software recommendation#psa#scam alert#< I do think this counts#it's not less scummy just because it's Microsoft#corporate hellscape#subscriptions#consumer protection#Youtube
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3d model
I put together this 3d model for a very specific background I wanted for the first panel, but the online program I was using #sketchup keeps crashing. I wanted to get a doorway and some wall textures in but I couldn't figure it out and why it was crashing.
Any recommendations on programs with prefabricated objects I can edit and use?
P.S. Here's the first iteration. I think I like my 3d model better, tbh.
#background#artists on tumblr#comics#webtoon canvas#webcomic#horror#suspense#firehouse 13#3d modling#Software recommendation#software
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In hopes that this may be seen quite accidentally by anyone who may need it: if you're having a hell of a lot of trouble getting your DAW to play nice with one or more VST plugins that either keep crashing, going silent, or somewhat start devouring each other, I am loudly vouching for jBridge. It's been the only thing that actually gets several older VSTs to consistently load, save the correct data, and work with other instances of itself or other similarly difficult VST plugins that I've come across. I'm pleased enough to recommend it, in any case.
(As with all software, scan and monitor activity liberally, but not a single problem was been encountered here.)
I can get back to making noise without the extra frustration involved, is the very important point. Just the usual levels of frustration.
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No-Google (fan)fic writing
After this post about Google automatically enrolling everyone into their AI program (including reading Google docs), I realised that many people may not be aware that there are actually very, very good alternatives to using Google docs – although what they can do for you varies.
So, since I’ve over the years tested quite a lot of different applications for usefulness in writing fanfic, I thought I’d share some of my experiences here. The link list below will be expanded as I continue writing more pieces, so keep checking here.
Part 1: LibreOffice Writer
Part 2: Zettelkasten
Part 3: LaTeχ
Part 4: Markdown
Part 5: Obsidian
Note: I updated some of the posts with screenshots of the interfaces for illustration purposes. You might want to reblog those again.
#fanfiction#fic writing#resources#degoogle#degoogle your fics#degoogle your writing#software recommendations#no-google (fan)fic writing#fanfic writing
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for a girl whose never built anything from scratch before i'd call this a triumph
#it's safe to say i won't be building ever again. this was painful.#4 houses and a little pub with 2 apartments upstairs#it is fully unfurnished but that is a task too immense for me to tackle right now#and the sides are very bare.. i'll fix that#so excited to play gahhh#i have until the 16th to finish all of my assignments but after that it'll be sims sims sims#do ye have any recommendations on anti-virus software?#i've been using mcafee but it's the most god awful program know to man#the only annoying pop-up ads i get are from mcafee itself#trying to get me to sign up for shit and buy better plans#would appreciate recommendations thank you 🙏
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yipee mahiru reference (if anyone knows the actual source pls lmk)
#this took so long partially bc i was doing it in between school work and other draws#but also because i refused to learn any animation software and used ezgif#which i do not recommend anyone do#anyways my first 2d animation yayy#tsuyuzaki mahiru#mahiru#revue starlight#revstar#starira#shoujo kageki revue starlight#my art
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I just finished sacrificing sleep to read Software Entropy fanfic by clubsheartsspades, and I'm a snotty ugly crying mess. I will never recover from this-
#rain world#rw software entropy#rw fanfiction#clubsheartsspades#everyone should read this#can't recommend enough
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macaque

finished the sketch lmao was it worth it? absolutely not but i completely forgot to post this on my tumblr despite posting it on my insta as well .P
closeup under the cut / reference

i liked the way macaque looked, it’s like the first and only time i’ve drawn him

original sketch

reference
#art#lego monkie kid#fanart#macaque fanart#lmk art#lmk macaque#monkie kid#lmk fanart#screen redraw#scene redraw#lego monkie kid fanart#the six eared macaque#sorry im tagging this to hell#digital art#digital drawing#also can you recommend other drawing softwares that are for free on mac ? .P#i’m lowkey losing it when i draw with krita#it’s fine but idk im still not used to it at all despite drawing with it for like a year now
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Development going forward
So in case anyone hasn't heard, Unity announced this morning that they're going to be making some pretty major (baffling) changes to their licensing plans and monetization. TLDR regarding the pertinent info (from what I understand. The company hasn't made another statement at the time of writing, and the FAQ is very vague):
They've removed the cheapest paid subscription tier (Unity Plus) completely, and are altering Unity Personal (the free one) so that the editor needs an internet connection in order to function. If you're offline for 3 days, it kicks you out until you reconnect to the internet again for the software to phone home. This is apparently not an issue if you subscribe to Unity Pro, the $2,000/yr plan.
If you publish a game made using the Unity engine, once it passes a certain threshold of installations and revenue, Unity will charge you a fee for every subsequent installation of your game on a per-month basis (and it's not per-purchase, it's per-installation. So (allegedly) if someone on Steam buys, installs, uninstalls and then reinstalls your game, or if they need to update the game, that's considered multiple different instances of installation and Unity will (allegedly) charge the developer as such). This will go into effect in January of 2024, but will seemingly retroactively apply to all games published before then as well.
If I've misunderstood any of this, please feel free to correct me.
I would not be surprised if they heavily walk back some of this (i.e., "the last time we announced something bad everyone got mad about it, so this time we'll announce something unbelievable and then say that we changed our minds so people will be more willing to accept the slightly less bad thing we wanted to do in the first place"), but it's setting a very bad precedent for using Unity for any future projects.
I'm currently weighing my options on whether to finish Vollema in Unity and then migrate to a new engine for future projects (Godot gets better every day, from what I've heard), or to just take what I've made so far and start over using different software. Honestly, it's early enough in development that the vast majority of what I have finished and ready to implement is visual assets, dialogue, narrative stuff and audio, so I'm leaning heavily towards testing the waters with a different engine. I likely also will not be able to work on or release any smaller games in the coming months for the time being (RIP 2023 Halloween Game, I'll make it up to you) while I make some decisions. Regardless, I'll keep you all in the loop.
TLDR: I'm likely going to be changing game engines, which will definitely set Vollema's development time back a bit (along with my other projects), but development in general will continue regardless.
Hopefully I'll have more positive news to share with you soon! I'm gonna miss my add-ons, though. Oh man, am I gonna miss my add-ons.
#not art#vollema#gamedev#i'll have to update my software recommendations list to remove Unity regardless because I'm not about to pretend this is a good thing lmao#long post
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the past few days have consisted of me trying to collect and make lists of my favorite fanfics and authors i want to share here but then suddenly getting an intense overwhelming feeling mid typing i had to stop and stare at my laptop screen until it feels like the lists i’ve made so far look unorganised so i delete everything and start over
#as someone who likes making hyperspecific media lists and recommendations#books films music#why am i having a hard time making a list of my favorite fanfics#i used my notes app the first time i decided to start this new little project#got overwhelmed and moved to google docs#hated how it looked like so i moved to another writing software#i still don’t like it#thinking of just using google sheets#i never use google sheets#screaming crying throwing up#i know there’s something about me that’s undiagnosed#i don’t know what it is but at the same time i kinda know what it is#i just don’t want to acknowledge it by saying it out loud#it will only become more real to me#but like it is real! just not officially diagnosed yet#idk#but i’m excited to finish my lists#arcane and love and deepspace fanfics for now#love and deepspace#arcane#jayce arcane#jayce talis#caleb#love and deepspace sylus#sylus#sylus love and deepspace#caleb love and deepspace#love and deepspace caleb#caleb lads#sylus lads
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While I was away I learned how to use Bryce 3D. Crazy how you can just use old software
#bryce 3d#art#3d art#surreal#i honestly highly recommend bryce if you want to make little 3d things without the hassle of learning modelling software#it's so easy to make things and it makes them look really cool
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It appears my anti-virus decided to block my internet provider?? Or Google itself?? For some reason?? And doesn't let me unblock it??? Pretty straight forward I must admit, no internet = can't get virus
#notes&thoughts#good protection 10/10 would recommend#(sigh) alright I need to get myself a domesticated IT-guy. I'm tired of dealing with all of this#I don't understand computer problems I panic I lie down and cry#last time the anti-virus I got started a beef with pre-installed anti-virus. they called each other all kinds of names#(“unreliable” and “malicious software” included)#they tried to close and delete eachother and it was kinda flattering honestly#I felt like a young noble lady on the balcony watching to knights having a duel over her favour
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No-Google (fan)fic writing, Part 2: Zettelkasten
Storytime
Word and Writer (see this post) used to have one huge disadvantage – the number of pages either of them were capable of keeping in active memory before the whole thing would just crash. This was, of course, in part because computers had less RAM in those days, but also because Word and Writer constantly keep everything you write available in exactly the layout it will be printed as. Or, to use slightly more computer-y language, both of them are “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG).
That also means that if you start using certain features – lots of headings, footnotes, images especially – they quickly reached their capacity. I had one document consistently crash at 100 pages, although usually, it would take up to 300 pages before that happened.
Nonetheless, it was frustrating, also because the crashing meant that documents would get corrupted and I would lose what I had written. Yes, corrupted documents are a real issue. Especially because Word’s source code is protected, so it’s not easy to recover them.
Also annoying was the “having to split up documents into several files”.
But the worst part, for me, was that I lost some really good stuff because I was rearranging the order of scenes and forgot to paste before cutting another scene, and didn’t notice in time.
So I went looking for other options. How I ended up finding Zettelkasten is a mystery today, but I did.
Word/Writer/Google docs versus Zettelkasten
So what is Zettelkasten?
Many notes, one story
Well, if you have heard of Scrivener, that would be an equivalent. The principle is fairly easy – every new thought/idea/scene is created as a “note”, which is added to a growing collection of other “notes”. That means you can keep different scenes separate and work on them individually without always opening the whole document, which, given the crashing problems mentioned above, definitely a +1.
Features
It is also easier to rearrange the order of scenes without losing anything, because Zettelkasten has a virtual “desk”, on which you can place your notes. This “desk” can be divided into chapters, sections and subsections, basically small “folders” that you keep all the scenes for a specific story in, in the order you want. They can be moved up and down, to different chapters, or entirely removed from the desk. That’s important to note, because it doesn’t mean you’re deleting the note completely. Even if you accidentally delete a scene from this desk, the note will still be there, so you can simply add it again, no harm done.
+1 for organisation and another +1 for not having to be afraid of losing stuff.
Additionally, Zettelkasten lets you tag every note. I had tags for characters, so each note would be tagged with the characters appearing in that particular scene, but you can create tags as you like. This also allows you to search specifically for scenes with certain characters involved, which is useful because I used Zettelkasten a lot to simply jot down ideas for scenes that weren’t yet part of a larger story. If and when I decided to actually write that story, I’d create a new virtual “desk” (you can have several) and find the notes via tags to add them to that desk.
Great feature, much beloved, +1.
Since it was originally developed for taking notes for academic papers, Zettelkasten also has a literature tab. For every note, you can add a reference. I used that to enter the provisional title of the fic, which again made it easier at the end to find all notes belonging to the same story. Additional benefit: renaming the story is super-easy, because there’s no need to find every note and replace the “reference” individually, instead you just rename the title from the literature tab and it automatically changes on all notes with that “reference”.
Again, a much-beloved feature, +1.
There are more features – bookmarks, cross-referencing, attached files – but since I rarely used those for writing (fan)fic, I’m not covering them here. If you want to know more, leave a comment.
File formats
Zettelkasten has its own file format, .zkn3. That means it’s difficult to open it with other programs but the original (but not impossible – 7zip, for example, can open .zkn3 files). The idea here is that you jot down all of your ideas in notes, sort and organise them on your virtual desk, then export them either as the whole desk or as single chapters/sections/subsections from the desk to a file format of your choice, and there are many. HTML, DOC(X) (Word), ODT (Writer), RTF, XML, MD, TEX …
Safe to say you’re somewhat spoilt for choice here, with one caveat: some of those require you to have Pandoc installed on your computer. Which is also freeware, so, you know, not a problem.
My preferred method of uploading to AO3 was usually to export to HTML, then copypaste from one browser window into the other browser window with the Rich Text AO3 text field. Just like with Writer, rich text formatting (bold, italics, underlined, etc.) are copied over, so you don’t need to redo all of that.
Or you just open the .html-file in an editor (Notepad) and copy the code over to the HTML text field on AO3. Either works. Black magic is not required.
Interface
Like Writer, the big pro of the Zettelkasten interface for me is how uncluttered it is. It’s divided into areas where you can see your note, the note’s title, the “references” field and then, on the right, two columns showing the tags for the currently open note and another column with tabs showing available tags, individual note titles, all available references and more.
New notes or notes you’re working on are opened in a separate window, where you enter your changes and then save them. The desk is similarly simple – on the left side are your chapters/sections/subsections, in the middle are the notes and their text, on the right are three fields for additional notes.
Again, the interface isn’t fancy and may put some people off. I love it exactly because it’s so simple. I want to write, edit and develop my story, not be distracted by something the designers thought would look cool.
So, at least for those of similar simple minds as me, +1 for clarity.
Cost
Zettelkasten is free to download, unlike Scrivener or many other comparable applications. However, as with many a free software application not backed by a company or corporation, it probably has an expiration date and will likely stop working at some point in the future.
Since you can export the whole .zkn3-file to various other formats, you aren’t going to lose anything – in a worst-case scenario (and yes, been there, done that, it works), you can open the .zkn3 file with an archive application like 7zip and extract the underlying .xml-files from there. So no, your stories will not be lost forever just because Zettelkasten stops working. It might just require half an hour’s work to get them out.
Syncing
No cloud storage for Zettelkasten, either. As mentioned here, alternative options include Dropbox, GIT, OneDrive or a regular old USB.
Ease of use for Word/Google doc-users
Again, I really like the uncluttered interface of Zettelkasten, which only has very few buttons. The “write notes first, export later” took a moment to get used to, but was outweighed by the knowledge that I couldn’t lose a note, any note, unless I actively deleted it.
Honestly, that decreased my stress levels significantly. I used Zettelkasten for a long, long time, also for work-related stuff. Once I’d wrapped my brain around the idea of having a note for every idea, I found using it extremly easy and conducive to writing. It wasn’t even a problem when I decided later on that two scenes in two notes should actually be merged – I just put them in the right order on the desk and then deleted the empty line between them when uploading to AO3.
A very long story can take some time to appear on the virtual desk, admittedly, but not once has Zettelkasten crashed on me. My fears of losing ideas and scenes disappeared after I started using it, and I like to believe it even helped me get better at writing, because structuring on the virtual desk made me really think about what was happening in which order.
In short, it is software I can whole-heartedly recommend.
Read No-Google (fan)fic writing, Part 1: LibreOffice Writer
Read No-Google (fan)fic writing, Part 3: LaTeχ
Read No-Google (fan)fic writing, Part 4: Markdown
Read No-Google (fan)fic writing, Part 5: Obsidian
#fic writing#zettelkasten#fanfiction#fanfic writing#degoogle#degoogle your fics#degoogle your writing#software recommendations#resources#no-google (fan)fic writing
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#im was fucking locked in on this 4th of july#bc i have so much to fucking to before i leave next week i was like fuck it im just gonna go into the lab. and i needed to prep for a#meeting Monday but didn't fucking want to so i was getting data together so that i could send figures to my advisor#bc hes going to a photosynthesis conference and wants to share some or my data. so ive got all my figures all nice displaying evidence of#recombination in my gene cluster. which is cool bc i have this strain that comes frome a huge population at Yellowstone and it's clearly had#contact with this strain from Alaska. they have 2 identical sections across the cluster. so thats 2 transfer events. so cool stuff. exciting#too bc with this cluster everyone in the literature was initially like: its all horizontal transfer bc its inconsistent who had it. but now#everyone is like: its all vertical transfer bc the gene trees match the species trees. but their trees fucking suck lol#and my data says fuck u recommendation is happening so its primarily vertical transfer but with some horizontal mixed in. messy messy.#but the tail end of my reference strain is weird compared to the other 3 strains showing evidence of transfer. so i was like. well. i dont#wanna prep for my meeting so maybe ill try to figure out where this end bit comes from for a bit. and like 3hrs later im like hm i really#think its from this strain from costa rica lol. so now i have to make another 6 fucking trees. and probably go into the lab tomorrow and#Sunday bc for some reason i cqnt connect well enough on our super computer to transfer files from my computer to the cluster while using a#vpn. and then im like what if i look at all the rest of my trees for interesting stuff. and i like there may be some transfer going on#between the group the costa rica guy is in and the sister species to the thermalis group. and some stuff probably came from fuck knos where#bc it groups way outside of where everything else. so who knows. i lov looking at trees so much. its like doing puzzles and all the software#for doing genetics stuff looks so satisfying. love love love the visuals of a sliding window. anway#i basically worked until like 8am-7pm bc i was having fun. idk if any of this is comprehensible to anyone but like i love that#organisms r just out there being weird in ways we can't tell until u look at their genome in comparison to their direct relatives#like: ...hang on. why tf r u like that? secretly weird. not the type of thing the government wants to fund. tho my funding this summer does#come from the government bc my advisor listed that im gonna help with something. which i didnt kno abt. so shh#i love working with data so much. just let me stare at data and code all day#unrelated
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