#Current Website to WordPress

[brandngraves]

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[tardis--dreams]

I am sisyphus and trying to add tags in WordPress is my boulder

[laosinsin]

"S-Classes That I Raised": A Repository of Translations

What's It About: In a changed world with dungeons, and monsters and Hunters, lowly F-Rank Hunter Han Yoojin gets the chance to turn back time after his estranged younger brother - an elite S-Rank Hunter - Han Yoohyun, dies saving his life.

This time around, starting from before their relationship really worsened, he's determined to make sure he gets the best possible outcomes for himself and his brother, and just live quietly beyond that, but looks that won't be so easy when the world is coming to an end, and now all the S-rank hunters around can't stay away from Yoojin.

(It's not a harem novel (mostly). It's Yoojin and his so so many kids and some friends and some situationships. This cover has quite a few people missing from the cast, tbh, even if it does have all the more key ones. The blond man in the top center - NOT the villain - regardless of this cover lmao)

Where to Read It

There are a lot of chapters and quite a few translations floating around in different stages of doneness, so putting this together for reference, with some latest-as-of-2025 info.

The Original (aka the novel in Korean)

The main story in Korean seems wrapped up and finished as of May 2025. Clocking a whopping 1165 (sweet sweet) Chapters across the Main Story and the 2 Sequels (Side Story and After Story)

Main Story: 856 Chapters + 14 Chapters of an Epilogue

(This is usually available and often considered one complete work of 870 Chapters. Epilogue Chapter 1 is sometimes just Main Story Chapter 857 also)

This is available to read on a whole bunch of sites such as Naver, Kakaopage, Ridibooks, Munpia, both in ebook and chapter form, as well as on more 🏴‍☠️ platforms where knovel raws thrive.

Side Story: 167 Chapters (Completed)

Afterwords: 128 Chapters (Completed)

These are, as of now, Naver exclusive and only available on the most hellish of the websites to buy from if you're not in SK, IMO (i.e. Naver). Hopefully this will change. These are also a bit tough to find raws of on 🏴‍☠️ platforms, ime.

Where to read the Translations!

Main Story Chapters 1 -400: The primary source of translation currently is SFS Translations' version! One needs to contact them for access to their locked/gdocs version (access can take a few days, but generally not more than 3-5 days) This is currently the best and most-up-to-date translation, as far as I know.

Beyond this, we venture into MTL land.

- Main Story Chapters 350 - 870 (aka till the end): Naive_twilight has put together a MTL epub and pdf available for Chapters 350-870 on reddit. While it is MTL, it is pretty decently understandable, IMO. But you would still want to re-read the chapters once they are released in actual translation, because this is a novel with layers and layers of stuff going on in the narration and dialogue. - Side Story Chapters 1-167 (aka complete): Naive_twilight to the rescue again, with an epub MTL file on reddit, updated just a few weeks ago. And that's where we are for now. After Story translation isn't available yet, will update this post, as/when there is something to link.

- Other than the Story itself, the author has also done extensive Q&As, which detail out a ton of worldbuilding and characterization notes, and a great collection/translation of some of them by dbgdbw can be found here on tumblr (uhhh, tumblr post linking to gdocs file?)

Other Misc Translations Under the Cut

As I said, this is a story with a lot of translations out there, and also this is a story with laters of stuff going on in the narration and dialogue, so sometimes it is very fun indeed to read different versions/takes on the same chapter. (And sometimes you just can't wait until you get access to SFS Translation's version, so you start elsewhere while you wait ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

- Chapter 1-330 (330- 350 is Patreon-locked) - MattReading Translations is on Wordpress, and the main/current translation linked on NovelUpdates. This is ongoing, and updates pretty frequently. Pretty decent - I think the flow of translation feels more natural in some earlier bits and gets a bit sloppier in later chapters - but the site is just ad-city central if you're on mobile. - FreeWebnovel - Chapters 1-261, but this seems to be abandoned and last updated 6+ months ago. This is also, I think the version, one will find in epub/PDF files of early chapters if one goes looking, and I think it uses text from older unedited raws, as opposed to the latest ones. And hence misses some pretty key new scenes/moments. So unfortunately, decent epub/pdfs for the early chapters are not currently easily findable. - dbgdbw - Very explanatory and informative translations on tumblr with extensive culture and translation notes for some selected chapters in the 183-350 chapter range, and then a lot of selected chapters all the way to the end. Definitely worth a look, especially if you are into the han-brothers relationship.

I think that's more or less the main versions that are out there, that I am aware of. Will update as and when new things pop up, and also please do let me know if I have missed something which is out there!

(Also thank you and shoutout to sctir who put together a similar post 3 years back, which is what got me started on this journey and helped me find the good stuff beyond the novelupdates entry)

[alanshemper]

[17 Oct 2024]

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg made another buyout offer this week, and threatened employees who speak to the press with termination.

After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave.

“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem. In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.

In the “Alignment Offer,” Mullenweg offered Automattic employees six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. “However now, I feel much lighter,” Mullenweg wrote in his blog.

But many stayed at Automattic even though they didn't agree with Mullenweg’s actions, telling 404 Media they remained due to financial strain or the challenging job market. Several employees who remained at the company describe a culture of paranoia and fear for those still there.

"Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one Automattic employee told me.

The current and former Automattic employees I spoke to for this article did so under the condition of anonymity, out of concerns about retaliation from Mullenweg.

“I'm certain that Matt hasn't eliminated all dissenters, because I'm still there, but I expect that within the next six to twelve months, everyone who didn't leave but wasn't ‘aligned’ will have found a new job and left on their own terms,” another current employee told me. “My personal morale has never been lower at this job, and I know that I'm not alone.”

Mullenweg himself, in internal screenshots viewed by 404 Media, acknowledged that his first “Alignment Offer” did not make everyone who disagreed with him leave the company.

On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months). Mullenweg wrote:

“New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here's a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don't have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won't be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.”

“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can't disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.”

Mullenweg and Automattic did not respond to requests for comment.

This is the latest in what has been a tense few months at Automattic.

“Regarding escalations, to me, the most upsetting thing has been the way he's treating current and former employees and WP community members,” one former employee who recently left the company after several years told me. “He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress. It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality. One, sharing pictures of him being on safari while all this shit is going down, as if people would think that was cool. Only rich tech bros would think that.” (Mullenweg posted photos from a trip on his personal blog and social media posts last week.)

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

“We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

Mullenweg didn’t block emails from the @teamblind.com domain, Blind said. According to Slack messages viewed by 404 Media, instead, he redirected those emails to himself.

“We are disappointed when we hear employers or executives try to limit access to Blind. Some of the most commonly discussed topics on Blind are protected speech in the U.S.—pay, job terminations, critiques of workplace conditions—which we believe workers should be free to access and discuss. Blind's mission is to bring transparency to the workplace, as we believe it can inspire meaningful change,” the spokesperson for Blind said. “Employers' attempts to block Blind are misguided and often have the opposite intended effect. Generally, we have seen more employees register and use Blind when their company tries to restrict access.”

One Automattic employee told me that Mullenweg’s interception of Blind emails was the thing that made them start looking for a new job. “For Matt to do that, without prior announcement, was equivalent to spying on his employees. And for him to think it's ok to tell people to message him for their verification code is ridiculous—I've never questioned an employer's judgment as much as I did in that moment (although it has happened many times since),” they said. “Clearly, Blind is designed to allow employee discussion free from employer interference, and he was trying to prevent that in the most obvious way possible.”

Instead of Blind, employees have been posting on Anonymattic, an anonymous message board set up on WordPress’s own systems that allows all employees to post using one login.

“A common theme for posts on Anonymattic is ‘Any time I try to get work done, some new drama comes up and I get distracted.’ I know that's true for me,” an employee told me.

“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt's actions via Anonymattic,” they said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can't relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company.

Anonymattic was “conveniently closed down around Covid with the excuse of avoiding toxic discussions,” an employee told me. “I say conveniently because people would post their opinions and complaints to leadership that were sometimes uncomfortable. That’s when the Blind migration happened.” They said they believe Mullenweg’s interference with Blind emails was “an attempt to stop employees from joining Blind in some kind of intimidating fashion (are they collecting who is joining Blind? With what intentions?)” Anonymattic was reopened around that time, they said.

“At the end, even if anonymous, Automattic can delete posts there and not in Blind,” they said.

Last week, in response to someone criticizing his decision to add a checkbox to the WordPress.org login that forced users to denounce affiliation with WP Engine, Mullenweg posted in the WordPress contributor community Slack, “Wait until you see what we have in store for Thursday! And Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday. And Monday.” Several people posted vomiting and face-palm emojis in response to that message.

A recently-departed employee told me that the WP Engine legal drama wasn’t their final straw. “But in hindsight, it should have been,” they said. “The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice. At the time, I thought Matt might have a point about the trademarks (something I know little about), but he did say at the time he was going to treat this like a war and continue escalating it, because the truth was on his side. I guess we’re now seeing what that really meant."

[smellslikebot]

"how do I keep my art from being scraped for AI from now on?"

if you post images online, there's no 100% guaranteed way to prevent this, and you can probably assume that there's no need to remove/edit existing content. you might contest this as a matter of data privacy and workers' rights, but you might also be looking for smaller, more immediate actions to take.

...so I made this list! I can't vouch for the effectiveness of all of these, but I wanted to compile as many options as possible so you can decide what's best for you.

Discouraging data scraping and "opting out"

robots.txt - This is a file placed in a website's home directory to "ask" web crawlers not to access certain parts of a site. If you have your own website, you can edit this yourself, or you can check which crawlers a site disallows by adding /robots.txt at the end of the URL. This article has instructions for blocking some bots that scrape data for AI.

HTML metadata - DeviantArt (i know) has proposed the "noai" and "noimageai" meta tags for opting images out of machine learning datasets, while Mojeek proposed "noml". To use all three, you'd put the following in your webpages' headers:

<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai, noml">

Have I Been Trained? - A tool by Spawning to search for images in the LAION-5B and LAION-400M datasets and opt your images and web domain out of future model training. Spawning claims that Stability AI and Hugging Face have agreed to respect these opt-outs. Try searching for usernames!

Kudurru - A tool by Spawning (currently a Wordpress plugin) in closed beta that purportedly blocks/redirects AI scrapers from your website. I don't know much about how this one works.

ai.txt - Similar to robots.txt. A new type of permissions file for AI training proposed by Spawning.

ArtShield Watermarker - Web-based tool to add Stable Diffusion's "invisible watermark" to images, which may cause an image to be recognized as AI-generated and excluded from data scraping and/or model training. Source available on GitHub. Doesn't seem to have updated/posted on social media since last year.

Image processing... things

these are popular now, but there seems to be some confusion regarding the goal of these tools; these aren't meant to "kill" AI art, and they won't affect existing models. they won't magically guarantee full protection, so you probably shouldn't loudly announce that you're using them to try to bait AI users into responding

Glaze - UChicago's tool to add "adversarial noise" to art to disrupt style mimicry. Devs recommend glazing pictures last. Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

WebGlaze - Free browser-based Glaze service for those who can't run Glaze locally. Request an invite by following their instructions.

Mist - Another adversarial noise tool, by Psyker Group. Runs on Windows and Linux (Nvidia GPU required) or on web with a Google Colab Notebook.

Nightshade - UChicago's tool to distort AI's recognition of features and "poison" datasets, with the goal of making it inconvenient to use images scraped without consent. The guide recommends that you do not disclose whether your art is nightshaded. Nightshade chooses a tag that's relevant to your image. You should use this word in the image's caption/alt text when you post the image online. This means the alt text will accurately describe what's in the image-- there is no reason to ever write false/mismatched alt text!!! Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

Sanative AI - Web-based "anti-AI watermark"-- maybe comparable to Glaze and Mist. I can't find much about this one except that they won a "Responsible AI Challenge" hosted by Mozilla last year.

Just Add A Regular Watermark - It doesn't take a lot of processing power to add a watermark, so why not? Try adding complexities like warping, changes in color/opacity, and blurring to make it more annoying for an AI (or human) to remove. You could even try testing your watermark against an AI watermark remover. (the privacy policy claims that they don't keep or otherwise use your images, but use your own judgment)

given that energy consumption was the focus of some AI art criticism, I'm not sure if the benefits of these GPU-intensive tools outweigh the cost, and I'd like to know more about that. in any case, I thought that people writing alt text/image descriptions more often would've been a neat side effect of Nightshade being used, so I hope to see more of that in the future, at least!

[leslekieuart]

What did you use to make your comic website?

I used the open source version of Wordpress with a toocheke plugin and am currently hosting it on bluehost 👍

[copperbadge]

Howdy! I am considering submitting manuscripts I've written to a publisher or possibly self publishing. The publisher states on their website that authors must maintain an active social media presence. I'm not normally a social media type, Tumblr is my only one. What would you reccommend for such? Is it worth it to pay someone to make a website for me? Thanks and many virtual kisses for Dot and Deebs!

Honestly, I haven't submitted to a publisher since before a lot of modern social media existed. :D

It is my understanding, but this is secondhand information, that publishers want you to have either a twitter or a tiktok, preferably both, where you're frequently active and have a high follower count, because they want you to be able to publicize your book on it. One of many reasons I don't even consider trad publishing anymore is that I don't want to spend a significant chunk of my time filming videos for the sole purpose of hawking my books.

Now, as I said, that's an inference I've drawn; you may want to speak to someone who has been trad published recently to get the inside scoop (readers if you work in publishing or have been published recently, feel free to add commentary; remember to comment or reblogs, as I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks). I do have an author website but I built my own; I don't know what the going rate is for paying someone to build one these days but most website platforms are pretty intuitive to use -- I built mine on Wordpress and I'm building a new one on Wix currently, and at this point both are very drag-and-drop oriented. I do think a website is a good thing for an author to have, but I wouldn't pay someone to build one for you until you've taken a swing at DIY and decided it's not where you want to spend your time and energy.

In terms of self-publishing, the good news is that none of the rules apply; this is also the bad news. :D Because the thing about selfpub is that you either pay or DIY for...everything. It can be very inexpensive; when I publish a book the only direct monetary cost is what I pay for an ISBN and a proof copy of the book, which I will make back in the first 10 sales or so. However, I am "paying" in man hours in terms of typesetting, cover design, uploading the PDFs to lulu.com, proofing the initial copy, correcting the proof and reuploading (which usually involves further typesetting), and of course all the publicity -- website design and redesign, copywriting, tumblr posting. And while my profit per copy sold is well above what most authors with traditional publishers will make, that's because the publisher is doing a lot of the work for you. And, because I don't have an active twitter or tiktok or a publisher, my books are not very widely publicized. Undoubtedly I sell fewer copies than I would if I had a robust twitter following, but catch me touching that rancid wasteland without inch-thick gloves on.

So -- I think it's probably pretty important to understand that I have deliberately rejected trad publishing for good but not lucrative reasons, and I'm considered at best an iconoclast and more commonly a crank for having done so. If you can go the tradpub route, I would, but I also wouldn't put any money you're not prepared to write off as a loss into that pursuit. Definitely I would see if there's anyone in the industry you can reach out to who can answer these questions with a more thorough understanding of what publishers look for in an author and how to go about achieving that than I possess.

In any case, good luck! It's a journey regardless and I hope you enjoy your time on the path wherever you end up. And I'll give the cryptids a special cuddle for ya.

[talenlee]

The Whole Sort of General Mish Mosh of AI

I’m not typing this.

January this year, I injured myself on a bike and it infringed on a couple of things I needed to do in particular working on my PhD. Because I had effectively one hand, I was temporarily disabled and it finally put it in my head to consider examining accessibility tools.

One of the accessibility tools I started using was Microsoft’s own text to speech that’s built into the operating system I used, which is Windows Not-The-Current-One-That-Everyone-Complains-About. I’m not actually sure which version I have. It wasn’t good but it was usable, and being usable meant spending a week or so thinking out what I was going to write a phrase at a time and then specifying my punctuation marks period.

I’m making this article — or the draft of it to be wholly honest — without touching my computer at all.

What I am doing right now is playing my voice into Audacity. Then I’m going to use Audacity to export what I say as an MP3, which I will then take to any one of a few dozen sites that offer free transcription of voice to text conversion. After that, I take the text output, check it for mistakes, fill in sentences I missed when coming off the top of my head, like this one, and then put it into WordPress.

A number of these sites are old enough that they can boast that they’ve been doing this for 10 years, 15 years, or served millions of customers. The one that transcribed this audio claims to have been founded in 2006, which suggests the technology in question is at least, you know, five. Seems odd then that the site claims its transcription is ‘powered by AI,’ because it certainly wasn’t back then, right? It’s not just the statements on the page, either, there’s a very deliberate aesthetic presentation that wants to look like the slickly boxless ‘website as application’ design many sites for the so-called AI folk favour.

This is one of those things that comes up whenever I want to talk about generative media and generative tools. Because a lot of stuff is right now being lumped together in a Whole Sort of General Mish Mosh of AI (WSOGMMOA). This lump, the WSOGMMOA, means that talking about any of it is used as if it’s talking about all of it in the way that the current speaker wants to be talked about even within a confrontational conversation from two different people.

For people who are advocates of AI, they will talk about how ChatGPT is an everythingamajig. It will summarize your emails and help you write your essays and it will generate you artwork that you want and it will give you the rules for games you can play and it will help you come up with strategies for succeeding at the games you’ve already got all while it generates code for you and diagnoses your medical needs and summarises images and turns photos of pages into transcriptions it will then read aloud to you, and all you have to focus on is having the best ideas. The notion is that all of these things, all of these services, are WSOGMMOA, and therefore, the same thing, and since any of that sounds good, the whole thing has to be good. It’s a conspiracy theory approach, sometimes referred to as the ‘stack of shit’ approach – you can pile up a lot of garbage very high and it can look impressive. Doesn’t stop it being garbage. But mixed in with the garbage, you have things that are useful to people who aren’t just professionally on twitter, and these services are not all the same thing.

They have some common threads amongst them. Many of them are functionally looking at math the same way. Many or even most of them are claiming to use LLMs, or large language models and I couldn’t explain the specifics of what that means, nor should you trust an explainer from me about them. This is the other end of the WSOGMMOA, where people will talk about things like image generation on midjourney and deepseek (pieces of software you can run on your computer) consumes the same power as the people building OpenAI’s data research centres (which is terrible and being done in terrible ways). This lumping can make the complaints about these tools seem unserious to people with more information and even frivolous to people with less.

Back to the transcription services though. Transcription services are an example of a thing that I think represents a good application of this math, the underlying software that these things are all relying on. For a start, transcription software doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of exactly this kind of experience. Someone who chooses or cannot use a keyboard to write with who wants to use an alternate means, converting speech into written text, which can be for access or archival purposes. You aren’t going to be doing much with that that isn’t exactly just that and we do want this software. We want transcriptions to be really good. We want people who can’t easily write to be able to archive their thoughts as text to play with them. Text is really efficient, and being able to write without your hands makes writing more available to more people. Similarly, there are people who can’t understand spoken speech – for a host of reasons! – and making spoken media more available is also good!

You might want to complain at this point that these services are doing a bad job or aren’t as good as human transcription and that’s probably true, but would you rather decent subtitles that work in most cases vs only the people who can pay transcription a living wage having subtitles? Similarly, these things in a lot of places refuse to use no-no words or transcribe ‘bad’ things like pornography and crimes or maybe even swears, and that’s a sign that the tool is being used badly and disrespects the author, and it’s usually because the people deploying the tool don’t care about the use case, they care about being seen deploying the tool.

This is the salami slicer through which bits of the WSOGMMOA is trying to wiggle. Tools whose application represent things that we want, for good reasons, that were being worked on independently of the WSOGMMOA, and now that the WSOGMMOA is here, being lampreyed onto in the name of pulling in a vast bubble of hypothetical investment money in a desperate time of tech industry centralisation.

As an example, phones have long since been using technology to isolate faces. That technology was used for a while to force the focus on a face. Privacy became more of a concern, then many phones were being made with software that could preemptively blur the faces of non-focal humans in a shot. This has since, with generative media, stepped up a next level, where you now have tools that can remove people from the background of photographs so that you can distribute photographs of things you saw or things you did without necessarily sharing the photos of people who didn’t consent to having their photo taken. That is a really interesting tool!

Ideologically, I’m really in favor of the idea that you should be able to opt out of being included on the internet. It’s illegal in France, for example, to take a photo of someone without their permission, which means any group shot of a crowd, hypothetically, someone in that crowd who was not asked for permission, can approach the photographer and demand recompense. I don’t know how well that works, but it shows up in journalism courses at this point.

That’s probably why that software got made – regulations in governments led to the development of the tool and then it got refined to make it appealing to a consumer at the end point so it could be used as as a selling point. It wouldn’t surprise me if right now, under the hood, the tech works in some similar way to MidJourney or Dall-E or whatever, but it’s not a solution searching for a problem. I find that really interesting. Is this feature that, again, is running on your phone locally, still part of the concerns of the WSOGMMOA? What about the software being used to detect cancer in patients based on sophisticated scans I couldn’t explain and you wouldn’t understand? How about when a glamour model feeds her own images into the corpus of a Midjourney machine to create more pictures of herself to sell?

Because admit it, you kinda know the big reason as a person who dislikes ‘AI’ stuff that you want to oppose WSOGMMOA. It’s because the heart of it, the big loud centerpiece of it, is the worst people in the goddamn world, and they want to use these good uses of this whole landscape of technology as a figleaf to justify why they should be using ChatGPT to read their emails for them when that’s 80% of their job. It’s because it’s the worst people in the world’s whole personality these past two years, when it was NFTs before that, and it’s a term they can apply to everything to get investors to pay for it. Which is a problem because if you cede to the WSOGMMOA model, there are useful things with meaningful value that that guy gets to claim is the same as his desire to raise another couple of billions of dollars so he can promise you that he will make a god in a box that he definitely, definitely cannot fucking do while presenting himself as the hero opposing Harry Potter and the Protocols of Rationality.

The conversation gets flattened around the basically two poles:

All of these tools, everything that labels itself as AI is fundamentally an evil burning polar bears, and

Actually everyone who doesn’t like AI is a butt hurt loser who didn’t invest earlier and buy the dip because, again, these people were NFT dorks only a few years ago.

For all that I like using some of these tools, tools that have helped my students with disability and language barriers, the fact remains that talking about them and advocating for them usefully in public involves being seen as associating with the group of some of the worst fucking dickheads around. The tools drag along with them like a gooey wake bad actors with bad behaviours. Artists don’t want to see their work associated with generative images, and these people gloat about doing it while the artist tells them not to. An artist dies and out of ‘respect’ for the dead they feed his art into a machine to pump out glurgey thoughtless ‘tributes’ out of booru tags meant for collecting porn. Even me, I write nuanced articles about how these tools have some applications and we shouldn’t throw all the bathwater out with the babies, and then I post it on my blog that’s down because some total shitweasel is running a scraper bot that ignores the blog settings telling them to go fucking pound sand.

I should end here, after all, the transcription limit is about eight minutes.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[codfiish]

that post that’s going around about how we should be backing up our tumblr blogs + the google doc with instructions is really good but the version with the tags attached like “lol you’ve gotta be joking about downloading python just import your blog to wordpress” or whatever pisses me off because like. why would you want to move your tumblr blog to a website owned by the same company that is currently slowly driving tumblr into the ground? what if someone wants more customisation in what exactly they’re backing up, and to where?

i did the tumblr-backup python method myself to back up my art across like 5 different blogs and it took maybe an hour if that. most of that was just download-art-to-my-laptop time and even then it was pretty quick on my crappy australian internet. i have never used python before in my life it is literally just that easy, the doc has very detailed and clear instructions and some commands you can just copy paste and then change the blog name to your own. i tried the wordpress method too just to compare and i found it much more difficult to navigate [could’ve been the fact i wasn’t really trying, but i couldn’t work out how to get my art blog to actually display on my wordpress site, it was just stuck on whatever site template i’d picked]

anyways. even if you don’t think tumblr’s gonna go down any time soon, it doesn’t hurt to back up your tumblr blog [not my google doc, got it from the aforementioned post]

[brandngraves]

The Ultimate Guide to Converting Your Current Website to WordPress

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[utopicwork]

Out of curiousity since you seem to know a lot about the area, what's the cheapest way to make and host a website on the internet?

I pay for hosting and a domain but I have no intention of ever having even a fraction of the visitors it can handle. Plus it has some limitations on file size that are annoying to circumvent.

Ideally I'd like to keep my wordpress.org site and setup (otherwise I'd be using neocities for it) but in general I'm curious!

Thanks, youre doing great work :]

For free this is the default recommendation a lot of people I know give for PHP so this should work:

https://www.000webhost.com/

For paid hosting I currently use Aquatis for hosting because they're particularly cheap for my use case. They have a kvm vps plan for $2.50/month:

Which is half the cost of the cheapest Digital Ocean instance (as far as I know) though DO will definitely spin up an automatically configured WordPress instance.

That said I'd also really recommend looking at lowendtalk's threads on hosting if none of what I mentioned matches your needs:

Last, if you need cheap/free (depending on your usage) file hosting I recommend b2 from Backblaze and optionally Bunny CDN if you need higher speed delivery

[fallingtofar]

Website currently down? Not sure if you're working on it and that's why but it did catch me off guard. But I figured it wouldn't hurt to mention just in case it's somethin else.

Oh yeah everything's all good. Should be back up and running now

I just took it down a moment to test some features, trying to improve navigation settings

Right now I have paginations as part of individual post(which is not ideal down the line) and have been trying to fix that all the night with unfortunately no luck.

But it is now 6am, wordpress and toocheke have defeated me for now and I am going to sleep

[smallfightercat]

i find it annoying when on google i search something like "how to make an artsy personal website" and lots of the results will be like "use wordpress" or "make sure it's good for search engines", like shut your fuckin' mouth, i wasn't lookin' for that, i was trying to figure out how to build and design a website that isn't boring looking. literally every html/css tutorial i've been on has taught me how to make your basic website but not how to make it look less boring. i wanna have stuff like the snazzy websites people have trending on neocities plus more accessibility but i can't figure out how to do that with the knowledge i have currently.

[shortformblog]

More on the Automattic mess from my pals at 404 Media:

We still do not know the answers to all of these questions, because Automattic has repeatedly ignored our detailed questions, will not get on the phone with us, and has instead chosen to frame a new opt-out feature as “protecting user choice.” We are at the point where individual Automattic employees are posting clarifications on their personal Mastodon accounts about what data is and is not included.  The truth is that Automattic has been selling access to this “firehose” of posts for years, for a variety of purposes. This includes selling access to self-hosted blogs and websites that use a popular plugin called Jetpack; Automattic edited its original “protecting user choice” statement this week to say it will exclude Jetpack from its deals with “select AI companies.” These posts have been directly available via a data partner called SocialGist, which markets its services to “social listening” companies, marketing insights firms, and, increasingly, AI companies. Tumblr has its own Firehose, and Tumblr posts are available via SocialGist as well.  Almost every platform has some sort of post “firehose,” API, or way of accessing huge amounts of user posts. Famously, Twitter and Reddit used to give these away for free. Now they do not, and charging access for these posts has become big business for those companies. This is just to say that the existence of Automattic’s firehose is not anomalous in an internet ecosystem that trades on data. But this firehose also means that the average user doesn’t and can’t know what companies are getting direct access to their posts, and what they’re being used for.

This story goes deeper than the current situation.

[kradeelav]

Hey Krad, do you have any advice for starting a website like yours? I love the idea of starting a website to host my fandom and personal portfolio, and maybe get back a piece of the old internet. How did you put yours together?

hey there! great question, and the good news is there's a lot of ways to go about it.

the bad news is, there's a lot of ways to go about it.

to simplify things, there's kind of ... three "tiers" to the back-end of how to create a website. let's break it down below.

high ease, low customization. (wix, weebly, squarespace, etc. you pay a company + they give you a bunch of themes and pre-made pages for you to drop images in.) can have one of these online in 2-3 hours, but it often "feels" templated and sterile.

medium ease, medium customization. (making a theme from scrach with tumblr's custom code editor, hybrid sites with some pages in pure code, some with wordpress grafted onto some subdomains). this is what i'd classify my site as, as I use wordpress for my logs for brainless updating. while i'm confident coding single/static pages, i just don't have the time or brainwidth right now to make a complex archiving system.

low ease, high customization. (neocities, pure html/css/coding). the downsides to this is oftentimes these sites are not phone-friendly, and there's a steep learning curve. but for the quintessential "old internet" experience, by far the best route to take. there's also something really empowering about learning why things work the way they do.)

some of this can be super intimidating if you're starting from 0 coding knowledge; there's no shame in switching to a templating software. hell i started with weebly and dicking around in tumblr's custom code template for a solid 5 years before making my current site, and that was with a previous 5 years of sketchy html experience) you're not gonna learn everything overnight.

but! as long as you keep a curious and inquisitive mind, you can't go wrong.

one last encouragement: there's kind of a mini renaissance with custom sites right now, especially in neocities circles, so you're kinda in luck in that there's more resources than ever. i love scumsuck's guides, and fancoders (the community) is also all over this too.

good luck!