#Types of Website Hosting

[inkskinned]

my brother got covid because he's a college professor and there's not much he can do to mitigate exposure when he has 200+ students per lecture. he's got a baby at home, so he does his best, but.

the governmental website for covid information is now propaganda. not a joke, not hyperbole, not an exaggeration: it's genuinely the definition of propaganda. this is biased misinformation determined to push a political stance. it is being hosted on a government server. it looks like something you'd find in a "top 10 weird internet conspiracy stories (and their origins)" youtube video.

my brother called me when he saw it. he had me type it into google. for a second i legitimately thought that i had typed something wrong. we have both taught college: we have both said "a .gov site is usually a reliable resource." i just stared at my phone for a long, long time.

i thought about how when i was a kid, conspiracy theories were mostly fun and a little spooky. unserious. i remember reading some long, complicated website about how avril lavigne is dead. how bigfoot is real. it used to be funny-and-a-joke.

over seven million people (globally) have died from covid. america has the highest death rate with over 1.2 million people.

the thing is - every time a person dies from something like a mass shooting or poverty or treatable illness - we are told don't make it political. we are told it's just something that can happen. we are told it's sad but what can you do!

the president of the united states is using a government website to try to erase the very-real deaths that he personally caused due to a complete mismanagement of the pandemic. the president of the united states is using a government server to host propaganda, undermine science and medicine, and encourage distrust amongst his followers.

nothing is going to happen. nobody's gonna, like, do anything about it. it's a thursday today, and we are just going to move on from this like we have been moving on from everything else.

yesterday my brother was outside walking his dog, mask included. a guy in a truck pulls up and shouts something about covid and whatever the fuck else. my brother has a good sense of humor, described it to me as enthusiastic! i hadn't ever been catcalled before, this was new and therefore thrilling! i do see why you hate it, though. like. i have actual covid, does he want me to cough on him?

my brother doesn't get extra time off work anymore, because the cdc practically doesn't exist. my brother said i'm not exposing 200 students to covid. his boss shrugged and said: who cares? they're going to get it eventually anyway. like it isn't a pandemic.

like it's just a fucking thursday, and who cares about it.

[safaaabdelhameed]

ما الفرق بين أنواع الاستضافة؟ شرح كامل للمبتدئين

تابع موقعنا من هنا ��يصلك كل جديد 😍👈

https://bit.ly/3igFQB3

انضم لعائلتنا على قناة التليجرام

https://t.me/safaadesign

رابط قناتي على يوتيوب 😊👇

https://www.youtube.com/c/SafaaAbdElHameed

صفحتنا على فيس بوك

https://web.facebook.com/SafaaDesign96

صفحتنا على تويتر https://twitter.com/DesignSafaa

[bogleech]

Going to put all this in its own post too by popular request: here's how you make your own website with no understanding of HTML code at all, no software, no backend, absolutely nothing but a text file and image files! First get website server space of your own, like at NEOCITIES. The free version has enough room to host a whole fan page, your art, a simple comic series, whatever! The link I've provided goes to a silly comic that will tell you how to save the page as an html file and make it into a page for your own site. The bare minimum of all you need to do with it is JUST THIS:

Change the titles, text, and image url's to whatever you want them to be, upload your image files and the html file together to your free website (or the same subfolder in that website), and now you have a webpage with those pictures on it. That's it!!!!! .....But if you want to change some more super basic things about it, here's additional tips from the same terrible little guy:

That last code by itself is: <meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=001.html"> Change "001.html" to wherever you want that link to take people. THIS IS THE REASON WHY when you go to bogleech.com/pokemon/ you are taken instantly to the newest Pokemon review, because the /pokemon/ directory of my website has an "index.html" page with this single line of code. Every pokemon review has its own permanent link, but I change that single line in the index file so it points to the newest page whenever I need it to! While I catered these instructions to updating a webcomic, you can use the same template to make blog type posts, articles or just image galleries. Anything you want! You can delete the navigational links entirely, you can make your site's index.html into a simple list of text links OR fun little image links to your different content, whatever! Your website can be nothing but a big ugly deep fried JPEG of goku with a recipe for potato salad on it, no other content ever, who cares! We did that kind of nonsense all the time in the 1990's and thought it was the pinnacle of comedy!! Maybe it still can be?!?! Or maybe you just want a place to put some artwork and thoughts of yours that doesn't come with the same baggage as big social media? Make a webpage this way and it will look the same in any browser, any operating system for years and years to come, because it's the same kind of basic raw code most of the internet depends upon!

[maxillo]

I am happy to formally post about BlinkieWiki (@ https://blinkie.wiki ), a website built on TiddlyWiki & hosted on NekoWeb that's an (ongoingly) searchable archive of blinkies as well as other types of graphics! A big goal here on top of exhaustive transcription is to source the original creators of graphics whenever possible, something which is often missing in collections.

I've mostly been doing this solo so far with lots of help from my boyfriend @vesselvindicate for finding websites. I'm opening this up to the blinkie community because I've now added a way for users to submit metadata for graphics, which is handled through Google Forms. That way, anyone can contribute to the collection! Just click on any blinkie and hit the button in the top right corner that says "Submit metadata for this graphic".

This site is a big work in progress! It is only somewhat mobile friendly at the moment and is prone to lag. The UI in places is a bit ugly, but I'll be making it look better over time. There's a bunch of other features I'm aiming to add as well.

This was heavily inspired by the Geoblinkies project by blinkies.cafe, which I helped work on back in 2022. You should check it out!

[hexiva]

Roleplay Is Not Dead Nor Doth It Sleep

There's a post going around about how text-based, freeform roleplay is dead, and I was typing up a huge response to this, with an accompanying guide on how to find roleplayer in 2024, when I realized it might have a bigger reach if I made it its own post. So here's that guide.

I hesitate to say that there isn't a problem with the new format of social media making roleplay more difficult to find, but in the desire to make that point, the OP of the original post has left people with the idea that there's no way for them to get into freeform text roleplay in 2024. Which just isn't true! Here, look at all the ways.

Forums

The link to RPG-Directory to find roleplaying forums is a good start. Once you've found a forum RPG, even if you don't join, there's usually an 'advertising' section on that forum where other forum RPGs post their ads - this may help you to find forums that don't advertise on RPG-D.

Another really good forum to find roleplay on is Barbermonger. Barbermonger is focused on connecting people for one-on-one roleplays.

This last one's going to be weird, but it turns out that there are still people seeking roleplay on the Gaia Online forums after all these years. I think this is delightfully retro and then crowd there seems a little older than average. No pre-existing knowledge of Gaia required.

Tumblr

You can also find forum roleplay groups (as well as tumblr and Discord groups) right here on Tumblr. Usually, the thing to do is to use the search function - search for "[genre] rp" or "[fandom] rp" and sort by "latest." (If you sort by Top, you are likely to find dead RPs.) For example, here's fantasy rp, historical rp, and marvel rp. You can also try jcink rp, as most roleplay forums are hosted on Jcink these days, or discord rp, depending on your favored platform.

There are also tumblr blogs specifically dedicated to advertising roleplays. I'm not super familiar with these nowadays, but just in the process of searching those tags above, I found these:

Jcink Tinder

RPG Adverts

RPings

There are more, I just don't know them off the top of my head.

Reddit

Listen, don't run away, I swear it's good now - I swear Reddit is good now -

Reddit is a good place to find Discord roleplays. It's a little heavier on smut-only roleplays than other platforms mentioned here, but it's not impossible to find sexless, plot-based roleplay here either. Most ads are for one on one RP, but you can find groups mixed in here too. The big subreddits for text-based freeform RP seem to be:

r/DiscordRP

r/RoleplayPartnerSearch

r/roleplaying

r/Roleplay

Some of these have weird rules about what you can put in your ad, and I don't remember which ones, so read carefully and don't get discouraged if your ad is initially removed.

Discord

In 2024, Discord is by far the biggest and most popular platform for roleplay, and it has its own native roleplay advertising hubs. Here are a bunch:

roleplay partner hub

Rockin Roleplay

The Roleplay Garden

roleplay help

the roleplay connection

RP Central

Roleplay Central

Roleplay Hub

Barbermonger also has a Discord server

Roleplay Meets: Reborn

RP Hub

The Scribes Guild

DM Rp Village

cherry blossom! roleplay hub

DM-RP

Roleplay Round Table (21+)

The Historical Syndicate (specifically for historical roleplay)

The Roleplayer's Directory

If you can't find the Discord roleplay you want on here, you can also try Discord hub websites, like Disboard. These work similar to tumblr tags - search for [genre] rp or [fandom] rp.

Other

The original post specifically mentions that 'all the old "omegle but for role play" type websites died out ages ago'. This is mostly true, but not quite! There's still Rolechat. It's a little janky, but what it needs more than anything is a bigger user base. Their Discord server is also a good place to find one on one discord roleplay. It is, of course, free, but if you want to support its development, they have a patreon.

Please reblog this post, and add your own tips on how to find roleplay!

[thenorthsource]

Hello everybody!

We are offering to make any gif/graphics request you ask of us as long as you donate to the vetted families and charities listed below.

We are also collaborating with the following artists:

@adharaphoenix

@cappucosmic

@sofikiii

@asparklethatisblue

@martelldragon

@aemondtargaryen

@amuelia [4 slots open for now]

half body, colored and shaded, two characters, 65$

half body, colored and shaded, one character, 40$

half body, colored and shaded, one character, 40$

bust, colored and shaded, one character, 25$

@snoozingfae

from whom you can request fanart in exchange for donations.

Rules:

- request things related only to the north

- send proof of your donation in asks of our blog and the artist of your choice if you commission art.

Prices:

- graphics: 5$

- gifsets: 5$

- lineart sketch - 10$

- simple coloring - 15$

- complex coloring - 20$

- halfbody portrait - 50$

- fullbody portrait - 100$

PALESTINE

Dina Maliha (€36,331 raised of €50,000 goal) Google Doc of vetted fundraisers; Dina is 160 on the list

Mohamed Hamad (£12,030 raised of £50,000 goal) Mohamed is 145 on the list

Mahmoud Qassas (€15,265 raised of €100,000 goal) Mahmoud is 62 on the list

Mahmoud has recently gotten a severe head injury and therefore his wife requested that we donate to the PayPal for emergency medical funds

SUDAN

Eman Abdulrahman (GFM CHF33,013 raised of CHF50,000 goal, Chuffed $2,548 raised of $30,000) Eman is 213 on the list

Khartoum Kitchen

LEBANON

Lebanon Emergency Shelter and Humanitarian Relief ($18,480 USD raised of $23,000 goal)

Lebanese Red Cross

[is-it-ableist-if]

''Is it ableist if I don't want to speak to any of my friend's alters?'' Let's start off simple: Yes, It is. But, allow me to explain why It's ableist. I feel like this type of saying coming from singlets Is a big problem that comes from misunderstanding and lack of research. Many singlets often don't know anything about how DID/OSDD works, and end up saying things like this as a result. DID/OSDD forms In childhood. If your system friend, Is, for example, 13 and FOUND OUT (important keyword here) they were a system, then they didn't just create their system right off the bat. They found out. And let's remember here that your friend wasn't a singlet before discovery, they simply found out about the disorder and their alters! They are an alter, too. There Is no 'original' personality, you have already spoken to their alters before, too. You just didn't know it, and neither did they! Saying ''I don't want to speak to your alters'' Is ableist, and very disrespectful at that. They're an alter too. They all are, and they're not any different from the host, or any alter that you have spoken to before. If you're a singlet with system friends, please do your research instanstly Instead of assuming things like this. They WILL appreciate you trying to understand them. Don't be afraid to reach out to resources or research websites. Please remember. Be respectful. And if they allow it, don't be afraid to ask questions. My system personally always appreciates questions about DID/OSDD, and we're always happy to answer. For systems, I know singlets may struggle to understand. But please give them time and resources to learn, have patience and allow them to understand you, even if it's just a little. thank you for coming to my tedtalk

[covenofagatha]

The Psychology of Love (Part 1)

The First Day

Your first class of Personality Psychology with Professor Agatha Harkness awaits

Word count: 3.5k

Warnings: very light smut, slowburn, teacher x student

“Can you believe we’re graduating college in the spring?” your best friend and roommate, Wanda Maximoff, asks when you sit down at the table in the dining hall with a plate of toast and a cup of orange juice. 

You shake your head, brain still foggy with sleep, and silently curse yourself for picking the nine AM class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It’s the first day of your senior fall semester and you already know it’s going to be rough. You really hope this is the kind of class that has optional attendance. 

Wanda is much more of a morning person than you are, with chipper green eyes and a glow to her pale skin. She was more than happy to sign up for all early classes and you wish you had half of her energy. 

“You have Creative Writing at nine and then Gender and Sexuality Studies at ten-fifteen?” you ask. Wanda’s an English major and you sometimes wish you had gone down that route as opposed to Psychology. It’s interesting, of course, but some of the courses you’ve had to take made you want to poke your eyes out with boredom. 

She nods. “What do you have?” 

Shrugging, you pull out your phone to look at your schedule. “Personality Psych at nine,” you say. “Physiological Psych at twelve. I really hope these aren’t bad.” 

“Did you look up the professors? I did—apparently one of mine was fired for making racist comments and then rehired by the university,” Wanda scoffs and your eyes widen. “He apparently sued, it was a whole thing. So I bet that class should be fun.” 

Her sarcasm makes you chuckle and then wince. “No, fuck, I didn’t look,” you say, inwardly kicking yourself. When you had registered for classes, there were only certain times that some of them were offered so you had to work around that. You didn’t get to be picky in your senior year, when you were down to the last few classes you needed to graduate. 

You zoom in on the professor’s name for your first class on the screenshot of your schedule—Agatha Harkness. Typing it into google, you say a silent prayer that she’s an easy-A teacher. 

Clicking on the first website, your face falls when you see that she has a two-point-nine out of five rating, with the average grade being a C. Difficulty level four out of five. Attendance mandatory. You scroll through the reviews and your heart sinks lower with each one. 

Barely any homework, tests are about ninety percent of the grade. 

I made two-hundred flashcards and still failed the final exam. Professor Harkness is a total hardass. 

I didn’t wear my seatbelt while driving to class in the hopes I’d get into a car crash. 

“Jesus,” you mutter. Some of them are a little better, saying that she’s a wicked genius, and that going to office hours will help. One of them says she has some unorthodox ways of teaching psychology and that she picks favorites—but it’s effective. 

You put your phone away, not even bothering to look up any of your other professors. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. 

Wanda gets up to get some eggs and you bite into your cold toast, but you’ve lost your appetite. It’s your senior year and you can’t let your GPA tank this semester—you refuse to let that happen. If it takes going to office hours every day for the week before an exam, or buttering your professor up, you’ll fucking do it. 

“Nat and I heard about a welcome-back rager that one of the sororities is hosting tonight,” Wanda says when she comes back. Natasha is her girlfriend, one of your other best friends. You take all the credit for them getting together. Both of them had confessed that they liked the other to you so you had made a reservation for dinner for the three of you at a restaurant known for its romantic setting and then you had texted them about three minutes before to let them know that you wouldn’t be able to make it. 

Wanda didn’t come back to the dorm that night and when she had stumbled back in the next morning, her neck was covered in hickeys. 

Your nose wrinkles. “A sorority?” Not that you have anything against them, you just imagine their parties being very guy-infested. 

She laughs and rolls her eyes fondly. “It’s not what you’re thinking. They’re all invite-only and this is a queer sorority.” 

“Oh. Yeah, that sounds fun then.”

“Maybe you can get some action,” Wanda smirks, raising her eyebrows suggestively. 

Snorting, you take a long sip of orange juice to delay answering. Your love life has been complicated to say the least. Your first serious relationship was in freshman year of college, when a girl who had lived across the hall from you asked you out and no one had told you that it was a bad idea to date someone who lives that close to you. She was clingy and immature and you weren’t convinced that she actually cared about you—more just the idea of you. 

And you felt more from just a few compliments from women twice your age than you did the entire time with her. 

Looking back on it now, the whole thing was a bit of a mistake but you had gotten some experience from it and thankfully you had moved dorm buildings and hadn’t seen her again since. 

There had been some hookups in the past two years—drunk calls and makeouts in the bathroom at parties—but no one had caught your eye. 

“Yeah, we’ll see,” you say evasively. It just felt like something was constantly missing. You hadn’t opened up to Wanda or Nat about it, but you secretly longed for what the two of them had with each other. “It’s tonight?” 

Wanda hums. “At nine. So Nat will come over around then and we can pregame and then head over? Can’t be too early.” 

You shake your head at how egregious it would be before laughing. Natasha plops down next to Wanda, out of breath, before kissing her girlfriend on the cheek. They giggle to each other and you push your chair back. 

“I should probably get going. I can only imagine what my professor would do if I’m late,” you say. 

One of your general psych professors taught you that there’s only one type of person who goes out of their way to do a survey or write a review: someone who feels incredibly strongly about it. For each person who wrote a bad review about Professor Harkness, there’s surely five people who did just fine in the class with no complaints. That makes you feel a little better and you smile at your friends before trekking across campus. 

Her classroom is in the Psychology building, which is possibly the furthest one from the dining hall, and by the time you get there and walk up the flight of stairs, your calves are burning and you have to make an effort to control your heavy breathing. 

But you have five minutes to spare and the room is empty, so you lean against the wall next to the door on your phone. You’re already getting notifications of assignments for this week—why do you have five things to do for one class? A ball of stress starts to coil in your stomach. 

“Nervous habit?” someone asks, and it takes you a moment to realize that they’re talking to you. You look up, surprised, and find an older woman, maybe late forties, with curly dark hair that’s tossed over her shoulders, dark blue eyes that pierce into yours, and large, black glasses resting on her nose. She’s wearing a navy dress with a black blazer and smart brown shoes. Her eyebrow is posed expectantly and you realize that you’ve been chewing on your thumb nail. 

You clear your throat and straighten up, a feeling that you can’t quite name growing inside you. “Sorry?” 

Her lips slowly stretch into a smile and you catch a whiff of her perfume—a unique blend of warm vanilla with a dark coffee and something extra that adds a little spice. “Are you here for class?” she asks. 

“Yeah, um, Personality Psych,” you answer, feeling like you’re missing out on something. She looks absolutely delighted and steps to the side of you to open the door to the classroom. The pieces slowly click into place and your mouth drops open. “You—you’re Professor Harkness?”

She smirks. “Not who you were expecting?” 

She is not who you were expecting at all. The reviews made it sound like she was a mean crone deriving pleasure from failing students left and right. Not an attractive older woman.

You swallow roughly. 

Professor Harkness tilts her head to the side and you brush past her into the classroom, muttering a “Not really,” her scent lingering in your nostrils. It’s a small room and you sit at a desk in the second row on the left side, where the lectern is. You’ve found that it’s easier to focus when you’re close to the teacher. 

More students trickle in and sit behind you or to the side of you. No one takes the desk in front of you, though, so when Professor Harkness sweeps through the aisles of chairs and stops at the front, you’re in her direct line of sight. Her eyes twinkle when they land on you and you squirm.

“Welcome to Personality Psychology,” she announces at nine on the dot. “I am Professor Agatha Harkness. I have a PhD in clinical and behavior psychology. I’m sure many of you have heard or read that this class is difficult.” 

Out of your peripheral vision, you see some people nodding and nervously chuckling. 

She slams a hand down on the surface of the lectern, making everyone jump. “They are correct. But, let me tell you something. A lot of the students that take this class think it will be easy. They hear ‘Freud’ and they think ‘Oedipus Complex’. They hear ‘biological approach’ and they think ‘nature versus nurture’. Of course we will cover that—but we will also go very deep into what each theory pertains and includes. People fail because they think there’s too much information so they give up. What’s the solution?Try.” 

You wonder if she saw the review from the person that said they made two-hundred flashcards and still failed. 

Agatha moves to the desk next to the lectern to log into the computer. Quiet chatter fills the room, people introducing themselves to each other, but you dig in your bag and pull out a notepad and a pen. Your psych teacher in high school taught you that writing down information helps your brain retain it better than typing, so you’ve grown accustomed to taking notes by hand. 

She presses a button and the screen at the front of the classroom turns on and projects the syllabus. Agatha quickly goes through it, making note of the three exams and two research presentations that are scattered throughout the semester, and someone raises their hand. 

“So we only have five grades?” he asks, a nervous tremor in his voice. You’re right there with him—it will be very hard to bring your grade back up if you do bad on a test. 

Agatha stares him down. “If you do well on each one, you won’t need more than that.” The boy stammers but she moves on, telling everyone that attendance is indeed mandatory and that she won’t be posting the slides for notes online. You inwardly groan, hoping that your fear of failure will outweigh your lack of motivation. 

When she closes the tab with the syllabus, you hear rustling behind you and you turn slightly to see a girl packing up. A quick check of your watch shows that there’s still thirty minutes left.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Agatha says. “Did I dismiss the class?” 

The girl freezes before slinking back into her seat. “No, sorry, I just thought—” 

Agatha laughs humorlessly and you flinch. “Well, you are dismissed. We’ll see you on Wednesday unless you drop the class first.” The girl’s mouth drops open, eyes glassy, but she holds her head high as she walks out of the door.  

If you were her, you’re not sure you’d be able to come back. 

“Alright, let’s get into it,” Agatha says, clicking on a new tab and opening a slideshow. There’s a quiet ugh among everyone—of course she’s making you take notes on the first day. “What is personality?” 

No one moves an inch, no one says a word. 

She scoffs and stands up, perusing the room. You’re sure everyone is doing the exact same thing as you—looking anywhere but the professor. Raising your hand to your mouth and biting your fingernails, you feel her eyes on you and you reluctantly meet her gaze. 

“It’s the way you think and behave?” you offer and she smiles pleasantly. A feeling of warmth spreads through you at the validation. 

She clicks to the next slide. “Very good. The definition I want you to know is that personality is first and foremost a construct. It’s an idea that we created. It’s a person’s overall, individual pattern of behaviors, emotions and thoughts. There are five basic approaches to how we can look at personality.” 

You furiously scribble that down. You’re one of the only people who’s writing notes and she thankfully waits for you to look up before continuing. 

“We have the Trait approach, the Biological approach, the Psychoanalytical approach, the Phenomenological approach, and the Behavioral approach. I’m sure some of you are familiar with most of these, but over the semester, we’re going to really dive into how each of these approaches views personality and what they think is the basis for it. There are a lot of different ways to assess personality, some a lot more legitimate methods than others.”

Someone raises their hand and Agatha nods at them. “The Trait approach is where we look at the Big Five personality test, right?” 

Agatha sighs and clicks to the next slide. “Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to in an attempt to appear smart. It doesn’t work.” You stifle a laugh—she sees and winks at you and your cheeks flush. 

She continues talking a bit, giving you a bit of information about each one, before telling everyone to take out a piece of paper. 

“Draw a picture of a house and your family, whatever it looks like to you,” Agatha instructs. She sets a timer for five minutes while she walks around and glances at people’s work. 

When she gets to you, her perfume invades your nostrils as she bends over your shoulder. You can feel her hair brush your back. She hums in your ear and your stomach heats up. 

“This is an example of a projection test. You can tell a lot about a person based on how they drew the things,” she says, sitting back at her desk. “How intricate they draw the house. If it looks like the place they grew up in. Where they put themselves compared to the rest of the family. Who is even included in the family. I’m not going to collect these, but if you do want me to take a look at them so you can judge for yourself how accurate it is, stay after class. If not, then you may go and I’ll see everyone on Wednesday.” 

You’re the only person who doesn’t immediately rush out the door and you slowly make your way up to her, paper in hand. Her eyes flick to yours and she smirks, like she knew she could count on you. 

She holds out her hand and you give her your drawing. The lines on her forehead crease and she nods, analyzing it. You shift and scratch your head and resist the urge to bite your nails because of her comment earlier. 

Agatha puts the paper down on the desk, faced towards you. “The house isn’t detailed—just a square with a door and four windows and a triangle as the roof. Maybe you’re just not an artist, or maybe you never really considered any place home.” 

It feels like all the air gets sucked out of your lungs. 

“There’s space between you and these people,” she points to you and then to your mom, brother, and father, “but there’s also space between your parents. Or that’s who I’m guessing they are.” 

You nod. 

“It seems like you don’t feel very connected to them, or to your home. Maybe their home specifically?” She looks up at you, lips quirked up. “So, projective tests—total nonsense?” 

Chuckling shakily, you meet her eyes. “Total,” you joke. 

Agatha leans back in her chair and studies you. “What made you want to study psychology?” 

“Oh, well, I don’t know,” you say lamely, shifting your weight from one foot to another. “I guess I just like knowing how people think. What about you?” 

There’s a dark glint in her eyes. “Understanding people, the way they think—” she gestures to you in agreement with your answer, “—it gives you power over them. You know how to get inside their head, you know how to get what you want.” 

The air seems to thicken around you two and her perfume makes you dizzy. “What do you want?” you ask, voice barely above a whisper. Her eyebrow twitches up. 

“Right now, I want a coffee,” she asserts, standing up and handing you back your paper. Whatever spell, whether real or imagined on your end, is broken and Agatha smiles. “I’ll see you Wednesday?” 

The unspoken question is if you’re going to drop the class, if you’re scared off by her demeanor. You meet her gaze firmly. “I’ll see you then.” 

“Have a good rest of the day, y/n,” she says, walking past you and out the door, and you stand there, agape, realizing that you never told her your name.  ~~~

“I’m Natasha Romanoff! I’m friends with Stacy,” Nat yells over the pumping music from inside the sorority. The girl at the door nods and moves to the side to let you, Nat, and Wanda into the house. 

The lights are a deep blue and you see people in the corners doing shots and playing beer pong, there’s girls making out in the middle of the floor, guys outside in the pool. You turn to say something to your friends, but they’ve already gone off somewhere else and left you standing there alone. 

So you go and fill a cup up with beer from the keg and take in the scene, perfectly content to just be a wallflower for the night. You’re not even really sure why you came, but you had nothing else to do and now the drinks you had earlier are settling pleasantly in your stomach, making your veins buzz and your head float.

“Hey!” someone says loudly and you look to the side to find a girl with dark hair and blue eyes standing there. “You look lonely.” 

You laugh and take another sip. “My friends left me. They’re probably hooking up in a bedroom right now.” 

She leans in closer and you find yourself mirroring her. “Do you want to go look in the bedrooms and see if we can find them?” 

“What? Why would I—” She raises an eyebrow and it clicks. “Wait, are you hitting on me?” She nods and you down the rest of your drink. You’re about to apologize and walk away when you inhale and smell something. 

Vanilla, coffee, and a hint of something else. 

There’s a flicker of heat in your stomach and you reach out a hand to cup her cheek, bringing her closer to you. 

It’s her. You can’t explain it, but energy thrums under your skin and you pull her mouth to yours. The scent fills your nose and your mouth and you moan. She pushes you against the wall and you don’t even know her name but you don’t care. 

Your tongue licks into her mouth and she whimpers, hands frantically sliding down your body and around your waist. You’ve never done anything like this before, never this reckless, but there’s something about her that is driving you crazy. 

Her fingers fiddle with the button on your jean shorts before sliding in, her smell the only thing you can focus on and it hits you. 

It’s the same perfume as Agatha was wearing in class. 

You should stop because it’s so fucked up but you’re too wet now to just walk away so you wrap your arms around her to bring her closer. 

And when she slides a finger into you, in a hallway in a sorority house amidst fifty other undergraduates, your professor is all you can think about.

Part Two

@lostbutlovely33 @diorrxckstar @whoreforolderfictionalwomen  @katekathry @onemansdreamisanothermansdeath @tayasmellsapples @natashashill @mybraininblood @mysticalmoonlight7  @cactuslover2600 @loveem0mo @readysteddiero-nance @lonelyhalfwitch @lesbiantortilla @crescendoofstars @sol-in-wonderland @ahsfan05 @gbab09 @sasheemo @agathaharness @live-laugh-love-lupone @chiar4anna @fuckedupforkhahn @lowlyjelly @sweetmidnights @n3bula-cats @m1vfs @agathascoven1

[neoskitties]

Welcome to NeoSkitties - your guide to the indie web!

Run by Stahl of Steel-Type and Homura... who doesn't currently have a website or socials (she's shy)

We're here to encourage Trainers to try their hand at HTML and CSS and put together a fun hand-coded website! We're here to help!

Join the tumblr community

//OOC under the cut

this is a parody of Neocities, a web host you can use to host your very own website for FREE! Eventually, I'll have a masterlist of webmastery things and such but we're pretty bare-bones for now. If you have any questions feel free to message me!

Stahl's Rotomblr is @steel-type-stahl

Homura doesn't have any socials or anything yet, maybe with enough pestering you can convince her to make a blog ;)

[fuckingrecipes]

Utilizing Ingredients You Have On-Hand: 

When choosing what to cook next, prioritize perishables. The stuff that’s going to go bad quickly. Berries are at the top of the list, followed by Meats, Fleshy Fruit & Vegetables (tomatoes, mango, peppers) and Milk, and then Eggs & Hard Vegetables (potatoes, squash, radish, etc.)

If it's in the fridge, it's on a timer. If it's in the freezer, you've got a lot more time.

But FR! What if I don’t know any recipes that use what I have? 

Go hunting, you beautiful bastard~  https://www.supercook.com

Supercook allows you to list off all the ingredients you have on-hand, and it will find recipes which use ONLY those ingredients.

If you make an account, it should save your ‘Pantry’ list, so you can come back to it again later. 

There’s a bunch of ‘Use what I have to make recipes!’ guides on the internet, but I love how granular ‘Supercook’ gets, and how it doesn’t ask you to pay to use its database. 

You can enter a ‘Key Ingredient’ to focus on using up something (Like if you’ve got too much celery and need to use a lot, quickly) - AND you can select what type of dish you want to make (Main dish, side dish, dessert, etc.) so you can quickly filter out the billion cookie or sweetbread recipes. 

It also tells you WHAT you’re missing, so you can tell at a glance if it’s something you actually don’t have, or if it’s something you just forgot to add to the list. 

--

Write Down the recipes you love so you can always find it - even if the site ever goes down or that recipe gets removed. 

If I’ve learned anything from watching the Internet evolve, it’s that you can NEVER trust a website to continue hosting your shit into eternity. They always die eventually. Save your important shit as a physical object that you can hold in your hand.

- If you have a LOT of perishable vegetables that are reaching the limit of their lifespan, that’s when you make soup or stir-fry.

IN CONCLUSION:

Prioritize Perishables

Use Supercook to find recipes to use up stuff that might go bad soon, or ingredients you have a lot of.

Write down the recipes you like to save them foreverrrr

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[cheezitofthevalley]

a guide to internet graphics and my blog

I'll try to make this entertaining, but we have a lot to cover!

Q: Sooo... What are blinkies? Or buttons?

A: Blinkies are a type of graphic that was popular 15+ years ago on personal blogs, often on a web host called Geocities.

Geocities no longer exists, but lovers of the indie/old web use other platforms, such as the new Neocities, to make their own old web-inspired blogs. They often decorate these with collectible graphics.

Q: You haven't really answered my question. What's the difference between all of these graphics?

A: Well, there are a lot of different kinds of graphics. For the sake of time, I'll only talk about the ones I post.

Blinkies are usually 150x20 pixels, but many creators like to improve their quality by making them 300x40, or even larger. There are also some oddly-sized blinkies, like this one:

However, most blinkies adhere to the standard dimensions. Most of them also have "blinking" borders, and usually feature text.

Let's talk about buttons. Buttons are, well, buttons. This button specifically is 88x31. This seemingly random size was the standard for Geocities users back in the day, who used these buttons as a portal/advertisement to their website, as well as a way to say pretty much whatever they wanted. Lot's of companies used them as well. Here are some examples:

Not all buttons share this standard dimension, though. Here are some other possibilities:

There are variations of these, too. Some buttons look pretty weird:

...and there are blinkies called "chain blinkies" that look like something else entirely:

Q: Ok, cool. What about stamps?

A: Stamps are a bit different. They're a slighter newer thing, and were made popular on Deviantart in the early 2010's. They are traditionally 99x56 pixels, and can be used to decorate any blog or website. Here are some examples:

as you can see, they can be made with a variety of borders.

I would love to continue, but I think this is enough for today. I'll have a part two up within a couple days! Stay tuned for explanations and examples of dividers, favicons, fanlistings, web etiquette, and more!

part two!

[phantomrose96]

Anon-hate is whatever and porn bot followers are that type of symbiosis where I'm the host and I don't give a shit, but the one Tumblr irritant that will make me maul you with teeth is when someone hops on my conversational, borderline creative writing shitpost and goes "Omg, OP needs to learn about grammar. OP needs to learn about ending sentences with periods." Like Oh? Did the creative piece on the no-one-gives-a-fuck blogging website not conform to textbook grammar? Did the frenetically-cadenced writing contain a run-on sentence as a rhetorical device to mimic fast-paced oral conversation? Should we tell everyone? Should we report this to the library? Should we call Merriam Webster?

[afloweroutofstone]

If you've ever been reading your social media feed and suddenly noticed that conservative personalities have latched on to some obscure issue they’ve never cared about before, it may well be that they’re secretly getting paid to do it.

Back in 2013, a host of writers—including future Federalist cofounder Ben Domenech—suddenly all became passionate about rival Malaysian political factions. Surprise: they were receiving hefty payoffs from the Malaysian government.

Last year, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and some of the right’s other big-time YouTubers kept pumping out glossy videos for a new site called Tenet Media. It turned out to be a Kremlin operation. They were on the payroll to the tune of millions of dollars each, though they insisted they didn’t know where the money was coming from.

So I watched with interest last week when a host of MAGA types, including comedian Chad Prather, prolific X user Ian Miles Cheong, and Florida pro-Trump personality Eric Daugherty all started, seemingly at random, to defend the right of food-stamp recipients to buy soda.

The posts appeared to be in response to the movement under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” banner to get legislatures in states like Idaho and Arizona to pass bills that would ban food-stamp recipients from spending that money on soft drinks or other junk foods. The movement has been received well on the right, where the idea of restricting poor people from buying junk food with welfare benefits is an easy sell.

But then, last week, a wave of MAGA types started to take the pro-soda position. In similarly worded posts, Cheong, Prather, Daugherty, popular MAGA meme account “Clown World,” and other X users with big followings said it was unfair for the government to tell recipients how to spend their food-stamp money...

It’s not like these people were previously big soda fans, either. Cheong—a Malaysian citizen who has become fluent in inane American culture war issues through fights in video-game forums—said just a few years ago that Coca-Cola wants Americans “fat and addicted to sugar.”

But there Cheong was, on Thursday, writing on X that he opposed the government “curbing Diet Coke purchases.” For emphasis, he attached a picture of Trump guzzling Diet Coke on a golf course.

The first indication that something was afoot came on Friday, when Blake Marnell, an online pro-Trump anchor who goes by “Brick Suit” (he wears a suit that looks like border-wall bricks), posted comparisons of the pro-soda tweets authored by MAGA influencers, illustrating what appeared to be some sort of coordinated campaign. The attention grew after Turning Point USA’s Riley Gaines claimed on X that she’d been offered money to oppose the soda bills that had earned praise from RFK Jr. She said that she’d turned the cash down.

Conservative sleuths claimed the campaign came from Influenceable, a social-media startup aimed at getting Gen-Z influencers to promote companies’ messaging. One sleuth, Nick Sortor, posted documents purporting to be from Influenceable that laid out talking points for the pro-soda campaign and how influencers could claim money for posting the messages...

In 2023, right-wing website Current Revolt posted documents claiming to show Influenceable payment offers in exchange for social-media posts backing embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And last week brought us another difficult-to-decipher episode when Cheong, “Clown World,” and other right-wing influencers got inexplicably passionate about opposing a Texas Senate electric-grid regulation bill that otherwise received little coverage.

[pirate-of-the-southern-isles]

A long time ago, when I was in an elementary school - I think it was around 2005 - you could just make yourself a blog. For free. In fact, you could have as many blogs as you please. It was a service from one of the most popular websites here. And boy, did we have a lot of those.

It was before I have learnt about fanfiction.net. It was way before Ao3. It was the place where the fanfics were born for us.

There was a popular fanblog for one of the most beloved franchises in my country. It even won an official contest for the best fansite. And it hosted their own contest for "a character's diary" type of fanfics. We were to write new stories and post it, first person POV, and they were choosing the best in their category.

I won in one and I was there, writing, for... not sure how long, but at least a year, having great fun. But it's not about me.

Thanks to that, I've found another blogs with fanfics. One of them - with a story exclusively of my favourite characters.

And I just want to say - it was one of the most formative experiences of my life.

I loved this story. I loved this story so much I was using all of the prepaid card money on my Nokia to read even a small glimpse of the newest update when on vacation and away from my PC (let me remind you, it was 2005!). I actually became friends with the author and we are in contact to this day.

This fanfic was so, so important for me.

Was it good? It was a story written by middleschooler for another middleschoolers. But for me it was the best. Was it popular? No, it wasn't. I mean... it was 2005. The "popularity" in today's terms wasn't really reachable for us. Why was it so big for me? Because it was about my favourite blorbos! For us, back then, it was the whole world. It was our happy place. It was my happy place.

What I want to say is - you never know, if something you write, however small, won't become this Very Important Thing in someone's life. Maybe not one of the milestones, but a comfort fic. A thing you remember when you get sad. Something significant- even for one person.

I don't know if anyone else remembers that blog and the story it held. It is long gone.

But I can still, 20 years later, recall all the names of the OCs.

That's the power you hold.

Keep writing.