#Word plugins development

[i4technolab]

DOT NET Core is an amazing framework that gives developers a versatile and efficient environment for their Word Add-ins development . It includes the Office.js library, which is a set of JavaScript APIs designed specifically for the development of Office Add-ins. These APIs may be used in conjunction with .NET Core to create cross-platform compatible Add-ins operated on various platforms including Windows, macOS, and web browsers.

.NET Core allows developers to leverage powerful tools and pre-built libraries to create robust and scalable add-ons for Excel, Outlook, Word, and other O365 platforms. Moreover, they can also be integrated with other Microsoft products and services, such as Azure and Microsoft 365 platforms.

[hotelasian]

Top WordPress Website Design Company in the USA

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[insertdisc5]

📚 A List Of Useful Websites When Making An RPG 📚

My timeloop RPG In Stars and Time is done! Which means I can clear all my ISAT gamedev related bookmarks. But I figured I would show them here, in case they can be useful to someone. These range from "useful to write a story/characters/world" to "these are SUPER rpgmaker focused and will help with the terrible math that comes with making a game".

This is what I used to make my RPG game, but it could be useful for writers, game devs of all genres, DMs, artists, what have you. YIPPEE

Writing (Names)

Behind The Name - Why don't you have this bookmarked already. Search for names and their meanings from all over the world!

Medieval Names Archive - Medieval names. Useful. For ME

City and Town Name Generator - Create "fake" names for cities, generated from datasets from any country you desire! I used those for the couple city names in ISAT. I say "fake" in quotes because some of them do end up being actual city names, especially for french generated ones. Don't forget to double check you're not 1. just taking a real city name or 2. using a word that's like, Very Bad, especially if you don't know the country you're taking inspiration from! Don't want to end up with Poopaville, USA

Writing (Words)

Onym - A website full of websites that are full of words. And by that I mean dictionaries, thesauruses, translators, glossaries, ways to mix up words, and way more. HIGHLY recommend checking this website out!!!

Moby Thesaurus - My thesaurus of choice!

Rhyme Zone - Find words that rhyme with others. Perfect for poets, lyricists, punmasters.

In Different Languages - Search for a word, have it translated in MANY different languages in one page.

ASSETS

In general, I will say: just look up what you want on itch.io. There are SO MANY assets for you to buy on itch.io. You want a font? You want a background? You want a sound effect? You want a plugin? A pixel base? An attack animation? A cool UI?!?!?! JUST GO ON ITCH.IO!!!!!!

Visual Assets (General)

Creative Market - Shop for all kinds of assets, from fonts to mockups to templates to brushes to WHATEVER YOU WANT

Velvetyne - Cool and weird fonts

Chevy Ray's Pixel Fonts - They're good fonts.

Contrast Checker - Stop making your text white when your background is lime green no one can read that shit babe!!!!!!

Visual Assets (Game Focused)

Interface In Game - Screenshots of UI (User Interfaces) from SO MANY GAMES. Shows you everything and you can just look at what every single menu in a game looks like. You can also sort them by game genre! GREAT reference!

Game UI Database - Same as above!

Sound Assets

Zapsplat, Freesound - There are many sound effect websites out there but those are the ones I saved. Royalty free!

Shapeforms - Paid packs for music and sounds and stuff.

Other

CloudConvert - Convert files into other files. MAKE THAT .AVI A .MOV

EZGifs - Make those gifs bigger. Smaller. Optimize them. Take a video and make it a gif. The Sky Is The Limit

Marketing

Press Kitty - Did not end up needing this- this will help with creating a press kit! Useful for ANY indie dev. Yes, even if you're making a tiny game, you should have a press kit. You never know!!!

presskit() - Same as above, but a different one.

Itch.io Page Image Guide and Templates - Make your project pages on itch.io look nice.

MOOMANiBE's IGF post - If you're making indie games, you might wanna try and submit your game to the Independent Game Festival at some point. Here are some tips on how, and why you should.

Game Design (General)

An insightful thread where game developers discuss hidden mechanics designed to make games feel more interesting - Title says it all. Check those comments too.

Game Design (RPGs)

Yanfly "Let's Make a Game" Comics - INCREDIBLY useful tips on how to make RPGs, going from dungeons to towns to enemy stats!!!!

Attack Patterns - A nice post on enemy attack patterns, and what attacks you should give your enemies to make them challenging (but not TOO challenging!) A very good starting point.

How To Balance An RPG - Twitter thread on how to balance player stats VS enemy stats.

Nobody Cares About It But It’s The Only Thing That Matters: Pacing And Level Design In JRPGs - a Good Post.

Game Design (Visual Novels)

Feniks Renpy Tutorials - They're good tutorials.

I played over 100 visual novels in one month and here’s my advice to devs. - General VN advice. Also highly recommend this whole blog for help on marketing your games.

I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye

[johnnylandslide]

WoL Magic Cards Tutorial!

I'd made a custom Magic: the Gathering card of Johnny recently, and shared it in the Seafloor discord, and since there was a lot of interest in the concept I figured a tutorial might be nice so we have something to do while we wait for plugins to come back. Here goes!

Download CardConjurer This is the tool I use to make custom cards. It's just a web app developed by a college student; he got DMCA'd by WOTC so it's not hosted on the internet anymore, but you can still run it locally.

Just unzip the contents somewhere, and then run launcher.exe when you're ready. It should open up the app in a browser tab.

2. Navigate to the Card Creator

3. Pick out a Frame

Enter this search box on the right. We're going to be using the Nickname ("Godzilla") frames. These give us a small subtitle box below the card name that indicates what the Magic card's actual name is.

If you want to create a custom card instead, use the Borderless frames.

In the menu below, you should see the different colors of the borderless frames. You'll have to add three of these elements to the card: the text box, the card name, and the power/toughness box. Do them in that order, by clicking each element and then Add Frame to Card. If your card is legendary (or if you feel like it), use the Crown option rather than just Title.

You'll have to choose the correct color. If your chosen card is monocolor or >=3 colors, this is very easy since you can just choose that color or gold, but for two-color cards the process is slightly more involved. First, add the color that goes on the left using the Add Frame to Card button, and then add the right color using the Add Frame to Card (Right Half) button. Use the gold power/toughness box.

If any of the card elements get out of order, you can reorder them using the layers controls at the bottom of the page.

4. Import the card text

Navigate to the Import/Save tab, and type in the name of the real card you're putting your OC over. Select the specific version of it using the dropdown afterwards.

(For some reason, Firefox suggests completing this field with my credit card information. I think it knows more about Magic than it's letting on.)

After the card is imported, navigate back to the Frame tab, and click Load Frame Version. This will force the text on the card to fit into the frame set that's currently selected in the bar on the right, which should still be the Nickname ("Godzilla") from earlier.

We should have something closely resembling the real card in the editor, now.

5. Make it yours!

First off, go to the Art tab, and upload your image. Once it shows up, you can adjust it by clicking the actual card in the editor. Clicking and dragging pans it around, shift+clicking scales, and ctrl+click rotates.

Next, pop over to the Set Symbol tab and remove it, since this is your own card and isn't from a Magic set.

And now, go over to the Text tab to finish this off! Start by entering your card name into the Nickname tab.

If your chosen card name is too long and ends up clipping the mana cost, you can reduce the width of the text box with the Edit Bounds menu until it fits.

Next, go to Rules Text to update the name if the card refers to itself. I changed all instances of "Vadrik" to "Johnny". Since this card is really just to look at and not to play with, I also renamed the Day/Night mechanic to fit the Black Mage flavor even better. Feel free to get creative!

You can use {flavor} to add flavor text as well. I added the {lns} commands after some words to add line breaks to make the text blocks look better.

You can also edit the typeline in the Type tab, if the creature type doesn't match your WoL. Johnny is already a Human Wizard though, so I didn't have to do that. Technically this would be a mechanical change of the card, but since these aren't real cards anyway I think it's a valid concession to make. Just don't go abusing it if you actually end up printing these out LOL

6. Download the card image

Finally, head back over to Import/Save, scroll all the way to the bottom, and hit Download you card.

And you're done! There's obviously a lot more that's possible with CardConjurer, and tons of avenues for creativity. If you end up following this tutorial, or creating any other FFXIV-related MTG cards, I would really love to see them!

[idrellegames]

can i inquire generally what your twine stories look like in editing format? like with the different connected squares that contain text blocks. im writing smth rn but i fear my organization in twine is not optimal at all. how did you manage for as big of a story as you have?

I figured out something that makes sense to me. I'm the only person developing this game, so it's optimized for my own systems and workflow. What I do may not work for anyone else.

A few things: I don't try to pre-plan my branches in Twine itself. It doesn't really matter what the tree even looks like until I'm coding it, and the main thing the visual editor helps with is seeing the overall flow of the game, how everything connects together, and finding sections where something got overlooked.

Because of the lag in the Twine editor and also to help with compartmentalizing the game into different sections, I split it into multiple stories that are then compiled with Tweego. So, there is no overarching editing tree for the whole game that I actually use.

This post and this post goes more into that process.

This is my current library, with each chapter file labelled. WAYFARER is the start of the game (CC, Prologue, the first bit of Episode 1), Chapter_1.1 is the Route A Count fight and end of the episode, Chapter_1.2 through to Chapter_1.6 is Route B of Episode 1, Chapter_2.1 to Chapter_2.3 is Episode 2, so on and so forth).

This is what one of the files in the editor looks like. I colour code some passages to make it easier to see major events (yellow is autosave, green is the start of a major branch/choice, red is combat). This story file corresponds to the fight with the Crimson Count on Route B in Episode 1.

I use an old version of the Twine editor because I didn't like some of the newer updates, so I reverted to the last version I like (that's why my library and story files may look a bit different from what's current).

I don't use VSCode with Twee plugins since I didn't like it, though that is probably a better way to make a large game than what I'm doing. I have a system that works for me; I don't really see the point in updating it to something else when what I do makes a functioning game and I already have a lot on my plate with writing new content.

I've heard of people taking Wayfarer's HTML file and attempting to upload it into the Twine editor to code dive, but this is not going to be useful because:

The size of the compiled game will make the editor non-functional due to lag. It will probably break it.

Twine overlays all of the compiled story files on top of the other so you can't even see what's going on.

What is helpful for me is to make sure that every passage has a unique label. I never name my passages the same thing as their link text (for example, if I have a link that reads "1. Attack", the title of the corresponding passage is never "1. Attack").

Instead, I label passages according to what story file they are in along with a single word referencing my internal notes so I don't get lost, and then a letter + number combination for tracking splits. So, a link that reads as "1. Attack" to the player may end up having a passage title as something like CHAPTER 3.4 ATTACK 01. And then if it divides into three choices at the end of the passage, the titles for those passages could end up as something like CHAPTER 3.4 ATTACK 01A, CHAPTER 3.4 ATTACK 01B, CHAPTER 3.4 ATTACK 01C.

[technofeudalism]

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is required to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org and let WP Engine back into its ecosystem after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in its ongoing lawsuit.  In addition to removing the checkbox—which requires users to denounce WP Engine before proceeding—the preliminary injunction orders that Automattic is enjoined from “blocking, disabling, or interfering with WP Engine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ access to wordpress.org” or “interfering with WP Engine’s control over, or access to, plugins or extensions (and their respective directory listings) hosted on wordpress.org that were developed, published, or maintained by WP Engine,” the order states. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools. 

“It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. “I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀” Mullenweg began to publicly denounce WP Engine in September, calling the web hosting platform a “cancer” to the larger Wordpress open-source project and accusing it of improperly using the WordPress brand. He’s “at war” with WP Engine, in his own words.  In October, Mullenweg added a required checkbox at login for WordPres.org, forcing users to agree that they are not affiliated with WP Engine. The checkbox asked users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” The checkbox was still present and required on the WordPress.org login page as of Wednesday morning. Automattic and Mullenweg have 72 hours from the order to take it down, according to the judge’s order.  WP Engine sent a cease and desist demanding that he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” the platform posted on X.  Automattic sent back its own cease and desist, saying, “Your unauthorized use of our Client’s intellectual property has enabled WP Engine to compete with our Client unfairly, and has led to unjust enrichment and undue profits.” WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. In October, Mullenweg announced that he’d given Automattic employees a buyout package, and 159 employees, or roughly 8.4 percent of staff, took the offer. “I feel much lighter,” he wrote. But shortly after, he reportedly complained that the company was now “very short staffed.”   All of this has created an environment of chaos and fear within Automattic and in the wider WordPress open-source community.  Within 72 hours of the order, Automattic and Mullenweg are also required to remove the “purported” list of WP Engine customers contained in the ‘domains.csv’ file linked to Automattic’s website wordpressenginetracker.com, which Automattic launched in November and tracks sites that have left WP Engine. It’s also required to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, including reactivating and restoring all WP Engine employee login credentials to wordpress.org resources and “disable any technological blocking of WPEngine’s and Related Entities’ access to wordpress.org that occurred on or around September 25, 2024, including IP address blocking or other blocking mechanisms.” The judge also ordered Mullenweg to restore WP Engine’s access to its Advanced Custom Fields (“ACF”) plugin directory, which its team said was “unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent” and called it a “new precedent” in betrayal of community access. “We are grateful that the court has granted our motion for a preliminary injunction,” a spokesperson for WP Engine told 404 Media. “The order will bring back much-needed stability to the WordPress ecosystem. WP Engine is focused on serving our partners and customers and working with the community to find ways to ensure a vigorous, and thriving WordPress community.” A spokesperson for Automattic told 404 Media: “Today’s ruling is a preliminary order designed to maintain the status quo. It was made without the benefit of discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will be filing against WP Engine shortly. We look forward to prevailing at trial as we continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full-fact discovery and a full review of the merits.” 

[blissfullyunawares]

5 Days of Helping You Outline Your Next Novel

Day 5: Obsidian for Outlining

Find all 5 installments of the mini series: helping you outline your next novel

*I have added a layer of “static” over my screenshots so they are distinctive enough to stand apart from the surrounding text

did you miss this series? here you can find all posts here: [day 1] [day 2] [day 3] [day 4]

Do you use Obsidian?

What is Obsidian?

A note-taking and knowledge management tool that allows you to create and connect notes seamlessly.

Uses a local-first approach, meaning your data is stored on your computer, not the cloud (unless you choose to sync).

Features bidirectional linking, which helps create a non-linear, networked way of organizing ideas—great for brainstorming and outlining.

Why should you use Obsidian?

Flexible & Customizable – Unlike rigid writing apps, you can design your own workflow.

Distraction-Free Writing – Markdown keeps the focus on text without extra formatting distractions.

Ideal for Outlining & Organization – Connect story ideas, characters, and settings effortlessly.

Obsidian for Writing

Outlining

Creating a One Pager

Create a single markdown note for a high-level novel summary.

Use headings and bullet points for clarity.

Link to related notes (e.g., character pages, theme exploration).

Here’s an example of an outline I’m currently using. This is what my website will have on it (and what goals I hope to achieve w my website)

Using the Native Canvas Tool

Use Obsidian’s native Canvas tool to visually outline your novel. (Best on PC)

Create a board with columns for Acts, Chapters, or Story Beats.

Drag and drop cards as the story evolves.

Writing

Why Write Directly in Obsidian?

Minimalist interface reduces distractions.

Markdown-based formatting keeps the focus on words.

No auto-formatting issues (compared to Word or Google Docs).

Why is Obsidian Great for Writing?

Customizable workspace (plugins for word count, timers, and focus mode).

Easy to link notes (e.g., instantly reference past chapters or research).

Dark mode & themes for an optimal writing environment.

Organization in Obsidian

Outlining, Tags, Links

Each chapter, character, important item, and setting can have its own linked note.

Below, for example, you can see the purple text is a linked page directly in my outline.

Use bidirectional linking to create relationships between (story) elements. Clicking these links will automatically open the next page.

Tags can be used for important characters, items, places, or events that happen in your writing. Especially useful for tracking.

Folders for Efficient Storage

Organize notes into folders for Acts, Characters, Worldbuilding, and Drafts.

Use tags and backlinks for quick navigation.

Creating a separate folder for the actual writing and linking next (chapter) and previous (chapter) at the bottom for smooth navigation.

You can also create and reuse your own internal templates!

Spiderweb Map Feature (Graph View)

Visualize connections between characters, plot points, and themes. Below you’ll see the basic mapping of my website development project.

This view can help you spot disconnected (floating) ideas and create bridges to them.

Exporting

Why Export?

Ready to format in another program (Scrivener, Word, Docs, Vellum, etc).

Need a clean version (removing tags, notes, etc) for beta readers or editors.

Creating a backup copy of your work.

When should you export?

Personally, I like to export every 5 chapters or so and update my live version on Google Docs. This allows my family, friends, and beta readers to access my edited work.

After finishing a draft or major revision.

Before sending to an editor or formatting for publication.

Where should you export?

Personally I copy and paste my content from each chapter into a google doc for editing. You may also want to make note of the following export options:

Markdown to Word (.docx) – For editing or submitting.

Markdown to PDF – For quick sharing

Markdown to Scrivener – For those who format in Scrivener.

To Conclude

Obsidian is an invaluable tool for novelists who want a flexible, organized, and distraction-free writing process.

Try setting up your own Obsidian vault for your next novel! Comment below and let me know if this was helpful for you 🫶🏻

your reblogs help me help more ppl 💕

follow along for writing prompts, vocabulary lists, and helpful content like this! <333

✨ #blissfullyunawaresoriginals ✨

[canmom]

one of the interesting things with game dev and tech art is watching new techniques spread across the industry.

an example: videogame ocean water has gotten really good in recent years through fourier noise vertex displacement, better reflection models, etc. etc. - at first it was just a few games where boats are a core part of it, like Sea of Thieves and Valheim, but word spreads through videos like Acerola's, Unreal implements it as a plugin, even old games like No Man's Sky are getting modern water shaders added. and variants of the technique develop to support different use cases (in the game i'm working on, I figured out a way to do it using flipbook displacement textures that is performant enough for standalone vr).

another case, nonphotorealistic cel shading - Arc System Works basically solved this in Guilty Gear Xrd (2014) through some ingenious techniques like editing the normals to get specific shading regions, and that rapidly spread out to the world of nsfw animators. but there other techniques as well, that might instead implement cel-shading in a deferred way as essentially a post-processing effect over traditional lighting - this is the approach used by Hi-Fi Rush for example. but Hi-Fi Rush is definitely informed by the understanding of what makes for 'good cel-shading' - note that classic Rembrandt triangle on the face of the MC when lit in a 3/4 view.

sometimes it's a a genuine technological advancement on the hardware side - like graphics cards with programmable shaders changed everything in the 2000s. but a lot of time, it's just a matter of someone getting a good idea, a way of thinking. and then it becomes a standard practice.

most of the time the algorithms and calculations we use in graphics are incredibly simple, because we are doing millions of them every frame. sometimes we do need to make things more complicated for physical accuracy - GGX speculars are more involved to calculate than good old-fashioned Blinn-Phong - but we're usually trying not to make the ALU cry and so often we're doing the same basic calculations we'd do in the 90s. but now we've gotten used to juggling all these different maps and buffers and data sources in new ways. it's a different paradigm and the shift has taken place within my lifetime.

[shituationist]

assuaging my anxieties about machine learning over the last week, I learn that despite there being about ten years of doom-saying about the full automation of radiomics, there's actually a shortage of radiologists now (and, also, the machine learning algorithms that are supposed to be able to detect cancers better than human doctors are very often giving overconfident predictions). truck driving was supposed to be completely automated by now, but my grampa is still truckin' and will probably get to retire as a trucker. companies like GM are now throwing decreasing amounts of money at autonomous vehicle research after throwing billions at cars that can just barely ferry people around san francisco (and sometimes still fails), the most mapped and trained upon set of roads in the world. (imagine the cost to train these things for a city with dilapidated infrastructure, where the lines in the road have faded away, like, say, Shreveport, LA).

we now have transformer-based models that are able to provide contextually relevant responses, but the responses are often wrong, and often in subtle ways that require expertise to needle out. the possibility of giving a wrong response is always there - it's a stochastic next-word prediction algorithm based on statistical inferences gleaned from the training data, with no innate understanding of the symbols its producing. image generators are questionably legal (at least the way they were trained and how that effects the output of essentially copyrighted material). graphic designers, rather than being replaced by them, are already using them as a tool, and I've already seen local designers do this (which I find cheap and ugly - one taco place hired a local designer to make a graphic for them - the tacos looked like taco bell's, not the actual restaurant's, and you could see artefacts from the generation process everywhere). for the most part, what they produce is visually ugly and requires extensive touchups - if the model even gives you an output you can edit. the role of the designer as designer is still there - they are still the arbiter of good taste, and the value of a graphic designer is still based on whether or not they have a well developed aesthetic taste themself.

for the most part, everything is in tech demo phase, and this is after getting trained on nearly the sum total of available human produced data, which is already a problem for generalized performance. while a lot of these systems perform well on older, flawed, benchmarks, newer benchmarks show that these systems (including GPT-4 with plugins) consistently fail to compete with humans equipped with everyday knowledge.

there is also a huge problem with the benchmarks typically used to measure progress in machine learning that impact their real world use (and tell us we should probably be more cautious because the human use of these tools is bound to be reckless given the hype they've received). back to radiomics, some machine learning models barely generalize at all, and only perform slightly better than chance at identifying pneumonia in pediatric cases when it's exposed to external datasets (external to the hospital where the data it was trained on came from). other issues, like data leakage, make popular benchmarks often an overoptimistic measure of success.

very few researchers in machine learning are recognizing these limits. that probably has to do with the academic and commercial incentives towards publishing overconfident results. many papers are not even in principle reproducible, because the code, training data, etc., is simply not provided. "publish or perish", the bias journals have towards positive results, and the desire of tech companies to get continued funding while "AI" is the hot buzzword, all combined this year for the perfect storm of techno-hype.

which is not to say that machine learning is useless. their use as glorified statistical methods has been a boon for scientists, when those scientists understand what's going on under the hood. in a medical context, tempered use of machine learning has definitely saved lives already. some programmers swear that copilot has made them marginally more productive, by autocompleting sometimes tedious boilerplate code (although, hey, we've had code generators doing this for several decades). it's probably marginally faster to ask a service "how do I reverse a string" than to look through the docs (although, if you had read the docs to begin with would you even need to take the risk of the service getting it wrong?) people have a lot of fun with the image generators, because one-off memes don't require high quality aesthetics to get a chuckle before the user scrolls away (only psychopaths like me look at these images for artefacts). doctors will continue to use statistical tools in the wider machine learning tool set to augment their provision of care, if these were designed and implemented carefully, with a mind to their limitations.

anyway, i hope posting this will assuage my anxieties for another quarter at least.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Backing Up Fanfiction with Calibre + FanFicFare (with screenshots!)

If you've been reading fanfiction for any significant length of time, you've probably had the horrifying realization that a fic or series that you absolutely loved was deleted. Maybe the author was harassed or stalked, maybe they didn't want an abandoned WIP lying around, or maybe they just didn't like the fandom any more. Whatever the reason, it is so important to back up your favorite fanfictions.

Calibre is one of the most popular ebook management softwares available, primarily because:

It is full-featured and fairly easy to use

It has a large plugin ecosystem (like Firefox's addons)

It's available for most operating systems

It's completely free

By "ebook management", I mean it can do things like indexing and searching a library of your books, downloading covers and metadata for them, etc. I originally got Calibre for backing up ebooks I had purchased from various online stores in case they ever shut down (like Microsoft Books) or decided they wanted to take a book back (like Amazon has done), and so I could read in whatever app I wanted.

BUT, remember that plugin ecosystem I mentioned? JimmXinu took advantage of that to create FanFicFare, a plugin that allows Calibre to download stories from over 100 creative writing sites (primarily fanfiction archives, but also erotic writing sites among others).

Just paste in the URL to an AO3 fic, for example, and it will:

Download the fic in your preferred format (EPUB, MOBI, TXT, HTML, others)

Fill in all the metadata for you (story name, author + AO3 pseuds, the fic's order in a series, if the fic is complete or not, word count, all tags, etc.)

Generate an ebook cover from scratch OR using art that was embedded in the fic

From here you can just click on a tag to find all other fics in your library with the same tag; you can also click into the author or the series. It's almost like having a mini-AO3 on your computer, one that is always available and where fics never get deleted.

Installing Calibre

Download Calibre from here, choosing the appropriate copy for your operating system

Run the Calibre installer and click through the wizard. For most people the default options work well.

Open Calibre; the Welcome Wizard should appear and walk you through initial setup

Choose your language, and the place on your computer where you want Calibre to store the fics/ebooks that it downloads, then click Next.

Select the device you use most often to read fanfiction on. This helps Calibre decide what format ebooks should be stored in (but you can override it with FanFicFare later)

You should now have Calibre open with an empty library. NOW we want to install several plugins to teach it how to handle fanfics.

Installing Calibre Plugins

First up is Count Pages. This plugin counts the words and pages in a fanfiction and shows it in Calibre so you know whether the fic you're looking at is a oneshot or a behemoth.

Look for an icon like the one below and click it to open Calibre preferences.

2. Under the "Advanced" section, click "Plugins"

3. At the bottom of the Plugins dialog, click "Get New Plugins"

4. Type "Count Pages" into the "Filter by name" search box at the top right. Once the plugin is visible in the list, click it, then click "Install". It will bring up a prompt about the security risks, but we are only installing well-known plugins today (ex. ZimmXinu has been developing FanFicFare for over a decade). Click Yes to install the plugin.

5. It will then prompt you to restart Calibre in order to begin using the plugin, but just click "Ok" because we're going to install a couple more plugins first.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for three more plugins: "Generate Covers", "EpubMerge", and "FanFicFare"; once all 4 plugins are installed, close Calibre completely and open it again. You should now have several new buttons on your Calibre menu bar:

FanFicFare is now installed! But we still have a little bit of work to do to unlock its full capabilities.

Configuring FanFicFare for Your Fanfic Site of Choice

So FanFicFare is now installed, but right now if you tell it to look at a fic on AO3, it will be browsing AO3 as a new, anonymous user without an account. This means that:

It won't be able to see explicit fics because it hasn't accepted the "See adult works" prompt

It won't be able to see locked fics (ones you can only read if you are logged in to AO3; these are very common nowadays as authors try to prevent AI engines from scraping their fics and flooding them with spam comments).

So we need to configure FanFicFare to accept the adult prompt (if you'd like to download anything rated higher than T), and we also need to give it our AO3 username and password so it can download locked fics on our behalf.

Click the dropdown arrow to the right of the FanFicFare button in the Calibre toolbar. A dropdown menu will appear. Click "Configure FanFicFare"

2. At the top of the "Basic" tab, select your prefered download format (if you prefer a format not listed, like PDF, don't worry, Calibre can convert it for you later).

3. Click the "Personal" tab in the FanFicFare settings dialog, then click "Edit personal.ini"

4. It will open a very basic text editor where you can type your personal fanfic site details for FanFicFare to use. If the box is small and text is cut off or hard to read, resize the editor window by hovering over the edge of the window until your cursor changes into an arrow with two heads, then click and drag to expand the window.

5. Type "is_adult" (without the quotes) into the Find bar, then click Find. The first result should be this a line that looks like "# is _adult:true". Delete the "#" and the space after it to uncomment the line; the text color of that line should change from yellow to green and light purple.

6. Type "archiveofourown" (without quotes) into the Find bar, then click Find until you see a section that looks like the one below (it should be the first or second result):

7. Type your AO3 login details after the "username" and "password" text. Do not put any spaces between the colons and your username or password. Note that your password is stored in plaintext in this file, so don't let anyone else get a hold of it.

8. Skip this step if the only site you're interested in downloading from is AO3. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for each fanfiction or erotic writing website you use. There are only a few sites in personal.ini out of the box, so you may have to copy a specific site's configuration section from defaults.ini, which has example sections for all 100+ supported sites.

9. Click "OK" to close the personal.ini text editor, then click "OK" again to close the Customize FanFicFare box.

Whew! Lots of clicking but you're done now! Time to download some fanfic.

Downloading or Updating Fanfic(s)

Copy the URL of the fic (I'm using one from AO3 for this example).

Click the FanFicFare button on the Calibre toolbar. It should automatically detect that you have a URL from a supported site in your clipboard and paste it into the dialog

If you want to download multiple fanfics in a batch, you can hit enter and paste more URLs into the box, one per line. NOTE: please do not try to download like 30 fanfictions at once; a bunch of people doing that can strain AO3's servers, and your account might have its download capability temporarily throttled to prevent that.

5. Click OK. Calibre may look like it's frozen for a few seconds, but this is normal during the metadata fetching process. Once it figures out which of the fics you pasted actually need to be downloaded, it will unfreeze and begin downloading them

6. Once Calibre has begun downloading your fics, it will display "Jobs: 1" with a spinning icon in the bottom right corner of the Calibre window. If you click that, you'll get a progress bar of what it's doing

7. Once Calibre has finished downloading your fics, it will display a summary of the job in the bottom right corner of the Calibre window. In this summary, "good" updates meant that a fic had to be downloaded, while "bad" updates indicate fics that didn't need to be updated (because you already had them on your computer) or that could NOT be downloaded due to an error (usually a fic that was deleted or hidden in a private collection). You can click "View Log" if you're curious about which fics were downloaded and which were skipped. In this example, 2 fics were missing from my library and were downloaded, while "Where the Sand Meets the Sea" was not downloaded because it was already on my computer and up to date.

8. Exit the FanFicFare log if you clicked into it, then click "Yes" to accept the results and add the downloaded/updated fics to your library. The fics should appear in Calibre almost immediately. Then FanFicFare will kick off a second job by calling the Count Pages plugin to grab a word count for the new/updated fics. Once that job completes, just click "Yes" in the job summary window that appears in the bottom right of Calibre to store the word counts in your library.

And you're done! You just backed up your first fanfictions :)

Downloading a Series

FanFicFare can actually pull all of the URLs for individual fics in a series for you automatically!

Copy the AO3 series URL (not to an individual fic in the series)

In Calibre, click the dropdown arrow to the right of the FanFicFare button on the menu bar, then click "Get Story URLs from Web Page"

3. FanFicFare should automatically detect that you have a supported web page in your clipboard and paste it into the text field. Choose the download option you prefer: downloading each fic in the series as a separate ebook, OR combining every fic in the series into a single ebook, commonly called an anthology. Note: anthology ebooks can get rather large in file size if they have embedded fanart in them.

4. Once you pick an option, FanFicFare will grab the URL of every fic in the series and automatically paste them into the FanFicFare fic download window. From there on out just follow the normal steps for downloading those fics (this will start at step 3 in the "Downloading Fic(s)" section above).

Updating Fanfictions

Just wanted to note that you can update fanfictions in multiple ways. You can either:

Select ebooks in your Calibre library, then click the dropdown arrow next to the FanFicFare toolbar icon and click "Update Existing Fanfiction Books" OR

Take the URLs and just download them like you would a new fic. FanFicFare will automatically replace your existing copy with the updated one. This way you can just paste in the URL from an AO3 subscription email alert instead of having to hunt down the fic in your library first.

For Advanced Users

FanFicFare can actually pull the URLs off of any page of multiple fics - this includes pages of bookmarks. For example, if you want to download fics that you have bookmarked and tagged with "favorite", just filter your bookmarks for that tag and then use the resulting URL in the steps for "Downloading a Series". Note that FanFicFare doesn't handle pagination, so if you have multiple pages of results for that bookmark search, you'll have to paste in each paginated URL separately.

Summary

Well this got WAY longer than I meant it to. I think my background in technical writing is showing - this is probably more detailed than the average tumblr user wants or needs. But whatever, at least it's thorough. If you found this guide useful, please reblog it! The more people who back up fics, the better the chances that those fics will be available if you want them later. And if you end up using Calibre extensively, consider donating to the one-person developer team to keep the project going :)

[i4technolab]

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[hotelasian]

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[radiation]

hello! i just wanted to say following you for memes and silly goofy haha stuff ive come to realize how insanely talented you are at game design and rpgmaker and just wanted to let you know youve been a huge inspiration to me!! Speaking of rpgmaker, would you perhaps have any words of advice to people wanting to make games in that engine for the first time? ty!!

I keep forgetting to answer this but this is so sweet ;_; thank you so much for the kind words!!! It always makes me really happy when someone follows me for either Joke posts or Art/gamedev stuff and then realizes i do the other half too, and ends up liking that stuff as well. Its super fun

And Im not sure if youll see this but i'll offer my thoughts on RPGmaker too. Ill be repeating a lot of stuff ive said on da blog before but hopefully its still helpful and is more specific to this particular question

So as for RPGmaker, regardless of the version you use -- I use MV, but research and figure out whats best for you -- Id honestly just recommend screwing around in the engine. Start off making junk test projects where you just have fun testing different features. RPGMaker is pretty unique in that its a very "exploratory" engine to learn, theres a lot of tools there for you by default that you dont need coding knowledge to understand, and its really fun to familiarize yourself with them. So its easy and fun to spend a bunch of time making a bunch of horseshit that you dont plan on putting in an actual game as a way of learning

These are the tutorials i watched to figure out rpgmaker MV, very simple and fun. Id recommend just going thru something like these and making doo doo projects to see how it works. Like for example I relearned the engine by making shit like this using default assets. its way too fun.

Once youre essentially familiar with how the engine works and youre like "hey why cant i do this extremely basic thing in the engine already" id suggest searching for plugins! Theyre scripts other people have made that expand what you can do in the engine. Here are all of the ones i use for my game.

I say thsi a lot but i think the most important thing as an RPGmaker developer, particularly one not super versed in coding, is planning your games around what the engine does best and what plugins you know are available. RPGmaker is very good at making what it expects you to wanna make. Its very bad at doing anything else. So if youre like "im gonna make this cool minigame" or "Im gonna make this crazy looking UI" and plan your game around the idea youll achieve those things its gonna be very very difficult for you to do that unless you get a programmer on board. And itll probably be kind of a pain for the programmer as well. Research how feasible it is to get a particular function in the game before you become married to that idea

Also as i always say, i really recommend starting with a tiny project! like take your conception of what a "small project" is and imagine it so much smaller that it seems ridiculously tiny and simple. And youll find that that alone takes way more work than you anticipated. But dont let any of this dissuade you too much, the most important thing is doing *anything* in the engine (and having fun with it). Its great to finish projects but if you end up not finishing one then its ok, you still learned a bunch from doing that

[bridgeybrainrot]

In light of some recent developments, I decided to have a go at my unwieldy bookmarks. And I thought, while doing so, how when I was trying to decide how best to organize myself, I was searching online to find tips on how to go about it. So I thought I might do a recap about how I personally categorize, bookmark, and filter, and I can dive in deeper if anyone is interested! (If you are, feel free to send an ask or a comment).

Generally speaking, right now, all I'm reading on AO3 is Polin so that makes my bookmarks a bit easier to tame. I know some save the stories they want to read as actual browser bookmarks, some do Marked for Later and then remove them from that when they finish, some use bookmarks, and some have 159 tabs open at all times like a chaos gremlin. And I mean that affectionately.

I started out with a system from the get go once I realized I was all in with Polin. I marked my to-reads as Marked for Later and bookmarked my finished reads. Then it was easy to see at a glance if I'd read something before. But I realized I couldn't really filter anything in my marked for later, and there wasn't a good way to organize that section at all. So I moved to bookmarking everything.

But not JUST bookmarking everything. I use bookmarking tags and browser plugins to make it an easier experience. Which is a good segue into the best part of bookmarking for me - Tampermonkey scripts.

These scripts have VASTLY improved my organization. There are some aspects of AO3 tagging, bookmarking and filtering that leaves much to be desired and where those needs aren't met, I've almost always been able to find a script to fill it.

If you've never used Tampermonkey, it's a plugin you can use for Chrome, Firefox and Safari (as well as likely other browsers) on desktop, and in some mobile browsers as well. I use Chrome on desktop and have my Firefox on Android dedicated only to AO3 use. It allows scripts to run when you are on certain sites and can change the look and functionality of those sites.

My faves are:

AO3 Fictracker

This script is AMAZING. It allows you to easily (as in, from your bookmark list!) tag a fic as to read, completed, favorite, or disliked. I don't usually use the disliked function but I have if I've accidentally come across a fic with a concept I won't enjoy reading that maybe wasn't explicitly tagged so I know off the bat. It makes it SO easy to then click on these filtered tags right from the menu bar.

w4tchdoge's AO3 Bookmark Maker

This fic makes bookmarks a breeze. It automatically adds a story synopsis when you add a bookmark (which you can customize) so in case a fic is deleted, you know what it was. I also LOVE their auto-tag button so I can tag my bookmarked fics with their word count and completion status, making filtering even easier.

ao3 savior/ao3 savior config

I use these scripts to filter out authors, tags and themes I don't want to see. For example, I don't really like reading dark!Colin. I also don't really care for A/B/O. So I use the ao3 config to add those to my filter list, and they don't show up in my searches or when I load the Polin tag, and also don't tell me that they're missing (because I know myself and my curiosity). There are other plugins and scripts that do this but this one seems the most customizable to me (for example, some only let you do actual tags - this one lets you do wild matches within tags AND within the summary)

AO3: Comment formatting and preview

This makes both commenting and previewing text SO much easier. I love it for commenting because you can easily add formatting AND it lets you add on your own commonly used or needed text (I have one for easy "Thanks for reading!" to add on to the responses I do for comments on my own fics). This is more a want than a need as far as ease of use and organization but I've really gotten used to it.

That covers a lot of what I use to organize my bookmarks, though I go more in depth when it comes to my filters and searches. I also have other scripts that I use on the regular that aren't essential, but that make my life easier.

Do you have a different way of organizing? I think it's a very personal thing, but I like hearing how others do this to see if I can tweak my own methods. I'll admit it, I'm a nerd!

I'll probably do a part 2, if for no other reason that it makes it a good resource to link to when I do get asked how I customize.

Unrelated but, you might think looking at this that I'm an organized person. And you would be wonderfully, horribly wrong. 💛

[jcmarchi]

Combining forces, GSAP & Webflow!

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/combining-forces-gsap-webflow/

Combining forces, GSAP & Webflow!

Change can certainly be scary whenever a beloved, independent software library becomes a part of a larger organization. I’m feeling a bit more excitement than concern this time around, though.

If you haven’t heard, GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform) is teaming up with the visual website builder, Webflow. This mutually beneficial advancement not only brings GSAP’s powerful animation capabilities to Webflow’s graphical user interface but also provides the GSAP team the resources necessary to take development to the next level.

GSAP has been independent software for nearly 15 years (since the Flash and ActionScript days!) primarily supported by Club GSAP memberships, their paid tiers which offer even more tools and plugins to enhance GSAP further. GSAP is currently used on more than 12 million websites.

I chatted with Cassie Evans — GSAP’s Lead Bestower of Animation Superpowers and CSS-Tricks contributor — who confidently expressed that GSAP will remain available for the wider web.

It’s a big change, but we think it’s going to be a good one – more resources for the core library, more people maintaining the GSAP codebase, money for events and merch and community support, a VISUAL GUI in the pipeline.

The Webflow community has cause for celebration as well, as direct integration with GSAP has been a wishlist item for a while.

The webflow community is so lovely and creative and supportive and friendly too. It’s a good fit.

I’m so happy for Jack, Cassie, and Rodrigo, as well as super excited to see what happens next. If you don’t want to take my word for it, check out what Brody has to say about it.

Direct Link →

[3dspecbio]

Project updates!

Hi, sorry I'm so slow on updating everybody.

I'm bad for staring at the 'post now' button and having trouble finding the ability to actually update you people by using my words.

TLDR:

Episkyros update is going well. AI took some more time than expected as I discovered some bugs in a plugin I was using to handle some weight selection logic, but it lead me to get in touch with the awesome developers and we ended up fixing bits of the addon and my game together! My upcoming goal right now is working on some of the non-stekh NPCs in the game, namely some preliminary prey animal 3D modelling. I'd like to share my 3D modelling/Ecorche process for spec-bio animals.

In other news: I'm going to be distracted in October / November working with @caba-111 and @hotkoin to convert our game jam project Scalepiercer into a full game. https://3dspecbio.itch.io/scalepiercer

I can't really say too much about what we have planned other than that it likely won't share the same name or visual direction, but we hope our spiritual successor to the jam will be something we're proud of having on the Stores.