#I made myself sad and now I'm making it ya'll problem

[purgatory-jar]

Darling, don't be afraid, I have loved you for a thousand years, i'll -

🍂

Like my art? Commission me here!

[thegalleonsnest]

OK since I haven't seen too many people talk about this since twitter news usually strikes pretty fast over here whenever e'usk does anything ever, let me give ya'll the run down on two things that will go live on NOVEMBER 15TH and why people are mass migrating to Blue Sky once more; and provide resources to help protect your art and make the transition to Blue Sky easier if you so choose:

The Block function no longer blocks people as intended. It now basically acts as a glorified Mute button. Even when you block someone, they can still see your posts, but they can't engage in them. If your account is a Public one and not a Private one, people you blocked will see your posts.

They say because people can easily "share and hide harmful or private information about those they've blocked," they changed it this way for "greater transparency." When in reality, this is an extremely dangerous change, as the whole point of blocking is to cease interaction with people entirely for a plethora of reasons, i.e. stalking, harassment, spam, endangerment, or just plainly annoying and not wanting to see said tweets/accounts. or you know, for 18+ accounts who do not want minors interacting with them or their material at all (There is speculation saying these changes are specifically for Elon himself so he can do his own kind of stalking, and honestly, with the private likes change, it lowkey checks out in my opinion)

Also, this straight up goes against and may violate Apple and Google's app store policies and also is straight up illegal in Canada and probably other countries as well.

If this ACTUALLY goes through, twitter will only be available in select countries, probably exclusively in the US, which would collapse the site with the lost of users and stock, and probably be the last push it needs to kill the site. And if not, will be a very sad and exclusive platform made for specific kinds of people who line up with musk's line of thinking.

2. New policies regarding Grok AI and basically removing the option to opt out of Grok's information gathering to improve their software.

And anything you upload/post on the site is considered "fair game" with "royalty-free licenses" and they can do whatever they please with it. Primarily using any and all posts on twitter to train their Grok AI. A few months ago, there was a setting you can opt out of so they couldn't take anything you post to "improve" Grok, but I guess because so many people were opting out, they decided to make it mandatory as part of the policy change (This is mainly speculation from what I hear).

So this is considered the final straw for a LOT of people, especially artists who have been gripping on to twitter for as long as they can, but the AI nonsense is too much for people now, including myself. Lot's of people are moving to Blue Sky for good reason, and from personal experience, it is literally 10x better than twitter ever was, even before elon took over. There is no algorithm on there, and you can save "feeds" to your timeline to have a catered timelines to hop between if your looking for something specific like furry art or game dev stuff. It's taken them a bit to get off the ground and add much needed features, but it's genuinely so much better now

RESOURCES

Project Glaze & Cara

If you're an artist who's still on twitter or trying to ride it out for as long as you can for whatever reason you have, do yourself a favor and Glaze and/or Nightshade your work. Project Glaze is a free program designed to protect your art work from getting scrapped by AI machines. Glazing basically makes it harder to adapt and copy artwork that AI programs try to scan, while Nightshade basically "poisons" works to make AI libraries much more unstable and generate images completely off the mark. (These are layman's terms I'm using here, but follow the link to get more information)

The only problem with these programs is that they can be resource intensive for computers, and not every pc can run glaze. It's basically like rendering a frame/animation, you gotta let your pc sit there to get it glazed/nightshade, and depending on the intensity and power of your pc, this may take minutes to hours depending on how much you wanna protect your work.

HOWEVER, there are two alternatives, WebGlaze and Cara

WebGlaze is an in browser version of the program, so your pc doesn't have to do the heavy lifting. You do need to have an account with Glaze and be invited to use the program (I have not done so personally so I don't know much about the process.)

Cara is an artist focused site that doubles as both a portfolio site and a general social media platform. They've partnered with Glaze and have their own browser glazing called "Cara Glaze," and highly encourage users to post their work Glazed and are extremely anti-ai. You do get limited uses per day to glaze your work, so if you plan on doing a huge backlog uploading of your art, it may take awhile if your using just Cara Glaze.

Some twitter users have suggested glazing your art, cropping it, and overlaying it with a frame telling people to follow them elsewhere like on Bluesky. Here's a template someone provided if you wanna use this one or make your own.

Blue Sky Resources and Tips

So if your a twitter user and your about to realize the hellish task of refollowing a massive chunk of people you follow, have no fear, there's an extension called Sky Follower Bridge (Firefox & Chrome links). This is a very basic extension that makes it really easy to find people on Bluesky

It sorts them out by trying to find matching usernames, usernames in descriptions, or by screen name. It's not 100% perfect, there's a couple people I already follow on Blue Sky but the extension could not find them on twitter correctly, but I still found a huge chunk of people. Also if your worried that this extension is "iffy," they do have a github open with the source publicly available and the Blue Sky Team themselves have promoted the extension in their recent posts while welcoming new users to the platform.

FEEDS and LABELS

OK SO THE COOLEST PART ABOUT BLUESKY IS THE FEEDS SYSTEM. Basically if you've made a twitter list before, it's like that, but way more customizable and caters to specific types of posts/topics. Consolidating them into a timeline/feed that exclusively filled about those particular topics, or just people in general. There's thousands to pick and choose from!

Here's a couple of mine that I have saved and ready (down below). Some feeds I have saved so I can jump to seeing what my friends and mutuals are up to, and see their posts specifically so it doesn't get lost in reposts or other accounts, and also specialized feeds for browsing artists within the furry community.

The Furry Community feeds I have here were created by people who've built an algorithm to place any #furry or #furryart or other special tags like #Furrystreamer or #furrydev. They even have one for commissions, and yes you can say commissions on a post and not have it destroyed or shadow banned. You are safe.

If you want, and I highly recommend it to get visibility and check out a neat community, follow furryli.st to get added to their list and feeds. Once your on the list, even without a hashtag, you'll still pop up in their specialized feeds as just a member of the community there. There are plenty of other feeds out there besides this one, but I feel like a lot of people could use one like this. They even got ones for OC specific too I remember seeing somewhere.

And in terms of labels, they can be either ways to help label yourself with specific things or have user created accessibility settings to help better control your experience on Blue Sky.

And my personal favorite: Ai Imagery Labeler. Removes any AI stuff or hides it to the best of it's abilities, and it does a pretty good job, I have not seen anything AI related since subscribing to it.

Finally, HASHTAGS WORK & No need to censor yourself!

This is NOT like twitter or any other big named social media site AT ALL, so you don't have to work around words to get your stuff out there and be seen. There are literally feeds built around having commissions getting and art seen! Some people worry about bots and that has been a recent issue since a lot of people are migrating to Blue Sky, but it comes with any social media territory.

ALSO COOL PART,

you can search a hashtag on someone's profile and search exclusively on that profile as well! You can even put the hashtag in bio for easy access if you have a specialize tag like here on tumblr. OR EVEN BUILD YOUR OWN ART FEED FOR YOUR STUFF SPECIFICALLY!

So yeah, there's your quick run down about twitter's current burning building, how to protect your art, and what to do when you move to Blue Sky! Have fun!

[milyonline]

life update #whydoesschoolexist

I feel like I come on here when my life is in shambles and I'm stressin abt smthn. This problem that im stressing about is what uni i wanna transfer to in the fall. I'll get fake names for these uni so i dont give my location 😅

my original uni i thought i was going: pink uni

this new uni I wanna tranfer too since jan of this year: green uni

anyways so pink uni was the uni i decided on when i started community college and i needed to find a uni to transfer to stat, and when my sophomore year started i needed to start the transfer process. There was a deadline in December that i missed due to a missed document that i put in a request to be sent but never was and couldnt due much besides emailing. anyways when i missed that deadline i was under the assumption that i no longer could go to that uni in the fall. so during that missed deadline to jan 25, i looked into green uni cuz they started sending me emails about tranfering over there. I looked cuz i thought i had no school to go to in the fall and i needed one so my dad wouldnt be uspet at cuz, a uni is still a uni that will get me a degree and thats all that matters. Yesterday a representative for green uni came to my community campus and i went up and talked to them about the transfer process there and if im not too late to do so, I wasnt cuz their deadlines are feb. 15, but they said if i missed it i can still enroll for classes cuz they have open enrollment and they dont close till a week before the 1st day of classes. That night i received an email from a professer i met on tour for the pink uni back in the fall, and they said that i can still apply for the uni and go in the fall. BUT my mind already grieved the fact i wasn't going to pink uni anymore and i started getting excited to attend green uni. Now that i got that email im conficted and what to do and which uni to go to...

is this what the female lead feels when having to choose between to males to be her lover. example being the summer i turned pretty...

anyways ill update you when i made the decision cuz i gotta make it by tonight (deadline i put myself) so i can make deadlines by feb 15 if i choose green uni or make the music auditions of the pink uni that start feb 20.

im majoring in music education btw

anyways heres the song of the day/week:

dont question it, I only have happy memories while listening to this song/ watching the movie, and I need it to feel happy or keep myself in a good mood to see the bright side. I feel sad but i dont want to feel sad all the time yk?

life was easy back than when this came out, i miss it ✋🏻😔

have a good day ya'll

hopfully better than mine 😀👍🏻

[ponderingthoughtsblog]

well, it finally happened.

i got my first hate comment from one of my former friends, who wasn't even really my friend at all, we just had a mutual friend. she of course brought up a situation from nearly three years ago so it's good to know she's hated me all along, just as much as i hated her.

and to top it all off, i blocked her but she somehow has access to my private twitter account and sent me screenshots of a post i made concerning the situation and accused me off saying i could out my former friend bc i had insider knowledge. i would never do that bc i know the pain of being outed, bc she herself outed me to all our friends years ago and made it some big whoopsy joke. i have plenty of other ammuniation to use against her, such as her and her brother's heavy drug use, or her engaging in lots of premarital sex which her parents would hate. she's very financially dependent on them in a way im not and telling them anything would ruin her life. but i wouldn't do that bc i'm trying, of i'm trying, to be the bigger person. it's hard.

how can i be the delusional, obsessed one when their tracking and stalking ME on social media? sending me hate and directly mentioning me online? she clearly has told them a made up version of what happened if this is the reaction. i can be content in knowing i was right and i did the right thing. there is no coming back from this and that makes me sad. and the fact that they constantly talk shit about each other to one another and still want to be friends makes me laugh. as long as they can laugh at me privately in their hateful groupchat, i'm good. hate me, love me, i don't really care.

as i said them, i'm just happy to no longer be friends with people who DO NOT LIKE ME. why are ya'll mad at me for taking myself out of that situation when it's clearly what you wanted. and then to LIE and say I owe you and your brother money???? for what????? you nickle and fucking dimed me on my way out of that godforsaken situation you have all the money you need. your poor financial decisions are none of my business and not my fucking problem. just say your broke babe. no wonder your boyfriend dumped your ass. literally good on him for recognizing his worth and leaving you in the dust. none of your friends liked him or were nice to him. ever. only me. and that was bc you begged me to do what i could to make the others see that he was cool.

you're a nasty little cunt who feeds off of other people's success, can't be happy for anyone else, puts other people down to make yourself feel better, shit's on other people constantly (even your own friends), questions and belittles other people over their sexuality, is ok with one of her friends SA'ing another friend and said it was her fault and she was asking for it, screams at me to the point of reducing me to tears/an autistic meltdown, is bitter as fuck over other people's happiness, has no concept of respectable boundaries, makes her problems everyone else's, shitted on me for spending my hard earned money bc it "made her feel bad" bc she wasn't in a place to do that, among so much else shit. this is what i've put up with for literal years. and i finally put my foot down and was ignored, so now i've simply taken myself out of the situation and they're mad at me over it. make it make sense.