#also if you click the drop down menu in the corner of the post and then click the date time stamp it will take you to reblog

[curlicuecal]

My craziest current tumblr fact is that if you click on someone's username in a post thread it doesn't take you to that post on their blog anymore, BUT if you click on the little divider line ABOVE their username it does

This website was designed by squirrels

[exeggcute]

none of this is new info, but you know I have the "loves to write lists and compile links" disposition, so I thought it might be helpful to share some of the tips I've seen about how to make sure you're sharing legitimate palestinian evacuation fundraisers and bundle all those tips into a single handy reference post.

this is a spreadsheet of legitimate ("vetted") fundraisers on tumblr.

this post explains how the people who maintain this spreadsheet confirm the legitimacy of each fundraiser they add.

this podcast episode ("yousef and the fourth move") explains why evacuation fundraisers are often organized by people who don't live in gaza and/or who may not be immediate relatives of the people trying to evacuate. it's part three of a series about a man named yousef and his family; parts one and two aren't required listening for part three to make sense, but if you have a few hours to spare then I wholeheartedly recommend listening to all of them.

this is the process that I personally have been using to check whether a particular fundraiser has been vetted:

spreadsheet method

open the vetted fundraisers spreadsheet.

inside this spreadsheet, open the "find..." menu. on a windows computer, this shortcut is ctrl+F. on a mac, this shortcut is cmd+F. on a mobile device, click the three dots menu in the upper right corner of your screen, then select Find and replace.

search for the last name of the person or family in the fundraiser. you may get several results because last names obviously aren't unique; keep hitting "next" until you've looked at all the results.

if you find an entry in the spreadsheet that has the exact same name and whose gofundme link leads to the same fundraiser associated with the blog, it's legitimate. if you don't find an entry in the spreadsheet that matches the blog's fundraiser, that does not mean it's a scam. try the next method below!

tumblr search method

copy the username of the tumblr who originally posted the fundraiser and/or sent you a message asking you to boost the fundraiser. (for example, username123)

paste this username into tumblr's search bar.

for best results, click the All types drop-down menu, then select Text. since the search page is often dominated by asks sent by username123 (which people then answer and tag with their username), this helps narrow things down a bit.

look to see if any people who are not username123 have made posts confirming that username123 is legitimate. this includes people who've reblogged fundraisers and added notes, people who've compiled masterlists, and people sharing hyperlinks to other posts confirming a fundraiser's legitimacy. if the message seems to be "yep, looks legit," then it's safe to assume it's legit.

this is not a comprehensive list, but here are some of the usernames I've seen associated with "yep, looks legit"-type posts and who I've come to trust by association. (disclaimers: I am not mutuals with any of the users, and not all of them do the vetting firsthand, but the ones who don't vet posts themselves still seem to be careful about what they share and therefore are a good lead to follow. also, don't bug these people to vet fundraisers for you unless they've specifically indicated that they're open to that.)

90-ghost

el-shab-hussein

nabulsi

appsa

northgazaupdates

retvolution

communistchilchuck

neptunerings

a-shade-of-blue

shimamitsu

neither of these methods yielded anything definitive; what now?

it may just be too early to tell. unless a trusted source has shared overwhelming evidence that a particular fundraiser is a scam (which seems to be a very very rare occurrence), the best thing you can do is ignore it. don't report their blog as spam, because there's a good chance it's a legitimate fundraiser who just hasn't been vetted yet.

[dqmeron]

「 Gradient Text Tutorial for Captions 」

i'm sure there's several of these already out there, but here's a rundown of how i make the gradient text for my gifset captions! (example)

𖥻 tutorial below cut <3 | screenshots + bold/italic/small/color text included for my fellow adhders who can't sit through long blocks of text

websites used: color picker, text colorizer, text replacement

step #1: pick your colors (optional) when making gradient text for a caption, i usually use an image color picker to get exact hex codes! this just helps me match everything even better than i could when manually inputting colors! (this is completely optional, but i like doing it, so i thought i'd include it here!)

step #2: making your gradient now the fun begins! open the text colorizer linked above, and enter the text you want to be a gradient into the text box:

(all caps is by no means necessary! i'm just doing it to make the gradient stand out even more, since i'm going to have a decent amount of text in my caption.) after entering your text, choose the type of color effect you want using this drop-down menu! color effect is essentially the type of gradient/how many colors it uses, etc. play around with this to find the one you like best!

i'm sticking with horizontal gradient, but you can choose whichever one you like! (there's also a solid color option if you want to just use a color that isn't available in the tumblr text options.) after color effect, you can choose your colors using this section - if you did use the color picker from step one, you can just paste the hex codes into the boxes.

if not, click on the colored bars, and this hue picker will pop up:

drag your mouse around in the left box to choose your color. the bar on the right can be used to modify shade.

(these are the colors i'm using)

skip over the "additional text settings" section (these options mess with the html code and cause issues when you try to use it on tumblr) and check the preview to make sure you like how your gradient looks.

if you're having a bit of trouble seeing the gradient properly, you can scroll back up to "additional text settings" and turn on bold to see it better. just make sure you turn it back off before copying your code.

now you're ready to copy your code!

after making sure any additional text settings are returned to their default/unchecked states, scroll down and copy the HTML code (NOT the BBcode). select the text and copy it using command/ctrl + C or right click and click "copy".

step #3: replacing

the text colorizer used here is great, but it does add unneeded semicolons to the html code that mess with tumblr's settings and cause formatting problems.

open the text replacement site (linked at top), and paste the code you copied into the text box:

in the "replace this:" box, type ; (leave the "with this:" box blank)

click "replace text". skim over the new code to make sure the semicolons are gone (sometimes you've got to click "replace text" a couple of times for it to work), and then either click "copy to clipboard" or select and copy the text manually.

step #4: writing your caption now that you've got your code, open tumblr and make a new photo post. look in the top right-hand corner of your screen, and make sure "legacy editor" is turned on. if it isn't, click the toggle to turn it on.

next, you need to make sure your text editor is set to html. to do this, click the little gear in the top right corner of the new post. select "html" from the drop-down menu next to "text editor", and then close the settings. [07.27.23 update: if, like me, you're stuck using the new editor, you can still set your post type to html, and gradient text will still work. the post editor will just turn your files into code when you're editing, and you'll have to fix the spacing in between your gifs (if you're using this for a gifset caption) in the preview tab. it looks super weird and alarming at first, but it does still work with the new post editor.]

upload your gifs and then move down to the caption. open the html tab and then paste your code! once you've done that, click on the preview tab to check how it looks.

my gradient looks pretty good, but i'm going to bold the text to make it more visible. here's how to use html to do that:

<strong>code goes here</strong>

here is a list of other html codes you can use to stylize your text! (they use <;b> for bold text, this is another way to do it, either method works fine!)

if you want to have another line of text under/above your code you need to add <br> at the end of the top line to create a line break (just pressing enter won't work). here's an example of how to format that:

text text text<br> text text text&lt;br> text text text

write the rest of your caption, and then you're done! here's my end result and my final code:

i hope this was helpful! feel free to send me an ask if you have any questions! happy giffing <3

[atsulovee]

I wanted to ask how you color your texts bc I‘m always wondering HOW to do that Pls help

anon, i so got you.

i use this website!

first, you put your two desired colors into the two hex code things here (i use this website to find the color codes, personally)

then, you click run which sets the colors

type in your text and click the run button next to the color samples. That's where you get the text you need to copy and paste.

once you copy it, head over to your post and click that little settings icon in the corner. Scroll down until you see text editor. In that little drop down menu, there's an option for HTML. Hit that and paste that where you want your ombre text to be!

a little pro tip, it's much easier to find where you want the text to be in HTML if you type it normally in rich text.

for example-

and there we go!

hello, anon!

(and i'd also recommend making the text bold so it's easier to see the colors <3)

[bambi-slxt]

welcome back to bambi teaches stuff

requested by @satvisfavetoodles and @bellasturn

so you wanna make a pinned intro post but you have no idea how and no idea what to put in it - i got u.

before we start, please not that you can only have ONE pinned post on your blog, so make it count. you can also go back and edit a post after you've made it.

an introduction post can have about a million things in it, but it doesn't have to - that depends on what your blog is about (or what you want it to be about).

for instance: i write fanfiction, so my intro post has a masterlist to my other works, as well as a taglist so people can be notified when i post.

but if you're an aesthetics blog, or you're just here for the vibes, then a good thing to start with would be the basics:

preferred name: mine's bambi! hey.

age: ten billion and four. (you may be anxious to post this, so if you don't want to put your exact age, you can simply indicate whether you're a minor or not)

pronouns: mine are she/they (if you'd like)

you can also go into what music you like, what's gonna be on your blog, and if there's anyone you want to Not Interact With your blog, you should highlight those under DNI (Do Not Interact).

this can be anything from racists/bigots to people who ship Hermione Granger and Jake from Adventure Time (they exist and they scare me a lil, but are not categorically evil people - your DNI's can be a little ridiculous).

adding on to that, you can specify rules for interacting with your blog as well.

for instance, on my blog i don't allow kink-shaming of any kind, and i block liberally and with glee. your rules can be anything, don't be afraid to enforce them.

you can also organize your blog by tags.

for instance, anything i post that answers something from my inbox, i tag it with #bambi's asks. if i'm just rambling, it'll be #bambi yaps or #bambi's rambles, and if i wanted to, i would explain those in my pinned post so people can navigate my blog. (i haven't because ya girl's lazy asf)

you can also locate every tutorial i've ever made by searching my blog for #bambi educates apparently

i'd like to clarify that i'm not the fount of knowledge for all things tumblr (shocking, i know), so this isn't everything you can put on your pinned post, just a little something to get you started.

now that we've made our post, how do we pin it?

that's easy - once you're happy with your post, once you've added your cute little pictures and your cute little text fonts, you click "Post Now". then, go up to the top right corner of your now-public post and tap/click your three lil dots. your drop down menu will appear, and then you tap "Pin Post".

*epic guitar riff*

go forth, pin your posts, and fuck responsibly.

[ourdokidokilife]

Make a Cove Chat in Char.AI in 30 Min or Less

PART 2

PART 3

Intro

This guide will help you make a personalized chatbot.ai of Cove in less than 30 minutes. You can see this as one of many possible methods to continue your story with him Post-Step 3 or Post-Step 4. Or you can just live a high school life with him, or even some crazy horror/fantasy AU if you want. The choices are endless now that you’re going to make a personalized chat instance for you to interact with Cove in.

I recommend viewing the ai “bot chats” as nothing more than a medium to interact with certain character ideas, rather than the bot chat being representative of the character. The boundaries you give these bot rooms (or don’t give them) determine the quality and depth of the interactions.

Instructions under the cut.

REASONS TO SET UP A PRIVATE CHAT

More consistency in chat memory

Filter out character.ai’s weird predatory or pushy message generation

Higher quality chat interactions personalized to your MC

More efficient to spend 30 minutes making a personalized private bot chat than to spend several hours/days trying to get the same quality out of a generalized public bot chat

Step 1 - Starting Creation

Go to character.ai app or website.

Log in or make an account.

Click “Create” > “Create A Character”.

NAME (what name the character will respond to): For the name, I suggest using a sort of ‘in-progress’ label like “Cove Test” or “Cove Egg”. You can rename it to “Cove Holden” once you’re finished setting up.

GREETING (generally establishes the starting scene/situation): The greeting also establishes some of the dialogue patterns that the chat will follow. Here is an example greeting (asterisks will italicize the text into an 'emote' format to indicate action outside of spoken dialogue):

*Cove sees {{user}} and his smile grows just a tiny bit wider than it originally was.* "Hey, {{user}}. It’s been a while." *He says cheerfully, his voice sounding like a mixture of friendliness and affection.* "What are you up to?" *He asks, taking a careful glance at them.* *He is back home in the apartment he shares with {{user}}, after returning from a recent research trip.*

You can copy and paste this greeting if you want, and change the last sentence into any situation or scene for your desired chat setting.

VISIBILITY (determines who can access the bot chat): I suggest setting this to "Private". There is no point in making this personalized bot chat public, since it will be specific to your MC only. You could still try using this template to make a public bot, but you would have to exclude a lot of the details in the advanced definitions.

AVATAR (profile pic used by the bot chat): Use any avatar you'd prefer to represent Cove. Some folks use the game cgs or screenshots, and some use their own art.

Step 2 - Edit Advanced Details (Super Important)

There will be two buttons at the bottom of the first creation page. I suggest clicking "Create and Chat" first, so that the personalized chat bot will immediately be saved to your account. Then you can continue editing it safely in case you accidentally navigate away from the page. If you click the "Edit Advanced" button without creating the chat first, it will not save the bot, so beware.

After creating the chat: - if on the mobile app, click on the top tab that has the chat bot's name. It will take you to another page with an option to "Edit Character", click this button to be taken to the Advanced Details page. - if on the desktop website, there will be three dots in the right corner. Click these and you will see a drop down menu of options. Select "View Character Details" to be taken to the Advanced Details page.

Scroll down to the "Short Description" section, which is right below the Greeting section.

SHORT DESCRIPTION (gives brief overview of the character): You can only fit a few descriptives here, such as a string of adjectives describing the character:

Introverted, loving, messy eater, softboi or Your best friend and a marine biologist.

You can use either format. The short description is more for helping you quickly identify what story you're going to be focused on for each individual character.

!!LONG DESCRIPTION!! (decides bot's behavior & strongest influences): This portion is extremely important-- this section is basically the "anchor" that will determine the focus of all the chat bot's conversations and their principal awareness of the situation in the chat. There is a limit to how many words you can use in this section, so keeping the determinations brief is extremely important. Here is a format you can copy-paste and personalize per your own tastes:

Character's name: Cove Holden Character's nature: introverted Character's passion: the sea Character's feelings for you: [feelings]1 Character's relationship to you: [relationship]2 Character's skin color: olive Character's eye color: aquamarine Character's hair: [length] sea-foam green hair [styling]3 Character's height: [height]4 Character's body: [physique]5 Character's job: [career] focused on [field]6 Character's home: [residence] with [residents]7

If you want SFW interactions only, you can put this line in as well: Character avoids any sexual acts if you want paced NSFW interactions, you can use this line: Character is attentive to your comfort

Format all the personable descriptors for the MC you intend to use in the chat. Try to keep descriptors short and brief. Here are some examples below (feel free to copy paste any):

Feelings Descriptor Examples: "friendly" or "love"

Relationship Descriptor Examples: "childhood best friend" "childhood best friend, boyfriend" "childhood best friend, fiance" "childhood best friend, husband"

Hair Descriptor Examples: "short sea-foam green hair in taper cut" "chin length sea-foam green hair in middle part" "long sea-foam green hair in ponytail"

Height Descriptor Examples: "6'0" or "183 cm" [Step 3 Cove] "6'3" or "191 cm" [Step 4 Cove]

Physique Descriptor Examples: "toned" or "slender"

Career Descriptor Examples: "student focused on sports" "student focused on academics" "young man living at his own pace" "marine biologist focused on conservation" "surfing instructor focused on remediation" "environmentalist focused on education" **

Residence Descriptor Examples: "a condo with you" (use if he lives with MC) "a house with his dad" "alone in an apartment"

CATEGORIES - Not applicable for private chat instances.

CHARACTER VOICE - Skippable. Use at your own choosing. (I personally don't.)

IMAGE GENERATION - Same as above– skippable and use at your own discretion.

After all this is done, next comes the chunkiest and most important section, right next to the Long Description, is the ADVANCED DEFINITIONS.

Click here for Part 2 on Advanced Definitions and resources you can easily copy-paste/modify for that section.

[batemanofficial]

how to remove the live tab (and other annoying marketing ploys) from the desktop tab menu using ublock origin

i'm not good at html, so there's probably an infinitely easier way to do this, but here's what i did if anyone finds it useful!

note: i'm using ublock origin and firefox, so if you're using a different browser or adblock program, your process may look slightly different, but the html stuff should be the same!

step 1: right-click on the tab you want to remove, and select "block element..." from the drop-down menu.

this will open a dialogue box on the lower-right corner of your screen, which looks like this:

[image id: a dialogue box for ublock origin. the top half of the box contains a white text field with black text, with a menu of buttons underneath: a grey button reading "preview," a blue one reading "create," a grey one reading "pick," and another grey button reading "quit." below this is a light-grey menu labelled "cosmetic filters," which contains several line html line items notated with hashtags. end id]

right now, there will probably be red boxes around both the live tab and other tabs on the side menu, like the home and inbox tabs and other things you probably want to keep.

[image id: the tumblr sidebar menu. the menu is dimmed, with a slightly darkened background and text. red borders exist around the home, explore, live, inbox, settings, get a domain, and go ad-free tabs. end id]

if you click "create" on the ublock window right now, this will remove all tabs that have that red box around them, so don't click "create" just yet.

step 2: select the "pick" tool from the ublock window, and click on the live tab.

[image id: the same ublock dialogue box from before. this time, the grey "pick" button has a red circle around it. end id]

step 3: once you've got the live tab selected, in the "cosmetic filters" menu, scroll until you find a line of text that contains the words "nth-of-type" and click that.

it'll be preceded by hashtags and will have a number in parentheses after the "nth-of-type" section. when you hover over this line of code in the menu, the live tab should be the only one with a red box around it. looks like this:

[image id: the "cosmetic filters" section of the ublock box. several items are listed, but one of them is highlighted in a slightly darker shade of grey. this highlighted section contains the words "nth-of-type(4)." end id]

[image id: the tumblr dashboard with the ublock box open. the cosmetic filter containing the "nth-of-type" string is highlighted, and the live tab in the sidebar is contained in a red box. no other tabs have red boxes this time. a draft of this post is visible in the background. end id]

step 4: click "create."

this should remove the live tab from the menu. if you do what i did the first time and click the text and not the actual button, there will still be an empty space where the tab used to be, which will link you to the live landing page. to remove that, follow steps 1-4 again, this time selecting the empty space where the live tab used to be (it'll still highlight like a button would when you're using the pick tool).

here is what selecting the text vs. the button looks like:

[image id: the "go ad-free" button on the tumblr sidebar menu. the text "go ad-free" is contained in a red box, but the sparkle icon beside it is not. end id]

[image id: the "go ad-free" button again. this time, both the text and the sparkle icon are contained within the red box; there is also a wider margin of space around the text. end id]

i did this for the live, explore, tumblrmart, domain, and ad-free tabs, and now my sidebar looks like this:

[image id: tumblr user batemanofficial's sidebar menu. the home, activity, messages, inbox, and account tabs are visible. the account drop-down menu is open, and batemanofficial's url and icon are visible at the bottom of the menu. end id]

like i said, there's probably an easier, more efficient way to do this, but this solution (if done with ublock) will stay in place even if you refresh the page.

anyway that's the tutorial, please lmk if anybody has any suggestions for improvement lol!

[anyataylorjoys]

Hi! I'm wondering if it's too much to ask by wondering if you could explain how to do gifs like this: /post/665885361316233216. Or if you know of some other tutorial or just things to think about while making it? Thank you!

Not at all, I’m happy to know someone appreciated my template! I'm sure there are other tutorials out there on how to create layouts like this but I haven’t seen any lately to link you to so I'll go ahead and show you my approach to getting this type of layout. This will be very detailed and image heavy to make it easy for those who might have never worked with putting gifs into templates before to follow.

This tutorial assumes you have:

just about any version of photoshop (I use CC23)

basic knowledge of giffing with this program

some experience with layer masks

If you want to actually learn how to make a template like this from scratch, keep reading. Otherwise you can just download the template I created here and skip to step 3, or download this anyway for a visual and follow along.

(STEP 1): HOW DO I GET STARTED?

Create a new blank document with the dimensions of the entire size of the canvas (file > new) and change the highlighted settings to match these (with your own choice of dimensions of course):

Before you do anything else, make sure your timeline is visible (window > timeline) and select “create video timeline” from the drop down.

(STEP 2): MAPPING IT OUT AND CREATING THE TEMPLATE

With your blank canvas is where you have to use a little imagination to create your layout to fill in the space and where you start is up to you.

I started at the top of the canvas in the left corner and decided my first gif was gonna be 268 x 340. Why these dimensions? 268 is tumblr’s standard width for (2) side-by-side gifs and I want the gutter alignment at the top of this canvas to be centered. The height of the block just felt right. As you drag the tool, photoshop will tell you what the dimensions are.

Now I have this:

Our second shape will also have a width of 268px to ensure the transparent space between them is perfectly centered. My second block ended up being 268 x 260.

Make sure there is a gutter of 4px between all of the squares you create. This is important because tumblr’s standard gutter size between gifs is 4px, and this means you need to subtract 4px from your squares on all sides that face each other.

The easiest method to make and align the squares without spending too much time on it is to click off the canvas in the corner and drag the shape inward. Then click on the shape you’ve just created and align it with its designated 90 degree corner of the canvas first. [Edit > free transform] the sides until they align correctly by holding shift + control while dragging. Zoom in to a microscopic level to make sure the gutter is right if you have to 📐🔬🔎��

If you’re not using weird shapes in your template, do the same thing with all the blocks until you get your desired outcome.

Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with this:

(STEP 2.1): THE ANGLE

In order to create a template like this, you will need to delete the corner of your shape. Create your rectangle like normal as you did with the others, but this one is going to overlay the layer on the top left.

To make sure everything will be even, I used the rectangle tool again to measure and with a new square (in yellow for visibility), I determined that this corner overlay is 75x75, so I fixed the alignment of the red rectangle to make it even.

(STEP 2.2): DELETING THE CORNER OUT OF THE SHAPE

Using the yellow square as your new guide, extend its edges to cover the gutter on the two sides while maintaining its 1x1 proportion.

Keyboard command + click on your yellow square layer and once the “ants” dance around the square, hide the layer so it’s invisible on the canvas.

Right click on the red rectangle layer and select “rasterize” from the drop down menu, then you can hit “delete” or “backspace” on your keyboard which will remove the selected portion only to reveal the gutter. command + D will make the 🐜s go away. Then the yellow square layer can be deleted.

Once this is complete, you can finish up your template by adding your small rectangle in the left bottom corner in the space that remains and VOILA! You have a template!

3. REPLACING THE SHAPES WITH GIFS USING LAYER MASKS ETC

When you make your gifs, remember that they will need to be in timeline form in order to drag them onto the template. You can resize them to match the dimensions of the shapes, or you could just drag your gif—whatever be the size—directly onto the canvas, and “free transform” them to fit inside each space.

Create a group for each shape and create a layer mask for each group, containing it’s designated shape. I’ve colorized this visual to make it make sense.

Now you can finally drag your gifs onto the template. The coloring can be added before or after, it doesn’t matter as long as you place your gifs and the colorings inside the groups with the layer masks to contain the effects of the color adjustments.

And the best thing about putting gifs in a template in timeline is you can move the groups containing the gifs from left to right to get your desired part of the clip.

Once you’re finished with this, hide the original shape layers, as they were just guides and we no longer need them, but also if you don’t do this, you may be able to see them on the sides rather than transparency once you upload to tumblr. And AT LAST you can convert everything into frames as you normally would and save.

It seems like a lot, but these are very satisfying to make. Feel free to drop me another ask if you have any questions regarding some detail I might have left out.

[derpycat02]

Hot Take

Okay so now that I've been on the website instead of the app for a few days I have things to say I think.

The app is better (for me) than the website hands down. Easy. No competition. And no, this is not just because I am used to the app version. I actually thought this out.

Things the website does better than the app (to satisfy you long term tumblees):

I can delete a poll from my post if I accidentally click it thinking it is the listing format option. I do this a lot because listing is different than font type in every document editor ever, and there is no way to remove polls from drafted posts on mobile that I have found. The website puts a big fat red X in the top corner of the poll. This is helpful

Bigger screen = less overwhelm. The information to screen ratio is smaller which is less overwhelming for my skrunkly little brain. Also, since I have the pride theme activated (which was a bitch to try and find) all the extra space is pink!

More customization options. I haven't actually played with this, but it seems to be the thing that most Tumblr users use to say the website is better than the app. I did notice there were more options for themes when I finally figured out how to do that, which was cool. (On mobile, I'm pretty sure there are just 4 themes: light mode, dark mode, tumblr classic, and pride. I could be wrong though)

No push notifications. I have notifs turned on on mobile for all of the polls I follow, so I get like over 30 notifications from Tumblr alone overnight. It's very stressful, but I put up with it because it keeps me from missing voting times and ensures that I can go through and like every post that comes out from accounts that I am invested in. I know liking does nothing algorithm wise. I just like showing support and likes are a nice, quick, easy way to do that. Anyway, without the push notifications, I'm pretty much confined to me my feed, which I've never HAD to scroll before. The way I am now consuming content has become (mostly) more relaxed and less stress inducing.

Text formatting. I like that it's a drop down menu. In the app, It's just a button, and you have to press it repeatedly to get the format you want (this is fonts and listing specific).

Things mobile does better that the website

Navigation. Oh my gosh the app is SO much easier to navigate than the website. It took me less time comparatively to figure out how the app worked than it did for me to figure out how to do most things on the website. The website has been around longer, and therefore has the opportunity to be more complicated. The whole point of mobile apps is to be a simple, accessible way to go about navigating whatever the app is for. It's just easier to use.

Typing in posts. The amount of times my laptop has just randomly stopped typing in the middle of the post is ridiculous. It tends to happen when the "draft saved" bubble pops up, which makes me think it may be a glitch with the website rather than my computer. My computer also does not have this problem literally anywhere else. Also, the "draft saved" bubble, while cute and reassuring, obstructs my vision just a bit. There is so much dead space to either side. Why is this bubble not off to a side instead of right in the middle of where I am typing? It was also difficult for me to find the text formatting option, but this is mostly because I was not used to it.

GIFs. I do lots of propaganda, and to save space on my device I use gifs instead of going on the internet and downloading pictures and finding video links. I'm not always very good with words, and find that images tend to be more convincing anyway. On the mobile app, when I search something in the GIF search bar, it stays there even after I've made a selection. Not having to re-type my search 10 times makes it a lot easier and less monotonous to look for propaganda and fill up a post. This is not the case on the website. As I learned after attempting "Kitbull" propaganda, you have to re-type your search each time you add a new GIF. That got annoying really fast, and I only wound up putting two GIFs when I would normally use all image spaces (10).

Push Notifications. But I thought you said the website not doing this made consuming content less stressful??? I know what I said, and yes, for the most part, it does. However there are a lot more areas where the lack of push notifs on the website make my Tumblr experience a lot more stressful. For one thing, I am missing out on ALL of those polls. I follow SO MANY polls, because I was able to keep up with all of them as long as I had push notifications. I have not been able to vote in many polls this last week because I would have to go through and search every single one of their usernames exactly correct to find their pages and vote in my regular fashion. I simply do not have the time, energy, or memory to be able to do this. I also do not get notified when I am sent a message. I learned recently that most Tumblr users don't use the "share" function on posts, (via) however my girlfriend and I use it all the time. Our feeds consist of different interests that we like sharing with one another, so we share posts and polls back and forth just for funsies. To show that we love each other. Etc. etc. The website does not notify me when I get these messages unless I am actively in the tab, so I don't know when she's sent me something. Same goes for any interaction with my account or on my posts. I cannot see if someone has made a comment or a silly reblog with funny tags unless I am in the app. You know what the website DOES show me? How many new posts have been made. This is CONSTATLY refreshing even while I am actively scrolling and not only shows up in the app but also in the tab information. This is why I have such a problem with this. I understand that computers in general just don't do push notifications, but usually with social media, you can see how many notifications you have by checking the tab above the search bar. There's usually a little number in parenthesis next to the title or name of the social media you are using. This is very helpful for me, since my computer doesn't always give a little sound when I get any kind of notification, so I can just look over and see what I've missed while I was queuing up Spotify or playing Minesweeper or Solitaire. With Tumblr, this number only factors in the number of posts that I haven't seen yet. This number stressed me out, has me constantly refreshing the page even before I am done scrolling, and is not actually helpful in any capacity.

Page Jumping. Both the website and the app are dogwater at not jumping around the page while you scroll. However, the app is slightly less so. Page jumps in the mobile app only happen when an ad loads in where it wasn't before. This is pretty consistent with how any webpage, crappy mobile game, or social media app works on a phone (on my phone at least). When I'm scrolling anything I have to be careful to wait until all ads have loaded before I try pressing a button or I'll accidentally hit something I'm not supposed to. On the website on my computer, Tumblr page jumps every time I reblog. EVERY. TIME. Reblogging is, like, the currency of the realm. It is how things are meant to be done. I don't have the energy for a page jump every time I try to reblog something. That's gross.

Screenshots. This is admittedly more of a device difference than a Tumblr format difference, but it is affecting how I interact with Tumblr, so I thought I should put it on here. If you actually follow me and try to keep up with what I post (which isn't much) you know about my Untitled Bots threads. Essentially when I see a bot follow me, and their name is either blank or "Untitled" I screenshot it, crop it to the word "Untitled" and add it to the thread with a silly quip or lament or goofy photo. However, to make sure I don't miss any, I don't block and report these bots until after I've gotten a screenshot of their profile. Because it is so difficult to take and edit screenshots on my laptop specifically, I have not updated this thread even after being able to access Tumblr via the website.

For these reasons, I have decided the app is better than the website. Thank you. Have a nice day.

[metaltea]

Sorry to bother you but I remember you making a tutorial on how to make your own ai with beta character ai? I can't seem to find it though. I'm I just imagining things?

You're not, I did make one, however...

Honestly?? I wouldn't even bother at this point. Character.ai has had so much drama with the devs being horrible human beings: most likely stealing/selling user data (you want to delete a bot off their website?? Too bad. You can't. Also they took a bunch of bots with high interaction counts and locked the creators out of editing, essentially stealing them from people), not listening to feedback whatsoever (actively making things much worse with every update), implementing a "nsfw" filter that blocks even the most sfw things like hugging or kissing (even with family/platonic characters), has a nasty habit of comparing anything romantic to children ("she looks at you like a daughter looks to her father" like ew what the actual fuck, and this happens literally all the fuckin time so you gotta ask how it made that association hmm), dumbing down the ai in favor of making it "safer" (now characters hardly ever act like their source material, often making up random shit), bots ignoring user input (often going on a tangent describing the environment and ignoring dialogue), bots being stupid in general (forgetting what you said literally 2-3 messages ago and giving horribly lackluster responses), devs shadowbanning people/deleting any posts respectfully calling out their shit to facilitate propaganda in their favor and make it seem like nothing's wrong, and so much more.

Drop it like a newborn giraffe.

Some other options: Pygmalion, which I'm still learning how to use and it ofc isn't going to be as advanced as Character.ai since it's a 6b model while the latter is like 100+b, meaning less data power so responses are less intelligent + slower, BUT it is free, it is open source, and you can get some pretty decent responses if you hold its hand a lot. There are some UIs you can use it through, like forks of TavernAI that give you the ability to use world info and get it to have a better memory, one for group chatting with different characters (tho I haven't tried that), a customized background, and so on. The devs are still working on a site but you can access it right now- I can make a smol tutorial for the basics of that if anyone wants it.

OpenAI is also an option, you can also use it through Tavern and it will give responses akin to if not much better than Character.ai- though you gotta pay. HOWEVER you can get a free trial with $5 to use... and there are ways of using it free after that, but I can't say it here cause if it's too widespread, it'll prolly get patched out, and we don't want that.

How to access Pygmalion - Go here and click this: (when it asks u for permission to access ur google acct, click yes)

It'll take a while to load, maybe like 5 mins or something,

Once you get to this, click the UI links (usually only one will work, use that)

Now, that will take u to the KoboldAI UI. Wanna use Tavern instead? (good choice, gives a lot more customization) Use this link.

Now scroll down till u get here to this drop down menu. Choose Pygmalion 6b or 6b Dev (to be quite honest I'm not sure what the difference is yet). Wait for that to load, and while you're waiting, go here to download the Tavern files:

boom (or some other fork)

Go here and click download ZIP.

Unzip and look for this:

Ignore everything else, just click this. (the file's safe, if windows gives you a warning, ignore it) Now you'll be here (I'm using a different fork so it may look different:)

click the 3 lil lines in the upper right corner to access settings and characters.

Once you've added/edited characters as you like (I suggest looking at the default ones if you're curious about how that works) you can come back over to the google drive and, if it's finished loading, you'll have two url links like before:

Paste one into the API key and click connect. I used the top one but the bottom might only work for you.

There ya go! A bit complicated, but that's a free substitute for character.ai.

If you instead wanna use OpenAi, (assuming you're either paying or using the free trial, or... something else ;), you'd go here on ur openai account page and go down here:

and create a secret key. Copy that and go into the UI of your choice... ima use TavernAI again. Go into settings, change your API to Openai, and paste that API key you just copied into the API link. Voila!

Here's a couple helpful links for further info: https://www.reddit.com/r/PygmalionAI/ (they have a discord, with some really helpful guides)

character creation/writing tips for Pyg

Soft prompts

General tips

I'm still a noob who knows jackshit about coding, so I can't offer much help, BUT I know the basics so ye. Hope this helps!

[seattlewa-hq]

An Introduction to the Beta Editor

Hello all! I’ve gotten some feedback that the tutorials on using the new Beta editor and xKit Rewritten has been confusing a few people, so I wanted to make my own! I’ll try to cover everything below, but if something isn’t clear or you need extra help, let me know please! This post is gonna be pretty long, but I sectioned it up so hopefully you can find what you need with ease.

Step 1. Switching to Beta

You very well may be able to skip this part, because all new blogs are automatically switched to the newer editor. But if you’re still using an older blog, don’t worry, it’s easy! There should be a big purple button in the corner, pretty hard to miss. Should look like this!

Go ahead and hit “Let’s go!” and, well... let’s go!

Step 2. Getting to Know Beta

The Beta editor is very, very different from what we’re all used to. But really, it’s kind of intuitive in a lot of ways. You have to know a lot less shortcuts. Whenever you highlight your text, you’ll see this little guy pop up:

Now, from left to right, here’s what we’re looking at: strikethrough, bold, italics, small text, link in text, and colored text. Most of your keyboard shortcuts should still work (I can’t speak for all computers, but the shortcut for small text no longer works for me with the Beta editor), but we also have handy-dandy buttons now, too! We also have the 'Regular' drop down menu, which opens this:

This one is pretty self explanatory, and it shows what the text will look like if you select that option. 

Step 3. Finer Details

I’m still personally getting used to a lot of the smaller details that come with the Beta editor, but here are some that I’ve learned! Hopefully I’ll be adding to this list when more troubleshooting comes into my realm of knowledge.

Auto-Readmores: For whatever reason, Tumblr has taken to cropping any posts over a certain length by itself? Annoying, but this is something you can toggle on/off in your Dashboard Settings!

Editing Tags: This isn’t something that needs to be fixed, but it was big news to me! Instead of having to delete your tag completely when you’ve made a typo, you can just edit your post and edit the tag! Handy!

Links on Gifs: This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just new, different, and weird. But if you dislike it, there is a way to stop it from happening! It’s just a manual task. When you copy and paste a gif into your reply, you’ll see three little images on it. We’re going to click on the circled one below.

That’ll open up a link box, with a link to your gif. Just backspace that, hit the ‘Done’ button, and boom! No more link at the bottom of your gif!

Step 4. xKit Rewritten

I know what a lot of people’s main concern is: cropping replies. This is how we get to that point. The first step is going to be to download the newest iteration of xKit. You do not have to uninstall your old one to do this, they coexist on purpose! New xKit and xKit Rewritten have different features, so I’ve found it best to have both and utilize all the features! 

xKit rewritten is a Chrome extension, and it can be found at this link! Just follow the instructions on that page to install it. Once it’s all good and installed, it’ll be found next to your other extensions, or by the URL bar on your browser window. Looks like this!

Now you have xKit Rewritten!

Step 5. Cropping Replies

Alright, this is where the money is. Just like with regular xKit, you have to toggle on the setting that allows you to cut replies down. Once you click on that purple X icon, you’ll see a drop down with lots of options. I’ve underlined the one we’re looking for right now, "Trim Reblogs."

Once you toggle that little switch on, you can go ahead and start replying. If you’re replying to a starter, then there is no need to worry about this feature. You have nothing to crop, so don’t worry! But if you’re replying to an active thread, here’s what you’re gonna do. Type out your reply, format it however you want, and then draft it. Then we’re gonna go into our drafts.

Here’s my thread with three tiers to it! The standard is two replies per post, and that’s what a lot of people like to stick to. So let’s make that happen! If you’ll notice at the bottom of that draft, there’s a scissor icon. I drew an arrow to it in the photo above. We’re gonna click on that.

And that icon brings this up! You’ll see it says “Select trail items to remove,” and it shows the trails separately. “Trails” are each individual reblog, and of course, we only want two of those, not three. This is really easy to fix! We’re just gonna select that top “trail,” aka the first reply in the thread, and hit the “Trim!” button.

And once we’ve done that, the first “trail” is gone! You just have the two more recent replies on the post, and you’re good to reblog it!

The one caveat of this is that you can no longer edit parts of other people’s replies, so you can’t format the posts to your heart’s content like we’re used to. A downside for sure, but so far, this isn’t something there’s a fix for. Hopefully in the future, xKit will figure that out for us!

Step 6. That’s All!

Once you have all that down, you’re a master of the Beta editor and a master of xKit Rewritten! Tumblr staff has mentioned phasing out the Legacy editor all together in the future, so it appears this will be our new reality. It is worth it to mention that the Beta editor is still, well, in beta, so it is subject to change. If it does and we get even more features or work-arounds, I’ll be sure to come back and edit this post! Until then, if you have any questions, please let me know! I am here to help!

xoxo, Kirby

[satocidal]

sorry this is random but how do you get the multicoloured text 😭 I know of a website that only lets you use 2 colours MAX🙄

Ok so. Since this is like the fourth ask about it 😭 I might as well make a tutorial? (caution: I'm very very very shit at explaining)

Right so you gotta begin by going to the tumblr website (it'll only work there) and then go to create a post—youll see a settings option in the top right corner, click on it and then you'll see the drop down menu

Choose html in the text editor option and then close it.

Now, people typically use sites for it for convenience, here s the one I use <3

This must be how the site looks and then, you'll find a couple of different ways for the gradient to come, and ps, choose the code for the website

Simply paste the code on the website, in the post we shifted to think and you can also preview it simultaneously

I prefer adding the gradients from the site and then continuing the rest of the editing from all because more convenient.

I think this should be all😭? Ye- im holing this is what you meant? Ye-

[ranger-kellyn]

One thing I haven't seen cross my dash is a "how to" tutorial for how to change your icon and header, and I mean. I've been here since 2011, so I'm well versed in this, but I have no clue how the website guides any new users. Maybe it's not nearly as intuitive as I think it is. Genuinely, no judgement here.

So have one I threw together while putting off an email. This is for DESKTOP. Maybe I'll make an app version as well, but I'm hoping that the app maybe guides you if you've just signed up on it.

First you go to the pencil icon in the top right corner of your dash.

It then gives you this drop down menu, and you want to hit Edit Appearance at the bottom.

From there, it takes you to this. You want to hit Edit appearance in the right corner of your blog. ( also recommend enabling custom theme, but that's a post for another day)

Once you've hit that, there's two pencils you can click. The one on the upper right, below Cancel and Save lets you edit the header.

Like this. You can play with the stretch header image toggle to see if it works better for whatever picture you choose. You can zoom in and reposition however you like.

The bottom pencil over your icon will bring up this. If you toggle Show avatar off, it just won't display your icon whenever someone clicks to preview your blog, it'll still be visible on the dash. You can change the shape to either circle or square. It's all personal preference.

Make sure you hit save and you're good!

I also recommend at least putting something in the header text. I obv have some Taylor Swift lyrics on the top, and then some very basic info about myself in the main body. You can put as much or as little as you like. You don't have to put your legal name. I know some people I follow have just a random quote or sentence there, and nothing else, and I personally don't think anything of it. But just put something to at least indicate you're a real person. Even something like "idk what i'm doing here". Yep. Sounds like the average tumblr user to me lmao (until the bots pick that up and well...if you have enough genuine posts on your blog you should still be safe)

And if I can give any other advice for newcomers: You're not here to be popular. You're not here for clout. You're here to be you. You don't have to give anyone you know IRL your url. Be free. Something something release your inhibitions, feel the rain on your skin and all that.

Also, get the XKit extension. It has a ton of handy features like the mass unliker, quick reblogs, some accessibility features, and my personal favorite: post blocker. (Goodbye color of the sky shitpost) Most of XKit, though, you'll have to play with on your own to find out what you do and don't like.

[pi-creates]

A Better Model Swapping Tutorial for The Walking Dead: The Definitive Series

As the title of this post says, I have had the pleasure to discuss modding [and more specifically model swaps] with some clever cookies recently and I have learned that the old method I was using to make model swaps and texture edits appear in-game is obsolete and there are much easier and simpler methods.

And for whoever is still lurking here, I figured it would be a disservice to not provide information on this easier method for others who stumble across this post (or the old tutorial I made).

For this method, you can use Telltale Explorer to open your archives and look at files, and optionally a Bulk Renaming program to speed up renaming files, and optionally the Telltale Script Editor to compile your file changes into an easy to install/uninstall mod file.

The basic process to making a model swap involves 3 steps, with a few extra steps if you want to go beyond:

Finding the files associated with the character we want to swap in

Renaming a character’s files in a manner that causes the game to load them instead of another character

Putting the renamed files back into the game

(optional) Tweaking the swap to have it fit better or correct errors

(optional) Building it into a mod file

In order to get a swap to work correctly, you need to understand a few basic file types that we’ll be dealing with:

d3dmesh : These are the meshes, in very simple words they are the 3D shapes that make up the objects and characters within the game

d3dtx : These are the textures for the meshes

skl : The skeleton of a character which is needed to make animations work correctly

ptable : The emotion table that determines which animations to load on a character’s face

anm : The animation information for all of a character’s movements

The trickiest part is finding the appropriate files amongst all of the game files, and then also renaming them in a manner that does create the end result we are looking for. To begin, let’s decide on what swap to do and figure out where to find the files we need.

===

**Added content for people want an example of a swap that is tailored more to the specific season you want to swap in**

Season 1 or Season 2 example - a swap where Ben overwrites Lilly Season 3 example - a swap where Mariana overwrites Gabe Season 4 example - a swap where Marlon overwrites Minerva Cross season example - a swap where McCarroll AJ overwrites Lee in Season 1

===

For this swap let’s try to take Vince from 400 days and turn him into our playable character in Season 1 Episode 1.

Before we start, we should make a folder somewhere on our computer and simply name it “Vince Files” – this is where we will place all the files we find associated with Vince for this swap and then rename them.

1. Finding the Files

To begin, we need to boot up the Telltale Explorer. In the upper left corner of the explorer window, you can select to open up any Telltale game archives. Either use the drop down menu to select The Walking Dead > The Definitive Series, or simply select the “open file” button at the top of the menu. In either case the “open” window will appear and you will have to navigate to the install directory of your game, and then into the “Archives” folder within it.

Since Vince appears in the 400 days episode of Season 1, all of his unique files can be found in the following three archives:

WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_anichore.ttarch2 – all of the anm files will be in here WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_data.ttarch2 – the ptables and skl files will be in here WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_txmesh.ttarch2 – the d3dmesh and d3dtx files will be in here

Open “WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_txmesh.ttarch2” to start looking through the files. In this ttarch2 we can find all of the meshes and textures in the 400 days episode. You can now type in “vince” in the search bar in the upper right and the Telltale Explorer will only show you files with that search term.

Clicking on any of the d3dtx files (shown with the paintbrush icon) will show you the flattened texture on the right panel. Now that we have less files to look at, click the “Save All Files”, then select “Save all visible files (raw dump)”. A window will pop up asking you where the explorer should save the files – direct the explorer to the “Vince Files” folder you made earlier and allow the explorer some time to save all the files.

If we now go to this folder and look through some of Vince’s files.

Right away we can delete the files that start with “obj” – these are objects and not related to our swap. We can also delete the files beginning with “ui” – these are UI elements that aren’t related to our swap. Here is what we should be left with:

Looking through what is left, we can see Vince has a few versions – most notably, we can see he has two meshes: sk54_vince.d3dmesh sk54_vinceCh6.d3dmesh The first file is Vince when he’s on the prison bus, whereas vinceCh6 refers to Vince at the group camp at the end of the 400 Days story. We need to decide which version of Vince we want for our swap – in this case, let’s choose Vince in the casual clothes seen at the end of 400 days. What we need to do now is remove all the files that don’t relate to the mesh we’re going to use. Once we remove everything, we should be left with something like this:

This is everything we’re going to need from the WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_txmesh.ttarch2, so next we need to go back to Telltale Explorer and open up “WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_data.ttarch2”.

We follow the same process as we did before in the txmesh archive. Type “vince” into the search bar, then “Save all visible files (raw dump)” and put it into the same folder where we previously dumped our files.

Of the files we just added to our folder of Vince Files, we can immediately delete all of the “prop” files and “style” files – if you sort the files by “type” in your folder, it should be easy to single out these files and remove them.

After we’ve removed the unnecessary files, we should be left with just these files from the data files:

Notice how we have two skl files – we only want to use the skl connected to the mesh we are using, so we can also remove the “sk54_vince.skl” from this folder.

This is everything we need from the  WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_data.ttarch2, so let’s move on to the final archive, “WDC_pc_WalkingDead106_anichore.ttarch2”.

Once again, it’s the same process as the other files – open the anichore archive in Telltale Explorer, type “vince” into the search bar, then “Save all visible files (raw dump)” into the Vince Files folder.

This is where we need to be the most discerning in which files need to be deleted or kept for our swap to work – but to significantly cut out a big chunk of the files at the start, we can remove ALL of the files with the “chore” file extension. None of those matter for swapping – we only want to deal with the “anm” files.

We can then also delete all the animations that begin with the prefixes “cam” and “obj”. We’re not trying to swap any camera movements or object movements, so they’re all unnecessary to keep around.

From here we essentially want to delete anything based on specific moments in the game, but keep animations related Vince’s emotions, facial/head movements, and phonemes.

This means we can delete all the anm files that start with ��sk54_action” or “sk54_vince_sk54_action” – those are animations related to specific actions in the story that aren’t going to pop up during our swap, so they’re absolutely not needed.

We can also safely delete all the files beginning with “sk54_bennett”, “sk54_dan” and “sk54_justin”. These are the animations of other characters interacting with Vince – so they are not needed.

Now that we’ve removed most of the unnecessary files, we need to more carefully look at the file names and ask ourselves “is this an animation that could happen in my swap?” and if the answer is no, then we delete it. Also, we need to think about if the way an animation plays out will overwrite something and make it appear wrong. In our case, the game starts with Lee in handcuffs in the back of the police car – and we have animations of Vince in the police bus with handcuffs on. We specifically don’t want these files to be in our swap because the way Vince moves about in a bus will not be the same way Lee moves around in the car, using Vince’s files are likely to make scenes at the start of the game appear buggy.

After culling all the files I thought were unnecessary, I have been left with:

Now our Vince Files folder has everything we need to start renaming them.

2. Renaming

*NOV/2023 Section edited - reworded this part to hopefully fix some common errors For people new to model swapping, it is recommended you try to manually rename files until you are more familiar with what needs to be renamed.

In the end of this section I cover how to shortcut the renaming using a Bulk Renaming program - this is only recommend for people who have successfully created a swap before.

First, before we try to rename anything, it is important that we know the naming conventions of our “target” character we are overwriting. Using Telltale Explorer, try opening up the archives for the intended episode your swap takes place in, then search the name of the character you want to overwrite.

In this case, since we are going to overwrite Lee with Vince, I can open up either the episode 1 archives, or the ProjectSeason1 archives to get a better idea of what our renamed files should look like:

(not all information is shown in this screenshot - this is purely for demonstration purposes)

If this is your first time doing a swap, you may want to regularly come back to look at these files to make sure you rename things correctly in our exported folders. Our priority in this step is to rename our meshes, the character’s skeleton, their ptable files, and some of their animation files so they load instead of our target.

Most files are named something like this:

sk(xx)_(character name)(file information) (character name)_(file information)

And for some characters with alternative appearances depending on the episode:

sk(xx)_(character name)(identifier)(file information) (character name)(identifier)_(file information)

What we need to do ensure is that our swap has the correct number following instances of “sk”, the correct “character name”, and to make sure we use an “identifier” if necessary.

For this particular swap, both Vince and Lee use “sk54”, so we don’t need to make changes in that area for our files. 

We want to rename our extracted meshes to overwrite Lee’s meshes in the archives, like so:

sk54_vinceCh6.d3dmesh    >    sk54_lee.d3dmesh

But looking at the archives we can see that Lee has more than one mesh that he uses in episode 1, and this is a problem for our swap if we stop here. If we don’t overwrite ALL of the mesh files that Lee would use for the duration of our swap, the game will still load those other meshes as normal while only part of our swap takes place.

To fix this, we have to take our one d3dmesh and copy+paste it until we have enough meshes in our Vince Files folder so we can overwrite all of the Lee meshes that will appear in the duration of our swap.

Ergo, we end up creating something like this:

sk54_vinceCh6.d3dmesh >    sk54_lee.d3dmesh                                           >     sk54_lee_armL.d3dmesh                                           >     sk54_lee_armR.d3dmesh                                           >     sk54_lee_body.d3dmesh                                           >     sk54_lee_bodyStomachGutted.d3dmesh                                           >     sk54_lee_head.d3dmesh                                           >     sk54_lee_legs.d3dmesh

Alternatively, you could create a 0kb “fake” d3dmesh to overwrite superfluous mesh slots. 

All you have to do is make a text document (or empty file, it doesn’t really matter) then rename it to whatever we want, followed by changing the file extension to “.d3dmesh”. It’s likely you’ll get a popup asking if you want to change the file extension – click yes, and tadah! You have a 0kb mesh file.

You can do this with any files you want to not load in your game. It effectively makes your game decide to load nothing instead of what it should load in the normal situation.

We follow the same naming convention with our .skl file and rename like this:

sk54_vinceCh6.skl >   sk54_lee.skl

And again for all of the ptables, such as:

sk54_vinceFearC.ptable >   sk54_leeFearC.ptable

For the ptables, Lee clearly has far more files than we have extracted for Vince, and Vince may also have some ptables with emotion names that don’t overlap cleanly with how Lee’s are named. 

If this is your first attempt at doing a swap and you don’t mind your character not always lip-syncing or emoting correctly so long as they visually look correct - you can simply rename what we have and move on. 

However, if you want to tweak this and improve it, I go into more detail later in this tutorial on how to improve the facial animations and emoting of our swap.

We can also rename our some of our .anm files here if there is a clear alternative for it to overwrite. In season 1, this will primarily mean doing things such as this:

sk54_idle_vinceFearC.anm >   sk54_idle_leeFearC.anm

HOWEVER - we do NOT want to rename any of the phoneme files.

AND we do NOT want to rename any of our texture files.

We need those files unaltered if we want a “normal” looking swap. Renaming the phonemes is unnecessary, and renaming the textures will cause the meshes to load the wrong texture.

This should be all the basic renaming you need to do.

But if you are more confident in renaming and skipped to find the shortcut method...

Here is the point where if you have a Bulk Renaming program, it can make your life a lot easier – otherwise, you’re going to have to rename files manually. For those people who use the link I provided to the Bulk Renaming Utility, if the amount of buttons and input areas seems a little bit daunting, we only really are interested in these bits (I have already renamed my files in this screenshot):

For convenience's sake, I press that heading on the right to sort the contents of the folder by file type.

For this particular swap, both Vince and Lee use “sk54”, so we don’t need to make changes in that area for our files. And while Lee does have identifiers in future episodes, in episode 1 he does not. Therefore, we can simply type into that little replace window on the Bulk Renaming Utility to replace instances of the word “vince” with the word “lee”.

Now we need to highlight the correct files in our folder and hit the Rename button in the bottom right when we’ve highlighted everything. We can highlight the files by simply clicking on the file in the upper window, and holding Shift or Ctrl while clicking on other files we want to add to our selection.

As for what files are the correct files to rename… we want to rename everything in this folder EXCEPT for the phoneme anm files, and the d3dtx files. We still need these files for later, but we need them in their unaltered form.

I will repeat DO NOT RENAME the files with the .d3dtx file extension - it will cause the models to load the wrong texture. Only rename these files if that is your intention.

After you’ve renamed all of those files, we still have some more fiddly things to deal with inside that folder, but we can stop using the Bulk Renaming Utility now, so feel free to close it.

Remember how we were using the d3dmesh and skl named “sk54_vinceCh6”? We need to open our Vince files folder and check that those files are renamed in a manner that they will overwrite Lee’s files in the swap we’re making. And because I used the Renaming Utility, they are currently named like this:

sk54_leeCh6.d3dmesh sk54_leeCh6.skl

This won’t work in our swap because Lee’s d3dmesh and skl files in season 1 look like this:

So if we want our swap to actually appear instead of Lee, we need to name the files in our folder in the same way so that Lee’s files get overwritten. This means that for episode 1 we want to  change the “sk54_leeCh6.skl” file into “sk54_lee.skl”

3. Putting the files into the game

So this is the main reason I remade this tutorial, because what was once a very hard and frustrating part of this process that required you to make backups and ttarch2 archives actually has some very simple other methods to achieve.

Here is the easiest method…

All those files in your Vince Files folder (both the renamed and unaltered), select all of them inside that folder, right click and select copy. Now navigate to your game’s directory (the location where the game was installed) and open the “Archives” directory inside there. Paste your copied files here.

That’s it.

If you boot up your game now, you should be able to see if your swap was successful. You can check in the character viewer, or if you go into the season 1 menu, you should clearly see Vince has replaced Lee on the episode 1 slide.

But if you play for a little bit, you might notice some… oddities with the lip syncing and facial animations. Or perhaps you simply look at Vince’s clothes and recall a different texture being in the archives when you were using the Telltale Explorer and would rather see Vince wearing that.

Or you’re happy with the basic swap as it – if that’s the case, you can carry on and enjoy it as is – but if you want to make changes to your swap and improve the animation situation, then you can carry on to the next section.

4. Tweaking the details (optional)

How to switch textures:

You might have noticed that Vince has two body textures related to his sk54_vinceCh6.d3dmesh.

One is “sk54_vinceCh6_body.d3dtx”:

And the other is “sk54_vinceCh6_bodyALT.d3dtx”:

If we want the lower option to appear in our swap instead, we can simply delete the other texture from our folder of copied-over files, and rename “sk54_vinceCh6_bodyALT.d3dtx” into “sk54_vinceCh6_body.d3dtx”. Using the Telltale Explorer, you can find the single file you want and select to save it as a “raw” file to use without doing a bulk dump of everything.

Or, we can get creative and see what happens. Looking through other files using the Telltale Explorer, I stumbled on one of Russel’s textures that I thought might be an interesting alternative:

This texture is called “sk54_russellCh6_body.d3dtx”, and you’ll notice how the textures have a mostly similar layout with the exception of the shoes. If we decided to rename this file and it’s associated detail, normal map, and spec d3dtx files, we could overwrite the textures that would normally load on Vince’s mesh.

Basically, by replacing Vince’s files like this:

We can create changes like this:

It isn’t a perfect match, we can clearly see the texture seams on the inside of the pants and how the texture doesn’t line up on the shoes – but this is the potential method to apply texture changes between meshes.

How to improve the facial animations:

An issue with the swap we have performed thus far is that Vince’s face only emotes and lip syncs sometimes. This is because Vince only has a few unique ptable files and animations that we could find in the 400 Days archives, thus most of Lee’s ptables and animations have been left unaltered and are not compatible with Vince’s character – therefore his face defaults to a blank stare.

What Vince uses for the rest of his animations and ptables are rehashed from Glenn. Knowing this, what we need to do is find Glenn’s files and use them to fill in the blanks.

In order to find these we’re going to have to go back to the Telltale Explorer and open up the following archives: “WDC_pc_ProjectSeason1_anichore.ttarch2” and “WDC_pc_ProjectSeason1_data.ttarch2”.

Before we start getting our files, it may be prudent to make a separate folder called “Glenn Files” to keep these ones apart from the others for now.

Once again, use the search function to separate out and dump all the files featuring the name “glenn”.

There will be over 500 files for us to look through now, but there are some big cuts we can make to that number immediately by deleting:

The chore files The skl file The style files The prop file

After removing those, we should be left with only the anm files and ptable files. We will need to keep all of those ptables – however, we only want some of the animations. Of the animations, the files we definitely want to keep will start like this:

glenn_eyes glenn_face glenn_headGesture glenn_phoneme sk54_idle_glenn(an emotion name)

Everything else can be deleted – you could experiment and try using some of the other animations at a later time, but for the pure basics we have all that we need. And that cuts out about half of files we dumped initially. But now we have to go and rename some of these…

We want to replace the word “glenn” with “lee” in all instances except for with the phonemes. We don’t need to rename those, we just need to make sure they exist in the archives so the ptables can draw the animations from them.

Once everything has been appropriately renamed in the Glenn Files folder, copy and paste the contents into the Vince Files folder we were using earlier. There will be a few files that overlap with the files we previously renamed DO NOT overwrite your old files. This is important because we want Vince’s unique files to take priority over the versions that Glenn uses.

Now if we copy the contents of the Vince Files folder back into our game’s Archive directory, our Vince swap will be much more animated in his facial movements compared to before. I will also note that it isn’t necessary to copy the glenn_phoneme files into the Archive directory for this swap to work since those phoneme are already accessible in the swap we are doing – in other words, because Glenn and all of his files already exist in episode 1, we don’t need to make more copies in the archive. If you were however doing a swap to another episode or season where those files wouldn’t normally be located – then you would also need to copy the phonemes over.

Even with what we have done now, things might not be perfect all the time – if you believe you can improve further, it is up to you to experiment and look for ways to overwrite more of the incompatible animations and ptables with compatible ones.

5. Turning your swap into a mod file (optional)

If you don’t like having all of those loose files inside your Archives directory, you can go a step further and build a mod file that consists of a few lua files. This makes your swap more easily “stored” if you wish to keep backups, and also makes it easier to apply and disable your swap.

In order to create the mod file, we are going to need to use the Telltale Script Editor. I promise you, as someone who doesn’t know diddly squat about programming and scripting – you’ll be fine, it’s not difficult to use.

Run the telltale-script-editor.exe and press the big button that says “New Project”. Fill in the window that pops up (there’s no need to mess with the priority setting, just leave it as default) and then set the file location where you want your mod to be created. For convenience, I have used that Vince Files folder we were using before as the Project location.

Before we carry on using the Script Editor, lets go back and open up the Vince Files folder we just selected as our project location.

You will see a new folder inside with whatever name you decided to give your mod. In my case, it says MCVince so I will remember that this mod swaps the Main Character into Vince.

If you open up that folder, there will be a file inside, “(project name).tseproj”. Whatever gets placed inside this folder now will show up in the Script Editor window if you right click on your mods name in the left window and select “Refresh”.

So before we move on, let’s make a new folder beside that tseproj file. Call it whatever you want – I have simply called it “Model Swap”.

Now copy all of those files within the Vince Files folder (except for the project folder, of course) and paste them into the newly made folder (“Model Swap”).

Go back to the Script Editor and right click on your project name and hit “Refresh”. Now you should be able to see your new folder if you click on your project and expand it. Expanding the  new folder will also show us all of the files we have just put into it:

Now we need to click on the green hammer icon in the top, middle – this will build our mod files. Give the Script Editor some time, and then when it says it has completed building, you can close the program – we don’t need to use it anymore.

And now if we go back to the folder with our mod in it, there will be a new folder inside called “Builds”. Open up that folder and there will be a zipped build archive.

If you unzip this file you will see an lua file, a ttarch2 file, and a json file. This is your mod – you can either use a mod launcher to enable and disable this mod from now on, or simply copy these three files into your Archives directory. To remove your mod later, you simply remove the files.

Simple!

[yuujispinkhair]

Hi Winter, I wanted to ask you advice, I was wondering on how you post fics here and also a masterlist as well since Tumblr is all new to me and I hope you have a wonderful day/night! - ☀️💖👑

Heyyy Sunshine :) Ok I hope I will think of everything that is important for fic-posting here! Here is a guide that hopefully makes sense:

First of all, to make a new post click on the pencil on the upper right of your screen, and then you get several options, for what type of post you want to create. For fics, choose "text".

Now you can start writing or pasting your story into that post. When you press return on your keyboard, you can see a small menu with several things you can add to your post: "pictures" "gifs" "read more" etc. Those will be important later on!

In the bottom right corner, you have the option to save your post as a draft before publishing it. This way, you don't have to get the whole post ready in one go.

When posting a fic here, I think it's best to write a short overview at the top of your post, which includes:

A short summary

Pairing (please say here whether the reader is female or male or gender-neutral)

Word count

Warnings (for example, 18+, smut, and what type of sexual acts are mentioned. Most importantly, mention everything that could be triggering to someone, for example, blood, pregnancy, dub-con, etc.)

Always state that all characters are of age and that minors should not interact with your story!!!

When posting anything longer than a few hundred words, make sure to use the "read more" function so the post doesn't take up too much space on the dashboard. It can be annoying when you have to scroll through several thousand words :) Go to the area in your post where you want to make the cut and press return on your keyboard to create a linebreak. Now you see the menu again that lets you add pictures etc. Choose the " add a read more" option. To add a read more on mobile, you have to type ":readmore:" without the "".

When posting your story, use all the relevant tags. This is very important for your fics to get seen. When you write a Sukuna story for example, use tags like sukuna x reader, sukuna smut, sukuna fluff, etc. This way, your post will show up when people search the tags, and they can see your story and read it. Without the tags, your story will not reach a lot of people.

Don't use the community labels! Those are the drop-down thing next to the "post" button, where you can choose who can see your post. Those labels are there to say your content is mature content (sex or violence or drugs). But if you use those labels, Tumblr will hide your story. The default setting for new accounts is that all content with a community label is hidden from them. And a lot of people don't know about that and, therefore, never turn it off. So, just leave the setting at "everyone".

Always put an age indicator on your blog. In your bio or in your pinned post. A lot of people on Tumblr block you if you don't have an indicator that you are an adult. Write your actual age, or use an age range like "in my 20's".

If you want, you can add a pretty banner to your story. You can make one in different graphic programs/apps. Personally, I use Photoshop and Photopea for all my graphics. Make sure to never use fanart in that banner, though. You can use official pictures from different manga/anime, or if you like to use a certain aesthetic, look for free-to-use pictures on sites like Freepik, for example.

If you want to add dividers in your post, you can either make them yourself too or search in the tags for dividers you like (you may have to give credit to the person who posted them if they say so).

Concerning your Masterpost: First, I recommend making an introduction post for your blog. You can pin that post so it will always stay on top and be the first thing people see when going to your blog. (After publishing the post, go on the three little dots in the right corner and pick that you want to pin it). There you can say something about yourself, the characters, and the fandoms you write for and add some rules if you like. In this post, you can add links to a Masterpost so people can easily access all your writing.

Make a separate post which will be your Masterpost. List all your stories and add links to them. To add a link, just highlight the section of the text where you want to add a link, and then you will see several options to choose from. Pick "inline link" and paste the web address of the story.

Now you have a Masterpost, and you can add a link to that post in your pinned post.

I hope this made sense and that I thought of all the important things! If you have more questions or need help doing anything, just hit me up again! <3<3

[delivermytuneo6]

How to Add Songs in Spotify and Remove the Promote Button on Instagram

In today’s digital age, music streaming and social media are integral parts of our daily lives. Spotify is the go-to platform for music lovers, while Instagram serves as a creative hub for sharing photos, stories, and updates. However, managing these platforms effectively can sometimes be challenging. This article provides quick solutions to two common issues: how to add songs in Spotify and how to remove the promote button on Instagram. Let’s dive in!

Part 1: How to Add Songs in Spotify

Spotify makes it easy to customize your listening experience by adding songs to your playlists. Whether you’re creating a playlist for a workout, a road trip, or simply curating your favorite tracks, here’s how you can do it:

Search for Your Song:

Open the Spotify app on your device.

Use the search bar at the top to type in the name of the song, artist, or album you want to add.

Select the Song:

Once you find the desired track, click on it to open the song’s details.

Add to Playlist:

Click on the three-dot menu (•••) beside the song title.

From the drop-down menu, select “Add to Playlist.”

Choose an existing playlist or create a new one by selecting “New Playlist.”

Sync Across Devices:

If you’re using multiple devices, make sure your playlists are synced. Log into the same account on all devices to access your updated playlists.

Adding songs to Spotify playlists not only personalizes your listening experience but also makes it easier to organize tracks based on mood, genre, or occasion.

Part 2: How to Remove the Promote Button on Instagram

The “Promote” button on Instagram is a feature designed for business accounts to boost posts for better visibility. However, if you’re not looking to promote your content, the button might feel unnecessary or clutter your interface. Here’s how to remove the promote button on Instagram:

Switch to a Personal Account:

Instagram’s Promote button appears only on business or creator accounts. Switching back to a personal account will remove it.

Go to your profile and click on the menu icon (☰) in the top-right corner.

Navigate to “Settings” > “Account.”

Scroll down and select “Switch to Personal Account.” Confirm the change.

Disable Ad Features:

If you prefer to keep your business account but want to minimize promotional features, avoid engaging with the Promote button. Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t provide an option to hide it completely in a business account.

Customize Your Account Type:

For users who require some business tools but don’t actively use promotions, consider switching to a creator account. It offers a balance between personal and business features while keeping the interface less cluttered.

Feedback to Instagram:

If the Promote button is a significant inconvenience, provide feedback to Instagram through the “Help” section in settings. The platform often updates its features based on user input.

Why These Fixes Matter

Spotify and Instagram are platforms that encourage personalization and creativity. Knowing how to add songs in Spotify lets you build soundtracks that resonate with your personality, while understanding how to remove the promote button on Instagram ensures that your social media experience remains streamlined and focused on your goals.

Taking control of these features not only saves time but also enhances your overall user experience. Whether you're curating the perfect playlist or decluttering your Instagram interface, these quick fixes put you back in charge.