#god i hate the copy and paste formatting on mobile.

[serenofroses]

Renata Vitali, aka Darth Jadis: [47/?]

sw:tor Nevrakis legacy.

she/her and they/them pronouns only. was formerly Jadus but recent developments made me separate Jadis from actual Jadus.

[gh0stfellow]

RSS for Artists and the People Who Follow Them

RSS is the best thing for artists that you didn't know still existed. Tired of trying to figure out what new thing you have to do this week to get your posts seen? Tired of keeping up with 8 different websites to follow all the artists you like? Do you hate Musk/Zuckerberg, the general social media experience for artists, endless scrolling, or fractured communities? Use RSS! It's a super simple and comfortable way to experience social media.

Keep reading below for the full how-to!

What is RSS and why should I care?

RSS is a standardized format at a URL that computers can read to monitor updates to a website. When a post gets made, the RSS feed gets updated containing the post's information. An RSS reader is the app you use to view these RSS feeds and subscribe to them. It displays updates to the RSS feed similar to a normal social media dashboard.

There are many more specifics we could get into, but the technical details aren't really what matter here: the main point is that you can use an RSS reader to follow all your favorite people from almost any site and never miss an update, all while being able to view the content at your own pace.

Through simple steps outlined further down, you can follow twitter, instagram, deviant art, youtube, and tumblr accounts, subreddits, personal websites, newsletters, and more! The cool thing is, unlike your twitter or instagram feed, the RSS reader has powerful tools to display the posts exactly to your liking with filters, sorting, AND posts that won't disapear until you mark them as read, so you can kiss FOMO goodbye. Of course, this does mean I don't necessarily recommend you use RSS for your general meme accounts where an endless feed is somewhat ideal, it's much better suited for following creators or others you want to keep up to date on.

I use Inoreader as my RSS reader because it's free (though you can pay for more features), has a good mobile app as well as a browser version, and a good UI that is comfortable for post viewing.

Benefits as a viewer

No algorithms (but you can set filters)

Posts stay until you see them, so you don't have to be online 24/7 to see art you followed for

You can follow people on any* site and see it all in one place

No logging into multiple accounts or checking websites for updates

No ads, sponsored posts - nothing you don't want to see

Benefits as an artist

No algorithms! Format posts any way you like without worrying about getting nerfed

Freedom to post where ever you want

If RSS became standard, you wouldn't have to worry about posting on every social media in existance; anybody can follow you easily, no matter where you are

You'll be able to reach your audience no matter the whims of social media changes

Like having a newsletter without any extra work

How to subscribe to social media feeds through RSS

Here's a quick run down of how subscribing to an RSS feed generally works:

A website exists that has RSS

You type website.com/rss/ into your RSS reader and it sees an active feed

You hit subscribe

Peace on earth is achieved

Of course, sometimes it's not that simple and a website's feed is at a different URL. There might be a little RSS button on the website you can copy the link from, or readers like Inoreader can be given the basic URL and it'll try to find if any RSS feed is attached to it.

In the past, most socials had RSS built in, but this has slowly been phased out in favor of notifications/algorithms. So unfortunately, it's not as simple as it used to be anymore. Fortunately, however, websites like rssbox or RSS-Bridge can automatically turn twitter and other social media profiles into an RSS feed.

Before we get to that, however, there is some great news: some sites, such as tumblr and DeviantArt, still have RSS built in to each profile!

Tumblr feeds are at: https://blogname.tumblr.com/rss (god bless tumblr)

DeviantArt feeds: https://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?type=deviation&q=by%3Adeviantname+sort%3Atime+meta%3Aall (as usual, DA likes to over complicate things)

Enter the user name of the person you want to follow in the URL where indicated, remove the asterisks, pop it into your RSS reader and you're good to go.

Youtube channels can also be followed by pasting the channel URL into your reader, where it'll grab the feed for you to follow automatically.

*Note: sometimes, there appears to be small discrepancies between someone's tumbr.com/username url and username.tumblr.com url, and you must use the second for the rss feed link even though clicking on their profile name usually send you to the first link version. If you're having trouble, I recommend going to the user's archive on tumblr and then replacing the word "archive" with "rss" in the URL you're at. This way you'll know your formatting is right.

So what about twitter and other bastard sites? That's where our friends on github who make open source projects come in. As mentioned above, rssbox and RSS-Bridge are both great options. You can host them on your own server, if you're into that kind of thing, to ensure you never lose service and your feeds might get updated faster, but both have free to use websites that make it as easy as:

Copy the profile URL of the person you want to follow

Locate the corresponding social media section on the rssbox/rss-bridge webpage and paste the URL in

Adjust any settings you want

Copy the URL it gives you and subscribe to it in your RSS reader

*Note: Many RSS readers mention having twitter and other social support (usually with a paid subscription), but I've yet to see one that doesn't cap you at like, 20 accounts. This is a ridiculously small number. That said, Feedbro is a reader that is available as a browser extension only and DOES offer real, free, endless social media to RSS feed conversion. Personally, I hate its UI as well as the way it automatically marks things as read, but it's up to you and what works best for you. I probably just missed a reader when I was looking around, so if this matters to you do your research on what reader you use.

Another feed source of note is newsletters. Again, many readers will do this automatically for a price, but I enjoy the website Kill the Newsletter that'll do this for free. You can type in what you want to call the newsletter feed, click generate, and then sign up for the newsletter with the email address it creates for you. You'll then copy the second URL on the page (the one that ends in .xml) and this is what you'll plug into your RSS reader. Done! This is helpful for cleaning out your inbox of emails that you do want to see, but aren't important, and would otherwise end up cluttering up your inbox and burying time sensitive items.

Most websites, RSS feed or not, can have an RSS feed created for them if you're okay with it being a bit hacky. So I highly recommend doing some googling if you're interested in something I haven't mentioned here. You can also sometimes find RSS feeds for a website (if they aren't up front about it) by Inspecting the page and looking in the html head element for a .xtml or rss link. I'm passionate about this, so feel free to send me an ask if you have questions! (but also try to figure it out for yourself first)

How to get your own RSS feed

If you're on any kind of social, someone can follow an RSS feed of your art using the steps outlined above. However, I highly recommend you start posting your work somewhere with RSS built in! You don't have to do any extra work as your RSS feed is automatically made/updated on websites like tumblr and deviant art that still support RSS. I believe cohost might also be adding RSS support soon as well. I recommend following your own RSS feed so you know what is getting sent out.

If you want a space to truly call your own you can easily make a tiny website or blog. There are a lot of options for this, but if you're looking for simplicity I recommend bearblog.dev! Just make an account and start posting and your RSS feed is automatically made at: https://yourblog.bearblog.dev/feed/

Wordpress and Neocities also have built in RSS feeds, and likely a lot of other platforms that advertise blogging.

Now you have an RSS feed! And no worries about engagement from followers - it's easy to click the post link in your reader to a post, comment/like it, and then hop back into your RSS reader. It's made for that, even. Remeber to advertise your RSS feed; I hope they become the norm again, but until that happens you'll probably have to let people know it exists.

Closing Remarks

Listen, I'm realistic about this. I don't think I'm going to make this post and then RSS will return in full force to the internet like wolves being introduced back into Yellowstone. However, I spent years being dissatisfied with how I was forced to engage with artists on social media - the endless scrolling, feeling like "if I don't look at the next post I'll never see this piece of art again", the usual horrors of the internet we've fallen into - and if I can introduce a real solution to that for just one person I'll be happy.

I was born in the 90s and so can remember personal sites and forums, but never learned what RSS was and thought it was only something for power user programmers or stuffy business men. I have a feeling a lot of people have the same misconception, and it pains me to think of people out there that could benefit so much from this if only they knew of it properly. If you have ADHD, this is a game changer, I assure you.

I wish someone would've told me about this years ago. RSS is the answer to a lot of problems artists have. It's been there all along, it just hasn't been properly introduced to the wider community.

So I might not have much reach, but I feel so passionate about this; for the people this could help and the community we could create if we wiggled out from under what corporations have turned the internet into.

And oh, people have tried to fix this, sans RSS. I've watched many art websites come and go claiming to be the one to fix everything, but they usually fail because they divide the community and don't gain traction quickly enough. That, and non-artist support is extremely valuable and usually alienated in these attempts. RSS, on the other hand, is everywhere! Anybody can use it, anybody can follow it, and you aren't restricted to just one thing.

I say RSS is the solution because it's not just RSS. It's a tool that allows you to have the flexibility to make whatever solutions you need and be where ever you need to be on the internet.

RSS used to be everywhere, it used to be advertised - but of course, RSS feeds don't display ads, so it's only natural their head was on the chopping block. So my advice is such: pressure websites to add RSS back in! Make a tiny blog or website! Follow some feeds! Help reclaim the internet and regain control over the content you want to see. You don't have to be stuck in one spot, forced to use platforms you don't like, to see what you want and have your work be seen. Companies want us to consume more and more of what we don't want to see, to make us want to scroll endlessly into a stupor, and they'll do everything in their power to make us think we want it too.

So I dunno, follow some RSS feeds. Could be fun.

[zestyquetzalcoatl]

Luck is petty.

Like everything else about his luck, Gladstone hates this and loves it in equal turns, often both at once.

It’s pettiness means he always knows that people’s minds are their own (or at least not influenced by him). Once someone has decided he is insufferable and deserving of only a kick in the pants, it cannot make them give him things or put up with him anyway (ignoring the odd encounters he’s had with a chicken in a bright pink cape.*1 He’s pretty certain something entirely different then luck was at play there, though he has no idea what), which is why he mostly gets given free stuff by strangers instead of people who have met him before. It can influence the physical world, and that alone.

He loves this about it because it means he can exert some level of control over it, want and hate and whittle down its options until it’s forced to give him what he actually wants. He loves it because he is terrified of what it could do if it wasn’t petty. How far it could go, how much it could effect, how badly it would twist the world around it, while he would have no control or hope of containing it.

He hates it because petty luck is petty. It cares about riches, wining bets, getting free things, and curtailing talent and hard work. It can’t (and doesn’t) win him friends or happiness or love. It protects his physical health but doesn’t give a damn about his mental, content to let him be abused and taken advantage of (especially if that gives it another chance to win a prize), so long as he isn’t hungry, isn’t homeless, and isn’t injured. (Liu Hai’s was not the first gilded cage he’d been trapped in, just one that was unusually hard to escape.)

Luck is petty but Gladstone is not.

Sometimes (when the chips are down and the stakes are high) this means that his luck has to play by Gladstone’s rules.

———————————————O0—0—0O————————————————

Gladstone had run into Fethry by complete chance earlier in the day, and he’d spent the last several hours cheerfully walking and chatting with his red-hatted cousin as they meandered their way across town. Gladstone’s luck had been in full effect as they walked, guiding their route via construction sites that had blocked roads, flying $20 bills and interesting butterflies that tempted them down back alleys and side streets, and a very memorable dumpster that gave Gladstone a bad jump scare by falling over and releasing about twenty cats into the general area. The path they’d taken had been dictated largely by whatever looked like the least hassle, and had eventually ended up with them down by the docks, getting lost amongst the warehouses and shipping containers of the many trading companies that had operations in Duckburg Harbor.

Gladstone didn’t mind being utterly lost, he never had. His luck meant they’d get where they ought to go without being late, so he was content to simply wander at random while he enjoyed his cousin’s enthusiastic rambling.

Popping out of a particularly out-of-the-way alley, he realized that he and Fethry had ended up at the main road, less then twenty yards from the beginning of the pier. What was more, he could see Donald’s car.

It was pulled just off of the asphalt and onto the concrete, and parked behind a pile of boxes large enough that it likely couldn’t be spotted from anywhere except the small alley they’d just exited. The 313 was old, and in even worse repair then normal, with one of its mirrors duct taped on, and a couple of its fender skirts boasting decently sized dents. Slumped in the driver’s seat was Donald, with blood on his beak.

For a moment Gladstone felt like he had been plunged underwater.

He had seen his unlucky cousin injured before, many times even. Donald, Della, and Scrooge were always finding a way to get themselves into life-or-death danger, and even when they weren’t trouble managed to find Donald anyway. He’d seen his cousin thrown through walls, struck by lightning, almost crushed by falling boulders, and passed out in all sorts of places weirder then his own oddly parked car. But for all that, he’s rarely, if ever, seen his cousin bleed, so he thinks it’s probably the blood that makes everything about his just scream wrong.

The underwater-feeling, the feeling of wrongness, is intense, blurring the edges of the world and muffling all sound. He can just barely hear himself shout through the veil of unreality that, for one long moment, seems to drown him.

“Donald?!”

Beside him Fethry stops talking, then the underwater-feeling shatters to make way for the electrocuting feeling of ice-cold terror, and the next moment he and Fethry are both sprinting for the car.

Donald wakes up when they reach the car, both of them somewhat crashing into it in their panic. The more important thing, is that there are bloody petals in Donald’s lap. Gladstone suddenly feels like there’s something caught in his own throat that he has to force words out past, because he knows what bloody petals mean, but no no No NO—

“Donald, Donald what, w-who—“

Any doubt is swept away when Donald goes to respond and starts choking instead, coughing up not just bloody petals but entire flower heads. Red, Blue, Green, Pink, Gold, and White, all different shapes and kinds. Gladstone feels like every emotion he has has been flicked on at once, a white-hot intensity that burns through him just waiting to explode outward. The world around him is in crystalline clarity, all his senses turned up to eleven and recording in overwhelming detail, and he’s feeling everything at once. He knows what hanahaki is but he doesn’t know his flowers, can’t decipher what’s before him. Can’t know and can’t guess and can’t let Donald die.

Donald finishes hacking up a morbid bouquet and starts trying to tell him and Fethry, voice garbled even worse then normal, about having several hours left and wanting to be next to the ocean. Fethry is listening to Donald. Gladstone is doing anything but.

He hasn’t been Cloverleaf in years, and it’s been just as long since he actively controlled his luck. Focusing in the draining way it takes to Curse or Bless is not something he does outside of the mask, instead just letting Gladstone Gander be blown wherever his luck wishes to take him.

But by god he does it now, pouring everything he can into Blessing Donald more intensely then he’s ever done before, wanting and pushing, making bets against himself with devastating consequences if Donald dies. Deciding, with no hesitation or room for chance, what he’ll do —do to himself— if this goes wrong. Gladstone will never be okay again if Donald dies, making his luck agree is just a matter of making sure it knows that he means physically too.

He stifles and kills the urge to Curse whoever hurt his cousin, because that won’t help Donald now. But eyes are burning red with roiling anger, fear and worry adding fuel to the fire, the temper he shares with Donald on the few occasions he’s well and truly ticked on full display. And he will not release his death grip on his cousin’s arm.

And Gladstone doesn’t know it, but Paperinik has seen Cloverleaf Curse and Bless before, and can very much recognize the light static electricity jumping between his cousin’s feathers and the look of vicious concentration on his cousin’s face, even if he wasn’t expecting it at all.

Several miles across town in McDuck Mansion, six people discover they abruptly need Donald for something all at once. The worry that begins to break out when they can’t find him anywhere bubbles over into full blown panic as one of them trips into a trashcan, and a bunch of bloody petals are flung out as it goes flying.

———————————————O0—0—0O————————————————

Well! That wasn’t how I was expecting to loose my day. @bamboozledeagle this is your fault, I woke up to your Hanahaki post sitting at the top of my Tumblr dash, and spent the whole rest of the day writing it on-and-off. Then when I went to post it the WiFi crashed :/ so I had to wait a day.

This is completely unedited, so sorry about any glaring mistakes. I probably change style several times and I think I even changed tense once on accident. Oops. Also sorry about the formatting, I wrote it on notepad and then just copy-pasted to here, and only bothered fixing the italics.

The Gladstone/Cloverleaf on display here is my own version that I started playing around with after reading this post by @adamarinayu: https://adamarinayu.tumblr.com/post/176467180262/hey-yall asking for a competent version of Cloverleaf, but haven’t actually written anything with prior to this.

Blessing and Cursing is just what he calls manipulating his luck to make good things or bad things happen to other people. It also has the added bonus of helping protect his identity by making Cloverleaf seem magical instead of lucky.

Oh and Bam, the chicken in a pink cape line is also your fault by the way: *1 https://bamboozledeagle.tumblr.com/post/617956657118511104/i-love-how-in-your-and-other-peoples-aus

Sorry if the links don’t work on mobile.

[staboteur]

☢ What fads/trends are you so over?

The Salty AF Munday Meme

//I decided to stick it under a cut. I talk about pop-up rules/bio pages, mains, and... here it comes... Emphasizing words using italics or bold (god I hate it so I guess you can see where this is going).

//okay first off the whole “i’m going to hide all of my rules and information in an impossible to find place (usually under a number/letter or worse, a tiny fucking dot) and then make it into a pop up so there isn’t actually a link or url I can copy paste into a mobile browser) and no, I absolutely refuse to use an ugly theme because obviously there aren’t any themes that look good and are still mobile friendly”. *deep breath* bOI Sorry but if someone uses a theme like that? Unless I have a really really really good reason to sit through this bs, I won’t even bother following them. I use mobile for around 50% of my activity here (school) and if I can’t read their rules and bio which is funny bc it’s almost like yall don’t want people to read your rules/bio so you can complain about it afterwards I won’t bother following. No way I’m risking something like that.

//another fad I’m really just fucking over is the whole mains thing? Idk I talked about it before, but I don’t believe in the whole “mains” thing. Especially if y’all are gonna have mains calls. Doesn’t that just... Defeat the purpose of mains? Plus, mains just seems to encourage that ‘high school clique’ mentality that seems so prevalent on here. The drama that tends to surround being mutuals with someone is more than enough already. Where the hell do we draw the line here? It’s like saying “yeah you guys are my friends, but this guy is my best friend” and while there isn’t really anything inherently wrong with that, you just know it’s gonna be trouble when you start looking at popular rpers who are mutuals with more people than they can keep track of, and then add in duplicate drama, oc drama, muse drama... ugh. mains just seems like more fuel for this dumpster fire of drama. 

//and (oh yes there’s more) the whole... “I want to look aesthetique so I’m going to do crazy shit with blog and post formatting”... Sorry but like... I find that this stuff is actually less aesthetic than just a crisp, clean page of text. Maybe that’s just me, idk, but I think a long page of text with few interruptions except for active grammatical choices meant to enhance the reading experience and change the mood makes more sense than turning your one-liner into a haiku.

//oh and this isn’t really a thing I hate so much as i’m vaguely just thinking “what’s the fucking point” about is when you use these fancy, font-generator fonts in your... Rp posts? As like a header? I mean... I can’t even read it 90% of the time because I just get little boxes with question marks in them, so I don’t really see the point. It’s not compatible. Little boxes with question marks in them aren’t very attractive you know plus half the people seeing the post probably can’t even read the original text at this rate, so there’s literally no point in doing that. It’s just a big fucking hassle that creates something that maybe 5 out of 10 people can see, if that many.

//If it’s not like ooc and you really really want to make a point, or if it’s not your character’s thoughts (because if the character does: I don’t think that’s right, then it should be followed with they thought bc a bunch of italics together are thoughts). Also bold and italics should be used sparingly. How many published authors have you seen constantly use bold and italics to sound out the fucking words that their characters say? Like literally fucking none. It’s because they don’t need it at all, since the words that they write are already polished enough (and they assume that their readers have critical thinking skills to be able to emphasize words in their head without guidance plus it allows interpretation) to not need to bold every other word that happens to be a semi-important noun to the context of the sentence, because trust me, people aren’t dumb enough to need someone to hold their hand to find what the fucking subject or action verb of the sentence is. It’s like grade school homework: Bold the subject and italicize the action verb! Hooray! You’ve done it! Congrats! Now Everyone In This Big Blue Dumpster Fire knows that you know basic English sentence structure (which is taught in most American elementary schools, at least, and even if not taught, you already have a subconscious understanding of it simply because that’s how language works). Woo!!!!!!

//oh and the whole “i’ll bold every other word and bold italicize basically at random” is another fad I’m so over. Like c’mon. Most of us can talk in English. Most of us understand that certain words will be emphasized. Most of us can infer which words are emphasized without you shoving it down their throats. Jeez, leave a little room for interpretation. I find that it just disturbs my reading. I’ll be reading it in my reading voice (which does, in fact, speak in tones) and suddenly my reading voice will just cut out and like a loudspeaker will come on and shout BALONEY at me as loudly as possible because the word ‘baloney’ was in bold but has almost zero literary significance aside from the fact that it was the subject of a sentence (He ate the baloney). Oh wait, sorry, I forgot: gotta italicize the “ate” too, so it’s got extra oomph so... He ate the baloney. Sorry uh... I’d rather not. If this isn’t an enormously common thing in a thread (like say, once per paragraph), i can overlook it. But I honestly find that emphasis like this just throws off my reading. I’m suddenly not there in the scene anymore, I’m sitting at my desk or what have you, being a regular high school kid and not an Edgy McEdgelord spy, and it just takes my muse and throws it out the window. 

//if that baloney example feels extra to y’all, it’s because that’s exactly how I feel about the whole emphasis thing. God, just let us read it on our own! We aren’t incapable of reading words with emphasis in our heads!! I bet you just read my last sentence with plenty of emphasis in your head. Probably emphasized words like “incapable” or “reading” or “with” or “emphasis” or “our” or “heads” or any other number of combinations. Everyone’s is gonna be different. Stop trying to force me into doing specifically one and only one. It just throws me off and I have to reread the sentence several times before it makes sense to me, and literally all it does is slow down how fast i can read and lessen the chance of me replying sooner. But like I said: if it’s like once per paragraph, I don’t care as much because chances are, that paragraph probably as 3-5 sentences in it, and I’ll only have to ponder over one for longer than the others.

//tldr: i’m a salty-ass bitch who doesn’t understand the novelty around pop-up rules (they’re far more trouble than they’re worth), the obsession with mains (they attract drama like roadkill attracts flies), and emphasizing words that don’t matter (god how would you even read that madness? I shouted like half that clause, but that’s probably not the way most people would say it in a normal fucking conversation).

//god looking back its just because people are obsessed with the idea that the more complicated something is, the bigger or brighter or flashier or “trendier” something is, the more good it will look. UUUHhhhh sorry but no? My blog looks fine, and I use a really simple and easy to navigate theme. My rules are titled rules so you don’t need to hover and waste time waiting for the little box to pop up. My background is a dark color, while my post backgrounds are a light color with dark colored text that’s written in a... I believe it’s similar to tumblr default font (idk) but it’s meant to help you be able to absorb every word (or almost every word). I did my damnest to make sure that my blog, after I imported a new theme, both looks good, can fit images (bc I draw and post shit here) and is easily accessible and very easily readable. Why can’t anyone else do the same fucking thing? Do they just want to have an unreadable blog that badly? I mean sure, there’s some interest in creating a piece of art that no one can understand, but this is tumblr, a site meant for distributing information that you can understand, not a modern art museum. God. Even Hemingway���s writing is sometimes easier to read than people’s rules pages these days, and most people write it in plain English. At least his shit is written in a physical book, with plain white paper and plain black ink. Pretty hard to fuck up readability there. And I can barely understand Hemingway as is (I died when we had a unit about him in English last year). If I call your writing “less readable than Hemingway”, then that is probably among the graver insults in my book, just above “did you ask a blind monkey to write that for you with its tail?” Oh and just to clarify, Hemingway’s writing is easy to understand until you remember that he’s big on iceberg theory. We read a short story called “The White Elephant”. Guess what that was about? Abortion. Fucking. Abortion. I thought it was about a dude and a lady sitting at a train station waiting to go on vacation or some shit and the lady didn’t like the dude so they just drank beer together. The deepest I thought on my own about it was like “uh.. I guess their marriage failed or something...?” Like shit dude, where did y’all get abortion from this? Like shit dude, if this is the kind of mental leap I need to make, I’m out. Sorry. I’m good at making mental leaps, but this just has far too high of a chance of me missing it for me to risk.