#haven't opened the file since I created it

[catt-nuevenor]

A Brief Guide on Uploading ChoiceScript Demos to Itch.io

Since Dashingdon is shutting down, and there will be a lot of folks wanting to host their ChoiceScript demos elsewhere, I thought it'd be a good idea to provide a brief guide on how to do so for itch.io.

This is for Windows in the folder actions, but it shouldn't be too difficult for folks to translate for Mac. This also assumes you haven't changed any of the files within your game folder other than those found under 'scenes'.

Within your game folder, locate the 'web' subfolder, right click it and select 'Send to' then 'Compressed (zipped) folder. Name your newly compressed file something sensible, and I recommend moving it to a new folder outside of your game files, just to keep everything neat and tidy.

2. Assuming you already have an itch.io account, navigate to your dashboard, and click the 'Create New Project' button.

3. Name your project as you like, and under 'Kind of project', select the 'HTML' option.

4. Set the 'Pricing' to 'No Payments', you cannot use ChoiceScript for profit unless it is with the Choice of Games or Hosted Games publishing labels. No one wants to get in trouble unnecessarily here.

5. In the Uploads section, upload your newly zipped file we made in step one. After it's finished uploading, you'll be given one drop down and two tick boxes. You need to tick the 'This file will be played in the browser' option.

6. I've found so far that 'Viewport dimensions' work quite well for desktop at 1080 x 640. Either use these numbers or experiment and find what works best for you.

7. You must tick the 'Enable scrollbars' option for your game to display properly, otherwise options, text and buttons can be clipped off the bottom of the viewport.

8. Continue filling out the rest of the form, or skip it for now and scroll all the way to the bottom to the 'Visibility & access' section. Here make sure you have 'Draft' selected. This prevents others from finding your game until you're ready, and I always recommend play testing things before you make your work public.

9. Finally, hit the 'Save' button, then go and have a look at your creation by hitting the 'View page' link. And there you go! When you're ready for public release, just change the option in section 8 to 'Public'.

---

A few things to bear in mind about hosting on itch.io:

There isn't currently any way for your readers to save their game. I'm sure someone could write in a plugin similar to Dashingdon's at some point, but as for right now, this isn't available. See addition/edit below.

Make sure you properly tag your game with the 'choicescript' and 'interactive-fiction' tags. There are an awful lot of games on itch.io and it's easy to get lost in the crowd. Make sure folks can find you by having the right tags.

I hope this brief guide was useful to folks.

Best of luck to you with your writing!

---

Addition/Edit:

Thanks to @hpowellsmith for bringing this to my attention. You can add save functionality to your game by using this addon:

The ChoiceScript Save Plugin

Just tried it out on my own game and it works perfectly.

Rather than run through the addon author's own tutorial here, I'll just forward you to the Readme on their Github page.

One small note I would add is when it asks you to make the two small additions to your index file, make sure you right click the file and open it with your coding program, don't double-click it as this will just open it in an internet browser, and it won't give you the access to what you need to change.

[nocturnesmoon]

You don't have to do everything alone

A/N: Making some blurbs while I work on a longer piece, could be awhile before that one comes out though, probably gonna end up at 10k words if I haven't calculated it wrong. Requests are open too if you got a blurb you'd like to see!

Blurb: Reader is overworked and gets pulled away by their boys.

The screen in front of you had gotten exceedingly brighter during the last few hours. You could feel your brain slowly turning to mush in your head, no matter how hard you tried to sharpen yourself.

The sun outside had long since gone down, replaced by a dark and clouded sky that you didn't have time to pay attention to. You could feel your eyes hurting, slipping closed every now and then from exhaustion. Most people had already gone back to the barracks by now, done with their work for the day and in for a good sleep.

You couldn't afford such a luxury right now, not with the current mission and everything that's at stake. You didn't know how long you had been at it today, but it's all your mind had been focused for the last week. Your job was to track the targets, find them, information anything you could to figure out potential locations.

That's what you'd been occupied with for so long now, and you were failing at it.

You were supposed to be a specialist, a professional who knew what they were doing. Instead, you were here, with a headache that could kill, no hope, and tons and tons of unreviewed files you had yet to get to.

You take a deep, long breath, hoping that it could give you some relief in your state. It doesn't. Your hand comes up to rub at your neck, taking the opportunity to look around the office you'd been holed up in.

You'd been right to assume everyone else had already gone, someone must have missed you were still in here and turned off the lights. Either that, or you'd been sitting still as a statue for longer than you thought.

It was a possibility, judging by the ache in your bones when you stretch and pop your sore joints. You didn't dare look at the clock, but you didn't doubt that you had missed your usual afternoon gym session. There was too much to do to allow yourself to be distracted, even for a few moments.

You knew a large part of this operation now relied on you and few others. Ones that you didn't count on being competent enough to get the job done, so it came down to you. Not that you felt very competent now either, you weren't much better, having found no solution to your problem yet.

With a sigh, you turn back around in your chair, honing in on the sharp screen once again. You could ignore the ache in your stomach for a bit longer, if you just tried a few more things, maybe you could find the fix all solution you'd been looking for?

Even with your split mind, and rundown state, it wasn't hard to get back into focus. It was the only trait you could rely on now, the focus carrying you through long enough to fix your problems one by one.

A downside, some would say, would be the way you tune out of your surroundings, you stop noticing things happening around you, not to mention the passage of time completely eludes you. You didn't even realize when the light in the office were turned on, or when two different sources called your name. You didn't notice the footsteps become louder in your direction, or when two shadows towered over you.

You were only torn out of your focused fixation when someone gently slid down a hand over your eyes. Your breath hitches in your throat, your hands coming up to grab at the arm and push it away but getting stopped by a different set of hands.

"Jus' us luv" Simon's gruff voice vibrates close to your ear, making you relax your shoulders and let your hands fall back to your lap. It's only now when your eyes are shrouded in the darkness his palm creates that you realize how much your eyes were hurting. You forcefully blink a few times, settling for closing your eyes, protected behind the security of his hand.

You lean back in your chair, feeling the back of your head collide against Simon's firm stomach. You crane your head upwards, despite not being able to see him, you can almost imagine the curious look he has on when you do. His other rough hand slowly slides from your shoulder, over your throat, holding a persistent comforting weight there to keep you in check.

Your lips part ever so slightly, letting out a long gust of air, expelling everything in your lungs and making your shoulders sag. You had barely noticed how exhausted you had gotten, but this was nice.

You try to jerk your head when you hear someone else's movements, but Simon holds you in place. You feel a different set of hands gently lay on your shoulder, that someone shuffling in-between you and the desk you'd been spending the last several hours at.

"Missed ye darling," you let out a small huff when you hear the Scottish accent, not that you expected him to not be hot on Simon's heels. Your scoff is silenced when he gently places his lips on yours, Simon's hand not even bothering to move to give him space to do so.

In a way you don't want him to move his hands away from your face and neck, it was somewhat stabilizing. "What are you two doing," you ask, slightly out of breath when Johnny pulls away. From the sounds and his movements, you guess he crouches down in front of you, placing both his hands on each of your thighs.

You reach forward, blindly searching for him, and only finding him when he guides your hands to his face. "You've been actin' off," Simon starts out, Johnny slipping in a hum of agreeance, "you're working yourself to death dove."

You let out a huff in response, not wanting to agree with him no matter how true his statement was. You run your hands through Johnny's hair, grabbing playfully at his mohawk. You lean forward, gently sliding out of Simon's hold.

His hands resting on you retract, and you almost instantly regret it, squinting your eyes in the bright light. "M'fine," you mumble quietly, letting go of Johnny and looking into his bright blue eyes, "Jus' a bit stressed".

"C'mon to bed, love," you had halfheartedly expected Johnny to plead with you, but he seemed way past that now, using a more authoritative tone and leaving little room for disagreeing. Of course, that didn't mean you weren't going to, though.

"Can't" you continue to mumble tiredly, doing your best to keep your eyes open and ignore the dull ache in your head, "still have to finish this." You hear Simon let out a heavy sigh behind you, you'd almost feel guilt under his disappointed stare if you weren't already ridden with it already.

"You've worked hard enough for today, there's always tomorrow" Simon reasons with you. You're about to protest again when he points another thing out, "don't come with another excuse, you can barely even keep your eyes open, don't deny it."

You barely catch the glance the two men exchange with each other, but you don't fail to recognize what it means. You've already lost the fight at this point, you didn't have an argument that would actually make them listen, and deep down you knew they were right.

"I…" you barely get your word out before Johnny stands up, taking your hand in his and softly pulling you to your feet. You don't know when or how, but they'd already turned off the computer you had been using.

You take a step towards Johnny, but instantly feel your vision swirl, the millions of thin pricks blacking out your view for a good couple of seconds. With a groan, you collide against his chest, closing your eyes and staying there long past how long it took for the prickling to disappear.

"Ah got ye," he mumbles quietly, bringing around his burly arms to encompass you into a hug, placing a small kiss to the side of your head. The last of your willpower and determination to continue and finish your work tonight, dwindles away when you feel his warmth.

"When's the last time you ate?" you hear Simon ask in a quieter, knowing tone. You wince against Johnny, knowing the scolding you were gonna get later. It was hard for you to recall much of anything from the day, most of it was spent in front of a screen with data, minimal breaks. You weren't entirely sure whether or not you had eaten anything that day.

Johnny takes in a deep breath; you feel his chest expand under your cheek before lowering back again. "We'll get ye some leftovers on the way back aye?" he mentions and softly turns you around, "Garrick left some from his last meal, ah think it's something ye will like."

You nod gently, letting the exhaustion take a small win when your eyes softly close. You don't feel like opening them again, being quite fine with falling asleep standing up right now. "C'mon, let's get you to bed, Johnny'll get the food." Simon places a hand between your shoulder blades, guiding you along.

"Aye."

How you stay upright all the way to your room, you have no idea. You're pretty sure you should've collapsed at least ten times on the way here, but with Simon's hand on you, you felt like you could push on just a little more, and finally you could collapse on your bed.

Simon let's out a breathy chuckle at your theatrics, moving your limbs around like you were a doll. He pulls you up and takes a seat behind you, pulling you close with your back to his chest. You feel his hot breath on your ear, and after getting yourself comfortable, you can finally feel yourself relax.

"You need to stop taking on everythin' alone" he dips his head into the crook of your neck, his lips ghosting over your skin. "You're not the only one working on this, you can take a break" he mumbles, and lets his arm travel over your midriff, pulling you even closer back against him.

"I know, but the less I’m working, the more time it's going to take to find our target" you answer, moving your hand up to run it over his scalp. Your attention is taken away from him when the soft click of the door opening reaches your ears.

With a small smile, you greet Johnny back in, watching the plate of food he brings along. As soon as you smell the delicious meal, your stomach rumbles, loudly. You grimace, once again having forgotten the gaping hole you felt in your stomach.

"Hungry then aye?" He sits down in the bed next to the two of you, handing you the plate of food, which you accept graciously. You knew how good of a cook Gaz was, but this was one of your favourites, it was likely he had intended to give you some as well, had you been available at all during the day.

You let out a sinful groan when the food collides with your taste buds. "Thank you…fucking hell," you mumble with your mouth full. You make a mental note to thank Kyle for the food later, and then also beg him for another batch.

"Easy," Simon grumbles from behind you, "gonna upset your stomach by eating so fast." His hand comes to rest against your elbow, slowing your movements so you don't inhale the food on your plate.

"I know I know," you mumble between bites, catching the cheeky grin Johnny gives you from how you sound with your mouth full. "It's fine, I can eat, take a nap and then get back to it" you declare after finishing another bite of your food.

"Nu uh," Johnny shakes his head, seemingly amused that you think you're not going to be resting longer than that. "We'll keep ye in bed until ye're rested properly" he reaches his hand forward, letting it rest on your knee while his thumb rubs against your skin.

"What you can't do that-"

"We'll do whatever it takes to make sure our darling isn't working themselves into the ground again," Simon comments from behind you, leaving you a bit stunned at his sternness. You feel him gently take the empty plate away from you and put it on the bedside table when you're done.

"You can't keep me chained to the bed," you respond with a pout, crossing your arms over your chest and twisting your body to look in the eyes of the man behind you. He doesn't look like he's about to put up with your shit, however, and doesn't even dignify you with a greater response than his infamous glare.

Johnny brings your attention back to him, turning your head back by grabbing your chin. He leans in to plant a gentle and short kiss to your lips. "Ye heard 'im, whatever it'll take love" he chuckles quietly, the breathy sort of way.

You feel heat rise in your cheeks and let out a squeal when he picks you out of Simons lap, rolling over and ending up on top of you in the bed. He rests his chin against you, letting his weight hold you down and give you a comfort to your restless edge.

The light turns off above you, and it doesn't take long after that before the bed dips and Simon joins beside the two of you. Johnny let's out a satisfied hum when Simon pulls you both closer, wrapping you all up together in the blankets.

"Goodnight, ye sleep tight now, darling."

[unpretty]

Im interested by what you said about using Obsidian for writing. I downloaded it and was messing around with it a bit and it seems really interesting and very much like what I'm looking for but certainly like it could be... a lot too lol

Do you have any recommendations for someone wanting to start using it for writing?

step one is to get the longform plugin, that's what lets you use obsidian a little more like scrivener, where every project has its own folder full of markdown files that you can sort freely (these days i'm still in the habit of just naming chapters numbers, but if you actually want chapter titles or something that looks nicer than numbers this is crucial). so in my case I have a folder called Writing, a subfolder of that called Fanfic, and a subfolder of that called Sorrowverse. i right-clicked on the Sorrowverse folder and said "create new longform project", named it Wayne Manor, and then it created the folder with an index. then i moved all my existing markdown files into that folder, and when i opened the Wayne Manor project in longform it asked if i wanted to import those files as scenes (i did).

if you want it to be even more like scrivener you can give each chapter its own folder and then every scene in that chapter its own file. i might go back to this someday but for a long time i was using typora so i've got different habits.

i have not yet found a good way to make backlinks useful in my fiction but i'm sure there's a way. like, it would be neat to be able to see all of sorrowverse on a timeline, or see which fics lowkey reference each other, but if there's an unobtrusive way to do that i haven't figured it out yet. i set a daily goal in longform of 400 words and have it set to apply to all projects but it's still a little iffy if it wants to work right, especially when i'm syncing files via third party cloud storage. being able to start a new writing session helps with this one.

the only files i keep visible in longform are the ones i want to be included if/when i eventually compile the whole project, brainstorming or snippets are in the same folder in fileview but they don't appear in longform. this might be a good use of backlinks actually but i haven't needed to bother with that yet, my files are pretty easy to navigate manually still.

anyway. i actually found it more helpful to use for writing after i started also using it for journaling, since having a daily note to think out loud in means i can open the app up without any pressure to do anything but word vomit, and then as long as i'm in there i can putter around in my other files and things. i also installed the Tasks plugin and created a todo list, a special note that does nothing but tell me everything i want to get done that date, and a template for my daily note that includes all the tasks i completed that day so i can go back and see everything i did.

to start with you can always just write in it the same way you'd write in word, if you're not used to markdown i think there's plugins to give it more of a wysiwyg feel but personally i prefer my little asterisks and whatnots.

[redbatchedcumbermayned]

It all started under a duvet held up by an oar

Not so long ago I emailed Chris Tester, the voice of Heinrix van Calox in Owlcat’s recently released CRPG Rogue Trader, and asked if he would like to sit for an interview with me. Having some experience in interviewing people I like, most famously Oscar winner and all-around sweetheart Eddie Redmayne, this was not a completely nerve-wracking endeavour. And within a day of sending my email, Chris said yes. And what a pleasure it was interviewing him: Chris was so generous with his time, that the agreed upon 30 minutes turned into 50 minutes as we brushed upon many topics from his start as a theatre actor to his first voice-over role in a video game to his recently discovered hobby of playing D&D. Of course, we also spoke about all things Warhammer 40k, his new found fame brought on by voicing Heinrix and the insights he could share about the character.

I will publish this interview in three parts over the next week in text form and with the accompanying audio file (the audio quality is not spectacular but tumblr limits uploads to 10MB). If you quote or reshare, please quote me as the original source.

Part 2 of the interview

Part 3 of the interview

Fran: Thank you very much for taking your time.

Chris Tester: That's no problem. No problem at all.

F: So then let's start. You graduated in 2008.

CT: I did. Yes.

F: You started out as a stage actor. Did you always want to become a stage actor or an actor in general? Tell us a bit about your career.

CT: I always wanted to be a stage actor. Yes, as soon as I knew that I wanted to be an actor, which probably wasn't until I was a teenager. But yeah, my first passion was always the stage, and that was kind of borne out in my career. I would have been open to TV and film of course, if it had come along, I'm a huge fan of TV and film as well, but I never got an audition for any TV or film work.

I think I literally did about three short films in my 10, 12 years of actually professionally acting, and it is one of those industries where the more you do of one thing, the more you seem to find yourself doing the same thing to a degree. So yes, watching Shakespeare from an early age was one of my first passions.

And that was what first planted the seed of wanting to do it myself. The whole aspect of live performance is still something that I'm very passionate about. Up until 2020, when the world changed, I was trying to do two or three theatre shows a year, but since 2020, I haven't been near a stage and I doubt right now, especially with the way that the UK theatre scene is going, that I'm going to be back on stage anytime soon. I am resigned to that, but at some point in my career, I know I will be on stage again, because I can't live without it, but only for the right thing, both financially, but more importantly, creatively.

F: Your production company is currently on hiatus?

CT: I was the producer of a theatre company, which was run and was the baby of the director of the company, a guy called Ross Armstrong, who's one of the most talented writers and directors that I've ever worked with. I was helping out with a lot of the administration stuff so that he could still put me in plays. Instead of creating my own work because I'm not a very good writer or the best writer in the world, I support those people who will write me good parts. So yes, it is currently on hiatus, but never say never, we would always be looking to get back. It's difficult right now. It's difficult for all of us, because arts council subsidy, that way of being able to fund stuff, is drying up. We were doing a national tour of the UK when we were doing that [with the support of a subsidy]. There's even less money, there's even more people. I won't bore you with anything more than that, but it's kind of tough. We'd like to come back, but in the right way, and that's tricky to negotiate.

F: It's always hard as a stage actor to earn a living.

CT: Well, I've been spoiled by voice-over as well, and whereas when I was in my 20s and 30s then you're all about your art. And of course, I'm still all about my art, but I'm also about my wife and my cat and the mortgage and the bills and wanting to have nicer things to a degree as well. I've come to terms with that and voice-over does facilitate that as well as it opens you up to different roles and working with different people. So, I can't complain.

F: It's quite similar with making a living as a writer, because with a steady income you get used to a certain standard of living and once you have obligations and bills to pay, I think the stress on your mental health being creative and having all the stresses of regular life thrust upon you brings with it a challenge.

CT: It's a cliche we can very easily fall into: if I'm suffering, then it means I'm an artist. And that's not necessarily very true. It very often means that the art that we create only reflects one aspect of our lives, and it's usually a very tortured one. I am also about having wider experiences and broadening myself out. Whereas I think when I was in my twenties, I was thinking a bit more like: Oh, I'll experience the world and life through my art and just purely through my art. Whereas now necessarily I need to have a life outside of it as well, and then I can justify like I have the life so that I can feed my art or not, whatever. You know, I'll be a better artist by having a bit of a life outside of it. Maybe.

F: But that's what your twenties are for.

CT: Yeah, indeed.

F: Doing the crazy stuff, doing the band stuff 

CT: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, there was certainly an aspect of that in my twenties.

F: So, what brought you to voice acting or voice-over work initially?

CT: Money. Video game stuff is kind of sexy and cool, and I'm a gamer, so that's important. Before I was a video gamer, I was a board gamer and off the back of that, I was a voracious video gamer, partly because I wasn't very good at team sports at school. I was always the person who was picked last in the football team. So that becomes part of your identity for better or worse. But video games, I was pretty good at, not amazing, but I was pretty good at, and I enjoyed it. And it gave me a different form of escapism as well, and off the back of that I always had an interest in them. 

So, the very first voiceover job was a video game: Dark Souls, which is quite a big franchise. At that time, I was your very typically jobbing actor. My acting agent came in and said: I got something for you. And so, I went in with that. But it was only in 2016, 2017 that I realised it was something that you could actually do yourself. People had recording studios at home and they were contacting people directly, not just going through agents. Because I'd basically written to the same 20 voice agents in the UK, mainly in London for like eight years in a row and not received anything. So, you keep knocking on those doors hoping. 

Before I'd even graduated from drama school, I'd burnt a CD and made these cases with my headshot on it and sent them all off at what at the time felt like great personal expense and didn't get anything for eight years in a row.  So, I was a bit like, I'm obviously doing something wrong, but I don't really know what, because I'm doing these workshops and getting good feedback. Then I found out through a couple of online courses, that there were ways and means of doing it myself, and that was a bit of a game changer for me, and within six months of having started, I was earning more through voice work than the bar job and the box office job that I was doing combined. Within six months, I was kind of like: “I gotta quit because I'm actually holding myself back from things.” So that was quite a big shift.

F: Somewhere you said, you started out under a duvet and with an oar.

CT: Yeah. On my website, I do have an image of it. [Dear reader, I could not locate this elusive photo] I literally had to take the duvet off my bed and put it into the living room, which was the quietest space in my then shared flat. I also had to wait until after one flat mate had watched TV and another one had used the table that had their washing on it. One of my flat mates had stolen an oar from some night out and that was perfect in order to be able to erect it over my head and the duvet as a frame. 

I did probably the first four or five months of voice recording like that. Probably about 10, 15 voiceover jobs that I actually got paid for, I was using that because it worked well enough. Since then, I've gone through various different iterations of a setup in the bedroom, to a setup in the hallway, to my current setup. In 2020 we moved to our first house, and this is the spare bedroom which I've had converted into a studio, which means my cat can be here asleep on me or near me getting fur everywhere, but it's fine. I can thrash around and I've got natural light to work in at the same time, which I find quite important. [Pictured below Chris' current setup.]

F: Very pretty. That's good. Guide us through a typical day of yours, if you like.

CT: Oh, sure. I mean, there is no typical day. And yet, and yet, and yet. A typical day for me is, because I am spending the vast majority of the day sitting in this room or somewhere close to this room, because I may need to record at short notice, because the vast majority of jobs are quite short notice. My priority is exercise for mental health more than anything. I've got some weights at the bottom of the garden, and I will get up first thing, and I will go there and I will do that after breakfast. And that's my minimal routine of physical activity done. 

And then I'll come back, and this is so rock and roll. Now what I do is, I spend like an hour on LinkedIn. And that's what you dreamed of as a creative person. Isn't it as an actor? I spend time on LinkedIn regularly every day, because it's a really good networking place for a lot of my types of work, and first thing in the morning, I'm a bit mentally sharper. So that's when I come up with a quick post that may be inspired by a bit of content that I've made elsewhere. That probably takes about 20 minutes and then I spend another 45 minutes to an hour engaging with people and saying hi and introducing myself and asking questions, whether that's with video producers or game developers or documentary makers or pretty much anything and everything. There are a lot of people who are active at that time. And so I do it.

And then after that, if I already have some recording lined up, then I'll prioritise mid-morning, because I've warmed up physically a bit more then, and I'm focused. So, you're going through the scripts, annotating the scripts, recording the scripts, editing the scripts. But then there could be live sessions at any time within that as well. I try to keep hours from nine till six. But occasionally, like with Rogue Trader, that was recorded at various different times of the day because we had people in New York, we had people in mainland Europe, and we had people in the UK. So all different time zones, so that can happen at any time. 

And then I try to do other kinds of bits and pieces of marketing whenever I've got free time to. I do use really exciting productivity hacks, like time blocking. Again, not something that as a creative individual, I was like: Oh God, this gets me so excited, because it doesn't, but it works. It's finding a system that works for you, but still has a certain kind of flexibility and fluidity. I'm trying to make sure that I get outside of the house, and that kind of stuff. 

Recently, over the last year, I’ve started doing audiobooks as well. That long form type of thing is quite nice to be able to dip into because sometimes you don't record for two, three days. You don't get the work. Nothing’s coming in. So, you’re marketing, but it kind of connects you back to the performance side of things to go: I can do a few chapters and you know, that kind of thing. So that's probably it. I try to formalise it, but you know, every voice actor’s day is radically different. There are people, some of the biggest names, going into different studios every week or every day. I very rarely, despite being based in London, I very rarely go into external studios. Like I would say 99 percent of the work I just do from home.

F: So how do you find the right voice for the specific type of voiceover work you do, maybe start with how did you find Heinrix's voice?

CT: Thankfully, Owlcat sent through quite a detailed casting breakdown. So, you get a picture, and that's pretty crucial, as well as a short bio, in terms of the background of the character, but not too much, because you have to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. But even if you do sign an NDA, I think developers are always slightly hesitant of giving you too much info about the game because things could still be changed. But I think I did get a picture of Heinrix, if not in the first audition, then certainly on the second one. From that you immediately think about the physicality and what might affect the voice, and there was also some direction in terms of what they were looking for. Anybody who has heard the character and me, they do not sound radically dissimilar. There's not a transformative process that I needed to go through, other than his sense of authority and the space that he takes up and the sureness that he has in that he has a kind of divine right from the emperor, so that level of confidence being brought through.

The other part of the audition was about the void ship [the Black Ship] that he'd been raised in and the horrors that he'd seen. And you as the actor have to do the detective work to go like this is showing another side, the more vulnerable side, the side that underpins all of his life choices up to this point. It's essentially playing the opposite to a degree. So it was kind of knowing when to let those elements bleed through a little bit. I think I had probably about a page worth of scripts, quite a lot of script actually to audition with. 

But I don't like to listen back to it a lot, because I think you get into your head. My biggest thing is stage work where it's ephemeral. You say it once and it could be different the next night. The whole point is that there's no one definitive way of doing things. Not quite the same with voice acting, where it's being recorded and you've got to get used to hearing it back. But I try not to overthink it. Just like record it two or three times with different impulses and then review and go like, those two seem pretty contrasting. I'll send those along and hope and then never hear anything back unless I do.

[geneeste]

Creating a personal fanfic archive using Calibre, various Calibre plugins, Firefox Reader View, and an e-Reader / BookFusion / Calibre-Web

A few years ago I started getting serious about saving my favorite fic (or just any fic I enjoyed), since the Internet is sadly not actually always forever when it comes to fanfiction. Plus, I wanted a way to access fanfic offline when wifi wasn't available. Enter a personal fanfic archive!

There are lots of ways you can do this, but I thought I'd share my particular workflow in case it helps others get started. Often it's easier to build off someone else's workflow than to create your own!

Please note that this is for building an archive for private use -- always remember that it's bad form to publicly archive someone else's work without their explicit permission.

This is going to be long, so let's add a read more!

How to Build Your Own Personal Fanfic Archive

Step One: Install Calibre

Calibre is an incredibly powerful ebook management software that allows you to do a whole lot of stuff having to do with ebooks, such as convert almost any text-based file into an ebook and (often) vice-versa. It also allows you to easily side-load ebooks onto your personal e-reader of choice and manage the collection of ebooks on the device.

And because it's open source, developers have created a bunch of incredibly useful plugins to use with Calibre (including several we're going to talk about in the next step), which make saving and reading fanfiction super easy and fun.

But before we can do that, you need to download and install it. It's available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and in a portable version.

Step Two: Download These Plugins

This guide would be about 100 pages long if I went into all of the plugins I love and use with Calibre, so we're just going to focus on the ones I use for saving and reading fanfiction. And since I'm trying to keep this from becoming a novel (lolsob), I'll just link to the documentation for most of these plugins, but if you run into trouble using them, just tag me in the notes or a comment and I'll be happy to write up some steps for using them.

Anyway, now that you've downloaded and installed Calibre, it's time to get some plugins! To do that, go to Preferences > Get plugins to enhance Calibre.

You'll see a pop-up with a table of a huge number of plugins. You can use the Filter by name: field in the upper right to search for the plugins below, one at a time.

Click on each plugin, then click Install. You'll be asked which toolbars to add the plugins to; for these, I keep the suggested locations (in the main toolbar & when a device is connected).

FanFicFare (here's also a great tutorial for using this plugin) EpubMerge (for creating anthologies from fic series) EbubSplit (for if you ever need to break up fic anthologies) Generate Cover (for creating simple artwork for downloaded fic) Manage Series (for managing fic series)

You'll have to restart Calibre for the plugins to run, so I usually wait to restart until I've installed the last plugin I want.

Take some time here to configure these plugins, especially FanFicFare. In the next step, I'll demonstrate a few of its features, but you might be confused if you haven't set it up yet! (Again, highly recommend that linked tutorial!)

Step Three: Get to Know FanFicFare (and to a lesser extent, Generate Cover)

FanFicFare is a free Calibre plugin that allows you to download fic in bulk, including all stories in a series as one work, adding them directly to Calibre so that that you can convert them to other formats or transfer them to your e-reader.

As with Calibre, FanFicFare has a lot of really cool features, but we're just going to focus on a few, since the docs above will show you most of them.

The features I use most often are: Download from URLs, Get Story URLs from Email, and Get Story URLs from Web Page.

Download from URLs let's you add a running list of URLs that you'd like FanFicFare to download and turn into ebooks for you. So, say, you have a bunch of fic from fanfic.net that you want to download. You can do that!

Now, in this case, I've already downloaded these (which FanFicFare detected), so I didn't update my library with the fic.

But I do have some updates to do from email, so let's try getting story URLs from email!

Woohoo, new fic! Calibre will detect when cover art is included in the downloaded file and use that, but at least one of these fic doesn't have cover art (which is the case for most of the fic I download). This is where Generate Cover comes in.

With Generate Cover, I can set the art, font, dimensions, and info content of the covers so that when I'm looking at the fic on my Kindle, I know right away what fic it is, what fandom it's from, and whether or not it's part of a series.

Okay, last thing from FanFicFare -- say I want to download all of the fic on a page, like in an author's profile on fanfic.net or all of the stories in a series. I can do that too with Get Story URLs from Web Page:

The thing I want to call out here is that I can specify whether the fic at this link are individual works or all part of an anthology, meaning if they're all works in the same series, I can download all stories as a single ebook by choosing For Anthology Epub.

Step Four: Using FireFox Reader View to Download Fic Outside of Archives

This is less common now thanks to AO3, but the elders among us may want to save fanfic that exists outside of archives on personal websites that either still exist or that exist only on the Internet Wayback Machine. FanFicFare is awesome and powerful, but it's not able to download fic from these kinds of sources, so we have to get creative.

I've done this in a couple of ways, none of which are entirely perfect, but the easiest way I've found thus far is by using Firefox's Reader View. Also, I don't think I discovered this -- I think I read about this on Tumblr, actually, although I can longer find the source (if you know it, please tell me so I can credit them!).

At any rate, open the fic in Firefox and then toggle on Reader View:

Toggling on Reader View strips all the HTML formatting from the page and presents the fic in the clean way you see in the preview below, which is more ideal for ebook formats.

To save this, go to the hamburger menu in the upper right of the browser and select Print, then switch to Print to PDF. You'll see the URL and some other stuff at the top and bottom of the pages; to remove that, scroll down until you see something like More settings... and uncheck Print headers and footers.

Click Save to download the resulting PDF, which you can then add to Calibre and convert to whichever format works best for your e-reader or archive method.

Step Five: Archiving (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Here's the really fun part: now that you know how to download your fave fanfics in bulk and hopefully have a nice little cache going, it's time to choose how you want to (privately) archive them!

I'm going to go through each option I've used in order of how easy it is to implement (and whether it costs additional money to use). I won't go too in depth about any of them, but I'm happy to do so in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Option 1: On Your Computer

If you're using Calibre to convert fanfic, then you're basically using your computer as your primary archive. This is a great option, because it carries no additional costs outside the original cost of acquiring your computer. It's also the simplest option, as it really doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge, just a willingness to tinker with Calibre and its plugins or to read how-to docs.

Calibre comes with a built-in e-book viewer that you can use to read the saved fic on your computer (just double-click on the fic in Calibre). You can also import it into your ebook app of choice (in most cases; this can get a little complicated just depending on how many fic you're working with and what OS you're on/app you're using).

If you choose this option, you may want to consider backing the fic up to a secondary location like an external hard drive or cloud storage. This may incur additional expense, but is likely still one of the more affordable options, since storage space is cheap and only getting cheaper, and text files tend to not be that big to begin with, even when there are a lot of them.

Option 2: On Your e-Reader

This is another great option, since this is what Calibre was built for! There are some really great, afforable e-readers out there nowadays, and Calibre supports most of them. Of course, this is a more expensive option because you have to acquire an e-reader in addition to a computer to run Calibre on, but if you already have an e-reader and haven't considered using it to read fanfic, boy are you in for a treat!

Option 3: In BookFusion

This is a really cool option that I discovered while tinkering with Calibre and used for about a year before I moved to a self-hosted option (see Option 4).

BookFusion is a web platform and an app (available on iOS and Android) that allows you to build your own ebook library and access it from anywhere, even when you're offline (it's the offline bit that really sold me). It has a Calibre plugin through which you can manage your ebook library very easily, including sorting your fanfic into easy-to-access bookshelves. You may or may not be able to share ebooks depending on your subscription, but only with family members.

Here's what the iOS app looks like:

The downside to BookFusion is that you'll need a subscription if you want to upload more than 10 ebooks. It's affordable(ish), ranging from $1.99 per month for a decent 5GB storage all the way to $9.99 for 100GB for power users. Yearly subs range from $18.99 to $95.99. (They say this is temporary, early bird pricing, but subscribing now locks you into this pricing forever.)

I would recommend this option if you have some cash to spare and you're really comfortable using Calibre or you're a nerd for making apps like BookFusion work. It works really well and is incredibly convenient once you get it set up (especially when you want to read on your phone or tablet offline), but even I, someone who works in tech support for a living, had some trouble with the initial sync and ended up duplicating every ebook in my BookFusion library, making for a very tedious cleanup session.

Option 4: On a Self-Hosted Server Using Calibre-Web

Do you enjoy unending confusion and frustration? Are you okay with throwing fistfuls of money down a well? Do you like putting in an incredible amount of work for something only you and maybe a few other people will ever actually use? If so, self-hosting Calibre-Web on your own personal server might be a good fit for you!

To be fair, this is likely an experience unique to me, because I am just technical enough to be a danger to myself. I can give a brief summary of how I did this, but I don't know nearly enough to explain to you how to do it.

Calibre-Web is a web app that works on top of Calibre, offering "a clean and intuitive interface for browsing, reading, and downloading eBooks."

I have a network-attached storage (NAS) server on which I run an instance of Calibre and Calibre-Web (through the miracle that is Docker). After the initial work of downloading all the fic I wanted to save and transferring it to the server, I'm now able to download all new fic pretty much via email thanks to FanFicFare, so updating my fic archive is mostly automated at this point.

If you're curious, this is what it looks like:

Pros: The interface is clean and intuitive, the ebook reader is fantastic. The Discover feature, in which you are given random books / fic to read, has turned out to be one feature worth all the irritation of setting up Calibre-Web. I can access, read, and download ebooks on any device, and I can even convert ebooks into another format using this interface. As I mentioned above, updating it with fic (and keeping the Docker container itself up to date) is relatively automated and easy now.

Cons: The server, in whichever form you choose, costs money. It is not cheap. If you're not extremely careful (and sometimes even if you are, like me) and a hard drive goes bad, you could lose data (and then you have to spend more money to replace said hard drive and time replacing said data). It is not easy to set up. You may, at various points in this journey, wish you could launch the server into the sun, Calibre-Web into the sun, or yourself into the sun.

Step Six: Profit!

That's it! I hope this was enough to get you moving towards archiving your favorite fanfic. Again, if there's anything here you'd like me to expand on, let me know! Obviously I'm a huge nerd about this stuff, and love talking about it.

[cenorii]

Complicated things between Birkin and Wesker

Here I'll try to get to the bottom of why Birkin condemned his friend to death and why, through his fault, Wesker is doomed to be HIV (Progenitor) infected even if he stops using PG67A/W. Dealing with canon and delving into the dark side of lore...

Let's start right away with what I've intrigued you with - Wesker's infection. I compared his infection with the prototype virus to HIV for a reason, because there are many similarities. When Wesker became infected and mutated, he became a perpetual carrier of the virus in his blood. Every particle his body carries the virus. And for some reason this fact isn't brought up at all in the fandom… I haven't seen anyone discuss how infectious Wesker actually is. Like HIV, Progenitor strains are classified as retroviruses.

Wesker is just as contagious as any other creature that has been under the sway of any strain of Progenitor, because there are no exceptions in this case. Thanks to a successful symbiosis with the virus, he doesn't attack humans and has only gotten positive attributes from it, but that's the only thing that makes him less contagious than normal infected.

Even if he stops using PG67A/W, which stabilizes his abilities gained from the virus, it won't fix his situation, because even without PG67A/W the virus will continue to exist in his body, there is no connection between this injection and the virus in his blood, it's just a stabilizer supplement.

Getting his body fluids (for example, blood) into someone else's body would cause an immediate reaction and infection. Knowing what a small survival threshold the prototype virus has and how selective it is, the person would probably just die on the spot. The prototype is not capable of creating random zombie-like mutations, it has only two outcomes - death or success. So the precautions here are the same as for HIV positive people. I wouldn't recommend Chris with open wounds to shoot Wesker up close, because if his blood gets on the wound, it could cause irreversible effects. Of course, such a battle tactic is beneath Wesker's dignity, but I would recommend that he bite his opponents. This would prove to be much more effective than a hand punch, as even Chris can easily dodge that punch. However, I'd like to see him try to dodge someone who wants to claw at his flesh at breakneck speed…

Now let's talk about Birkin. He knew the effects of the prototype virus because he had personally worked on this particular strain. He lied to Wesker about the survival rate after injection (File "Virus Memo" from "Umbrella Chronicles"). His information is a lie because out of 13 Weskers, only two survived the injection of the prototype virus. The survival rate is clearly not 90% as he said, but about 15.3%. Birkin knew that his comrade was at risk of dying, so he could have given him the fake injection and lied to him along the lines of "it's something special, but you can't be injured after the injection or you'll die", thus safeguarding Wesker from the urge to throw himself on Tyrant's claws and also safeguarding his humanity. But Birkin was afraid to go against Spencer, however the old man would never have known whether or not Wesker had injected himself with the virus if Birkin had said he had handed him the syringe. I also think that Birkin was unaware of Wesker's immunity, so by giving him the virus under the guise of a panacea, he was sending his friend to his death. You could say it's a cruel and selfish act on his part.

Although, there is a slight possibility that Birkin could have taken tests from Wesker beforehand and calculated that he was immune, which is why he attributed such unrealistically high survival rates to the prototype virus. In that case, his act has a modicum of nobility, since it's unlikely that anyone took tests from the other 12 Weskers. But that's just a theory, we don't know if he really knew about it and if Birkin could have really selfishly thrown Wesker to his fate, turning him into one of his (and Spencer's) test subjects.

[kabukiaku]

heyyy would you recommend fire alpaca? im looking at art programs since im trying to move to drawing on my computer instead of a phone screen n i dont hear about this one too too much.

i know! it's honestly very user friendly, has all the basic tools and cool features needed for digital art. and best of all....it's free. it's got a brush store where you can download tons of brushes of all types.

you can create your own brushes, you can create animations, it's got it all. I've been using this program for 5 years now, haven't had the need to switch out since.

edit: i should mention it has tools specific for making comics / manga too! such as the visuals seen in this recent terzo artwork. you can open a file and open it as a comic and even put in dimensions fit for printing:

[ineffable-celestials]

Angel Crowley's Indentity?

Alright, I won't be delving too much into this theory for now, but I wanted to discuss the topic of angel Crowley and specifically her identity. (I will be referring to Crowley with all pronouns in this post.) So, as somebody who's been in the Good Omens fandom since, well, the release of season 2, I've been trying to think about which angel Crowley would have been in the past and, more specifically, her relationship with God. There are many theories in the past such as her being Raphael or even Jophiel, which are fine but I don't inherently subscribe to. However, let's get a better look at who exactly these angels are. Disclaimer, I am doing the bare bones of research for this right now as this is more-so a silly little thing. That and I am not an expert in religion at all.

Raphael, as stated by a quick search, is a "protector" and "healer" and one of the main, well-known archangels. In fact, he is one of the strongest angels and can outmatch most other angels he is paired with. Although Good Omens does not necessarily line up with the Bible and its teaching 1:1, I still look to it to form thoughts and opinions on certain things. Raphael, unlike Crowley, is not a fallen angel and therefore should still exist within Heaven and be a separate angel entirely.

Moving on, we can now look to Jophiel, another common theory. Honestly, I see this as a cute theory, being the angel of "art", "beauty", and "wisdom". When I think of her, I associate her with "love" which would make Crowley a being of love. I think this is a lovely (no pun intended) idea as I see angels as being of love, at least they are supposed to be. Similar to Raphael, Jophiel is an archangel who did not fall.

It would make more sense for angel Crowley to be Jophiel rather than Raphael since Jophiel, in my opinion, would be more inclined to beauty and creation. Crowley was a starmaker in the past, an angel that created a beautiful thing for humans to witness. However, I don't think certain aspects of both angels line up as they should when it comes to Crowley.

These theories, however, are on the right track. In season 2, episode 6 (yes, I know, the dreaded episode), we are met by this quote/scene between Muriel and Crowley:

"It's all confidential. I can't show it to you. I mean, I couldn't open it if I wanted to. I don't have clearance. You'd have to be a Throne or a Dominion, or above."

Of which Crowley opened the file easily and responded with:

"I haven't always been a demon, and they never change their passwords."

So, keeping that in mind, we must turn to the exact rankings of angels. I've found that the rankings are as such:

HIGHEST ORDER -Seraphim -Cherubim -Thrones MIDDLE ORDER -Dominions -Virtues -Powers LOWEST ORDER -Principalities (Aziraphale <333) -Archangels -Angels Which is a bit confusing considering Archangels are considered one of the highest powers in Good Omens, below the Metatron, of course. I forgot where I had seen these, but there MAY be a distinction between "archangels" and "Archangels" (yes, the capital matters.) In that way, it would make sense, that instead Archangels are somewhere within the Highest Order.

Having established that, we can determine that Crowley was either a Dominion, Throne, Cherubim, Seraphim, or an Archangel. And wow, that is a lot to look through when determining who she would be.

Now, to my theory on who I believe angel Crowley to be. Personally, I see them as "Kokabiel". When looking him up, Kokabiel is said to be a "holy angel" or even a "high-ranking angel". Now, I'm unsure of what exactly they would be in the ranking of angels above, but I think it's safe to assume via this description that she is relatively powerful. Our beloved Crowley is a starmaker and Kokabiel is quite literally known as the "angel of the stars". Not to mention that Kokabiel is a fallen angel which would match up with the Crowley we know today.

The angel Kokabiel was known to be dismissive at times about worldly concerns which may go against our idea of Crowley. But in some ways, it lines up. We know, in the nicest way possible, that Crowley is a selfish being. He desires to protect those closest to him or the things he cares about most in general. Crowley had fallen in love with their stars and it would make sense that he would choose to protect them dearly before even thinking of humans.

Moving on a bit, I want to discuss Kokabiel and her relationship to God. Honestly, I believe that Kokabiel was one of God's if not God's favorite angel. This may seem confusing at first and a bit too "serious" considering I am claiming that Crowley/Kokabiel is God's, the Highest Almighty being, favorite creation. Looking into it further, however, seems to allow something to click in my mind.

In the Bible, Lucifer is the one to turn into the Serpent of Eden. Lucifer was the one to tempt Eve into eating the apple, thus spurring the common story shared today. So why is Crawley the Serpent in our story? Sure, this can merely be of plot convenience and serve only to move the story along, but I believe that it has a greater purpose. God had handed down this fate unto Lucifer. Yet in Good Omens, Crawley was given this punishment instead. This implies that they had some sort of personal relationship with God.

Again, these are all just a small collection of theories on certain ideas regarding Crowley's early identities. I could be wrong, and I most likely am, but these headcanons are all in good fun!

[0heartangel0]

PERSONA 5 TACTICA IS NOT GREAT: A VERY ODDLY-CONSTRUCTED RANT

Pt. 3: This Is Not My Jam

Originally, I was gonna talk about the gameplay next, but I realized that in order for my argument of it to make sense, be accurate and fair, I'm currently stuck in a rather long bit of "research", so to speak. So, for the time being, I'll move on to my next complaint that doesn't require extensive comparisons, which I hope to be short and sweet: The music!

....it's very forgettable-

OKAY! Like I said from the beginning: I'm not here to judge people's tastes! If you enjoyed the music, that's great! Flippin', blast that crap while doing a power study at 3am all you want, I ain't stopping you (except for your neighbors likely filing noise complaints).

But, for me personally, they just didn't click with me.

As of me writing this, I had JUST listened to the full version of the opening theme ('Revolution In Your Heart'), and have immediately forgotten most of how it goes. Not to be harsh, but it sounds like someone trying to write what they think a Persona 5 song sounds like. It just doesn't have the *oomph* factor that would classify it as a Persona 5 song to me.

It doesn't have the high energy of 'Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There'.

It doesn't have the excitement of 'Colors Flying High'.

It doesn't have the motivational feeling of 'You Are Stronger'.

Unlike those openers, Tactica's opening theme doesn't give me that feeling - the feeling of wanting to move, and not just in dance. It doesn't get me hyped to play a game, where I'm overthrowing tyrants for the sake of

And the same is sadly true for the rest of the soundtrack.

(Update: Listening to Revolution In Your Heart again made me realize that in comparison to the other openings, Lyn here is getting drowned out by the music. The other openings leave her crisp and distinguishable from the instrumental. I haven't touched it, yet, but the mixing in this game is not very good....)

I'm glad almost everything is original music, apart from this one rendition of 'Beneath The Mask' at the very beginning of the game, as well as - of course - the Velvet Room theme. However, once again, almost none I remember too well and don't sound like Persona 5 songs. And yeah, I know that sounds contradictory to what I just said about liking that we're doing original music, but what I meant by it was that they don't sound like songs that would *come* from a Persona 5 game. It's just....eh.

What makes it most astonishing about all of this, mainly in regards to the battle music, is that unlike P5 or P5S, you'll be listening to these songs for about 5-10 minutes per level due to the nature of Tactica being a tactical rpg, so battles would run longer. And yet, despite P5's and P5S' battles running shorter (as a turn-based rpg and Musuo-styled rpg respectively), I still remember 'Last Surprise', 'Take Over', 'Axe To Grind', and 'What You Wish For'. Once again, I think it comes back to those songs having more energy and oomph in them by comparison.

You could try to make the argument that they probably wouldn't try as hard with the soundtrack due to it being a spinoff game, and to that, I say that that's a bad faith take to make, because A) that's a harsh assumption on the song writers for this game's soundtrack, as much as I dislike it. Looking it up, there's over a hundred tracks for this game, so they'd be obviously busting their butts on this soundtrack. It's just disappointing to me that I myself didn't find it worthwhile to listen to, personally. Besides, I already know there are people out there who disagree with me on this, so on that front, the songwriters succeeded.

And B) have you not listened to a single track from *any* Persona spinoff?

I already talked about some of Striker’s songs, both PQ and PQ2 have bangers in there, especially since they're balancing the song styles from all three modern Persona games due to the nature of them being crossovers, and Arena created themes for every fighter there, and they all fit them and *slap*! I don't include the Dancing games, since they're already based solely around the music, and most are just renditions or remixes of already existing songs.

(God, I just reminded myself of that terrible remix of 'Mass Destruction' they did in 'Dancing Moon Night', and now I have to apologize to the Tactica soundtrack, because its only crime is being just forgettable, unlike....that thing.)

There's only ONE song I remember, albeit, rather repetitive. It's called 'Abyss Of Despair', and it plays when you fight the Eri monster thing. However, there's only *one* reason I remember it: it reminds me SO much of 'Memory' from Undertale.

It's probably just me, but I just wanted to point it out.

But...I don't get it? Apart from the energy, I feel like there's this other "thing" that's missing in these songs. I've been trying to wrack my brain to come up with the explanation. What is the secret ingredient that makes a Persona 5 song *feel* like a Persona 5 song?

So, I've been listening to some tracks from P5, P5R, and P5S to maybe find that secret sauce. And after listening to the openings of all three back-to-back...it hit me.

It's.....

THE VIOLIN!!!

Think about it! A vast majority of P5 tracks have the violin as a major component in it. There are a few exceptions, mainly the palace and jail themes, but I let those pass because they're supposed to represent the rulers of those places, so they themselves would be given specific instruments ('Price's' zurna, my beloved). To me, I feel the Phantom Thieves themselves are represented by the violins in the music, which is why you mainly hear it in their battle tracks and infiltration themes.

You immediately hear it in 'Last Surprise:'

You hear it in 'Life Will Change' about 45 seconds in:

You can hear it in 'Daredevil' a few seconds in:

Hell, I got curious and looked at 'Counter Strike' to see if they had it (for I only recall the electric guitar), only to immediately be hit with that violin:

And going back to the beginning of this post, you can hear it in all of the openings.

All of them, except for Tactica's. And that's when the crux of my argument becomes realized.

I went back, and listened to random tracks on the Tactica soundtrack, and I didn't hear a *single* violin. No even a cello...

Even the songs done by Lyn don't have them ANYWHERE! Not 'Got Your Tail', not 'Inextinguishable', and definitely not 'Truth Or Dare' (I might do a reblog that adds these three Lyn tracks to show it, because I've run out of space, according to meany Tumblr....).

How could they forget the violins???

I get they're trying to go for a more "revolutionary" sound to the music (which is why you hear a lot of marching drums and guitars (mainly of the electric variety) in them. And a low synth, apparently...), but P5 was already about revolution in a sense. It's a bloody synonym to REBELLION, P5's main theme! And even then, they still could've kept the violins to keep the P5 sound. But, they chose not to for reasons that escape me.

So, in conclusion, I'm not big on the soundtrack to Tactica, and my findings have led me to conclude that it's because some lone bandit snuck into Atlus' headquarters, and stole all of their violins. The only thing they had left was little Ami's drumkit, so worked with that.

Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 4, Pt. 4.5, Pt. 5, Pt. 6, Pt. 7, Pt. 8

[kuwdora]

Naked Vid Draft - VID OUTLINE: Losing My Religion (The Witcher Netflix, season 3. Ensemble & Ciri.)

My next installment of my Naked Vid Draft vidding process series: my fanvid outline.

This post is meant to show how I've (mostly) learned how to outline fanvids over the years and how I think about song choice for some vid projects. I used to do this kind of outline for every single vid and write it down in a text file and keep it in my folder to review whenever I opened the project. These days I just do all of this in my head now unless I find myself struggling mid-way through a project.

You can listen along or just skip below to read the lyrics and my notes to learn about how I see/hear/feel my vid in my head already. I haven't rewatched most of season 3 since the summer. I haven’t even created the project file or started making any clips for this yet. This vid lives in my head and in these notes. All things are subject change once I start vidding but for now this is what it is as I get my start on this project. I've chosen Bellsaint's cover of Losing My Religion for this vid which I'll explain in more detail under the cut.

By reading through the lyrics and my notes, hopefully you’ll also be able to see how I’m structuring the vid. Maybe you'll see the vid in a different way if you come back to watch a completed draft.

I’ve put the lyrics and all my line notes below the cut since this post is already quite long. And also this would count as spoilers for my upcoming vid. (This post is also accountability so I can keep my excitement up and start working on this vid!)

Some vid projects I go into it having a vague emotion or theme or even just a few clips that I know I want to use and that’s really it. Sometimes I barely remember any key visuals, just my “!!! I LOVE THEM!!” Feelings about the character. I just dive into the movie or episodes and I’m just throwing visuals down on the timeline and seeing what sticks. It’s just me having a good time fucking around with the characters feelings or the show’s visuals and it doesn’t really matter how it comes together or what I was thinking before I started it. Usually turns into something by the end.

Other vids, particularly my witcher vids, I have more specific ideas going into the project right down to clip choices and visual climaxes. Because everything Witcher-related is still the top of my fannish obsessions and always on my mind in some way. Dominates my fannish feeds and reading and discussing and etc etc. I have specific things I want to squee and think about with TWN and that ends up in my vids.

Reminder: this is a season 3 only vid so I will only be pulling visuals from season 3.

Song choice/vid concept origins/process notes:

I’ve been making single-season character study vids for Yennefer and Ciri and Fringilla since 2021. I’ve appreciated a specific female vocalist/singer-songwriter with Halsey and Claire Guerrero for the vibes and the lyrics. It’s a musical motif I hadn’t really intended on falling into so thoroughly for the show. But it feels good and right and I enjoy making TWN vids with that music. So it was pretty natural for me to want to vid season 3 again with that vibe/atmosphere in mind.

I really loved season 3 of TWN. What I was really excited to see was how all the events of Thanedd would come together, the Family of Destiny, and I was so excited to see this chapter of Ciri’s journey begin when she’s separated from everyone.

So it’s exciting to have this concept for a season 3 vid. I want it to be very Ensemble but also Ciri. I want to look at the struggle, at the pain, at the grief, and mayhem of Thanedd. While also being able to highlight some of the lovely moments between Ciri, Geralt, Yennefer on the run. And Jaskier also showing up to do his best to help protect Ciri and help Geralt and Yen.

REM’s Losing My Religion has lyrics and a mood that is really perfect for this. I don’t even remember how I circled around to this song, only that I did. I've always been more of a lyric-driven vidder and I love to dig in and think about lyrical associations and emotional beats on certain verses.

I’ve really gotten into vidding musical covers over the years. I find covers to be a really interesting way to take the familiar song and put a new spin on it. A way to add some layers to a fanvid and emphasize certain vibes/atmosphere. Transformative remix art. :)

I found this incredible cover by Bellsaint of Losing My Religion. Not only did I fall so hard for the arrangement and the female vocalist, she ended up sounding similar to what I liked about Halsey and Claire Guerrero that I used for my Yen and Ciri and Fringilla vids. Yummy musical motif. I don’t have thoughts or fleshed out ideas yet for all the lyrics and instrumentals. Like I said before usually once I start clipping and adding things to the timeline, I discover how shots from the season that relate to the emotions/themes/characters will fit into place on the timeline. It’s a fun time.

This vid is ultimately going to be about the grief and struggle and pain of Family of Destiny and how it all falls apart leaving Ciri standing in the rubble. With those those climactic events of Thanedd. Ciri and Falka and The Rats.

This will be a fluid POV. We’re starting with Geralt, moving onto Yen, then Yen and Geralt, then Jaskier, then our Thanedd villains and ultimately Ciri. Everyone is losing their religion.

Pardon the formatting. I've always just slapped lyrics down and write notes next to the line, nothing fancy.

VID OUTLINE: Losing My Religion TWN Season 3: Ensemble + Ciri. LYRICS + VID NOTES

[0:00] Geralt POV in verse 1

Oh life, it's bigger [Geralt with Ciri on the ferry, Geralt sad eyes about the weight Ciri carries] It's bigger than you [Ciri Child of the Elder Blood/ Tor Lara, Everyone wants Ciri?] And you are not me [Geralt sad/exhausted, maybe on the ferry or another safe house?] The lengths that I will go to [Geralt rushing to save Ciri, maybe in the belletyn labyrinth maze] The distance in your eyes [many choices for Ciri haunted eyes, still thinking of Ciri on Ferry looking out at the water] Oh no, I've said too much [Geralt talking to Ciri in Sherrwarrdfijifjs maybe] I've said enough [also a play on TWN Geralt not being talky philosopher/ but also more Geralt sad eyes when he’s trying to keep Ciri safe]

[0:31] Yen POV verse 2

That's me in the corner [fucking TWN putting Yen in the corner, inverting Dear Friend Letter writing, Yen being shut out of the safe houses] That's me in the spotlight [Yen trying to teach Ciri magic and/or Yen and Ciri at market to get portal to aretuza and Yen saving Ciri? Or Yen at Thanedd in the Spotlight. Spotlight of nascent motherhood though..hmm..] Losing my religion [Ciri being mad/frustrated/irritated at Yen, i.e. when Yen pulls her away from applegat blabbing about her visions. Or maybe Yen at Thanedd?] Trying to keep up with you [Yen and Ciri antagonisms at the bathhouse? / Ciri and Yen on the run at the market after killing guy in Keira’s portal shop] And I don't know if I can do it [That One Shot where Yen walks away from Ciri at the bathhouse, Looking Pained] Oh no, I've said too much [Yen snapping at Ciri/ maybe when Ciri blabbing to applegat, or another instance?] I haven't said enough [Yen beautiful face of grief at trying to do right by Ciri]

[1:01] Yen and Geralt POV. Previous two POVs were more about themselves and focused on Ciri. This section of lyrics makes me think of Yen and Geralt about each other - as well as Ciri. And the vocals are kind of layered in the song, it sounds like two voices. It makes me think of all the quiet tenderness of Yennefer and Geralt had in this season.

I thought that I heard you laughing [Yen and Geralt watching Ciri dance at belletyn] I thought that I heard you sing [Yen and Ciri on the lake ice skating, Geralt watching them, maybe also Ciri and Geralt piggyback ride. Trying to sing = Ciri trying to do magic and/or trying to be a normal girl with a family.] I think I thought I saw you try [Yennefer and Geralt looking at each other !!!!!!!!! Trying!!!! To do their best! when they’re camping near Sherwrararrward and belletyn and in the forest on the way to Aretuza.]

[1:16-1:27] Foreshadow/Transition. There’s an ominous ‘oooooh’ with the ominous music in the background here for these 11 seconds. Maybe Ciri and Jaskier watching Yen and Geralt in the woods? Or: will try to bridge a Ciri clip from previous verse to Foreshadow Ciri in the desert, ‘thought I saw you try’ try to do magic.. Trying to summon magic and getting all the visions of Fire and Death. Transition from Ciri + fire/power to vision!Jaskier’s horrific death, then cut to:]

[1:28] Jaskier POV

Every whisper [whispers=secrets, lies and subterfuge. Also: Jaskier rubbing his fingers while in the carriage with Philippa and Radovid. Whisper=small action, Jaskier pain/fire/Rience, and/or from Ciri Vision. What Jaskier will do to protect Ciri, implied heartache/what will he lose along the way.] Of every waking hour [Philippa getting in Jaskier’s face? Keeping him on his toes.] I'm choosing my confessions [Jaskier going to Radovid, Jaskier face of pain and empathy and/or Jaskier singing?] Trying to keep an eye on you [Jaskier and Ciri in the cottage] Like a hurt, lost and blinded fool, fool [Jaskier/radovid kiss, Jaskier looking hurt/betrayed morning after] Oh no, I've said too much [Jaskier singing Ciri to sleep? Jaskier worry morning after when she’s gone? Jaskier’s woogity face when talking to Radovid?] I've said enough [Jaskier’s resolve? Jaskier eyessss.]

[3:35] Thanedd POVs: Philippa, Dijkstra, Vilgefortz.

Consider this [Philippa bending Geralt’s ear about taking sides at Thanedd] Consider this, the hint of the century [Vilgefortz + Geralt + paintings, or walking. Vilgefortz epic stakes. Staff.] Consider this, the slip [I’ve always heard ‘the slave’ instead of ‘the slip’ which has made me stuck on Geralt as a slave to his neutrality, whacking the shit out of Dijkstra and breaking his knee] That brought me to my knees, failed [Dijkstra owtchies howling in pain] What if all these fantasies come [Vilgefortz letting scoia’tael invade? Or Redanian soldiers grabbing Geralt? ?? something] Flailing around [Vilgefortz staff + Geralt. Ciri Beach Running Thanedd falling apart/ ring of fire/but also I’ve done that exact layering/transparency before in previous season 3 vids but hmmmm…something.] Now I've said too much [Vilgefortz beach. Maybe staff thumps to the percussion here, beat beat beat Geralt beat, Geralt losing his neutrality religion, Geralt bleed, Vilgefortz smirk, but maybe Vilgefortz in Tor Lara with Ciri watching Ciri touch the monolith? always circle back to Ciri..... To help transition to:]

[2:29] Ciri POV - Ciri on the run / Ciri in the desert here. Layering Past Ciri with all the memories of Geralt and Yen and Jaskier with the pain she’s experiencing in the desert alone and she’s losing her mind seeing her mother and grandmother. MAYBE also layer in Vilgefortz’ mind warping False Ciri?? Who is Ciri? It’s all just a dream.]

I thought that I heard you laughing [Ciri having dinner with Family of Destiny? / more Ciri/Family - maybe a flash of Desert Falka Vision?] I thought that I heard you sing [More Ciri focusing on Yen and Geralt Trying to Do Their Best. Ciri and Yen in the market? Maybe another layer of Hooded Cloaked Falka?] I think I thought I saw you try [Ciri Family Feels/ action of Tor Lara? Yen and Geralt trying to protect Ciri?] [maybe this is a Falka POV verse?????]

But that was just a dream [Ciri walking at night - blue desert, overlays with Family of Destiny] That was just a dream [Ciri/Family transition/layering Ciri getting dragged on the ground by bounty hunters, or when she’s tied up in the tavern]

[3:09] Ciri POV That's me in the corner [Ciri in the darkened tavern vision with Falka] That's me in the spotlight [Ciri being circled by no-hood Falka] Losing my religion [Ciri + fire magic + visions + visions of death + Falka?] Trying to keep up with you [Ciri fighting alongside The Rats in the tavern? Falka’s fire and fury and rage in her expression in the tavern.] And I don't know if I can do it [Ciri to Falka in the darkened tavern] Oh no, I've said too much [Ciri stabbing the guy / Ciri dissociating to become someone she needs to be to survive] I haven't said enough [Ciri’s face after she kills the guy / tells the Rats her name is Falka]

Messy vid outline is messy, sometimes specific and sometimes ambiguous. Likely to change or have happy accidents along the way.

[bluepurpz-j]

So, this is just a work in progress... but I've been wracking my head making another TWST OC that's not yuu, but an OC that's just like Rollo and Fellow Honest. You know, characters from TWST events, and she's based off Captain Hook :DDDDD

Her name is Captain Elena Harlow, and I plan to make her a headmaster to an all girls school, which I haven't thought of much yet since I'm still focusing on how she'd look like. I HAVE thought of a lore for her, but it also needs fixing.

It's been a while since I last opened the file to her concept. Character Designing is so tough man, aughhh but I love it at the same time. I love the hardship of creating a character... so the joke's on me.

Also did this because I wanted to see TWST have a character based off Captain Hook (he's an iconic villain, you see) but I don't want to get stuck waiting so I made one myself >:DDDD

[awingedllama]

Hello, do you have tutorial for how you get 3D models into your game?

hi! it's easy, here's a quick tutorial:

So first off you'll need Sims 4 Studio, Blender, and a very general idea of how to use Blender to make CC

Your 3D model needs to be in a file format supported by Blender. I use 2.76 which supports what you see in the screenshot below. If the model you found isn't available in a supported format, there are converters online which can convert models to .obj (anyconv.com, etc.). Just give it a Google

I found a .dae model of an old TV on freepoly.org to use for this tutorial (the download came with a textures folder and a model folder).

In S4S, create a 3D mesh for whatever kind of model you downloaded (or just a deco object, if you don't want it to be functional).

In the meshes tab, export the mesh of the EA object.

Open the blender file of the EA object, and import the 3D model into the scene. The TV model is a collada file, but you'd import whatever kind of file you downloaded.

If it looks like nothing happened, don't worry! Your model is there, it's probably just to scale - which means super huge in comparison to the tiny Sims 4 object. Zoom out until you can see it, and then size it down with the 'S' key. Move it to the same place as the EA mesh

Rename UV Map to uv_0. Then, after deleting the EA mesh in edit mode, join the 3D model with the EA object. Shift-click the imported model then the EA object in the outliner, before pressing Ctrl+J (you have to be in Object mode for this to work. Use Tab key to quickly toggle between Edit and Object mode)

If you are using a deco object, you'll be replacing s4studio_mesh_1. s4studio_mesh_0 will probably be a shadow plane, which can be left alone or hidden altogether in your mesh

Apply a decimate modifier to the mesh if necessary (some 3D models are pretty geometry heavy – you'll probably want it under 10k polys). Since decimating is destructive, you don't want a very high poly mesh, because it won't look good after the modifier is applied. (you can retopologize the mesh but that's a whole other thing)

Import the mesh in S4S (the higher poly the mesh, the longer this takes), then import the texture that came with the model. This texture was a 4k JPEG, so it needed a bit of work (especially as TS4 doesn't support 4k textures). I sized it down to 1024x1024 and converted it to a .png.

Replace all LODs and shadow meshes. Make sure to import a blank bump and specular map, or else your object will be oddly lined and shiny

This last step is optional, but as most 3D models (that aren't game ready) are made for rendered environments, a lot of the textures don't have ambient occlusion or highlights. It makes for a bit of a plain-looking object in TS4, so I like to add these by baking the shadows in blender and painting highlights in PS. I also used the oil paint filter in Photoshop on the wood to make it more maxis-match.

If you haven't made anything for TS4 this might seem complicated, but once you get the basics it's very, very simple. Like copy-and-paste

the only other thing would be to make sure that the license for the 3D model permits personal use! (and not to paywall it obviously because beyond being crusty behaviour, that is legally perilous)

download the TV here if you like

and if you have any questions about specific steps, dm me!

[raccoonscupoftea]

🍙 In love with Food

Timeskip!Osamu X Y/n

Summary: You had a date scheduled, but life was being life again.

Warnings: slight angst, fluff, shitty day, shitty boss, uh swearing, grammar mistakes cause english is not my first language, food

| MASTERLIST | REQUEST INFO |

//----//----//----//

As you woke up from a nice deep slumber, you were happy, exited even, because there was a date waiting for you after work. you were happy while showering, happy while eating, happy while talking, heck even happy while working. It's been ages since your last date and this new one brought back old feelings of a high school crush.

Even you're work bestie was happy for you to see such a big smile on you. She complimented you back and forth "Happiness looks good on you" "It's like staring into the sun" or "Keep that smile going. You look stunning" were her go to compliments. True a great day so far.

Until your boss came along.

"Miss L/n, nice to see you smile, but care to explain to me what this is"

He slammed down a file, opened it and pointed to a specific spot. As you looked on it you recognised the paper and there was a huge mistake on it. One which you made. To your defense it was late, you worked longer than anticipated and was tired, but your boss wanted the papers done this very day.

Seeing such a big mistake, only a rookie would do, was devastating and your very heart stoped beating before increasing in an alarming rate.

You wanted to speak up "I-" but then realised there's actually nothing to talk you out of this situation. You made that mistake. You remember putting in that number, but only now you know it's wrong.

"Miss, you have made many mistakes in this company. I'm questioning your intelligence"

You're eyes widened and looked up to the boss's face. "You're fired. Take you're stuff and leave immediately"

He really did just fired you. Out in the open, with every employee to witness. It was just an office job but it payed your bills and payed your food.

There was no word coming from you as said ex-boss left back to his office. He only came out to fire you. You weren't even mad at him, probably a bit, but all these mistakes did come from you. It was the company's fair right to fire employees who only deliver mistakes and complications. All fault lay within yourself.

So it wasn't helped. You placed your stuff in a box and before you left the building one last time, you placed you're personal card onto the table. Walking throu the glass door of your former work space, made you dive into the drowning reality.

You were happy this morning, but life gave you the middle finger and teard down thos ray of sunshines. Life truly is unfair.

After placing your stuff into your car, you'd drive home. The drive was a little emotional, but you arrived safely at least.

This reminded you of the rent. It was due every beginning of the month. What day is today? Oh, great the 27th. At least the last paycheck can cover up the next rent. Until then you have to find a new job to no be homeless.

So many new responsibilities and fears. And it feels like it's all your own fault. If you haven't messed up, if you would have just been more efficient than tired all the time, then maybe you would have kept your job and not worry about finding a new job.

How would you even explain why you were kicked out in the first place? Telling the truth would do you any favour.

A sigh escaped your lungs, and the box got placed on the coffee table by the couch. Your body let itself fall down in the next room, right onto the bed. There again was this feeling of tiredness after work a full shift with overtime, but this time oh has only been 3 hours.

You could luckily only create an alarm for a few hours later, until sleep was catching up on you. Now you laid there in full work attire, hair still made. You sleept on your stomach, head twisted to the side while the phone was still in your hand.

It only took a minute until you were knocked out of reality and Into the dream world.

---

You're phone vibrated in your hand and the loud alarm sound woke you up immediately. It felt like time moved faster and shot you to the day, but it was still the very same day as you fell asleep.

With the tiredness still all over, you sat up and looked down on yourself. The shirt was wrinkled and the rest was nowhere were it was supposed to be. One glance at the time and you knew, it would be wise to start getting ready.

Fired or not. You wouldn't let these negative things mess up your long awaited date.

You took a comforting hot shower, spend a little longer in it and then picked out a caual but still stylish outfit. The meeting spot was a restaurant specificly for Onigiris. It was a small but still very comfortable shop in the city.

You never been in this restaurant but you're very curious about the food. At the desired time, you just arrived and went inside. The date was no where to be seen but you still sat down on one of the chairs.

There was no notification on you're phone that someone had texted you, but maybe they were just stuck in traffic. There still was hope.

There seems to be only one guy working here and he came up to you, thinking you were ready to order "Do you know what you want or should I recommend something?"

You glanced up to him. His cap is a little deeper in his face but you still could see the smile on his face while he hold a little notepad, ready to write down whatever you wanted.

"oh, I waiting for someone. In a few minutes they should be there"

The guy first glanced over to the door then back at you. His smile didn't fade, but something in his eyes had shifted. He put away the notepad "if you change you're mind. I'll be right there" and so he wandered of to another customer.

With another glance in your phone you noticed it was now 20 minutes after the decided date time, but you still waited. Disasters always happen when one needs to be on time.

Time passed and passed by like it always does, but the supposed date was no where in sight.

Another glance at the time. Nearly one hour passed.

Well, guess they're not coming. No message, no call.

When you wrote the person "Are you still coming?" Only then did you see that they actually blocked you. A little message from the system told you so.

Your eyes wandered over to the last message they sent "Can't wait to see you :)"

What a big fat lie.

There were words running around in your head. Words more destructive than a bomb wand way more hurtful. First the debacle at work and now your date stood you up.

You felt the tears climbing up to your eyes, wanting to get out. It took quite some effort to call them back.

"I guess they are not coming. I'm sorry" this smooth voice from the store worker reached your ears. Upon looking up and glancing right into his worried eyes, you immediately felt the tears backing up with full force. They couldn't be stopped anymore and so you broke out crying, placing your head on the counter and hiding your head with the arms, hand burring themselves into your fresh showered and styled up hair.

Another hand reached out and touched your wrist. "You wanna talk 'bout it?"

You looked up to him "Uh, I don't want to bother you at w-" while you talked your eyes had wandered around the store, only to find it empty.

"Yeah, I'm about to close the restaurant"

"Oh I'm sorry. I'll leav-" you immediately stood up

"Don't worry. You can stay. Have some food"

As one foot was on the floor, he had interwien and you fell back onto the chair. Well, at least you can eas something and pay for occupying a seat an while hour long. The crying had stopped a little but you were still a bit stuffy on your nose, eyes red as well.

The guy Infront of you smiled, quite charming actually, and he then walked over to the kitchen.

"Don't worry 'bout paying" He shouted from behind "These are leftovers from today. So they either get eaten or thrown away"

The guy then appeared with a large tray full of Onigiris. You're eyes widened at the amount of food. He then continued to talk "And I don't really wanna throw them away. I would have probably eaten them this night, but then my stomach would have hated me again"

His comments about his stomach made you giggle a little bit and as the sound reached the guys ears he began to smile a little more.

"My name's Osamu, by the way. But you can just call me Samu"

"Y/n" you smiled a little.

Osamu placed down the plate full of Onigiris, grabbed himself a chair and sat down infront of you.

He also leaned down to grab two bottles of beer, opening them as well and giving you one "on the house" he simply smiles and gives you a wink.

You accepted the bottle, cheeks a little tinted red.

"Then you may dig in" he called out. After thanking for the food you bit into the first one.

You date may have stood you up, but this Onigiri may have just became your new date. The taste and the mixture all fit well together and you couldn't just not devour this art piece of food in an instant.

Osamu was watching you inhale his food and his smile grew bigger. Happy to have found another who loves his food.

You began to talk while still chewing on your food. At first he couldn't understand it but on a second thought he had heard you say "This is amazing"

Foods the best when one loses all of their social manners, you had just experience this first hand and started to hide your mouth with a hand in suprise.

Osamu laughed "No worries. I don't judge, besides I'm guilty of it too" He then as well began to eat.

You don't know why such a simple dish made you so happy, but for a second you had forgotten your misery and the curent problems you life with. May it also be the company of Osamu or just simply both.

The two of you ate the whole plate clean. No corn was left, no sauce was not licked up.

You fell in love with this food. It was the perfect comfort food for you, and eating it in an empty shop with the one who made them was like a big hug "thank you" you had voiced out after a minute of silence, comfortable silence.

"No problem. Just promise me to come back soon" He smiled at you widely. How could you not return to this place. This is heaven.

"will do" you nodded at him with a smile of yours. A genuine smile. A smile you had held at the very beginning of this day.

[violetsandshrikes]

Since sharing this post about a usful AI used to compile and graph research papers, I've realised I have a few other resources I can share with people!

Note: I haven't had a chance to use every single one of these. A group of post-grad students has been slowly compiling an online list, and these are some I've picked out that are free (or should be free and also have paid versions). However, other students using them have all verified them as safe.

Inciteful (Using Citations to Explore Academic Literature | Inciteful.xyz) – similar to connectedpapers + researchrabbit. Also allows you to connect two papers and see how they are linked. Currently free.

Spinbot (Spinbot - Article Spinning, Text Rewriting, Content Creation Tool.) – article spinner + paraphraser. Useful for difficult articles/papers. Currently free (ad version).

Elicit (Elicit: The AI Research Assistant)  – AI research assistant, creates workflow. Mainly for lit reviews. Finds relevant papers, summarises + analyses them, finds criticism of them. Free (?)

Natural Reader (AI Voices - NaturalReader Home (naturalreaders.com)) – text to speech. Native speakers. Usually pretty reliable, grain of salt. Free + paid versions.

Otter AI (Otter.ai - Voice Meeting Notes & Real-time Transcription) – takes notes and transcribes video calls. Pretty accurate. Warn people Otter is entering call or it is terrifying. Free + paid versions.

Paper Panda (🐼 PaperPanda — Access millions of research papers in one click) – get research papers free. Chrome extension. Free.

Docsity (About us - Docsity Corporate) – get documents from university students globally. Useful for notes.

Desmos (Desmos | Let's learn together.) – online free graphing calculator. Free (?)

Core (CORE – Aggregating the world’s open access research papers) – open access research paper aggregation.

Writefull (Writefull X: AI applied to academic writing) – Academic AI. Paraphrasing, title generator, abstract generator, apparently ChatGPT detector now. Free.

Photopea (Photopea | Online Photo Editor) – Photoshop copy but run free and online. Same tools. Free.

Draw IO (Flowchart Maker & Online Diagram Software) – Flowchart/diagram maker. Free + paid versions.

Weava (Weava Highlighter - Free Research Tool for PDFs & Webpages (weavatools.com)) – Highlight + annotate webpages and pdfs. Free + paid versions.

Unsplash (Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash) – free to use images.

Storyset (Storyset | Customize, animate and download illustration for free) – open source illustrations. Free.

Undraw (unDraw - Open source illustrations for any idea) – open source illustrations. Free.

8mb Video (8mb.video: online compressor FREE) – video compression (to under 8mb). Free.

Just Beam It (JustBeamIt - file transfer made easy) – basically airdrop files quickly and easily between devices. Free.

Jimpl (Online photo metadata and EXIF data viewer | Jimpl) – upload photos to see metadata. Can also remove metadata from images to obscure sensitive information. Free.

TL Draw (tldraw) – web drawing application. Free.

Have I Been Pwned (Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach) – lets you know if information has been taken in a data breach. If so, change passwords. Free.

If you guys have any feedback about these sites (good or bad), feel free to add on in reblogs or flick me a message and I can add! Same thing with any broken links or additions.

[triplesnet]

a gifmaking tutorial would actually be super appreciated :)

Okay, this is gonna get long and it might not be great but I will do my best to make it understandable.

Put under a read more cause we're not forcing anyone to look at all this.

We're gonna make this gif:

First of all you'll need 3 software programs downloaded.

4k downloader (to download videos)

Gomplayer (to get the frames from the videos)

Photoshop (I pay for it but there are other ways)

Some things to keep in mind

better quality video = better quality gifs

if you want videos in 4k you have to download them in MKV format as MP4s can't be 4k.

gifs can only contain 256 colours so gifs with a lot of different colours might get grainy.

if you use low quality videos or upscaled videos they sometimes have duplicate frames which will make the animations look weird, but you can easily remove those extra frames.

tumblr only accepts gifs under 10mb in size so all gifs have to be less than that (photos less than 20mb)

you can put up to 30 gifs/images in one post

ok here we go

Step 1: Download video

Step 2: Get the frames from the video

You will play the video using Gomplayer

Find the part you want to GIF

Press CTRL + G to bring up this menu

I haven't experimented much with these settings but you'll want to choose the place you want your frames to end up so you can find them later

4. Have the Capture all frames box checked (unless it's 60fps then do 0.03). You can capture up to 999 frames in one go.

5. Press "burst capture" and it will start getting the frames (video has to be playing) it will look like this.

6. Great you have your frames.

Step 3. Making a GIF

Open Photoshop

Load Files Into Stack

This will open the folders on your computer so navigate to where you put your frames and select the frames you want by clicking on the first and holding shift while clicking on the last.

3. Wait for PS to load the frames

4. Once it's all loaded the first thing you'll do is crop it. Press 'C' on your keyboard. There are a couple presets you can use or you can 'clear' that and crop however you wish.

I always crop out at least a little of the top and bottom cause there can be dark lines there.

5. Resize: for optimal quality on tumblr there are three sizes to keep in mind.

For sets like this with 3 gifs next to each other the width should be 177p, height does not matter.

For sets like this with 2 gifs next to each other the width should be 268p

And for a set like we're doing today with just 1 gif it's 540p

You'll want to memorise these numbers for future use.

177p, 268p or 540p will be the width of your gifs.

To open the resize menu you press CTRL + ALT + i

Change the width to in this case 540p (p as in pixels)

It will auto match the height to keep the same proportions.

Click OK and wait until it's done.

6. Make sure you have the 'timeline' window up at the bottom of your photoshop

7. Click 'create frame animation' (button might say video timeline but change that by pressing that little arrow next to it)

8. Press the button with three lines in the top right of the 'timeline' window and press 'make frames from layers'

9. The frames will have loaded in in reverse order so open the same menu and click 'reverse frames'

Step 4. Blurring the logo/text (optional)

Since we have a logo in there I will want to blur it but you might not have one or you don't care if there's a logo or text in your gifs.

First we have to make the gif into a smart object.

Select all layers by pressing CTRL + ALT + A

Convert into a 'video timeline' by pressing the button in the bottom left of the timeline window

3. Right click on your layers and click on 'convert to smart object'

4. Press Z to switch to the zoom and zoom in on your logo/text.

5. Press L to switch to the lasso tool and select your logo/text

there should now be a line where you selected.

6. Open 'Gaussian Blur'

7. Click OK

Now we have to get our GIF back to the frame timeline.

8. Click 'flatten frame into clips' using the timeline menu

9. Press 'delete' once to remove the smart object

10. Convert back to frame animation

11. Make frames from layers

No need to reverse this time. But now your logo/text is blurred, as long as it doesn't move but that's a topic for another day.

Step 5: Sharpening

If you didn't have something to blur let's go over smart objects again.

Select all layers by pressing CTRL + ALT + A

Convert into a 'video timeline' by pressing the button in the bottom left of the timeline window

3. Right click on your layers and click on 'convert to smart object'

5. Camera Raw Filter (Optional)

I use this for base editing of colours and the overall clearness of GIFs, it's not made for that tho it sometimes gets buggy. Works best on photos.

Press CTRL + SHIFT + A to open this.

It's best to do as little as possible in here as it can bug out.

I mostly mess with the effects, light and detail settings in here, don't touch the sharpening though cause we will use smart sharpen for that.

6. Smart Shapening

Most people have a sharpening action they use, including me. But you can also do it manually. You can find my actions in here.

To do it manually and make your own settings. This is how you open smart sharpen.

If you use my sharpening action remember it can be a bit much sometimes, in that case hide the second layer

Use an action or mess around to find a sharpening setting that looks good on your gif, usually don't need much.

Now we have to get our GIF back to the frame timeline.

7. Click 'flatten frame into clips' using the timeline menu (I'm low on images to use check the blur section for images)

It might take a minute since it has to process the new settings.

8. Press 'delete' once to remove the smart object

9. Convert back to frame animation

10. Make frames from layers

11. Select all your frames to set the framerate

You can click on any frame for this. Click 'other' and set it to 0,06.

12. Press CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + S to open 'Save for Web'

these are my save settings.

Click save and name and place it wherever you want it saved.

Congrats you've made a gif.

Step 6: Colouring

Now we have a problem cause there's already 30 images in this post.

For colouring I have a psd I use and adjust to the individual set. It's in my google drive you can find it here along with my actions.

If you're making several gifs from one video you'll want to adjust to the first and then copy that over to keep things matching.

We can go more in depth on this but that would have to be a different post since I can't put more images in this one.

Step 7: Watermark (optional)

A lot of GIF makers have watermarks these days as there's a lot of people who repost GIFs without credit. Make your own so people know the GIFs are yours even when posted elsewhere.

Step 8: Post

Post your hard work on your tumblr, use a bunch of tags so people have a higher chance of seeing it.

I hope this post was understandable and clear, let me know if you have any questions and if you want a proper colouring post.

[futzingbarton]

kind of a nika update since i don't really post much personal stuff on here, but i think?? most of the ppl i wouldn't want seeing any personal updates are blocked and would have to go out of their way to see this so. whatever.

anyway hi. i am crawling along. the tl;dr is that after the past, uh...what now makes 7 years of being constantly in survival mode, moving from place to place, living day to day and just desperately trying to survive, as of, idk, september? my life has finally kind of somewhat slowed down. i got out of a very horrible living situation, and have been working every day on remembering how to Live and Breathe. turns out trauma is a lot!

on top of that, i am finally in a space to address my health. besides mental health (diagnosed with things that make sense, the adhd and the autism) i'm also figuring out my physical health. i finally got my PCOS diagnosis after a couple years, and am in the process of figuring out what kind of EDS/connective tissue disorder i've got. my life at the moment consists largely of working, followed by doctors appointments, followed by sleeping.

i'm more exhausted than i ever could have imagined. i'm burnt out in a way i never expected. it's like i was a bird on an eight year migration and now that i've finally stopped having to flap my wings, i can't move at all. it's a lot to work around. i feel terrible that so many things have slipped away from me, whether it be responding to people or finishing up overdue commissions (i swear on everything in me that i haven't forgotten, @thebreakfastfish. i have the files on my ipad. i look at them every day! and yet, i pick up the pen, and my brain starts turning into static, and. yeah. i am working up the capacity to send you an email with a bigger update and some actual progress because you saved my ass last december and somehow it's been a year and aaaaaaaaaaaaa.)

work is good. work is great, actually. i love my job. it's a Lot, but i love my job. working in non-profit is a lot, and i am Important in that i manage a lot of projects for clinic services. i work to help the vulnerable population where i live, so it's fulfilling, but it's also exhausting. turns out Thinking for eight hours a day makes your brain mush. this year has also been a series of unfortunate events for my job. four of our physical locations flooded in january, our main clinic was destroyed by it, we've spent months building back up and figuring out how we're going to rebuild, etc etc. tons of long term things in the works to fix things that happened overnight 11 months ago.

so things are Good but things are also Endless. i'm trying to not lose myself in the thought that this is how it's going to be forever. i want to create again, to dream and think and breathe again. there are moments among the fog where i do live and breathe and enjoy--i have a partner now, who was a friend of a few years first, and he brings me so much joy, and helps me love myself in ways i didn't think i was capable of. but by and large every day is a struggle where i am relearning how to live. how to feed myself and care for myself and exist in a way where i am not crushing myself to survive.

i hope i can get to a place where i can do the things i want to do again. i want to run tabletops again--but the thought of organizing something weekly, for multiple people, and creating and responding to things on the fly, makes me physically hurt. i want to draw and paint again--but i pick up anything and stare at the paper or ipad for hours and then sigh and turn things off. i think of words in the shower and run to write--but then i open the document and everything is gone. i feel like i'm in limbo, in some kind of purgatory, trying to crawl my way out. but at least i'm not in the inferno anymore.