#it just frustrates me especially because tumblr is a 100% functioning website

[bitterseadrop-a]

y'all if you wanna unfollow me ?? or i follow first and you don't want to interact ?? for literally whatever reason ?? that's totally fine.

only thing i ask is that you hardblock me, especially if it's a follow first from my side. i understand if you don't want to interact, you're entitled to curate your dash to your own needs. but i don't wanna stand here like an idiot or seem obnoxious by following again after i've already been soft-blocked, because 9/10 i won't remember if i've followed you before.

and if you have hardblocked me and change your mind one day, wanting to interact ?? i'm cool with that as well. i won't ask questions. heck even if you shouldn't be feeling any interactions at the moment but want to interact at a later point, you're free to shoot me a dm or just follow back 5 years down the line.

[pingnova]

every time ao3 runs a fundraiser I have to see at least one bad take on my dash that just makes me cringe because apparently people think software, hardware, maintenance, and being a legal nonprofit entity is free. I’m afraid to inform you we live under capitalism where literally everything costs money especially such a massively popular website. they have to buy web security so they don’t get DDOS’d (REALLY expensive), they host their OWN SERVERS, and LOTS of them, a small core group of programmers does all the fixes and innovation FOR FREE and the time it took to learn enough to get to their point and the time it takes to actively do this shit is really snappin a lot. you can have issues with ao3, I probably won’t agree with you but like, it’s your brain. but don’t bully them for the material realities of running a hugely popular website and a legally recognized nonprofit? so many organizations irl become businesses before they become nonprofits because it’s so complicated, time consuming, and expensive to become and recertify as a nonprofit. it’s easier to become a moderately successful corporation than a small nonprofit that survives more than three years in operation, and that’s not even accounting for a nonprofit whose main service is something with such massive overhead and active upkeep as one of the most popular sites on the internet. they have a public real time dashboard of what their programmers are working on, and like every nonprofit in the us release their financial report at least annually. it’s not AO3’s fault you don’t understand how websites or nonprofits work. a $100k fundraiser once a year is actually a shit operating budget for any org. that’s two functional salaries, so two full time employees, with no benefits or office space or honestly any product. That’s just enough to pay two people for their damn time. AO3 is 99% incredibly dedicated and skilled volunteers who make and upkeep an open source democratic fandom hub at essentially only the cost of operation. again, you can criticize their rules or whatever, because the basis is your opinion, but legal, financial, and technical realities don’t change based on your opinion. this is like criticizing a library because it’s built on the ground. everything is built on the ground. I especially hate this because as someone with huge investment in the social good and nonprofit sector it’s frustrating to see people wasting energy on a completely valid aspect of something. there are plenty of bullshit nonprofits out there that support shit like child labor in the us, but criticizing them for having an operating budget will make anyone look like an idiot. so once more criticize other things but not the literal legally binding requirements for telling the us government you don’t profit off the free work you do. EDIT and on top of being in the nonprofit sector I’m ALSO a web programmer and I cannot tell you how exhausting and rage inducing this very attitude is in my field. people contact me about programming them a custom website and will be shocked if it’s even $100. the general sense ive got is that many think I can slap together a massive interactive website by hand for $20. absolutely not???? I under charge because of the nonprofit aspect, but $3,000 for a website is cute. it’s even cute for just maintaining an existing website. $10,000 might do it for a small site with a few pages. ao3 has billions of pages. ignoring that the ao3 is part of a larger nonprofit hosting many many more sites, archives, legal work, etc (that you DEFINITELY legally or socially benefit from whether you’re aware of it or not, AO3s legal recently wrote a Supreme Court brief that helped rule in favor of keeping parts of previous widely depended upon software public goods so that the price you pay for internet & literally everything doesn’t blow), there are so many costs associated with making and maintaining a website that it’s apparently frankly unimaginable to thousands of people on tumblr, and in the end disrespectful to every nonprofit, programmer, and web designer out there.

[coldasyou]

How to gif without photoshop (second method)

Hello! A couple months ago I made a tutorial on how to gif without photoshop using the website ezgif. I got a really great response for it and received some requests for the other giffing program I use when I don’t have access to photoshop. The program is called instagiffer; this is a software so it needs to be downloaded but I have never had any trouble with my version.  

Warning that this is VERY text and image heavy because I know how frustrating it can be when a tutorial feels like it’s skipping steps and I want this to be as clear as possible. Also please read this on desktop, tumblr mobile kills the quality of gifs inside text posts.

Please reblog if you found this helpful!

This is the video I will be giffing and here is the gif I will be making!

What you need:

Instagiffer

This program has been around since 2013 and I have used it since 2016. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated since 2016 and the download link on the official website is broken. That being said, there are a few other websites that still have a working download, which is what I linked to above.

ezgif

Although we aren’t going to use this website to make the gif, we are going to use it to add more color and brightness to the gif.

A video downloader 

This is the video downloader I use but basically any youtube/video download website works. There are two ways to gif on instagiffer; using a video and using the built in screen recorder. I will show you how to use both. 

A video to gif

This program is a lot more forgiving about video quality than ezgif is, but for best results 720p or 1080p is still the standard. Scenes with good lighting and bright colors turn out the best, but you can still make good looking gifs from darker or unsaturated scenes if you know what you’re doing. 

1. Making a gif with a downloaded video

 Step One: Getting the frames

First, you download the video you want to gif. Then you open up instagiffer and click on “load video.” Scroll down until you find the video you want to gif and click on it. 

The video will appear on the screen in the right hand side. Go ahead and put “smoothness” up as high as it can go. This increases the frames per second and makes the gif look smoother. It also makes the gif longer, so you may have to bring it down later so it doesn’t go over tumblr’s size limit, but I always start as high as possible then work down. 

Next, find the moment in the video you want to gif. You can either use the sliding bar or just type in the start time (you can use hours, minutes, seconds, and millisecond). You also want to put how long the clip you want to gif is. 3 seconds is the default but I usually bump it up to at least 4 (unless I know it’s a really short clip) just because it’s a lot easier to delete frames than add them. 

If you do this, you’ll quickly realize your gif has extra frames that appear slightly before and slightly after the moment you want to gif. It’s really easy to get rid of those frames; just click on them until you only see the frames you want in the gif. Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the gif to move around the frames, and use it to make sure the only thing on screen is the clip you want included in the gif. 

Step Two: Resize the gif, brighten the gif, change the speed and add captions

Now, it’s time to size, brighten, and color your gif! First look at the “frame size” option. Using the correct gif size for tumblr is one of the easiest ways to make sure the gif looks good. For gifs that take up a whole row, the size should be 540p wide. For two gifs in one row, the size is 268p each. For three gifs in one row, the sizes are 177p, 178p, and 177p in that order. Here is a visual of it.  You can see what the width/height of the gif is in the bottom right hand corner of the gif screen. I am making this gif 268p. Get the frame size as close to the width you want as possible; right now, it is 269x151. To get it down to 268 exactly, go up to the top of the program, click on “frame” > “manual crop”. This little box will pop up. Just set the width to 268 and make sure the size is listed as 268 under the gif as well. The height can stay the same. 

Keep quality up to 100 obviously. I almost always brighten by 2. Unless you’re giffing something with a huge spot of light, 2 is basically standard. Going up any higher usually makes the gif just look grainy, but if the scene is REALLY badly lit, you can go up to 3. Playback rate is usually -1, just to make the gif look smoother. Unless it’s a super long gif or a super short gif, I don’t mess with it further.

Captions are obviously optional but if you want to add one, click on “click here to add a new caption.” A box will pop up with options of how you want the text to look. I only use this to “caption” gifs (aka add dialogue). The settings I use are 12pt font, calibri, white, bold italic, bottom of gif, outline up to 3. You can also chose what frame you want the caption to start/end on if you want. Since this gif doesn’t have talking, I’m not going to include the caption in the final gif, but I wanted to show how to use this function.

Step Three: Color the gif

There are two parts to this. The first place I color the gif is on instagiffer, and then I use ezgif to add more effects. The second part is totally optional but they have more choices for coloring there. 

Click on the “open effects panel”. A window will open showing what the gif currently looks like, along with a variety of filters you can use. Ignore how grainy it looks, it won’t look that way when it’s finished. 

First thing is keep “enhance” up to 100. This is basically a sharpening function and without it the gif will get super blurry. There are a ton of filters you can play around with, but the only two I focus on usually are “color fade” and “colorize.” For color fade, I click it on and set it at 10. Obviously, if you’re trying to make a desaturated gifset, you can raise it up for a faded color effect, but I use it more for color balance than desaturation. Next click on colorize, and then color picker. 

I almost always pick a light shade of blue, purple or pink; it brings out the color in the gif and tends to keep skin tones from being washed out. This is usually my default: 

Then, I bring the “colorize” option down to 90 to increase the effects of shadows. 

Last thing to do is click create gif! It’ll take a few seconds, especially for longer gifs, so be patient. ALSO there is a good chance you’re going to get a message saying something to the effect of “this gif is too big for tumblr’s photo limit.” Feel free to ignore that; the software being old means it still has the photo limit as 2gb when now it is 5-6gb so almost any gif you make will be considered “too big.” 

Your gif now shows up in a preview tab! It should also show up as a file labeled “insta” on your desktop. 

Here is the gif so far. 

You can end here if you want. But when using instagiffer, I always go to ezgif to brighten up the colors further. 

This part is basically the same as how you would color a gif you made in ezgif (see this tutorial) but I’ll quickly walk through what I do.

Go to ezgif.com/effects. Click chose file and upload your gif. First, you’re going to want to up the saturation, brightness, and contrast. You have to play around with these functions a lot because every scene is different, but in general, I have my saturation up pretty high and my brightness and contrast at at least 8. For a scene as dark and desaturated as this, I put saturation at 200, brightness at 12, and contrast at 16. 

Afterwards, you want to go down to “color presets” and select “tint.” In my other tutorial, I recommended tinting with a light red or light blue, but for gifs made on instagiffer, I tend to use a light yellow/gold. I already tinted the gif purple in instagiffer so adding yellow in ezgif tends to balance it out. The shade I used for this gif is #fffcf0. 

If the gif ends up looking too yellow, either decrease saturation, or click the “effects” button under the gif and add a layer of light purple to balance the colors more. 

Your final gif should look like this.

2. Making a gif with the “capture screen” feature

This only changes the method of how you get gif frames. Everything related to resizing, coloring/effects, and adding captions is the same as above. 

What if you don’t have a download of the thing you want to gif? The great thing about instagiffer is it has a built in screen recorder so you can gif any video you want, even if you can’t download it (or if you’re like me and don’t want to deal with downloading a 45 minute episode of something just to gif one scene). 

To use this tool, click on the “capture screen” button on the top right corner next to “load video.” Then this screen will pop up.

You’re going to want to take this blue screen over to the screen you want to capture. I’m going to put it over the youtube video I am giffing. Adjust it so the only thing it’s focused on is the video and set the length in seconds. I usually set it for longer than the clip is just because it’s easier to remove extra frames than rerecord a scene. There is also sometimes a lag so starting it right before the scene you want to gif helps with that. For example, if the clip I’m giffing is 3 seconds long, I set it to 3.5. Then start running the video and click “start” on the screen!

Your frames will now show up on instagiffer. Everything is the same, except you can’t change the frame rate or timing. Go ahead and delete frames that you don’t need by clicking on them. After that, just use the same resizing, and coloring method I outlined above. 

Some notes:

When using the video download option, the effects you use will save, as will the size of the gif. So if you gif one part of a video, then move the time stamp to another part, it will stay in whatever size you put the gif as. However, when using screen capture, you have to resize the gif and go to the effects menu each time because they reset after each use of the screen recorder.

You can also just paste a youtube link into the white bar at the top of instagiffer to gif it, but I’ve found that the quality is much better if you download or use the capture screen.

To crop a gif, move the red box around (just make sure it stays the right width size!) 

If you are using the screen recorder and only want to record part of the video (like just a characters outfit) size the gif recorder so it’s just surrounding the part of the video you want to see. 

I hope this made sense lol, it took me a few days to write it all so please let me know if you have questions or need anything clarified! Support me on Ko-Fi if you’d like and are able 💕💕💕

[panharmonium]

hey guys, semi-rhetorical question,

what exactly do i have to do in order to stop total strangers from leaving their unsolicited opinions on posts that i wrote for myself, on my own blog, behind a cut, not under the merlin tag, with a disclaimer saying “it’s cool if we have different opinions, feel free to scroll on by if this isn’t your jam”?

how many more steps do i have to take to remind strangers on the internet that i am not soliciting commentary and that not everything is an invitation for debate?  it’s frustrating enough that i feel like i have to take these steps at all - basic etiquette should be enough for people to understand that when you see a take you don’t agree with, you can just go ahead and scroll past it.  

i am going to try to muse about this in the gentlest way possible, because it’s hard to know on the internet whether people are maybe just too young to realize these things, or maybe they just weren’t thinking in that particular moment (like - the way i would talk about this with a young person is not the same way i would talk to a fandom veteran who ought to know better, for instance), but this is definitely a recurring thing on tumblr that i have experienced numerous times, and which i do think is aggravated by the structure of the platform.  and, given that tumblr does not have the old LJ-style functionality of friends-only or anything like that, the truth is that this site can make it kind of a challenging to establish a comfortable space for yourself, which is something that has bothered me for a long time.

this is why i started putting disclaimers on meta in the first place.  i know it’s hard to remember, given the structure of this website, but not everything on the internet is written in the spirit of “prove me wrong.”  that’s why i started writing preludes saying “this is how *I* engage with the show.  it is fine if *YOU* engage with the show a different way.  i am just writing in my own space for my own personal enjoyment, please feel free to continue enjoying the show in your own way.”

as an example - this is the disclaimer i put on a piece of meta that recently earned itself some unsolicited commentary (boldings added now, for emphasis [and yes, the commentary has been removed already, to protect that user’s anonymity; i’m not interested in pointing fingers at specific people, just in discussing the dynamics of a wider phenomenon that i encounter sometimes on this website]):

just some meandering thoughts on where the thematic center of merlin bbc lies for me, and how it weaves itself in and out of my fandom experience.

under a cut because this is a) sort of long and b) not really directed anywhere but my own brain, as i keep thinking about and creating for this show.

[as always, before i get rolling, a reminder: when i write about how i engage with this show, it’s just me talking about what gives me, personally, the most satisfaction or enjoyment, not the way i think everybody should do things.  if this isn’t your particular read, please feel free to scroll past.  i am not ever going to bother anybody for engaging with this show in their own way, so please don’t worry about it if we are not on the same page.]

when i look at that, i’m not sure how much clearer i can be.  i’m not sure what part of this says, “send me a six-paragraph screed about how vehemently you disagree with me, as if i personally placed this analysis in your inbox and forced you to read it.”

do you know how often in a day i see fandom posts that i disagree with?  every time i see a merthur post, for instance, i think to myself “ugh, this is not remotely accurate.”  but i have never, in my life, left a reply on someone’s post telling them how wrong i think their take is.  that’s just not polite, and it’s just not necessary.  what do i care if someone has a different opinion than me?  they are just having fun in their own area.  it doesn’t make sense for me to enter their space and tell them what i, personally, think of their take.  they aren’t asking me for a debate.  they are hanging out on their own blog, having a good time in their own way.  i am glad they are enjoying themselves!  i am happy to let them keep having fun!  i do not need to insert myself into that conversation and rain on their parade.

i know this is something tumblr culture isn’t always good about understanding (and i know the structure of this website makes it almost impossible to remember, too; i do get that), but just, as a gentle reminder: me posting an analysis on my own blog, in my own space, is not equivalent to me saying “you, a stranger on the internet, must agree with this!”  me posting on my own blog is not directed at you at all.  it has nothing to do with you.  i did not send you that post.  i did not ask you to read it.  i did not put it in your inbox.  i did not insert myself into your space.  i did not ask for your attention.  i did not come anywhere NEAR you.  i don’t even know who you are.  i don’t mind if you engage with this show in a different way.  it does not affect me.  i have never and will never leave contentious replies on posts that i disagree with in order to try to convince people they’re wrong.  i have never in my life sent somebody a message to change their mind about a fandom opinion of theirs that i believe to be ill-conceived.

i see posts that i disagree with every day, and every single time, i scroll past them.  i leave them alone.  i let people have their fun.

i understand that the knee-jerk reaction on this platform is for us to react to everything as if it’s being shouted at us, personally, through a megaphone, and a lot of this is a structural problem on this website, i know.  i know that.  it’s bothered me for years.  the reblog function creates a system where posts leave their homes quickly, so it’s all too easy for people to feel like an OP is seeking them out and forcing them to read something, or soliciting contributions from the wider internet.  but we HAVE to remember the structure of the forum we’re in - any particular post you stumble across was written on an individual blog, and the individual who wrote it did not ask you to look at it.  they had no control over whether you saw it or not.  it wasn’t directed at you personally, and it isn’t an automatic invitation for caustic debate with strangers, either.  

people are allowed to write about their own fandom thoughts on their own blogs.  the act of writing about one’s own fandom thoughts on one’s own blog is not equivalent to canceling someone else’s fun, or stopping other people from liking/disliking things in whatever way they please.  i am allowed to write about my own opinions, in my own space, without worrying about other people who might wander by, catch a glimpse of my house through the window, and get upset because i’m “telling them” something they didn’t agree with.  i didn’t “tell you” anything!  you came here yourself.  i did not send this post to you.  i did not visit your blog and tell you ‘you’re doing fandom wrong.’  i don’t even know who you are.  we have never spoken to each other in our lives.  you don’t follow me, we’re not friends, and my post (in this particular instance) has zero reblogs - the only place you could have read it was on my own blog, which you chose to visit.

i’ve met tons of great people on here, and we’ve had lots of fun conversations.  and sometimes our takes are not even the same!  but i don’t mind that, because we’ve introduced ourselves to each other and have already developed a friendly relationship.  like, just today, i was having a fantastic convo about hunith where myself and the other participant weren’t 100% on the same page, but we were still having a great time with the discussion.  i don’t mind talking to people who have different opinions than me - to be honest, most of the topics about which i recently received a bunch of unsolicited commentary were actually things that i have written about previously, and that i would’ve loved to have talked about more, under different circumstances.  but i do mind strangers barreling into my house uninvited and then lecturing me, via a series of long, combative messages (devoid of any background context that could have been gleaned from the rest of my writing), about how the ultimate message of merlin bbc is that “the only correct way to fight oppression is to suck your oppressors dick.”

like.  was that necessary?

if we were friends, or even acquaintances, you would know that i do in fact talk about this theme a lot.  but we’re not, and i am not interested in having a conversation with someone whose first message to me was a) an unsolicited argument and b) a reference to metaphorically sucking someone off.  i have literally never met you before in my life.  you did not say hello, you did not introduce yourself.  and you jumped right into that?  

it’s just not polite.  i wouldn’t approach a stranger like that in real life.  it’s not cool to do it on the internet, either.

and just to be clear - i don’t have anything personally against any of the people who have ever sent me messages like this.  i’m not mad about it, and i really do think that for the most part it’s not intended to be malicious in any way; i just think people legitimately don’t register that this isn’t an okay way to approach someone.  so just - in the spirit of maybe helping people pause before they interact with somebody else like this, because i’m pretty chill myself, but other people might be more rankled by it - please, next time, just stop and think for a second.  if it helps to ask yourself “would i interact with this person like this if we were off the internet,” then definitely consider that.  entering someone else’s space for the sole purpose of leaving them negative commentary, when you have never met them before, and when they did not come anywhere near you or ask for your attention or approach you in any way, is not a good way to start a conversation with a stranger, especially when that person’s work specifically states “these are my own thoughts, not a directive for how others should do things/if you have a different take, no worries; feel free to just scroll past.” 

*deep breath* ...anyhow.  

there is no “friends-only” option on tumblr, so i don’t really know what else i can do to make it clear that i am only writing about my own thoughts and my own experiences, and if your thoughts and experiences are different, cool!  go have fun!  i don’t need you to agree with me about everything.  i will never, ever come to your blog and leave you notes about all the ways i think your analysis is flawed, especially when i’ve never met you and haven’t read your other work, plenty of which address the “disagreements” i have.  i just don’t think it’s a polite or fun thing to do to others, and i would love it if people could extend me the same courtesy.

[sluttyten]

this is going to be a rant about the state of this website:

this hellsite grows more and more frustrating... I just want to edit the fics I put keep reading links in that sent you to a page, so that way you can actually read them now since you can’t go to any extra pages on my blog, but I can’t even edit it unless I’m using the app or unless I scroll back months just here on tumblr where I can see all of my posts but not like where it shows my blog as a sidebar of the dashboard or whatever the fuck you call that thing. And I can’t even properly do it on my phone in the app because of their 100 text block limit. Like the taeyong fic I was just trying to edit is over 11,000 words of course there’s more than 100 text blocks. This whole site has become a very difficult place to use, and while I thought before that these changes weren’t really going to be an issue they’ve just turned it into a place that’s barely even worth my time to try to use anymore. I’d really love to see how/if their numbers have dropped since they made the announcement back on the 3rd and especially since the 17th. I really want to make my blog as functional as possible for all of you, but even the matter of going through and deleting or editing posts in order to make my blog fit within the community guidelines so it’s not all blocked and locked up like this has been made fairly difficult or I’m just an idiot who can’t figure it out. Like I have to go through the mass post editor to be able to do that or to scroll down through all that on my phone and it’s just like.... I have 9,000 posts, most of which are probably asks, some of which are kinda raunchy posts that haven’t even been flagged. they did not do a very good job of making this site usable after the changes and I really fucking hope that they implement some improvements otherwise I’m probably going to have to stop using it because of the stress trying to run this blog is causing me.

also why the fuck can you not add a keep reading on the app?????