#it sucks that you don't have a lot of options if you don't want to play that game. banks need more transparency

[elfwreck]

I adore Fate, and I have no problem acknowledging that it can't do all kinds of games.

It sucks at mystery/whodunnits, because those are really hard to pull off for a pack of shared-storyteller players. If you're always trying to reach consensus on what the most interesting/awesome/plausible (definitely 3rd choice) result of the situation is... there's not a lot of room for surprises. The characters can be surprised; the players need that data in advance to figure out what they're doing.

(There are some surprises, but the whole "what would a Major Cost look like in this situation?" discussion means the player is often not shocked by weird downturns in the storyline.)

Fate can't do PVP worth a damn. (I don't like PVP, but a lot of people do, or at least want the option open, and Fate really doesn't allow for it.)

Fate does not scale well up or down. 3-6 players is optimal; below that--especially with 1 player--and the rules have problems because that player is supposed to have other resources, and the GM is supposed to have more Fate points available. Over 6, and you run into not only the standard "how do you give everyone time to do stuff" but more Fate points and Aspects being thrown around than the game balance is built for.

(9 D&D players in a room fighting the necromancer: Okay, only 3 of you can get close enough to hit him without tripping on each other; maybe 1 more can cast spells if you're careful. 9 Fate players: EVERYONE has access to all their Aspects + the situation Aspects + whatever stunts they have. The guy in the back has to explain how he's providing a help action to the one swinging the sword but he can definitely come up with something.)

And that's without getting into how both combat and in-game social relationships change if you're constantly making decisions based on the story that the character can't perceive.

I love that combat in Fate is not in game-piece mode. But that doesn't make it a perfect all-genres, all-game-styles game, just one that is missing one of the parts I hate most from D&D.

So what about FATE? How is it not universal as an RPG?

The biggest non-universal dimension of FATE – at least in its modern incarnations – is that it has a very strong set of baked-in assumptions about the relationship between players and player characters.

This is something I've talked about in the past; to somewhat oversimplify, there are roughly four ways for a player in a tabletop RPG to relate to their character:

The Isekai Stance: I am my character, and my character is me. I'll have my character do whatever I myself would do if I happened to be, for example, an elf wizard.

The Actor Stance: I'm an actor, and my character is my role. I'll have my character do what I feel it would be psychologically realistic for them to do under the circumstances.

The Storyteller Stance: I'm a narrator telling a story, and my character is the co-protagonist of that story. I'll have my character do whatever I feel would make for the most interesting story.

The Gamer Stance: I'm a person playing a game, and my character is my playing-piece. I'll do whatever it takes to win.

This generally isn't a useful way to classify either players or games; games typically have weak baked-in assumptions about which stance their players will adopt, and to the extent that these assumptions are present, a game may make different default assumptions for different parts of play. A common set of assumptions is actor mode outside of combat and gamer mode in combat, for example.

FATE is, of course, an exception to the rule, in that it has very strong baked-in assumptions about what stance players will adopt toward their characters, and further assumes that play will occur in this mode at all times. The Fate Point economy that forms the core of the gameplay loop 100% assumes that you're going to be playing in storyteller nearly all of the time – the types of decisions it's asking players to make on a moment-by-moment basis are frequently straight up unintelligible from any other perspective.

This is a big part of why suggesting FATE because it can "do anything" can go over like a lead balloon: the folks making this suggestion aren't taking into account the possibility that a given group's players may not vibe with the system's assumptions about how players relate to their characters. Storyteller-mode-all-the-time is actually a fairly uncommon group play style, and it often seems that FATE fans don't realise this!

[hyperions-light]

Making Fanfic Banners/Collages with Canva for FREE

Hello friends! Canva is an online software tool that mostly gets used for creating social media advertisements, but YOU can use it to make pretty, custom banners/collages/images for your fanfiction! For FREE!

WHY should you do this?

Fun

Custom art thing for your fic!

If you put pictures on your fic posts, sometimes you get more notes (sometimes)

The joy of creation!!!

I will walk you through it (with pictures) below the cut!

STEP ONE: GO TO CANVA, MAKE AN ACCOUNT

You can sign up with email, gmail, or FB. Gmail is the most convenient, but I think they do 2FA no matter what, so take that into account.

STEP TWO: DON'T PAY ANY MONEY & IGNORE AI

Every time you login or make stuff or do ANYTHING, Canva will try to get you to pay for Canva Pro. Don't do that. I've had access to the Pro and free versions and there's no reason to pay for anything on here. Also, they have an AI that's supposed to make things for you, but it sucks & isn't fun. Ignore it.

STEP 3: CHOOSE A TEMPLATE

Okay, so if you're a graphic designer... I mean I'm not sure why you're reading this tutorial, you can definitely make cooler stuff than I can! You should just use the 'create blank [post type]' button and go to town! But if you're not (like me) what I usually do is pick a type of template that Canva has (like blog banners, instagram posts, facebook covers, etc) and go browse their designs. My advice is not to look for something that you completely like, but something that has the right vibe-- you're going to be messing with all the individual aspects of the post anyway, so just pick based on aesthetics. Try to make sure that if you're going to put your fic title on your work that you pick/create a design where the text is clearly displayed/in an easily legible font.

NOTE: Some of the designs will have a little crown in the corner, and these designs are only available if you pay for premium. If they have a little $ on them, instead, that just means they have individual paid elements in them that you can get rid of, so feel free to use those, too!

STEP 4: CHOOSE YOUR PICTURES

Okay, so I like this screaming seagull one. I clicked on it, and selected 'customize template'. So now I want to get rid of the seagull, and replace him with my own stuff. You can do this a couple of ways: if you have screenshots from your game/show/other media, you can upload them by clicking on the little cloud icon on the left side that says "Uploads". If you DON'T have pictures, or you don't have ones you need, there are a couple options:

You can try to browse Canva's selection of pictures. It is in the "Elements" tab; you type in a search, and then select the "photos" filter from the little marquee below the search bar. My advice is to only use one word search terms, because Canva loves showing you all the photos that you can use if you pay for them, and if you use more words, they do that more often. There ARE free photos in there, but you have to scroll a bit.

If you don't want to deal with the search system or can't find what you're looking for, sites like Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash provide free photos that you can use without attribution, and do not require you to have an account to download. Please DO NOT just search using google/other engines and take things from there-- those photos are often not licensed for free use. The sites I linked will try to sell you pictures, but not as much as Canva, and there's usually a lot of free stuff to choose from. Download the pictures you want in a good resolution and upload them to Canva!

STEP 5: MESS AROUND WITH STUFF!

Okay, so now you can add your stuff and mess around with it!! Just click on the element (like the seagull) and delete it. Then go to your uploads and click + drag the image you want onto the canvas. You can use them as the background by dragging them to one of the corners, but you can also just put them on the canvas and mess around with them. In the left picture, you can see some of the options you have to resize and move around the image, so different elements appear on top of or behind it. If you click on the button that says 'edit' on the little bar menu that comes up when you select the image, you'll get the menu in the right picture, where you can mess with filters and colors, etc. It's not a completely comprehensive editing software, but you can do a lot of things! I encourage you to mess around and see what looks cool!

STEP SIX: ADD MORE STUFF, IF YOU WANT!

I love adding more stuff. You can change and add text by clicking on the textboxes that are already there, or you can use the "text" section on the left menu to add new blocks. They have some fun combinations and a lot of fonts! A thing I like to do is go in the elements tab and search for 'patterns'; you can add them on top of your image or elsewhere! The opacity setting is your best friend; you can overlay a bunch of stuff and create interesting/unique collages! You can also add basic shapes, frames, moving elements, and clipart, if you want!

STEP SEVEN (FINAL): DOWNLOAD YOUR THING!

When you're done, the 'share' menu in the upper right corner will let you download your image in a bunch of different formats (I'm pretty sure you could make a looping GIF for your fic here on Canva, too!) I usually do PNGs for the quality. I haven't had any issues uploading on Tumblr (or on Twitter, when I used it).

Anyway, I hope you'll try making these! I didn't show it, but there are a lot of different templates you can use, so if you want to make a collage instead, just look around! I think it's super fun to do for my fics! If you have any questions, you can bother me on my blog or in the replies section of this post, just please be polite! Thanks for reading!

[cerastes]

I tried the desert but got my shitmud rocked so I am bad at this game type so just what is the skill floor for it, do I need a large list of e2 units (I suck at that cause my squad is if it works dont try new ops and its been working for a long time)

RA2 is not only very endgame, it also seeks to challenge you with lots of moving parts that make you immensely strong if you know how they work, but conversely the game mode is balanced around the fact that you have access to these incredibly powerful tools and are expected to use them. Not master them, for sure, or even be great with them, just use them; I have made a joke out of RA2 several times on my stream, my people over there can testify when I say RA2 is easy when you know what you're doing.

You do need a lot of units to get the most out of the game mode, not just to deploy them in different fights to counter specific bosses' weaknesses and counter their strengths -- one boss is extremely strong against blocking comps but weak against structures, another is the opposite and wrecks structures but is weak against AoE and a solid blocker, some have sky high RES and low DEF, some have sky high DEF and low RES, one boss fully heals if you don't kill its phase 2 in time and goes back to phase 1, another boss has huge Arts aoe, and so on -- but also to make the most out of powerful Logistic bonuses in which you stow away Operators for bonuses depending how high level they are and what class they are, and expeditions for extra resources every 6 days, or on a 3 day cycle since you can have two teams out like this.

There's food recipes that give you immense stat bonuses and other advantages like extra block, more SP recovery, status resistance, reduced DP and redeployment cost, ignore DEF or RES per attack, and so on. There's a multitude of tools like 12 seconds of Stun with Mr. Booms, applying Freeze with Ice Blaster IIs, extra SP charging with Support Stations, and lots more. There's incredibly powerful structures like Urban Barriers which redirect your enemy's intended path in Blue Box maps, net launchers that Bind for several seconds, smoke launchers that inflict 10 seconds of high Fragile, and most powerful of them all, your own freaking ranged tiles on demand.

You are expected to interact with all of these aspects to properly succeed in RA2. Not master them, not become great with them, just interact with them, in addition to having a varied team. Critical Contentions, which is completely optional, requires a deeper mastery of these tools, but RA2 baseline? Just using them at all will make you much stronger.

...Now, with respect and because this is not our first dance together, I'll immediately say this since I know it's coming: If you really don't like being forced to use other units besides the small team you like and want, then don't play the game mode but also don't complain that the game is badly designed because it doesn't let you clear everything with the same team. I very much dislike that complaint because the game could not possibly be more explicit in its intent that you use different teams, adjust your strategy and experiment. Out of all gacha games, Arknights is the sole game that actually accommodates this explicit drive for variance by outfitting you with several strong welfare units and a spread of 3*s that are actually very strong and completely viable without needing you to get lucky at the gacha. If you decide you like to play the game with just your chosen few, that's completely valid and I would even say borders on adding a challenge, go for it, but don't complain that the game fails in its design when it doesn't let you clear either by lack of skill or because you decided to go against the grain of its explicit intent for you to use varied teams. I do not respect that complaint in the slightest and I do not wish to engage with it.

[pumpkinrootbeer]

I actually think about lip and brad a lot. Everyone in Brad's life had given up on him and then the most stubborn annoying 20 yr old you've ever met who's got more grief stored in his 5'4" body than one man should carry comes along and decides he's worth something. That he's worth everything. And nothing Brad can do will drive Lip away, and Lip spends days hunting him down. Lip does what Lip does best and throws himself completely into a person, except this time it doesn't end catastrophically. And Brad was the person who Lip went to when his mom died and when he relapsed. And Brad gave our neurodivergent king his first figit toy. And Brad makes Lip his best man and gives him a job and fucking purpose. "If Brad can't make it how am I supposed to make it"

[2-kamikou-1]

ok but no guys seriously how do you ask for reassurance in a way that doesn't make you look like a stupid yandere stereotype

[silent-sentinels]

okay. so. our facet Faucet is our secret keeper, and we did not ask [ ] permission before introducing this blog to others. so [ ] isn't very pleased, to say the least.

[gibbearish]

tumblr keeps suggesting me posts from fic writers who are Very Angry about people filtering fics by kudos or doing a mental kudos to hit ratio calculation because How dare you have standards for the FREE fic you consume for FREE, youre not the target audience for everything, when its like. a) no ones saying they are? theyre just. saying when choosing what fic /they personally/ want to read, they take into account how many people read it vs how many cared enough to give it kudos, b) it being free does not in turn mean you are entitled to viewership, that has literally never been how social media works, c) yes, people choosing fics based on hits means less Already popular works will have a harder time getting off the ground, but literally anyone who's been on reddit will tell you that there will Always be people who sort by new to get those jumpstarts going. those who sort by new and those who sort by hot are a symbiotic pair, you cant just kill off one OR the other because they support each other.

anyways tldr if youre a fic writer, people arent choosing not to read your fic as a personal dig to you and youre not entitled to people reading and liking it just because you made it for free. kind of the opposite, actually.

[g4rchomp]

it's great to see students rise up against ties between universities and military corps, I hope it will also extend into a larger conversation about the lack of transparency behind financial "investments" in general, for citizens and businesses alike. banks and financial institutions need to become more transparent on where the money is going and allow ppl to really chose who they want to invest in

[subsequentibis]

'nother big post of closed species guys i've designed since folks were nice abt the last one :)

mignyans (alien parasite crabs that infect a host and cause the thing-esque meat to manifest on their bodies):

^ free anniversary event design! they do a scavenger hunt every october for traits and it's always a good time

^design i did as a guest artist for the species! using the new mineral deposit trait that was added after the last anniversary event

^ this is one of my favorites i've ever done. i love you channel wvmb you will always be famous to me.

^ this one and the next one were designed based on premade crabs! this one's the same species as the first mignyan i ever designed

^ this one goes with the sun & moon one :) wizard & apprentice

^metalhead!! bloody remnants logo designed by my wonderful fiance

starlyngs (avian creatures that are personified stars i think? i'll be honest i'm less clear on the lore i just think they're neat):

^ shithead extraordinaire who is in trouble all the time for stealing & conning people out of valuables

^ freak.

[vounoura]

to be clear I love the champion point system bc it's a fun spin on the MMO-standard of raising the overall level cap and it's nice to have something with actual effects on my character to progress on (the much, much faster leveling at veteran rank doesn't make it a slog either, and it's obviously something you're meant to gain passively doing what you were normally doing) even after the 'soft' level cap and gear stat cap and doesn't make me feel like I'm wasting exp doing things like questing, world bosses, delves, etc bc technically I'm still leveling.

but tbh the main reason I like it is bc they had the genuinely good idea to make cp points a) account-wide and b) usable by every character on the account even if they're not high enough level to actually level cps themselves, and I like that you're tacitly rewarded not just for doing things on your main but for having alts and having them at max level bc every cp level makes every single one of your characters stronger even at level 1.

[bredforloyalty]

ok going back soon to the regularly scheduled posting. nothing changed it's just that the sun is up and i feel braver being a girlwreck so we're back to that not so sweet spot where i just don't care. just don't care. so what if i don't hand in anything or hand it in a week later and get a bad mark and have to apologize profusely and everyone's disappointed and they think i'll never amount to anything. what about it. what are they gonna do, kill me? better make it count. better make it hurt. because otherwise, well i do not care

[corvidcall]

thought too hard about possible future careers and got sad again!!!!

[asleepinawell]

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[doodlemancy]

Hey, so, Patreon is lying to you about Apple forcing their hand.

Patreon is getting rid of 1st-of-the-month/per-creation billing, claiming a new decision by Apple has forced their hand. This will hurt a lot of creatives, and their excuse is bullshit. Allow me to explain.

In 2018, Patreon tried to impose a new ill-considered fee structure on everyone that would have cost creators a lot of smaller pledges. They ended up apologizing for this profusely; they have now deleted this apology from their website and unfortunately I was unable to find it on the Internet Archive. This was shameful, but to their credit they backed off quickly when things got ugly.

Back in 2021, Patreon discussed plans to force all creators into a rolling bill structure and get rid of first-of-the-month/pay-up-front billing. The community once again very decisively shouted them down, and they had to walk it back again. This whole fiasco damaged the already shaky trust between Patreon creators and staff.

This week, Patreon announced that, along with extra fees, Apple's policies were supposedly forcing them to move everyone over to the rolling fee structure that they first tried to get us to agree to in 2021. Patreon will tell you they are not happy about this. As a person who spent a long time watching Patreon make terrible decisions, I can tell you-- they are probably very happy about this, because it's exactly the smokescreen they needed to do what they've been trying to do for years, which is pull ALL Patreon creators away from 1st-of-the-month and per-creation billing.

The spin in the news I've seen so far is "Apple bullies Patreon, boo hoo hoo poor Patreon". This is very obviously not what's happening. Mind you: Apple does suck, and they are doing something bad here. Fuck apple. But Patreon and Apple are BOTH the asshole in this situation; Everyone Sucks Here. Patreon has options: they can make the iOS app a reader app and do billing through the browser to avoid the restrictions and the extra fees (Netflix and Amazon, notably, both do this), or they can allow creators to opt-out of iOS billing if they want to use billing models that don't work with it.

It seems most likely to me that the Apple situation is a real fire that Patreon has chosen to use as a convenient smokescreen to do what they've been wanting to do since at least 2021, and maybe since 2018.

What do we do?:

They have a feedback form specifically about this.

They also have a creator discord.

And they have lots of social media pages where they probably really, really hope that this doesn't blow up again, because they never learn. The incidents I've described here aren't the only two other times Patreon has pissed off their creators. They know if they don't contain the noise it'll be harder to get away with it, so make some noise. They've done a lot of work to spin this cleverly so you'll have sympathy for them and they won't get the kind of backlash they know they deserve.

Please don't misuse these links and make threats or spam or something. All you have to do is give well-reasoned feedback. Patreon hates feedback. Make sure they get a nice heaping helping of their least favorite vegetable.

[justsomeoneunordinary]

god i hate it when americans post their politics on here

may biden die this instant and may the us burn to hell with him

fuck you all

[graphic--horde]

How do you make your stamps? :0

Disclaimer: this is an obscenely long explanation, with pictures. Efficiency is stupid

So, for the static ones, I make a 99x56 px file on ibis paint x. Other programs are probably available online but I don't use them.

After that, I either upload an image I want to make into a stamp, or I draw one.

Then, I find a frame I want to use. Ill upload them here but let it be known I stole all of these right from deviantart

Most of them are from Lil-Devil-Melii on deviantart. The rest i have no idea. They're not all 99x56px but you can crop the canvas it's fine

Make sure to erase the edges of the picture , so they're transparent. It's not as cute otherwise

Upload those frames over your image in whatever art program you're using and viola, stamp.

For moving ones, it's a lot harder. Mostly because I refuse to download Photoshop.

There are a couple ways to do this. Some are simple animations, like with flashing text and whatnot. For these, you download the individual animation frames from your art program. Make sure it's transparent.

Then, upload each frame to ezgif.com under the option "GIF maker." You can play around with how fast each frame goes and whatnot but in the end, it'll be a stamp with some rad text that moves. This is easy, and doesn't make me want to shit my pants and cry. If you're new, do this. This is fun. This is good. This does not kill me inside

I made that↓ stamp with this method :)

this next one is how we turn gifs into stamps. This one makes me sad. It involves math and sucks. But we gotta do it. For the vibe

First, grab your gif. I'm using this cow gif because it's awesome

Then, I resize it using ezgif. Literally everything for this will be using ezgif. I am a simple man

At this point you should decide what frame to use. I'm using this one because its the first one I clicked

Figured out what size the inside of the frame is. That's what I resize the gif to, so the edges can be transparent. The inside of this one is 93x50 px, so those are the dimensions I'm making the gif.

Figure it out by putting the frame into ibis paint and realizing the canvas to fit just the inside of the frame, then seeing what the dimensions are. But there could be easier ways

Woah it's so small now

Then, still on ezgif, I go to the "crop" option.

Make sureeee to upload the smaller gif

press the button that says "extend canvas size", and then put the "width" and "height" as the dimensions for your FRAME. This'll put a bit of a transparent border around the gif. For this frame, I did 99px and 56px.

The "left" and "top" boxes show how many pixels the cropping happens from the edges of the canvas. The formula for finding that is

(width of gif / 2) - (difference between gif width and frame width / 2) = left box

For me it's (93 / 2) - (6 / 2) = 43.5

Then you do the same.for the height, which for me ends up being 22 from the top

This is reallyyy touchy and annoying though

Here's my result , with no visible difference

Okay so THEN you go to the "overlay" option, under "effects." And upload your frame. If the cropping was done right, you shouldn't have to move the frame at all and can just download it

Here's my result:

if you don't care about transparency, you can resize your gif to be the same size as the frame, and then put the frame over it. But I'm a slut for transparency

Anyways. I'm sorry if anything was unclear, it's two am. And I hope this was helpful :) these really are fun to make once you get it down

also if anyone has an easier way to make stamps from gifs, please god tell me