#not like you're gonna have to change all the marks into proper quotation marks or anything

[gwydionae]

Me: With all the doom and gloom surrounding FFN, you know what would be nice? Having a physical copy of some of my fics, like a real, printed book! I mean, I learned about typography/layouts in college, I could handle it, and the hard part is already done, right? Oh, and it’s pretty cheap, too, nice! Now let’s see, which ones would I want... well, these go together, and those would fit in pretty well... oh, and I just like those...

Me 3 days later a little over halfway through reediting 26 fics and currently staring at the nearly 20 page long current project which will bring the current total number of pages to almost 200: *gross sobbing*

[stocious]

how to spot stolen/uncredited gifs + how to work the search function

there's been a lot of talk about not stealing gifs and not supporting people who do, but it might not be easy to spot shady posts for everyone. so i made this little guide with things i personally look out for. at the end there's also a guide on how to work the search function. i hope this will help out there on the wild tumblrmachine!

the gif has a watermark that doesn't match the poster and there's no "gif by @[username]" under the gif. please note that a lot of people don't watermark their gifs at all, but this is one of the biggest give aways to a gif being stolen and reuploaded.

the gif doesn't stretch across the entire post. very seldom does a gif maker go through the entire process of making a gif and not making it cover the entire post space. in the example below, the gif was most likely a part of a set, as a second gif would fit perfectly right next to the one posted.

"theme posts" with gifs of different sizes and/or quality. in the examples below, "mickey smiling" has gifs of different sizes and no "gif by" credit under either of them. "theme posts" can still be made with proper credit to the gif maker, like "road trip" to the right.

new posters and no "my gifs" tag. if you're unsure if the gif is stolen or not, click the top of the post and go the blog and look at the tags attached to the post. if someone made the gif themselves, there's usually a "my gifs" or a similiar tag under the post. this might be a good thing to do if someone is new to the space has started posting gifs. this is not 100% foolproof method, but it can help you give an idea if the gif is stolen or not.

so how do i work the search function? how do i get the gifs i want?

good question! in the example of "mickey smiling", try searching for just that - "mickey milkovich smile" and you should get some good results. in the case of grabbing a specific gif from a specific post, i'll try to make a guide down below. if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

first, find a post you want to use a gif from. we're gonna use this set from @heymacy.

open the post you wanna use and copy the url to it. then make a new post and hit the gif search button. paste the url and it should find you the first gif of the set. click the gif and tumblr brings you back to your post with the gif and the "gif by heymacy" at the bottom.

but say you want the last image in the set. we're gonna use a tiny bit of html but don't fret.

first, do the previous step i just explained above.

click the cog wheel at the top right corner, scroll down and choose "text editor - html". go back to your post and it should be a whole bunch of text instead of an image.

search the text for "img scr" and then delete everything between the two quotation marks following that, it starts with https and ends with gifv.

go back to the post with the gif set and right click the gif you want (in this case the last one of the set), and choose "copy image link" and paste it between the quotation marks where you deleted stuff before. make sure not to delete any quotation marks and that your new link placed between them!

please note: you might get an error message from tumblr that the post contains unsupported html, just ignore that.

then click the cog wheel again, and change the editor back to "rich text". you're new image should be there, with proper credit!

bam, you're done! i'm also including a video below of me doing these steps so you can follow along. sorry my os is in swedish, but the thing i right click on is just "copy image link" as stated above.

here's a more in depth guide to this method, but it can be a little confusing if you're not used to working in html.

as you add more images and text to your post, the amount of text after you change to the html editor will increase. it might be hard to find the exact gif you want to change, but play around with it and try it out. the more you use the method, it'll be easier to work with.

thank you for coming to my ted talk, i hope this helps! 🫂

[punctuation-completionist]

@kraglynn

okay! i suppose we can do this then!

. ? ! , : ; ' " – — - · ... [ ] { } ( ) / < >

here's our list of punctuation at current moment .

(gonna like really quickly assume you know what the first four are for. they're easy. periods end sentences, question marks end sentences when the sentence is a question, exclamation points express emotion (raised tone i guess? it could be excitement. it could be annoyance. you get it), and commas break down sentences and whatever. you know commas.)

colon and semicolon are kinda like a comma in that they will subdivide sentences. some schools of grammar like to do this thing where they all are like. supposed to represent a period of time you should pause for? so it's like the period/question mark/exclamation point pauses longest, then the colon, then semicolon, then comma. it's a whole thing. i figure most of you also know how to use these

an apostrophe is for contractions! i'm pretty sure you also know this. quotation marks are for quoting things or occasionally as irony punctuation (called scare quotes in this case)

for the en dash and em dash, i'm going to refer you to either of these posts (though one of them is slightly off. there is technically a separate minus sign but some people use an en dash)

the hyphen (or technically hyphen-minus. don't worry about it. it changed when typewriters were invented so it's basically just the normal hyphen but i don't like it so) is used for hyphenated words. and names. you know the ones. look up a list of hyphenated words if you don't know any. some people use two hyphens in a row to be an em dash but that's kinda dumb. sorry.

the interpunct is mostly used in non-english languages honestly. in french it's cool because it thwarts the horrible gendering by being fun and making the word gender neutral (basically it's "word with masculine ending·feminine ending" as in étudiant·e . it's not official but like. no gender neutral stuff in french is official. so . i don't care.) but also it's in a lot of twitter screenshots so. and also also, sometimes i will count bullets as interpuncts because. it's easier. they're similar okay • vs · is fine (it actually bothers me but we can redecide on it later)

... you know ellipses right? sorry i'm busy, so i'll skip em. they're longer than a period in the length thing i think

[ ] brackets like these are mostly used for adding information, context, whatever to quotes! they're sometimes called square brackets. it's mostly just quotes.

{ } curvy brackets/braces are mostly used in math. they do have uses technically but like. they're mostly here because i didn't want to leave them out

(you know these too right?)

/ good ol' fashioned slash. not a backslash that's this guy \ anyways. this is used for like. either/or a lot. or pronouns. those are fun

< > these are technically the less than/greater than signs but they're honorary angle brackets because it's easier to type. proper angle brackets are these ⟨ ⟩ and they're used to offset parenthetical information if you're not using an em dash or parentheses for whatever reason. sometimes called chevrons. afaik the less than/greater than signs can be substituted unless you're like. writing something extremely formal. also sometimes used in comics to indicate something has been translated! also sometimes used to denote thoughts! ⟨hm should i call this a day now?⟩

yeah. that's good enough. but if you want more info on any specific punctuation, you can ask me more specifically and then i will answer it when i am less busy probably