#one of them is a web designer :) and two of them work at a library

[the-roc-pile]

Hrmmmmm.... I have a very silly idea... a very silly idea where I take this batch of characters I have and make an AU where they are all in charge of the Welcome Home Restoration Project instead of an AU where they are inside of Welcome Home (by @partycoffin).

To be honest (as I cannot be Frank in this context) I don't know how much of this is that psychology personable fable versus my child me who feels the need to act drastically different as I can feel I am moderately different but no one else seemed to pick up on it but either way the thought is worming!

Lol I have three pages of filled notebook paper --including some relationship diagrams-- and about 600 typed-up words about the concept already and it's only an hour old! I thought of it an hour ago and I have generated so many things about it but I must go to bed : / sadly I have courses. I'll see if the idea is still going tomorrow or if I dream about it (I hope so it will give me Ideas).

[hedgehog-moss]

I've said goodbye to half of my greenhouse goldfish! And the other half will follow later. I started out with goldfish when my aquaponics system was new as they are quite resilient to variations in pH, etc, but I decided it was time to move on to edible fish (carp.) I feel like carp have a bad reputation (as food) but my mum used to fish & cook them when I was little and I liked them—I'll have to ask her to teach me how she prepared them...

To thank my goldfish for their good work fertilising my greenhouse plants, I wanted to find a nice place for them to retire. Here's their new home :)

One of my distant neighbours has this artificial pond where he used to have goldfish but their population got decimated by a gluttonous otter. I hope *my* fish will be smart and agile enough to escape her, and if not, well... the otter's family has to eat...

The process of finding a new home for my fish went as follows: 1. Find an old lady, for example Mrs L. at the library, who likes to talk about people's lives and minor problems 2. Tell her in passing that I have goldfish I'd like to donate 3. Wait a few days, then go buy groceries.

The cashier told me "Oh hey, Mrs L. told me to tell you she knows someone who knows someone who wants your fish. She gave me a piece of paper with his phone number"

4. Success.

I called this person, and it turned out to be the farmer I often buy hay from, who told me all about his problematic otter and said he'd like to repopulate his pond. I offered to bring him my fish, and then proceeded to procrastinate for several weeks. I realised this week that I was going to see this neighbour again soon (when he comes to deliver my hay) and it would be embarrassing if I still hadn't made good on my promise to deliver fish, so I finally set to work catching 15 goldfish.

It took so long. I think the reason I procrastinated is because my subconscious knew catching them would be a pain. They are so quick and nimble! And unlike otters I am not designed for this. There was one barracuda of a goldfish that I particularly wanted to catch, but she was too smart for me. She feinted and hid behind the filter and sacrificed fellow goldfish by pushing them into my net instead of her, it was very dramatic and eventually I had to give up on catching her.

(I even tried to use a large piece of chicken netting on top of my fish net, but of course it was very light and floated at the surface. I considered tying little rocks to it so it'd sink, and then realised I had single-handedly (re)invented bottom trawling. But I don't want to be a bottom trawler, it sounds like an insult. I'll have to try and catch my monster goldfish some other time when she least expects it.)

On my way to my neighbour's farm, I ran into a cow roadblock. Normally I would have pushed the cows aside, removed the rope across the road then put it back behind me after crossing the cowblock—but the cow in charge looked grouchy to me.

I made a détour.

Then, because the universe really didn't want me to deliver my goldfish, I ran into a goose patrol when I reached my neighbour's farm. I now know how Odysseus felt when Poseidon kept throwing sea monsters and other obstacles at him to prevent him from reaching his destination.

I dispatched Pandolf to parley with them and he looked very unenthused by his mission.

Fortunately, the geese were in a good mood and politely escorted us to the pond.

Goodbye, friends! Remember, there's a snake in this Eden. An adorable, web-footed, fish-eating snake.

Most of the fish dispersed quickly, but I thought it was so cute how these two leisurely swam away together...

And so I went and bought new fish for my greenhouse tanks. I'm going to miss the goldfish! They're cheerful to look at and I liked sitting by the tank and watching them go about their day. My new fish are better camouflaged and will be harder to observe. But it was fun watching their first introduction to goldfish society :)

[lost-in-fandoms]

So I'm thinking. Maxiel sort of meet ugly.

daniel has some sort of fancy designer job, max is a web developer, mostly freelancer because the job market is shit. daniel is heading to work in his fancy car, max is heading to the library because the wifi is free there even if it's a bit shit on his bike and he isn't really paying attention and daniel isn't either and they crash.

they're both fine, max has a few scratches and bruises but the biggest victim is the bike, whose front tire is all bent. they get in a bit of a fight about who was at fault, but then daniel is late and tells max "here, this is my business card with my number just call me and we'll sort it out".

max does call him and they do sort the accident out. and then max keeps calling.

"i need to go to a job interview and i don't have my bike anymore, you are contractually obligated to drive me" "i need to go to the library and it's raining i need you to drive me it's your civic duty after almost killing me" "my bike is still broken i need you to drive me to get groceries"

and for some reason, daniel keeps going. drops his work halfway through to go pick up this random guy who keeps pestering him. postpones meetings. interrupts work calls. and max is not even a good passenger princess, keeps commenting on his driving and has terrible taste in music, but daniel goes anyway. (it's only partially out of guilt)

when max's bike is fixed, daniel is expecting him to disappear, and sure max does ask him less to be driven around but he doesn't stop texting. random texts during the day, pictures of things he sees, random facts.

one day he is complaining about some pasta dish he had bought at a cafe and daniel makes the mistake of saying "my mom taught me how to make the best pasta" and max is like "bet. i'm coming over tomorrow night". daniel doesn't even try to argue, just puts the ingredients on his grocery list.

the pasta is indeed pretty good and after they're done max is gracious enough to help with the dishes (passes them to daniel while he's putting them in the dishwasher) and then lets daniel choose a movie.

and then climbs into daniel's lap and kisses him.

daniel for a second is like "whoa what is this???" and max is like "i'm kissing you, you dumbass"

"yes, but why?"

"because you're hot and I want to"

and somehow like most things max says it does make sense, in a weirdly straightforward way, so daniel kisses him back. and then they make each other come with sloppy handjobs on the couch.

and max keeps coming back and one day daniel comes home and simply finds him sitting at his kitchen table, working on his laptop. when daniel asks him how he got there max answers "did you forget my bike is fixed?" it doesn't really answer the question. daniel discovers two days later that max had told his neighbor he was daniel's boyfriend and had forgotten the keys and then jumped in the balcony and broken in.

they have a lot of sex (max is particularly fond of that time they have sex on the sunbed on the balcony, right next to the jasmine, daniel's shirt in his mouth to muffle his moans as daniel fucks him) and it takes more than a month for daniel to realise they're dating and max isn't just "hanging around".

max moves in with his cats two months later and daniel has never been happier (even if sassy does destroy his fancy couch).

[maryellencarter]

YouTube Downloads through VLC: Step by Step

So this guide to easily downloading off YouTube is super helpful, but there's enough important information hidden in the reblogs that (with the permission of OP @queriesntheories ) I'm doing a more step-by-step version.

Please note: these downloads will be in YouTube quality. My test video download is coming through at 360p, even though the video I'm starting from is set to 720p. They're legible, but they won't look great on a TV. For high visual quality, you'll want to seek out other methods.

This guide is written for Windows 10, since that's what I can test on. It's been tested on Firefox, Chrome, and Edge (which is a Chromium browser, so the method should work in other Chromium browsers too). So far, I haven't tracked down a way to use this download method on mobile.

BASIC KNOWLEDGE:

I'll try to make this pretty beginner-friendly, but I am going to assume that you know how to right-click, double-click, navigate right-click menus, click-and-drag, use keyboard shortcuts that are given to you (for example, how to use Ctrl+A), and get the URL for any YouTube video you want to download.

You'll also need to download and install one or more programs off the internet using .exe files, if you don't have these programs already. Please make sure you know how to use your firewall and antivirus to keep your computer safe, and google any names you don't recognize before allowing permission for each file. You can also hover your mouse over each link in this post to make sure it goes where I'm saying it will go.

YOU WILL NEED:

A computer where you have admin permissions. This is usually a computer you own or have the main login on. Sadly, a shared computer like the ones at universities and libraries will not work for this.

Enough space on your computer to install the programs listed below, if you don't have them already, and some space to save your downloaded files to. The files are pretty small because of the low video quality.

A simple text editing program. Notepad is the one that usually comes with Windows. If it lets you change fonts, it's too fancy. A notepad designed specifically to edit program code without messing it up is Notepad++, which you can download here.

A web browser. I use Firefox, which you can get here. Chrome or other Chrome-based browsers should also work. I haven't tested in Safari.

An Internet connection fast enough to load YouTube. A little buffering is fine. The downloads will happen much faster than streaming the entire video, unless your internet is very slow.

VLC Media Player, which you can get here. It's a free player for music and videos, available on Windows, Android, and iOS, and it can play almost any format of video or audio file that exists. We'll be using it for one of the central steps in this process.

If you want just the audio from a YouTube video, you'll need to download the video and then use a different program to copy the audio into its own file. At the end of this post, I'll have instructions for that, using a free sound editor called Audacity.

SETUP TO DOWNLOAD:

The first time you do this, you'll need to set VLC up so it can do what you want. This is where we need Notepad and admin permissions. You shouldn't need to repeat this process unless you're reinstalling VLC.

If VLC is open, close it.

In your computer's file system (File Explorer on Windows), go to C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\playlist

If you're not familiar with File Explorer, you'll start by clicking where the left side shows (C:). Then in the big main window, you'll double-click each folder that you see in the file path, in order - so in this case, when you're in C: you need to look for Program Files. (There will be two of them. You want the one without the x86 at the end.) Then inside Program Files you're looking for VideoLAN, and so forth through the whole path.

Once you're inside the "playlist" folder, you'll see a lot of files ending in .luac - they're in alphabetical order. The one you want to edit is youtube.luac which is probably at the bottom.

You can't edit youtube.luac while it's in this folder. Click and drag it out of the playlist folder to somewhere else you can find it - your desktop, for instance. Your computer will ask for admin permission to move the file. Click the "Continue" button with the blue and yellow shield.

Now that the file is moved, double-click on it. The Microsoft Store will want you to search for a program to open the .luac file type with. Don't go to the Microsoft Store, just click on the blue "More apps" below that option, and you'll get a list that should include your notepad program. Click on it and click OK.

The file that opens up will be absolutely full of gibberish-looking code. That's fine. Use Ctrl+A to select everything inside the file, then Backspace or Delete to delete it. Don't close the file yet.

In your web browser, go to https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua

Click in the part of the Github page that has a bunch of mostly blue code in it. Use Ctrl+A to select all of that code, Ctrl+C to copy it, then come back into your empty youtube.luac file and use Ctrl+P to paste the whole chunk of code into the file.

Save the youtube.luac file (Ctrl+S or File > Save in the upper left corner of the notepad program), then close the notepad program.

Drag youtube.luac back into the folder it came from. The computer will ask for admin permission again. Give it permission.

Now you can close Github and Notepad. You're ready to start downloading!

HOW TO DOWNLOAD:

First, get your YouTube link. It should look something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123DEF45 If it's longer, you can delete any extra stuff after that first set of letters and numbers, but you don't have to.

Now open VLC. Go to Media > Open Network Stream and paste your YouTube link into the box that comes up. Click Play. Wait until the video starts to play, then you can pause it if you want so it's not distracting you during the next part.

(If nothing happens, you probably forgot to put youtube.luac back. coughs)

In VLC, go to Tools > Codec Information. At the bottom of the pop-up box you'll see a long string of gibberish in a box labeled Location. Click in the Location box. It won't look like it clicked properly, but when you press Ctrl+A, it should select all. Use Ctrl+C to copy it.

In your web browser, paste the entire string of gibberish and hit Enter. Your same YouTube video should come up, but without any of the YouTube interface around it. This is where the video actually lives on YouTube's servers. YouTube really, really doesn't like to show this address to humans, which is why we needed VLC to be like "hi I'm just a little video player" and get it for us.

Because, if you're looking at the place where the video actually lives, you can just right-click-download it, and YouTube can't stop you.

Right-click on your video. Choose "Save Video As". Choose where to save it to - I use my computer's built-in Music or Videos folders.

Give it a name other than "videoplayback" so you can tell it apart from your other downloads.

The "Save As Type" dropdown under the Name field will probably default to MP4. This is a good versatile video format that most video players can read. If you need a different format, you can convert the download later. (That's a whole other post topic.)

Click Save, and your video will start downloading! It may take a few minutes to fully download, depending on your video length and internet speed. Once the download finishes, congratulations! You have successfully downloaded a YouTube video!

If you'd like to convert your video into a (usually smaller) audio file, so you can put it on a music player, it's time to install and set up Audacity.

INSTALLING AUDACITY (first time setup for audio file conversion):

You can get Audacity here. If you're following along on Windows 10, choose the "64-bit installer (recommended)". Run the installer, but don't open Audacity at the end, or if it does open, close it again.

On that same Audacity download page, scroll down past the installers to the "Additional resources". You'll see a box with a "Link to FFmpeg library". This is where you'll get the add-on program that will let Audacity open your downloaded YouTube video, so you can tell it to make an audio-only file. The link will take you to this page on the Audacity support wiki, which will always have the most up-to-date information on how to install the file you need here.

From that wiki page, follow the link to the actual FFmpeg library. If you're not using an adblocker, be careful not to click on any of the ads showing you download buttons. The link you want is bold blue text under "FFmpeg Installer for Audacity 3.2 and later", and looks something like this: "FFmpeg_5.0.0_for_Audacity_on_Windows_x86.exe". Download and install it. Without this, Audacity won't be able to open MP4 files downloaded from YouTube.

CONVERTING TO AUDIO:

Make sure you know where to find your downloaded MP4 video file. This file won't go away when you "convert" it - you'll just be copying the audio into a different file.

Open up Audacity.

Go to File > Open and choose your video file.

You'll get one of those soundwave file displays you see in recording booths and so forth. Audacity is a good solid choice if you want to teach yourself to edit soundwave files, but that's not what we're here for right now.

Go to File > Export Audio. The File Name will populate to match the video's filename, but you can edit it if you want.

Click the Browse button next to the Folder box, and choose where to save your new audio file to. I use my computer's Music folder.

You can click on the Format dropdown and choose an audio file type. If you're not sure which one you want, MP3 is the most common and versatile.

If you'd like your music player to know the artist, album, and so forth for your audio track, you can edit that later in File Manager, or you can put the information in with the Edit Metadata button here. You can leave any of the slots blank, for instance if you don't have a track number because it's a YouTube video.

Once everything is set up, click Export, and your new audio file will be created. Go forth and listen!

[evolutionsvoid]

With its grip on the land and its influence over all, it is obvious that the Church of Divine Wealth is a massive organization. Their reach is far and their power great, having ruled over all as the dominate religion for an era. At such a size, it is only natural that smaller pieces would be found within. Like the divine bodies they worship, any single entity is built upon multiple parts that function in unison to make it all work. As the blessed organa within our own flesh makes us who we are, the Church has a similar arrangement. Sects within their great folds that serve to bolster their numbers, influence and reach. Some were built within the Church itself, while others were absorbed and repurposed, as the Church found use for them while the outsiders chose assimilation over annihilation. Of the many parts and pieces that thrive in the Church in their own special way, there are four who stand out above all. Four pillars that support the Church of Divine Wealth, four organa whose fluids and faith allow this massive system to thrive. How perfect it all seemed back then...

One of the great sects within the Church is the Emerald Court of Eudaia, an organization of wisdom, learning and philosophy. Here was where the mysteries and conundrums of the world were discussed and debated, where brilliant minds came to puzzle and practice. All throughout the kingdoms held by the Church, courtrooms and debate parlors could be found where folk could learn and witness. Those who wished to meditate upon the secrets of the world, or the turmoils of their own existence would find a home here. The popular saying was that the Emerald Court was the Church's trap for those who considered themselves "too smart for religion." Those who debated about the gods, humors and all of existence would wind up here, fueling the Church even as they question faith. With this freedom to discuss and wonder, it painted the entire organization in a favorable light, giving the impression of open mindedness. And with such wisdom and delving into the mind, what better organization to represent Phlegm? A visit to the actual Court of Eudaia will show this beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The Court of Eudaia is in itself an entire academy, a great fortress of the mind. Beyond the walls lies the grand dome of the court, split and lobed like a divine brain. Within lies countless libraries, parlors and meditation chambers, all so one may better explore the mind. Court rooms and meeting chambers designed to hold debates and discussions, where folk may bring their ideas and theories for scrutiny. And in the center of the two halves lies the one and only Emerald Court, where the high philosophers hang in their web of endless discussion and musing. Here is where the brightest and greatest meet and speak, and where it is said the stances and futures of the Church are mulled over. Even the highest members of the Church would send their ideas and problems to this court, to see what these minds would discover. Folk eager for enlightenment would travel entire kingdoms to gain access, so that they could expand their own wisdom. Those with promise would be seen and eventually invited into the fold, so that they too could become a philosopher.

The most common members of the Court are the Philosophers, those who have devoted their lives to the art of discussion and moral quandaries. They take on the robes of green, and spend every waking moment reading, learning and puzzling over certain topics. As their time in the Court continues, they will begin to focus their sights on a scant few topics, putting all their energy into answering these questions. This niche study is what will give them an identity and purpose, and they will aim to be the master of it. Of course, others may choose this same subject, and they are welcome to, as this is where the great debates begin. Any theory, any idea, must be thoroughly discussed and scrutinized. Debate is necessary to find the truth, to cut through personal bias and foolish assumptions. It is expected for all philosophers to go to battle in the parlor, to be ready to be run through the wringer as they present their ideas. All wannabe students are forced to sit through several precedings, so that they may witness what these debates entail. Naturally, many drop their idea of joining the Court once they see these brutal defenses, as it is too much pressure to bear. This is meant to weed out the weak, as those who cannot take criticism or admit being wrong have no place here.

Philosophers start out as any other folk, but as their studies continue and their imbibing of Phlegm grows more and more to clear their minds, they begin to change. Neglect in eating and personal care causes most to grow gaunt and emaciated, eventually fueling themselves purely through hasty broths and Phlegm. Reclusive in studies and dusty libraries make them pale or even gray in appearance, as the dust and malnutrition shrivels them. In time, growing philosophers will see that they have reached the limit the basic human form can attain, and thus must open their minds further. The use of trepanning is the sign of evolution in a philosopher, literally opening one's mind to new possibilities and ways of thinking. It starts with a hole in the forehead, as if carving a third eye, and eventually calls for the removal of the entire skull cap. Outsiders can easily identify the rank of philosophers by noting how much of their green brains are exposed, as these are those who have expanded their minds beyond normal means. Yet, this is still not the end of their growth.

When one truly becomes a famed philosopher of the Emerald Court, their entire head will be cast aside. As it is found out, the senses and mortal wants simply distract from true enlightenment. A mouth only hungers, the ears are bombarded by distractions and wandering eyes take in details that are superfluous to advancement. Thus, a philosopher will eventually reduce their head to a brain, held within a clear orb filled with brilliant Phlegm. Awash in this calming and wise humor, they can truly be in the right state of mind to puzzle out the mysteries of the universe. The only need they must partake in now is the refreshment of their humor, which is needed when it grows cloudy and confused. Not only does this transformation allow for better thinking, it allows for the truest form of debate and conversation. Now they are no longer hindered by meaty tongues that tire and mortal nerves that scramble and fail. By using clearvein, they can hook up their spheres to other philosophers and swap fluids to partake in deep debate. To outsiders, not a single word is said, yet entire libraries worth of musings are released in mere minutes. Entire networks may be linked up as the arguments grow, taking in more and more perspectives. Some rooms may be reduced to a web of orbs and brains, locked in a ceaseless discussion.

The act of linking brains is a crucial one, as the philosophers warn about getting lost in your own dome and ideas. If one only listens to the sloshings of their own brain, then they will easily fall down the path of bias, blindness and assumption. They must connect with others to discover their own faults and get fresh perspectives. Thus, it is considered taboo if a philosopher has not linked up with anyone for an extended period of time, and word will travel that they have succumbed to ego. If they cannot get their ideas

approved by at least three other brains, then the highest levels of court will refuse to even let them present. Many take the logical route of opening discussion with others, but some crooked philosophers, consumed by ego and the want to be right, will go through shadier routes. They will find weaker minds and simpler folk to take under their wing, and then steal their brains. These will be placed in orbs and given Phlegm, but their minds are far from ideal philosopher material. This is fine for the cheater, who wants strawmen to dominate with their arguments and mind. These naive brains will cave to their superior, and become mere yes men to bolster their image and presence. Inside these halls, it is not uncommon to have posses of philosophers who group together and detract foes who "cheat" or undertake topics seen as unworthy. Though physical violence in heated debates between these unofficial factions is rare, the mental warfare going between them could reduce a man to a mindless husk.

When civil war broke out within the Church of Divine Wealth, the Court of Eudaia was quick to separate itself from the violence. This sect wanted nothing to do with the whole affair, and sealed their gates and halls to all. As philosophers, such brutish battles were beneath them and an utter waste of their talents. However, the crumbling of the Church and the ever growing war provided ample fruits of debate and discussion. Now there were new topics to present to the court, and all minds were eager to be the ones to solve these new conundrums. So now, as the war destroys the lands and leave the people fighting for survival, the great court of Eudaia spends its time and resources to prattle on about war, power and what it all means. Many outsiders wonder if there will even be a world left by the time they settle upon a decision.

Those who have climbed their walls and survived their defenses in hopes of gaining audience are never seen from again. In time, folk have abandoned the idea of rousing the high philosophers from their solitude. With the Emerald Court now fully severed from the outside world, they must be hungering for new ideas and perspectives. No doubt those who break in are seen as fresh tomes, ripe for the reading. Rumors are abound that those who enter are taken apart at the seams by the hungering debaters, eager for more fuel to their debates.

Due to the closure of the court and their defenses, many traveling philosophers were locked out, with no way to get back in. Thus they are forced to wander the war torn lands. However, they have taken this turn of events as an opportunity to learn more about the subject and find real juicy debate points out here in the ashes. With the chaos around them and the abandonment by their own institute, some have gone off the deep end. They would believe that if they find the right subject or philosophical view, that they would be allowed back into their home. And sometimes these different points of view come from others, and they know exactly how to get a hold of these new perspectives. And after all, what they are doing is a favor to the common folk. To be shed of all worries and pain, now allowed to join an enlightened conversation! Who wouldn't welcome such a chance? Thus, reports of mad philosophers in the wilds have begun to circulate, leaving behind the empty skulls of those who proved to be "fascinating conversationalists." It should be remembered that while these crazed folk may be physically frail, their mental abilities and mastery over Phlegm can make them deceptive opponents. Armor and weapons are useless when a wave of Phlegm makes you forget how to even use your muscles.

[notenoughpixel]

The sun gently rose up and peered through the gaps in-between the abandoned buildings, casting rays of sunlight on the snow covered planet. Everything was nice and calm and-

BEEP BEEP BEEP!

The alarm blared through Wren's auditory sensors causing her to jump as she woke up.

“Ughhh” She groaned,

It was the first day back after the summer holidays and Wren was not ready for it.

Patting the area around the side of her bed looking for the alarm before grabbing it and slamming it against the side table with the alarm finally switching off. She pushed her hand through the front of her tangled hair before gently squeezing it and sighing.

She stood up from her bed and grabbed her clothes that were lazily thrown onto an armchair yesterday and laid them on the bed before changing into them. It was just a basic off the shoulder black jumper with a ribcage design, some weird gothic cargo shorts thing and a grey beanie. Before she put on her beanie, she brushed her hair so it looked somewhat reasonable and nice. She then finally put on her beanie and headed to the kitchen for breakfast.

No lights were on in the living room that was also conjoined with the kitchen. It was quiet with not even a robo-roach squeaking.

“She normally is awake by now..”

“I'll go check her room..” Wren muttered to herself.

Just as she turned and was about to head to check if V was still sleeping, she saw a note on the table. Quickly picking up, it read,

‘PS:

I might be late coming home as food sources are getting harder and harder to find by the passing day and we aren't allowed to kill workers (which I am trying really hard not to do). I found a small canister of oil yesterday and left it on the table for your lunch.

V’

Right… Of course. Wren forgot about the shortages of oil lately and how V was trying desperately not to kill any workers but it was getting harder and she's been close to overheating several times by now.

“It's my fault.. If I wasn't here, less oil would be used”

Those words have been in her head for a while now. Is it really her fault..?

But she had no time to ponder about things like that as she had less than five minutes to get to school. She grabbed the oil can and put it in a small plastic bag before putting that in her school bag and heading out the door with her phone in hand.

When she had gotten to the school after practically running, she saw two familiar faces. Ones she did not want to see on a Monday morning right after summer break.

Monica Wood, The queen of highschool, head cheerleader, the almighty bitch

And

Onix Rodgers, The king of sports and… uh.. He's rich! I think….

(Ehm, let's get back on track)

The two are the unstoppable couple and the rudest people you will ever meet.

“Omg! Hii Wren~!” Monica said mockingly, giggling to herself.

“Yeah uh hi..” Replied Wren, walking past the two. Trying not to make any eye contact.

Wren didn't have many friends as most either thought she was weird or was scared of her. The only real friend she has was Olivia Jones who had gone missing during the summer and presumed dead so I guess actually she didn't have any friends.

Olivia was nice and also didn't fit in, just like Wren. She spent most of her time in the library. Wren didn't read much before but Olivia got her into reading. She would bleather to Wren about the books she was reading along with many random facts she knew, as Wren was the only person who listened. Like one time when she rambled on about different dog breeds.

“Did you know golden retrievers have gentle mouths and are very loyal to their owners? That's why they're good with kids!”

…

It was hard to believe for Wren that she would never hear that voice again… That she would never see her again or sit in the library for hours with her again and that she's back to having to deal with sitting alone at lunch once again…

RING RING RING!

Wren once again got lost in her own thoughts and forgot the time. She really rushed to her reg class and sat down. Everyone being already there. She sat in the one available seat that was left and waited for her name to be called.

Next to her was Mia Grant. She was a newer student, having only joined the school a year ago after moving from Outpost 8 to here for unknown reasons. Wren never got to know her as she wasn't in any of her classes last year and looked to be one of those popular girls. Always dressed up beautifully and nicely with neat, shoulder length, sandy blonde hair. Her green eye lights shining majestically. She was a goddess and-

“Wren Doorman?”

“Here Miss..”

The bell rang and it was time for the first class… Art.

[demvalhaken]

Hiiiiiii!!! Here’s me yapping about Insect culture and stuff

I drew this little thing of Mrs. Creek, who’s a Dragonfly by-the-way. This is probably just a doodle cus I didn’t work that long on this drawing of her. The architecture in the back is based off on some Greek temples and stuff like that. The Library of Aldaros is basically where she lives as she’s like literatures number one fan. Also don’t judge, she’s bald on the top of her head.

(Random language thingy cus I like making weird words in fictional languages)

So the language of Aldaros is called Aldarin because you know, but Aldaros/Aldarin are exoterms (I think that’s the right word?) Aldaros and Aldarin are actually from ancient Wasps who discovered the continent and it’s inhabitants (Ex: Crickets, Dragonflies, and Flies) The name comes from the ancient Waspian root Aldar/Aldor which means “less or fewer.” Basically the name of the continent means “Land of the lesser/inferior” to people who understood the ancient Waspian language. The endoterm actually used by its people is Ultoria, where Ult means foliage or flora and Ria means land or area. The endoterm is Ultoria (Land of great flora/foliage) and the exoterm is Aldaros (Land of the lesser) There’s actually unique letters for both Wasp and Ultorian but it’s better to show them in English then the actual native letters. Hold on, let me write them for your own curiosity!

I might change these letters but remember THIS IS NOT MODERN WASP LETTERS!!! This is from around 4,000-6,000 years ago when the term was created.

I forgot to mention but in Ultorian if there is an G-like letter in-between two other letters it means there is great/many of the first letter. A lot of people just write it without the G-like letter but some like to describe it better with great/many.

You should probably know who Bevel Stingheart is by now if you’ve seen my post but for those who haven’t I’ll basically just say who she is.

Bevel Stingheart is a descendant of Henry Stingheart, who was a royal guard like her. Bevel is in a secret marriage with Queen Snow Seaclaw (Current ruler of Wasp City) and is her royal bodyguard. She’s also a General of the People and General of War, as for General of the People that means she can arrest people and do whatever to keep the people protected and/or safe. General of War means that if there’s a war, she’d probably help make plans and get everyone ready for combat/give instruction or help.

I think Bevel is really silly, I really need a break from all this nerd talk help :l

Ancient Queen Bloodlust/Bloodlust 2,000 years ago when she was actually visible to the public. I based her clothing off of Ancient Chinese wears like the Han Dynasty I believe (I REALLY HOPE IM SPELLING THAT RIGHT) I never really had a crown design for her so I just put a giant jade on her crown cus like I don’t really have any Spider culture down just yet BUT I PROMISE I WILL! There are claw marks on her neck because of a recent war that happened in the Ancient Spider Kingdom (War of Webs) THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE THOUGH!!! I believe as of right now the war is about territory, Bloodlust’s kingdom wanted more land as their population was growing but the lesser weren’t cooperating. NOW THATS A LOT OF YAP I KNOW, BUT I LOVE THESE GUYS THOUGH!!! CATECIS IS JUST A WAY FOR ME TO SHOW MY LOVE FOR STORIES

So sorry I haven’t been posting a lot, I haven’t been doing too well mentally and I feel like shit 24/7. I love all of you so much!!! Especially my children (Followers)!!!

(If you have any questions, you can ask. If you like this yapping, consider supporting because there’s a lot of Catecis art on the way)

EDIT: I FORGOT TO MENTION BUT BLOODLUST’S HAIR IS TIED IN LIKE A BOW SHAPE!!! No the hair on her head isn’t ears or stuff like that, it’s just a hair-tied bow. Spiders don’t even have that kind of hearing

[krewssleuth]

# _ this is the crime kitchen after all.

ib:: their video (i work at a criminal kitchen) content:: murder, crimes, illegal stuff, it isn't as dark n very generic soo note:: first post let's go! (btw i'm still working on a better post design) help why was this so good?! why do 2am works turn out better than when i'm fully awake. also, i need to find proper ages for them to make it make sense.

The Killer ; Painting Rainbows

- An infamous 'alien hunter' in the community. Lunar knew of her as the head honcho in dealing of illegal items. Rainbow then got in touch with Funneh and thus got hired.

- She used to work at the sandwich store until the owner was arrested. Rainbow wasn't arrested due to the government wanting to hide the truth of aliens existance. She also harvests organs which are mainly hearts but doesn't tell how she got them so as to not get anyone else in trouble for her crimes, which I find pretty sweet (Rainbow being sweet is a canon event!)

The Knockout ; Golden Glare

- A fashionable ex-model, now hired at the Sandwich Store due to her ties with Rainbow. Gold knew her from school as Rainbow was called a 'lunatic' for believing that aliens exist. She didn't mind Rainbow as she found her quite 'normal' and understanding when it's just them two.

- She bought her fame, until one day her manager threatened to expose her. The man has helped her too much and demanded a higher pay. Gold being the greedy woman she was, declined and her manager launched at her with a knife. She was able to kill him out of defence, still traumatised by her actions, yet craving for more. The ex-model served her years for manslaughter, then losing her popularity.

The Mastermind ; Funneh Cake

- A young, avaricious money launderer who continued the business out of fun. Funneh hired Lunar, slowly bonding over time. After Funneh bought the place, she had Lunar and Draco invest in the Sandwich Store. She did find it strange that Gold and Rainbow wanted to work there but didn't question it much.

- She found out about the place from rumours that the place had 'aliens'. The thing that truly caught her interest was guns; a popular illegally-bought item. Who on Earth would buy alien bodies or human hearts? Some Science geek who is unafraid to get arrested? Funneh later got in touch with Draco, a man who could cover up their tracks when needed.

The Mule ; Lunar Eclipse

- A blood-thirsty money mule who knows too much about the dark web. Lunar had searched far and wide for quick cash, for unknown reasons. She was only a few years younger than Funneh, deciding then to be her money mule.

- She started off buying illegal items off of the dark web then selling it to classmates and schoolmates, making sure to make profit. She then crossed paths with Funneh while dealing in an alleyway, until Funneh hired her. Lunar found it strange but wanted the money, and since then they have become two peas in a pod.

The Silencer ; Draconite Dragon

- A quick-witted intelligencer that will do whatever it takes to protect his co-workers. Draco met Funneh through the heads of their respective crime families. She found him useful to the team, while he found her and the group interesting. Almost like he knew them, for a long a time. As though he had talked to them every day, had shared great memories with them, lived happily with the team of five.

- Draco is often at a nearby bar or library, eavesdropping on any information that the police knows about him and the others. He would of course report back to Funneh on anything urgent, not wanting to kill off too many people but still, he makes sure to get rid of any person that could risk the group's lives. The four women were very important to him. He never knew why but will never question his heart and soul.

[ Dyaa M_'s LOG Ended. ]

[queenlua]

"Vulkan is weird— but it's weird in a way that makes a certain sort of horrifying machine sense. Every Vulkan call involves passing in one or two huge structures which are themselves a forest of other huge structures, and every structure and sub-structure begins with a little protocol header explaining what it is and how big it is. Before you allocate memory you have to fill out a structure to get back a structure that tells you what structure you're supposed to structure your memory allocation request in. None of it makes any sense— unless you've designed a programming language before, in which case everything you're reading jumps out to you as "oh, this is contrived like this because it's designed to be easy to bind to from languages with weird memory-management techniques" "this is a way of designing a forward-compatible ABI while making no assumptions about programming language" etc. The docs are written in a sort of alien English that fosters no understanding— but it's also written exactly the way a hardware implementor would want in order to remove all ambiguity about what a function call does. In short, Vulkan is not for you. It is a byzantine contract between hardware manufacturers and middleware providers, and people like… well, me, are just not part of the transaction.

Khronos did not forget about you and me. They just made a judgement, and this actually does make a sort of sense, that they were never going to design the perfectly ergonomic developer API anyway, so it would be better to not even try and instead make it as easy as possible for the perfectly ergonomic API to be written on top, as a library. Khronos thought within a few years of Vulkan being released there would be a bunch of high-quality open source wrapper libraries that people would use instead of Vulkan directly. These libraries basically did not materialize. It turns out writing software is work and open source projects do not materialize just because people would like them to."

[guzsdaily]

Predicting and programming: enemies for life (part 2)

Day 42 - Dec 17th, 12.023

This is the direct continuation of yesterday's post. I hope that I'm able to continue my daily journals as usual, but there's a strong possibility that one day or another I will not able to post, or need to post after midnight. Also, the entries probably will be shorter or just small updates sometimes even on weekends, but I will try to write them on the morning to be able to have time and brain to do something bigger and with better quality. And some posts I could even need to split into two if I need to stop writing one in the middle, like what's happened yesterday. There's no need to go into details, I don't want to expose my personal life nor of the people around me, I just want to inform that this end of year is not being great to my partner, so I want to be with her as much as I can to help and support her to whatever she needs to.

"A ghostly server"

Like I said in the last part, the application was complaining about not having a server, and the stranger, it was complaining about not having the development server running. This as a production build of the application, the embedded web-app were a static one, a static HTML file, why was it complaining about the server!? I tried searching around the Tauri's GitHub issues, but there was nothing about it, and creating an issue wasn't in my mind at the time because again, I am short in time and couldn't wait for a fix.

So because Tauri wasn't working, and I didn't even want to think about how to fix this problem, I switched back to CapacitorJS. This process was somewhat easy, because both of them are a "wrapper", so I just needed to move the web app part of the application from a template to another, but it was somewhat time-consuming (I'm not so accustomed to Vim and my new file explorer, so navigating was somewhat slower, and like every JavaScript project, just setting it up a template can be time-consuming). But after setting it up, Capacitor compiled, and the app was working as normal without any differences.

Framework hopping

While that was happening, when I started the project, I also wasted a lot of time choosing what framework to use. "Why?" One, JavaScript is an ecosystem that in general can be somewhat overwhelming with choices; Two, I already used SvelteKit for my last application and projects, so this time I wanted something different; Three, I wanted to try something more "native-like".

Web as Native

I started trying to use Framework7, because it has a collection of components and routing that emulates the native-app experience, and most important to me, it had the updated Material Design 3 (Material You) design; with Svelte, my primary UI framework of choice. But it didn't work that well. The routing wasn't how I liked it to be, and Framework7 is a somewhat old framework as it seems (it uses Gulp as its build system and the last commits were a month ago, the project is not that active), it stills a great project, but somewhat difficult to integrate with newer thing like Svelte 4 and Vite. After not being able to, I tried to KonstaUI with Svelte, but ended up with the same results. If you know something about this area of trying to make web apps feel like a native app, you are probably thinking something like "why you didn't use Ionic?", and the main reason is that it stills uses Material Design 2, and personally I like more how the newer version looks. Also, Ionic doesn't have official support for Svelte, and even knowing that the community package is good, I already used it in the past and wanted something new to try.

So, after probably hours, if not a day, trying that, I hopped into another idea. I found something called Beer CSS, a library that creates a Material You look and app using just CSS pretty much, so I could use any framework that I liked! Nonetheless, because it was pure JS and CSS, I thought it would be good to use Astro, so I could also take advantage of its new View Transitions feature, and could use Svelte still for the interactivity blocks. But as you can already tell if you know Astro, it's probably not the best idea to use a static site generator (SSG) as a mobile application framework, however it was working, and I was being able to create something and actually develop the application part of things and not just continue setting up new projects.

Lack of documentation

But then some cracks started to open. Beer CSS's documentation is not the greatest for me, it's mostly code examples and there's pretty much no words about customization and how the CSS words and/or how to manipulate it, and it seems that you really need to follow Material's system and hierarchy to it to work properly. I don't have time for this, and I already wasted 2 to 3 days fighting my way around all of this.

Also, while this was happening, the problem with Tauri also happened, which for some reason also made me switch from Astro to SvelteKit. Why? I don't know really, for me the problem with the server could be related to it, but of course it didn't work, and I had to switch to Capacitor like I said.

Blank screen and broken dreams

And then, another problem appeared out of nowhere, the built app with CapacitorJS started to have a total black screen when I opened it. There were no errors in the console, warnings on the screen, nothing, the app simply stopped working, and I couldn't find anything about it on the issues, and being honest, at this point I had already wasted around a week and couldn't handle it anymore. The idea of not being able to give at least something in time was storming my mind and I ended up wasting another day procrastinating, because I couldn't handle and think of solutions.

I had so many ideas for this app and now everything stopped working, I was exhausted, this was supposed to be something special for my girlfriend, and I don't want to lose the date again, even more now when she's passing difficult times in her life. I need to do and try something.

Compromises

This is where I am right now. I have less than a week to finish this project, and the app itself is way unfinished than I anticipated it would be days ago. So, what we do when this happens? Compromises, I already had in mind that I would create just some features until the date and then update over time, but now it will be just one feature and as an online website for now.

One of the features of this app is an interactive messaging page, to give complements and things like that, but for now I will try to repurpose it to some predefined messages and just express out of my heart to her using it. Do I want to be simple as that? No, but it only what I can do for now, and hopefully I will be able to add more things as time passes, I really want to do something special and specific for my girlfriend. Thankfully, porting it to a native app in the future won't be so hard, and I already have some ideas now on how to fix the past bugs that impossibilitaded me from porting it, however I will try to focus more on the features themselves for now.

Knowing my girlfriend, she will understand, but again, it's more of me to her thing in my mind.

---

Today's artists & creative things

Song: Hello, World - by Louie Zong I don't know why, writing this post just remembered me this music.

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Copyright (c) 2023-present Gustavo "Guz" L. de Mello <contact.guz013@gmail.com>

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License

[clonerightsagenda]

Heya! I’ve worked circulation in my college library for about three years now, and am thinking of going for an mls or mlis—you seem to have a non-public facing job with time for podcasts and writing (which I would really appreciate), would u mind talking about what you specialized in at grad school? Or other advice (sorry for anon, don’t have a tumblr but remembered u from the homestuck rewrite). I’m an english makor and don’t have a lot of experience with texh, but would be willing to learn.

Hi! You remember me from my TLC days, huh? Welcome back.

First, I must admit I work an entirely public-facing job. I listen to podcasts while doing chores at home because otherwise I'd be forced to be alone with my thoughts. However, there are plenty of less-public facing jobs in LIS! Those could include:

Technical services - think cataloging, ILL, database/electronic resource management. If you're very detail oriented and love splitting hairs, cataloging may be for you. E-resource management is big right now, although it involves as much communicating with vendors as tech skills. (I spent two weeks trying to get ahold of ProQuest this semester...while trying to pay them, no less.) Depending on the posting, you may not need an MLIS for some of these positions.

Remote librarian - You'll see a lot of remote reference gigs, but these are often part time. A few are full time, though, so if you don't mind doing live chat or virtual help, that's a good option! I dream of being a FT remote librarian tbh. Most of the FT jobs I see are for special libraries - hospitals, legal firms, businesses - where most of your job would be managing company knowledge bases and providing information upon request.

Archives & museums - While these jobs still require work with the public, you'll often spend more time behind the scenes processing materials.

UX librarian or systems librarian - Much more tech focused. Think interfaces, web design, forcing all your different products to play nice with the link resolver, etc.

I didn't have a firm specialty in grad school - I took two courses in our archival concentration as it was getting established but graduated before the third one. I did angle toward academic over public librarianship and made sure to take a class on pedagogy. My overall tips regarding getting an MLIS are:

See if your job will pay for it. Sometimes they will! Grad school isn't cheap and librarians don't make loads so you don't want to take out loans if you don't have to. If you *do*, librarians qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program but that's a mess rn.

Keep a library job while taking classes if possible. Tbh I learned way more on the job than in class. Library school helps steep you in professional theory and values, but it doesn't always give you many hard skills.

Acquire hard skills if you can. Take classes that let you do practical projects. If there's *any* possibility you might take a job in academia or public librarianship where you'll be teaching classes, giving workshops, etc., I highly encourage you to take a pedagogy class. It's good to learn a bit about teaching and get over your jitters about presenting to a crowd.

Get comfortable with tech; no way around that one. If you're not having to master new tech to do your job you're going to be helping patrons figure out *their* technology. You don't have to be a whiz - I could never get the hang of programming and don't know much about command lines - but be ready to roll up your sleeves and try troubleshooting. Googling 'how do I do xyz' is, shockingly, not a universal skill and will get you far. I have become a master of weird workarounds because none of the tech at my college works.

When writing personal statements to get into a library school program, do not lead with how much you like to read. That's not what librarians do. Librarianship is a service profession - think helping people, solving problems, being flexible, etc. All key characteristics you should highlight in applications for programs and for jobs. Having past customer service experience will help you too.

If you can get an assistantship that will cover program costs while giving you experience, go for it. My assistantship was hands down the most informative part of my library school experience *and* I don't have student loans.

That's what comes to mind right away, but feel free to ask me follow up questions about anything you're curious about!

[alisheaburgess]

Dev Diaries: Day 8...We Back!!!

Dev Diaries, Masterlist

Romancing the Process...coming soon

June 4, 2023

The Day number will just be a log number as I may not do Dev stuff every day. I'll be including the dates though.

Now that I have a month to take classes, I'm going to be a bit more strategic with what I'm taking and when. I want to get the most out of this 😊

For the Dev side, I'm going to finish up the bigger courses that I wasn't able to get into before. They will mainly be HTML and CSS. There are a couple of them that have intros to Python and the like. I have already had a little bit of Python in other courses, so I'm kinda looking forward to that one and more C# 😁 that's the one I'll be learning for my game dev stuff.

For the Diaries though...

I'm thinking about having a separate Design Diary (non-web design) and Doodle Diary because I'm also going to be working on those. I mainly want to so I can find things easier later but also... so I remember what all I'm doing now 😂😋

I am starting Romancing the Process! Which is just a diary of all the crazy stuff I'm learning, trying, and just my story as I experience it. I think it's gonna be fun (for me at least lol)

My goal for this month is to be as job ready as I possibly can be! I'm going to be purging my belongings as well in case I need to move. This will trick my brain into cleaning which is useful even if I don't move 😅 I'll be going over this more in Romancing the Process. I am trying to get a balance of input (learning) and output (creating). This is gonna be so much fun!!!!

Weekly DevPlan:

Courses to Tackle for the Week (starts Monday, today is bonus)

Improve UX Prototyping

HTML

CSS

Soft Dev

Full-stack Dev

1 Class at a time! 😊

The prototyping course is introductions to a bunch of tools you can use. It's kinda boring to start but then I turn into a child when they start the actual prototyping part 😂🤣 It's so much fun and I can't wait to get to play...I mean...use them.

I won't be doing each of these every day. They are in order of importance. I want to get the first three done this week. The bottom two be the least important and can take all month if need be lol

I've already done a prototyping course but it's super close to being completely done. I've almost exhausted their library of UX stuff 😅🥰 This is the last fuller course they have for it. After that it's just shorter courses that I plan to filter in.

Let's Go!!!

[novalabs]

Wix Vs WordPress

Both Wix and WordPress offer fantastic features, regardless of whether you think a free website builder should host your blog or build an e-commerce website for selling your handcrafted items. If a feature isn't native to one platform or the other, there are programs or plugins to help you expand the functionality of your site. Your needs and goals, which you will discuss with your website application development business, will determine the best option for you.

The Difference Between WordPress and Wix in 2023

Comprehensive solutions, including WordPress and Wix*-based content management systems, are offered by seasoned website creation companies like Novalabs. Ask our specialists how to utilize the free website builder.  

What is Wix?

With Wix, you can create your own website without needing to know how to code. It's a "software-as-a-service" (SaaS) tool, meaning you pay a monthly price to utilize it rather than own the product. 

What is WordPress?

In 2003, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little founded WordPress as a platform for blogging. Since then, it has evolved into a totally free website builder.

By the year 2022, it will be widely known. According to BuiltWith.com, the platform is currently used by about 36.5 million live websites. 

There are two distinct WordPress configurations to take into account: 

Web-based WordPress

Similar to Wix, hosted WordPress is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for creating and managing websites that can be accessed at wordpress.com. 

Although it started out as a blogging service, it is now a fully functional website builder. You pay a regular charge to use it, and in exchange, you get access to a wide range of components that help you build a website. 

WordPress Self-Hosted

You can download and install the self-hosted WordPress program from wordpress.org on your own web server. This suggests that you should get hosting so that your website has a location. Currently, WordPress is open-source, which means that the code that powers it is easily available and modifiable. 

Wix vs. WordPress: Points to consider

1. Usability

One of the simplest website builders to use to create a website is Wix. Why? You can change everything in your program without installing any additional software. Their user interface is quite simple and intuitive, especially for total beginners. They also have an Application Market where you can add features with a single click if you ever want to add more functionality. 

However, compared to WordPress, Wix requires far more work to construct a website. WordPress is also well-known for its modules and plugins. However, installing or performing them is typically not that simple. To establish a site, the software as a whole basically needs a little bit of specialized training or at the very least some development experience. 

2. Design and adaptability

There are roughly 1,000 (yes, 1,000!) free templates in Wix's layout library. They are organized into classes (websites, cafés, photographers, etc.) and are slick and modern.

Whatever the case, you can undoubtedly relax because Wix offers a perspective that is entirely transportable. Although this is totally acceptable for Google (more on this later), you might need to re-arrange a few features (using intuitive) to properly serve your site on mobile devices. 

With Wix versus WordPress, you can get the exact you need if you know CSS and HTML or, on the other hand, if you wouldn't mind investing a few hours figuring out how to update your layout's code.

3. Plugins and Apps

There are many methods to expand your industry-specific site on Wix, and you can choose from 300 free and paid applications in the application market. There are incredible apps for things like lodging reservation systems, artist picture displays, or invoice generation, for instance. The fact that some of these applications are created by Wix itself is actually extremely significant. 

WordPress is renowned for its plugins, which include those for virtual entertainment, contact management, website design improvement, and more. WordPress serves as a good example of this since there is actually a plugin for everything. Although Wix's applications are much easier to set up and maintain, your choice is subject to some restrictions. 

Conclusion

It implies that the best free website builder depends on the type of site you want to create. Hiring a WordPress website development business is perhaps the best option if you require a solid solution that will scale over time. 

However, Wix is helpful for smaller, more modest sites that take less work and have an adequate design. The choice you make in the end will rely on what you really want from your website.

[questioningespecialy]

i’m constantly reminded of mortality, and it doesn’t bother me the way you’d think

repost from that time i deleted an article i spent 4 days on T-T actual post this time since i somehow posted it privately yesterday 😭

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Hi, I’m Questioning. And I like to waste my life away dedicate my free time to random hobbies that catch my hyperfixation interest on the fly. Currently, I’ve returned to something most important. Updating the encyclopedia-esque database of AlternativeTo.net. o_o

Let me finish.

See, I started exploring the world of Visual Novel (VN) makers, which led to me discovering the world of Interactive Fiction (IF)–their predecessor afaic. And that’s where it got strange. What I’ve found is interesting developments in terms of innovation and such. Like Undum (image)–“a game framework for building a sophisticated form of hypertext interactive fiction” according to its GitHub. IFWiki calls it “an authoring system for CYOA-style stories playable on web browsers.” It was created by I.D. Millington in 2009, released in 2010, had returned in 2018, and would’ve changed the IF genre (kinda like Twine did) if not for how hard it was to get into.

Undum’s flexibility and power have made it the engine that drove some of the most significant works in IF (The Play, Almost Goodbye). But it has always been relatively inaccessible. Undum is not the system of choice for writing straightforward hypertext games; it’s a challenging system to learn and use that demands the author build their own engine on top of it to drive their game logic. Consider Raconteur for “Undum with batteries included.” -Bruno Dias (x)

Enter Raconteur, “a friendlier way to write Undum hypertext fiction” that was announced by Bruno Dias in 2015. More accurately described as “a library of Undum tools that can get someone writing their story quickly.” Here’s the thing about the “library of Undum tools” part: Undum did not come prepackaged with any… even though they were required to write your game,…😐 which “meant doing a lot of your own tooling.” 😑

Yeah, no surprise it won the award for Best Technological Development in XYZZY Awards 2015.

But hold up, somethin’ ain’t right…

Undum’s only got 21 games on IFDB.org and Raconteur’s got 4… with 1 overlap with Undum. 😐

So~… wth?

Well, someone else had a similar question on intfiction.org in March and got Josh Grams’ opinion on it: JavaScript.

🤷🏿‍♂️

So even though Undum was designed as the visual version of bookbinding and with the specific goals “aesthetic” & “technical” in mind, shit’s too intimidating compared to alternatives.

I hoped [writing Undum in JavaScript] would make it accessible for a wider range of dabblers, requiring transferable skills rather than learning a new language. It also made it achievable to write and document over a few weekends: I didn’t have to worry about parsing, or creating a complete runtime. But the best benefit, and in some ways the one least exploited in practice, is the ability to use Undum as part of a bigger game. I imagined a strategy game with CYOA elements, or a piece of interactive fiction using natural language generation to be different each time. -Ian Millington (x)

And here’s~ where it gets a bit fucked.

Remember the other person who had a similar question–J. J. Guest? Well, they ended their post with “Was it simply superseded by Ink / Inky?”

Let’s keep this simple:

Ink [image] is the core narrative engine itself, written in C#. It includes the code for the compiler. If you’re not technical, you don’t need to worry about this. Inky [image] is our ink editor, which is a text editor with support for playing as you write. If you’re just starting out with ink, this is all you need. inkle is the game development studio that created ink (x)

So it’s “a narrative scripting language for games” and yet another CYOA maker. Why do I bring them up? Well, Inkle (the company) “was founded in 2011 by two Cambridge game developers [Joseph Humfrey & Jon Ingold] with a passion for storytelling and beautiful design” (x). They started off with their unique “inklebook” format, which had an early prototype game in ~2008 that Jon described as

an iPad-based choice-driven story made of ‘pages’ which stitched together into a single flow via frequent choice points. It was a lovely UI for a choice-based game, even in prototype form, and we had a strong scripting language underneath it – the first version of ink. (x)

In January of 2012, they released “a web-tool for writing and reading simple interactive stories” called inklewriter. Joseph described it as “a simpler subset of the inklebook format” (x) and admitted “inklewriter was partly born out of the surprise that there isn’t anything out there for quickly and easily writing non-linearly.” (x)

After already having “moved away from developing inklewriter for a long time,” it went “permanent beta” in September of 2017 due to “increasing frequency of persistent bug-reports.” Sad news considering the statement “we’ve had hundreds of thousands of stories created by hundreds of thousands of users; we’ve won awards from school and library associations; and hopefully we’ve helped kickstart a few interactive writers careers” (x). And since writers (who became aware in time) were able to “rescue” their story from the bugs and potential wipeout with a simple Save Page As, it was probably a bit less heartbreaking when inkle revealed less than a year later that inklewriter would be shutting down completely in August of 2018. Seemingly because “it’s real work to fix the issues that arise” with the constant browser changes. 😐

Only 7 months later, it returned in March of 2019. Stable, still free, and now open-source after developers in the open-source community “produced a full port of inklewriter to modern web-tech.” 🥳 Writers needed to make new accounts and import their stories to the new database, but that was it. And since the legacy version was (and is) still around, they could do it pretty quickly. (x)

But where dahell was I going with this? Let me tell you about the original connection first: Unity Integration.

The [ink-unity-integration] plugin provides you with everything you need to get started with ink in Unity. It automatically recompiles ink files as you edit them, and even comes with a simple previewer that lets you play stories directly within the Editor, without writing a line of code. (x)

Remember Ian Millington’s statement from awhile ago? “But the best benefit, and in some ways the one least exploited in practice, is the ability to use Undum as part of a bigger game. I imagined a strategy game with CYOA elements, or a piece of interactive fiction using natural language generation to be different each time.” (x)

Well,… Stoic Studio (announced that they) did it in January 2013 when they used inklewriter for The Banner Saga. Though, inkle recommends you use their ink scripting language instead for Unity projects. 🤷🏿‍♀️ A scripting language that was ported to JavaScript in May of 2016, btw. The port (inkjs) having its latest release just 6 freaking days ago while Undum and Raconteur had their last GitHub edits in 2018 & 2020 respectively.

Either way, Ian’s imagination of “a strategy game with CYOA elements” happened… with another mofo’s software. 😐

And what’s that? I left something out?

I left working on Undum to develop Varytale, a short lived commercial IF endeavour that shared a lot of the same aesthetic and narrative structure. And then I retired, and it lay fallow, aside from email help requests that still drip into my inbox. -Ian Millington (x)

Let’s see what IFWiki says about this endeavor:

Varytale was a platform for authoring and publishing browser-based CYOA, created by Ian Millington and Alexis Kennedy; it occupied a point somewhere between Undum and StoryNexus [a comparatively mostly defunct endeavor from 2012]. The Varytale website was live from approximately 2011 to 2015. The first posts on Varytale’s blog appeared in June 2011. On March 7, 2014, Varytale posted a comment on the Varytale Facebook page saying, “The project is stalled, due to key people leaving the project. So there’s no news, and I’m not sure if or when there will be.” The last Wayback Machine snapshot of www.varytale.com/books was taken in September 2015. (x)

On its May of 2012 public beta announcement on FailbetterGames website, something slightly poignant was said.

But the technology is great [seriously] - it’s easily the most flexible and powerful tool of its kind, and it’ll be fascinating to see what people can do with it once the writers’ programme opens up. And as it happens, Jon Ingold / Joseph Humfrey’s very elegant inklewriter has also just gone live [4 months prior]. (…) …[inklewriter] covers some of the same territory as Varytale, but it’s (by design) simpler in concept and execution. (x)

Life is truly cruel.

If you check the archive from possibly days before its shut down in September of 2015, you’ll see 4 official books (Bee, Fighting, How To Read, Hymn & Shanty) and 3 User Published Books (London Road, Sixth Tower, Tillinghast). That’s 7… 7 books. 😐

But it’s not that sad. According to the Varytale blog’s 2nd to last post (in June of 2012), “we passed 50,000 reads across the seven books currently on our reader’s beta.” This was perhaps a full week after they released the floodgates and actually allowed people to start readin’. Das alot to me. They clearly succeeded in “building a platform for authors to write great books, and for publishers to publish them.” Even built a whole-ass “system that does generative design,” creating “artwork based on the author’s choice of patterned design or photograph” (x). Or, as we’d quickly say 12 years later, some AI shit.

So wut 👏🏿 in da fuq 👏🏿

Why’d they never get past the 7 book mark in the 2 years between Reader’s Beta and project stallation? Well,… there’s a hint at the end of that 2012 blog post: “We have a queue of people wanting to write content, who are been added a few at a time. So lots of hard work in the beta still to go.” hm~ 🤔

If The Way Back Machine had archives past January of 2013, we’d definitely know more, but this is it (i ain’t diggin’ a wider hole at this point). And what is it? I think it’s a matter of workload. Too much for too few people who had however much goin’ on in their lives. Remember much earlier this bit from IFWiki?

On March 7, 2014, Varytale posted a comment on the Varytale Facebook page saying, “The project is stalled, due to key people leaving the project. (x)

Maybe things weren’t smooth enough for awhile. Maybe it was something else for those 2 years prior. 🤷🏿‍♂️ And you know… the end of Emily Short’s blog post Writing for Varytale might hold the answer.

There are still some challenges about using the Varytale system, though it’s evolved tremendously over the course of beta. One of the biggest authorial challenges is that, while there’s the awesome structure tool shown above for looking at branching structure inside a storylet, it can be considerably more challenging to get a view of what’s going on at the macro level. And I’m not even sure what the tool for this ought to look like. The strength of storylets is that they can affect which other ones pop up in a fairly freeform way, and one can affect another (via their shared stat use) without explicit logic in either. But that’s also what makes it really hard to graph how they will act. Most of the bugs that arose in Bee were related to this issue of envisioning the total structure of the work and detecting storylets that were going to break that structure. (x)

So in this case aswell, the innovations of Ian’s Varytale make it… (a bit) intimidating to work with. 😑Whether or not this difficulty was ever ironed out post-beta is unknown to me, especially considering the end of Ian’s thankful response to Tom H.’s suggestion for fixing the macro level problem: “When will I get chance to code it? That’s a whole other matter!”

…hm~

And on the same post lies magnus4444’s statement that “There isn’t a lot of documentation out there yet on the implementation of more advanced effects but, on the plus side, Ian is generous with advice and tips.”

🤷🏿‍♀️

So wtf do we have here. Effectively two developers (i’m simplifying it; fight me) who 1) made a CYOA maker (Undum & inklewriter) for very similar reasons, 2) put development aside to focus on other CYOA makers (Varytale & Inky), 3) had their neglected work taken up by open-source developers for the good of everyone, and 4) reaped the benefit of the other’s labor in some way. Now, here’s where we’re back to the sad part. Inkle’s version of the tale is the American Dream ™. Inklewriter was beloved by many and had mainstream success. Ian’s version is the harsh American Reality. Undum only bore 24+ games over the course of its 13 year existence on the internet and in the world of IF. And if a single person’s opinion is to be taken as fact… then the reason was simple: shit wasn’t easy to pickup. And thus, regardless of Ian & Bruno’s efforts, it (at this rate) is bound to become an obscure software regardless of its potential. All while Varytale remains gone and Inky (released in June of 2016) is still goin’ strong with 160+ games released using its Ink language/engine.

Which brings me back to the matter…

i’m constantly reminded of [my] mortality

[your-yandere-darling]

“I Can’t Lose You, I Won’t Lose You” | Klaus x Amber

《Here’s an idea that’s been in my head for a while now :3》

✎Self Indulgent

✎Tagging: @undeaddfelix @fluffytimearts @anonsleap @prettyemofashionistahours @ann-yeah @kingsis

✎Trigger Warning: Slight yandere, obsessive behavior, yandere with a willing darling

reblogs with comments > reblogs > likes

《↬.•.•✿•.•.↫》

Three days.

It’s been three days since Amber’s death.

Most people would plan a funeral or mourn the death of their spouse.

Not Klaus.

Klaus isn’t ready to lose his beloved wife.

Not now.

Not ever.

And he plans on making sure he won’t lose Amber ever again.

Lying unresponsive on top of his operating table is Amber’s corpse, Klaus sitting in front of another table scanning a bunch of papers scattered all over the table. His hair is a mess, there’s a bunch of empty coffee cups on the table, and there’s obvious bags under his eyes. Ever since those damned monster hunters killed his selkie wife, he’s been trying everything he could to bring them back to life.

The first thing he tried was to turn them into a vampire, but that didn’t work; they’re still unconscious and the only difference is the bite mark on their neck. These past few days, Klaus has been trying a few different experiments in hopes it’ll work. Since Amber’s a selkie- technically a merfolk, would the heart or blood of another merfolk bring them back? He would find another selkie but he couldn’t on such short notice, but hopefully it’ll be fine…?

Klaus groans as he slams his head on the desk in frustration. No, it’s stupid to think it would’ve worked. He should’ve studied necromancy instead. Well, it’s too late now. The surgery is done and the only thing he can do is travel to the library and find spell books on necromancy. But he doesn’t want to leave his beloved Amber…

Klaus perks up when he hears someone. ‘Is…Is that…?’ He spins around to face them.

Amber groans in pain as they try to sit up, finally regaining their consciousness. They quickly lay back down and clutch their sides, hissing in pain. They look…different. Very different…

Sure, Amber’s still the short, curvy, and slightly chubby selkie he knew, but that Amber looked entirely human. This Amber still has their long-ish dark purple hair in the pixie cut with shaved sides and dark brown hair in the roots. Now they have teal colored scales which are on some bits of their face, arms, legs, and body which fade from scales to skin like a gradient. They have fins on their ears, two on the side of their arms and legs, and three on their back. They have glowing gold eyes, a glowing anglerfish lure hanging in front of their face which is attached at the top of their head, claws instead of nails, webbed hands and feet, fangs, a short fish-like tail attached to their lower back like a sea monster, and they wear a light cyan, thin, fabric cardigan which has a shiny scale design on it if the light hits it just right. In this form, they don’t have a fish tail but rather legs, though they still look merfolk-like anyways.

Klaus lets out a gasp and stares at them in shock. “A-Amber…?”

Amber looks over and perks up upon seeing their husband, beginning to smile slightly. “K-Klaus…?”

“AMBER!!!” Klaus rushes up to the table, placing his hands on their shoulder and waist. “You-You’re alive!! Y-You’re really here!! I-I-” He pulls them into a tight yet comfortable embrace, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m so glad you’re back…!”

“Ack- c-careful luv.” Amber chuckles, gently wrapping their arms around him, careful not to press on one of their wounds.

“Oh! Shit…I-I’m so sorry!” Klaus loosens his grip yet doesn’t yet go.

“It’s alright, luv.” Amber smiles lovingly at him. “Wh-What happened…?”

He pulls away to face them. “W-Well…Some monster hunters attacked us, and…a-and they…” Klaus sighs before continuing. “They killed you. Two of them shot you in the stomach. I-I thought I was going to lose you, I…I did everything I could to bring you back.”

“I…died…?” Amber thinks to themselves for a moment. “That…That makes a lot of sense…” They look into his eyes. “Thank you for saving me, love…”

“A-Ah, yes. B-But, th-there is a slight…problem…” Klaus squeaks out nervously.

Amber’s face drops with anxiousness. “What problem…?”

“W-Well…” Klaus walks over to his desk and grabs a mirror, slowly approaching Amber with the mirror facing away from them. “Aheh, I-I don’t actually know how this happened myself, b-but… Y-You’re…not entirely “human-looking” anymore…” He holds up the mirror, showing them their new appearance.

Amber gasps upon seeing their new inhuman appearance, inspecting every detail with a shocked look. “Wh-What the…”

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so so sorry-” Klaus quickly apologies.

“Klaus, wait! Don’t worry.” Amber quickly reassures. They stand up and walk over to a full-length mirror, Klaus nervously following behind them. “Whoa…” They mutter as they inspect more of their new appearance.

“W-Wait…” Amber gasps upon realization. “M-My coat! Wh-Where’s my coat!?” They begin to panic.

“D-Don’t worry, my selkie! That cardigan you’re wearing is your coat! It changed one day, I saw it.” Klaus explains, hoping to calm down his husband.

“H-Huh? B-But how? Why?” Amber looks into the mirror. “What am I?”

Klaus hums, thinking to himself, before walking up to them. He places a hand on their waist and the other on their arm, pulling them close to him as he inspects the new scales and fins attached to them. He hums then lets go of them, switching sides to inspect their face, putting his hand back on their waist and his other hand cupping their cheek. Amber nervously stands in silence, letting him do his thing with a red face.

Klaus hums again and lets go of them, glancing at their cardigan and thinking deeply to himself. “Hmm…I’d say you’re a hybrid between three monsters. A merfolk, which appears to be an anglerfish; a selkie, which seemed to mix with your merfolk genes; and a vampire, probably because I bit you…”

“You bit me?” Amber asks him.

“I hoped it would’ve been enough to bring you back, but you didn’t wake up…” Klaus drops his head at the memory, frowning.

“Hey…” Amber cups his cheek, smiling at him. “I’m here now and there’s nothing for you to worry about now. I’m here and I’m alright.” They say in a soft tone.

“But you’re not human anymore… Well- human-looking.”

“But I’m still me, right?”

“Well, yes, but aren’t you unhappy with how you look?”

“You’re a shapeshifter because you’re a vampire, right?” Klaus nods. “Then I’m perfectly happy like this.” Amber smiles lovingly at him.

Klaus smiles, letting out a sigh and leaning into their touch, his shoulders relaxing. “I’m glad…~ I was worried you’d be upset and hate me…”

“No, honey… I could never hate you.” Amber cups his other cheek with her hand as well before pulling him down to give him a soft kiss on the forehead. “You’re too cute for me to ever hate you…”

Klaus giggles softly before pulling them into a tight hug. “Aww, I’m glad~!!”

“Ahh! K-Klaus!” Amber yelps in pain.

Klaus immediately lets them go. “Oh! I’m so sorry! I forgot you still need to heal-”

“It’s okay!” Amber chuckles. They glance away before asking, “Hey, do you know how I became a merfolk?”

“I believe it’s the merfolk heart I placed inside your body.” Klaus recalls.

“Wait what-”

“Oh! Well, you see…I thought because you were a selkie, I could replace your heart with that of a merfolk to bring you back. Now you have a new heart and your old one is in my fridge!” Klaus explains.

“Ooh okay.” Amber nods.

“Here, let me just-” He picks them up bridal style and walks into their shared room, setting them down on the bed. “Let me get you some pain killers and soup; and anything else you may need! Don’t worry meine liebling, I’ll take good care of you while you recover~!!”

“Thank you, luv…” Amber smiles at their husband, snuggling into bed.

“Of course, luv~!” Klaus leans down and gives them a quick kiss before hurrying over to the door. “I’ll be back, my darling, with your favorite soup and unlimited cuddles~!!”

《↬.•.•✿•.•.↫》

[pandoramusicbox]

So, I’ve been working on a lot of biodiversity for music box, a lot of figuring out what animals exists, what niches they fit into, what creatures they are related too, if magic influences their biology, and loose ideas on how they evolved to thier current form.

Along with food webs and what lives in what environment.

The thing is, what is one of the most Biodiverse places on earth? The tropical jungle.

And I have at least two of them in my world. I have the jungle that dominates the southern half of the continent Gargoraqi. Then I have one on the continent of Mergo. Both are in different hemispheres

Now because of this I wanted to have that they have different groups of birds that lived in these jungles. Unfortunately I’m not that creative so I went looking for inspiration. For the birds of gargoraqi I decided to take inspirations from the paintings of birds in my house (there are more pictures of birds in my house than there are of family members) but because I took the birds of my house as inspiration for gargoraqi, I couldn’t very well use them for Mergo.

But then I borrowed the Encanto art book from my local library. And let me tell you there are a lot of birds in that book.

Most of the drawings are splotches of colors formed into more shaped M birds. A good deal of them are more bird like. I’ve tweaked a lot of the designs and will be changing them more as I go along.

So here are the birds and butterflies of the jungles of mergo.

Colorful and calling the many birds of the jungle bring joy and frustration to the people who live there, their calls in the cacophony of background noise in the jungles of southern Mergo.

Locals use their colorful feathers for decorations. The flock harpies mimic their color patterns and the strange things and spirits enjoy their company in the tree tops.

Inspired by encanto but also their own thing.