#sai is so fucking good with user interface. it's really easy to use and gives you a lot of customization options for each brush

[lhazaar]

literally tumblr could capture so much of the social media market right now today by emphasizing their flexibility for content creators. this site is not Easy to grow on, no, but i don't think it needs to be in order to actually attract creatives—the things that make twitter and tiktok so easy to go viral on are also the things that enshittify social media. i don't want a super-discoverable algorithm, i want a more robust tagging system so that artists can upload their work and then sort it into genre tags, like #painting or #animal art or #concept art, and not be limited to the first five tags on their actual post. i want those tags searchable. give us a discovery page where we get, say, recent uploads to those genre tags, and maybe some of the "popular" ones that are picking up notes. like every art website for the past 15 years has been doing

like the best things about this site for artists, in my experience, are 1) flexibility and 2) long-term archival. the queue helps so much. your pieces will keep circulating for a long time organically just from people queuing posts. you aren't required to upload in specific resolutions or formats and i genuinely like a lot of the modifications staff has made to the photo upload process over the past couple years (uploading more than 10 pieces? being able to merge photo and text in the body of the post? hell yeah!), but tumblr has a compression problem and the full-screen viewer is glitchy and user-hostile. deviantart managed to figure that out and i think tumblr could too and that would attract, say, a ton of painters who moved to twitter for their portfolios. this site is really good in terms of allowing you to fully customize your blog's web interface and users have been figuring out how to make it work for us for a long time (see, for example, themes that are set up to host webcomics on your tumblr and allow you to click through posts like you're turning a page, in chronological order)

i don't even hate the concept of tumblr live! i think it's weird in its current iteration because they partnered with some shady fucking third party app, but can you imagine a native streaming functionality on this site that actually worked? i would be thrilled to be able to just jump into artists' livestreams. also i would absolutely use that to show people crowbar's harness walks. you don't have to enshittify it and try to shove monetization down people's throats, just give people the platform to so much as host their work and exist first. that's what artists don't have right now. deviantart has sucked ass since at least the eclipse redesign and twitter is actively dying; weasyl never really took off and the only people on furaffinity are either trapped there by their customer base or varying levels of covert about their neonazi shit. online Art Communities right now don't have anywhere, and tumblr could be that, and i don't think they're going to take the opportunity

[vergess]

Stupid question ahead! PLEASE feel free to ignore, but you're the person I know who seems most well versed in all this.

So, I'm aroace. I'm a virgin. I enjoy masturbation, and want to try having sex.

Where do you like. Start?

Like, in my head easiest option is find and hire a sex worker, and that was legit my plan once I found out they were a thing when I was young b/c "Oh wow that just takes all the pressure of first times off! That's great!" But now in my mid twenties I'm realizing I don't know how to find one/the ettiquite involved. And obvious getting in touch varies state by state I'm sure.

The whole "have a relationship, get to That Point" is a definite no go on my end. None of my friends are really casual sex types, or if they are they haven't clued me into that fact, and idk about hooking up with like. *Unvetted* strangers you know?

How does one enter their hoe era :<

Well, if you can find a professional in your area, I super recommend it. Having an experienced partner who is focused on teaching YOU rather than pleasing themselves is a really luxe way to make your sexual debut.

That said, it sounds like the market in your area is broadly inaccessible to you, and most sex work platforms were crushed under fosta/sesta, so let's focus on non-professional options.

You can basically go one of two ways: online hookups or in person browsing.

Now, with COVID being what it is (ongoing, crippling, often lethal), in person may not be super available. If it's an option, though, I'm gonna let you in on a secret the allos won't admit to.

"Flirting" isn't actually a specific technique. It's just the act of putting on your most euphoric persona and acting like everyone who talks to you is the reason for that euphoria. Sit at a bar (NOT a table) in a restaurant or club and look generally ecstatic to be there. Give meaningless, retail like greetings to anyone who enters your talking radius. People will wander up to you over time.

Online is often easier if you know what you want. Like, if you're specifically looking for someone 5'4" so you can lift them up like a trophy, that's easier to pick and choose.

Hookup apps are nearly infinite and hugely varied by niche. BDSMlr has had good reviews from people I trust, and has a nice, tumblr like user interface. You might enjoy it!

The benefit of a hookup app is, everyone is already there to fuck. No need for pretenses. Just find someone interesting and straight up say, 'wanna fuck?'

It's that easy.

Now, as far as 'unvetted' goes:

You can 100% vet your sexual partners. Ask them about past hookups and their STI status, especially. If someone refuses to discuss that stuff with a person they're about to fuck, that can be a red flag. But, in general, as long as a few friends know where you are and when to expect you home, you don't need to worry.

The biggest risk with casual sex isn't violence, it's disease. And just using condoms/dams is enough to crush that risk way, way down.

Finally, before making your sexual debut, get an STI test of your own. "Oh but I've never..." There are STIs you can get from nonsexual activities too, and you have the same responsibility to be upfront about your STI status when asked, at your partners would.

Be responsible, be respectful, get tested!

[arcaneyouth]

What kind of art supplies do you use?

I do exclusively digital art with the exception of doodling with these random glitter pens I found in my old purse! I use mainly Paint Tool SAI as my art program, but also do some things in Clip Studio Paint. CSP is big and scary tho and has a lot of buttons that confuse me so much, so I prefer working with SAI since I actually know how to use it. I use a Huion H610 Pro tablet and have been ever since I got into digital art. Other than the occasional glitch out that I've learned how to fix really fast, it's been a super reliable tablet and I'd hate to have to switch to another one. I also sometimes use paint . net because SAI doesn't have a shape tool, and if CSP does I haven't found it yet. Paint . net also just has cooler filters than CSP

[yellowmagicalgirl]

no good to dwell on dreams (even if i walked with you once upon one)

At the top of a wooden tower, Krel finds a boy cursed to sleep for 900 years until he receives true love's kiss.

At the top of a wooden tower, Douxie is finally awoken from his cursed sleep. Nothing is as he had expected it to be.

Thank you to the Sleepless Domain Discord user known as 10zin for helping me out when grammar was an issue for me. This fic is post-3Below AU where Wizards didn't happen, and also a Sleeping Beauty AU.

I'm still on hiatus due to finals, but I hope people enjoy this!

AO3

FFN

"I wonder what creepy creepers are in this creepy castle?" Steve asked.

"Really, it's just a tower," Toby said, swinging his warhammer around for light. The three of them had been excited to have a peaceful winter break. No school aside from the homework that Miss Janeth and Señor Uhl had assigned, and ever since Krel and Aja had defeated Morando last summer, the only fights there had been were with the occasional goblin or gnome. And, of course, sparring sessions that Krel tried to ditch as often as possible.

But then the tower had shown up, which meant that Toby and Steve had decided to drag Krel through the woods near Arcadia Oaks. He should have just stayed home, because at least there wouldn't be so many trees. Just the loneliness that had settled into every corner when Mother died and Aja and Varvatos had left.

The tower was made of wood. Dead trees, because of klebbing course it had to be. It looked a lot taller in person than it did from far away. A cool mist surrounded it. The door was made of wood as well, with a few runes carved into it.

Toby frowned. "That's not Trollish or Akiridion."

"Maybe we should come back with Claire, since she's trying to learn to decipher other magical languages?" Krel asked. Really, they should've just waited for Claire and Jim to heal from their common cold before investigating the tower.

"Uh, no. She and Jim will act all smug and superior because we needed their help," Steve said.

"They won't be... okay, they might be annoyed because how dare we go off on our own and pull a stunt when those two have nearly killed themselves doing the same thing, but! They won't be smug. Grumpy, sure. Jumpy, yes in Claire's case. But not smug. I'll lead, but have your axe and serrator out," Toby instructed. He pushed on the door, but it didn't give.

"Oh, well, I guess we should go home now," Krel said.

"Not getting out of this that easy," Steve said, punching Krel in the shoulder with enough force that Krel was glad he was in his Akiridion form. Otherwise, there was a good chance that Steve would've knocked him over.

Toby took a step back, then slammed his warhammer into the door. It still didn't give way.

Krel's curiosity won over the fact that he should be trying to be the voice of reason for his friends. He pushed past Steve and Toby. He then reached up to trace the runes. Perhaps there was some sort of mechanism to them.

They lit up green under his touch. Krel heard Toby make a nervous sound behind him as the rest of the door glowed green before turning to mist.

Steve coughed. "Well, since the castle-"

 "-tower," Toby interrupted.

"Since it likes you," Steve continued, "I guess you're leading the way." Krel groaned and walked into the tower.

The three of them made their way up the spiral staircase. Every several feet, a sconce in the wall lit up with green light. Eventually, they reached a second door at the top of the stairs. Krel once more traced over the ruins engraved in the door, which then disappeared into the same mist.

The room at the top of the tower was empty aside from a stone slab in the center of the room. On top of it lay a boy. He looked so still; so peaceful. He was human, with dark hair tied into a bun and bangs flowing down either side of his face. His arms were crossed over his chest. He looked to be at most a year older than Steve, Toby, and Krel.

"Is this... a tomb?" Toby asked as the three of them approached the boy.

"I don't think so," Steve said as Krel leaned over the boy, who showed no signs of breathing. "In all the video games I've played, the tomb is under the castle-"

"-I keep on telling you Steve, this is a tower!"

"The tomb is under the castle," Steve continued despite Toby's interruption. "Not at the top of it. Unless, I don't know, maybe some cultures don't have their tombs under the castles? Krel, how do Akiridions do it?"

Krel was about to retort that it didn't matter how Akiridions dealt with their dead, because this boy wasn't Akiridion. However, Steve nudged Krel forcefully enough that he lurched forward and his lips brushed against the boy's. They were soft, and just warm enough that despite being in his Akiridion form Krel could feel the temperature difference.

Krel stood up, about to turn and yell at Steve for pushing him. But then, the boy's eyes fluttered open.

Toby screamed.

The boy screamed, sitting up and scrambling away from the three of them.

Steve and Krel screamed.

The boy caught his breath and looked between the three of them. He drew his knees up to his chest as he   and Krel waited for Toby and Steve to stop screaming. He licked his lips and swallowed before speaking. "Which one of you kissed me?"

Steve pointed at Krel. The boy stared at Krel with an odd expression.

"I only did so because I was shoved," Krel said, rolling his eyes. Really, if the boy wanted an apology for having been unexpectedly kissed while he was asleep, then Steve should be the one apologizing.

Slowly, a shy smile formed on the boy's face. "I'll admit, I had thought that my true love would've been a human or another wizard, not... no matter what, it's good to meet you. I'm Douxie."

Out of the corners of his eyes, Krel could see his friends trying and mostly failing to not laugh at the entire situation with Douxie. This wasn't funny, and his friends weren't helpful at all. Maybe this was a sign that they should've waited for Jim and Claire, who would certainly... no. They'd probably also be trying to stifle laughter. Krel was so thankful that Aja wasn't here, because she'd definitely be laughing.

"I... no," Krel said. "Why the kleb do you think I'm your 'true love' or whatever?"

Douxie's face fell before raised an eyebrow. "I was cursed, so that I would sleep for 900 years, and then this tower would appear in close vicinity to my true love, who would wake me with a kiss. Didn't you read the runes the Master Merlin inscribed on the door? You would've triggered their magic."

Krel bristled with frustration. "Well, clearly this 'Master' didn't account for the possibility of my technology interfacing with the tower."

Douxie flinched, frowning and crossing his arms across his chest.

"Wait, by Merlin, you wouldn't happen to mean a crusty old wizard who likes the color green and uses the Staff of Avalon, would you?"

"I wouldn't call him crusty..." Douxie said. One of the corners of his mouth twitched like he was trying to fight off a smile.

"Come on," Toby said. "My friends - other friends, not these two - and I have way too much experience cleaning up Merlin's messes."

The four of them exited the tower and watched it turn to mist behind them. Douxie frowned and was silent as they made their way to Jim's house.

"So," Jim said, glancing over at Douxie. Douxie was seated on the couch, sipping at a glass of water. He had tucked himself into a corner, arm not holding the glass wrapped around himself. He looked around slowly with a dazed and confused expression. "You decided to, instead of waiting for backup, go investigate the tower on your own. And then you woke up yet another ancient wizard."

"I mean," Toby replied, "at least this one doesn't seem to be genocidal or power hungry." Claire flinched.

"Technically Krel woke him up!" Steve said. Krel scowled. He only woke Douxie up because Steve pushed him. For all they knew, carrying him out of the tower would have worked just as well. Or splashing him with water or shaking him.

"Why were you asleep and trapped in the tower, Douxie?" Douxie jumped upon hearing Jim say his name.

"The curse was intended for our king, to make him sleep for 900 years, but his sister pushed him out of the way. It was because the curse wasn't originally meant for her that I was able to sacrifice myself for her," Douxie said. Very pointedly, he looked away from Krel. "I... there was an old wooden tower on the edge of Camelot. It had fallen into disrepair, so Master Merlin was able to enchant it to protect me, and so... the curse was supposed to only be breakable by true love's kiss, but I guess since Morgana took on the curse instead there were other ways to wake me up."

"Wait." Claire sat up straight, muscles tensing like she was preparing for a fight. "By Morgana, you wouldn't mean a witch 'has many names' and was the apprentice to Merlin?"

"I have never heard her claim to have many names," Douxie said, "but you do remarkably well at mimicking her voice. And yes, but she finished her apprenticeship years before I met her. How do you know her?"

"Oh, let me count the fucking ways." Claire sneered. "Let's see, in reverse chronological order, there's the time she tried to kill all life on Earth-"

"She wouldn't do that!" Douxie's hands shook before he balled them into fists.

"Oh, she definitely did. She did that and more."

"No, I know  her. You must be mistaken," Douxie said quickly, like he had very little air and couldn't say much before gasping again.

"You knew her," Claire said. Pinpricks of purple invaded her eyes, and her voice raised a little in volume with each word. "But I know what she became after you fell asleep. You should have just let her keep the curse."

Douxie began to hyperventilate, shaking his head. Krel just barely saw the way tears and pinpricks of blue formed in his eyes as he reached for his bracer before a cloud of pale blue smoke enveloped the room. The glass fell to the floor, and the sound of the door opening could be heard.

Douxie was gone when the smoke cleared, and there was no sign of where he could be.

"I... fuck," Claire said. Her hands shook, and she kept glancing down at them and around the room. Her eyes were wide and her voice had taken on a slightly higher pitch than normal. "I didn't mean to- I just- I'll go after him. Apologize."

"No," Toby said. "Claire, we all know you didn't mean to hurt Douxie, but we also all know that if you even just start sneezing because of dust then your PTSD starts to act up more. That argument you just had about Morgana isn't helping things. You're on the edge of a panic attack, and one or both of you will get hurt if you go after him."

"I'll go after him," Krel said. "What's the phrase... you wake it, you pay the consequences for it?"

"Eh... sort of, not really," Jim said. "It's you break it, you bought it."

"You break his heart upon waking him up, you're responsible?" Steve said. "But it's probably best if we split up to look for him before he gets himself hit by a car or anything."

Naturally, Douxie had run off into the trees near Jim's house. Given his path, it seemed like he had tried to find his way back to the tower, but he had probably given up when Krel found him. He was casting magic from his bracer and sitting on a tree stump. Half-dried tears reflected the blue light of his magic.

Krel bit his lip, recalling the way that Douxie's had felt against his. The doors of the tower had given way for him. As much as he wanted to deny it and blame Steve, it was Krel's fault he was stuck in a strange world with no one.

Krel inhaled sharply as it finally hit him why Douxie had been so pleased that Krel was his supposed True Love. It wasn't just because Krel broke the curse keeping him asleep, or else he wouldn't have insisted on it so much. He probably would've been thankful either way.

It was because, even if everyone else he ever knew was dead or evil in their old age, at least Douxie would have had someone guaranteed to care about him. It was the one thing he could hope for, and Krel had smashed that hope and left him all alone.

"I know this is probably overwhelming for you," Krel said, slowly approaching Douxie. Douxie didn't look up at him. "I'm not from Earth, so it was overwhelming for me as well, and I at least had my sister and our bodyguard. I'm sorry I'm not who you hoped I would be."

"It's not your fault," Douxie mumbled. "Is it true? That because I sacrificed myself, it's my fault that Morgana did so many horrible things?"

"No. You couldn't have known what she would do. Not even Claire believes that, and if she had been the one to find you I'm sure she'd be trying to apologize. But, out of all my friends, Morgana hurt Claire the most badly, so she overreacted. But no one blames you." Krel pointed at Douxie's bracer. "How does that work?"

Douxie smiled, probably thankful for a change in subject. He could talk about his ancient wizard technology instead of his feelings. "It's sort of like a portable spellbook. It helps me control my magic, and it's also easier to remember the components needed for spells like this. I'm currently trying to cast a spell that will help me find my familiar."

Douxie's smile slid off of his face. "He's a dragon, and dragons live for a long time. If he didn't, then I would have run away from Camelot and never would have sacrificed myself for her. But, what if he's changed like Morgana did, or gotten another wizard after all this time? Or what if he died of non-natural causes?"

"We can try to help you find him. Him and Merlin." Besides, everyone had been trying to find Merlin anyways, after the geezer had skipped out on the trolls by proclaiming that he had things to do.

"Thank you. Though, I'm scared to find either of them."

"Though, in the mean time, you'll need a place to stay. My sister doesn't live at home anymore, so I have a spare room if you want it."

"I'd like that; thank you."

There was no foretold true love waiting for Douxie, but that didn't mean he had to be alone. And neither did Krel.

A/N: I'm going to leave it up to the reader as to whether or not Krel actually is Douxie's fated true love and is just in denial about it.

[fangirltothefullest]

Hey Tashi! I’m looking to get more into digital art. I know next to nothing however and was wondering what advice you could give about tablets to use and programs? Thank you!

My favourite art programs are Paint Tool Sai and Sai2. You need a license for Sai2, but there ARE versions of regular Paint Tool Sai you can get without paying for it, you just kind of have to poke around. (I know there are a few on deviantart if I remember). Pros of Sai are that it's fairly easy to use, it's user interface is very easy to understand and you have a few layer options. Biggest con is that it doesn’t autosave or backup save if it crashes. Sai2 does have autosave features. 

Sai 2 has more options in terms of layers too, and has a textbox so if you want to spend $50 on a license I do recommend it. I have heard that the free programs for art are also good, I personally tried using gimp and it wasn’t terribly user friendly but that was a long time ago.

Photoshop CS2 is not exactly user friendly and can be very complicated. Photoshop CS6 is much the same. I personally don't care for them, myself. 

Tablets can be expensive, but I prefer them. You CAN find them sometimes at thrift stores but generally they'll be the tiny ones and you'll have to look online for driver support to enable pen pressure which is your best friend. I recommend starting with a small cheaper tablet at first because generally most drawing tablets are all the same and you don;t need one with a screen to be able to work it. 

There IS a disconnect between what your hand does and where you're looking but you'll get used to it pretty quickly. I also recommend scanning in your artwork if you are able to onto your laptop if you have one to be able to colour that way if you find you have trouble using a tablet or can;t afford one. 

Paint Tool Sai's lineart layer is a vector tool and you don't need a tablet to be able to use the vectors to line your work, you just need to edit line points. I personally really like Wacom tablets. they fucking SUCK when it comes to usb chargers, every single USB port I have ever had on every tablet I've had of theirs breaks way too easily, HOWEVER all you have to do is get 2 rechargable batteries and a universal charger and you can alternate charging batteries and basically never run out. I think aesthetically they suck, but they DO last for a long time. they are too expensive for how cheaply they are made though and I have been told that huion tablets are better. Honestly the next time I get a tablet I'll be looking into a different brand mainly because of the price and also because all tablets pretty much do the same thing. 

Personally my favourite size of tablet is medium, I think it gives you a better space to work with. 

 There are regular non-art tablets you can use, I know Bumble ( @sweetest-honeybee) uses a non-laptop tablet I think and she could probably tell you more about price and tools and how it works for her.

So to sum up and add a few more short notes: 

- Paint tool Sai and Sai2 are my favourite art programs 

- Photoshop is hard to navigate and you'll have to look up keyboard shortcuts, BUT it has a lot to offer in the ways of free downloadable brushes 

- free art programs all have pros and cons and I suggest giving them a quick goodle 

- scanning in your artwork to line and/or colour can be a good way to go 

- All drawing tablets pretty much do the same thing 

- Medium tablets have better space than small but they're more expensive 

- Check that your tablet drivers work because pen pressure won't work without the drivers 

- Paint Tool Sai does NOT have an auto recovery feature. Sai 2 does. 

 - FIND A WAY TO CONNECT YOUR TABLET PEN TO YOUR TABLET. I tied a ribbon to mine and I've never lost my tablet pen since doing that.

[dysfunctionalbatfam]

Do you have any advice/tips/tricks for new artists?

I’m definitely not the most qualified for this but I’ll try my best!! 😅

I kind of started out sort of using other artists’ art as references (just personal studies that I threw away right after) - that’s how I actually got into drawing. I did it for fun and when I finished I thought, “Huh. Neat” (even though it was terrible) and then I just tried a few more. Unlike working from real references, some artists may choose to have a style that’s more simplified and easier to understand. (Do keep in mind that you should never just trace it and repost online.)

Another thing I took from were speedpaints and tutorials - and they don’t really all help me, but they at least give me some motivation, even if they make it look overwhelmingly easy. They help break down the steps and give you a process so that you don’t only see the masterful finished product and that the beginnings can be rough. There has been, however, two (2) that really did help a lot. (Probably will drop the talented users in the tags 💞💞)

And honestly? Most of it has been just, making up shit, and that’s okay! Even if you have no idea what you’re doing, it’s not going to hurt your art progress, and often times you learn from them. Explore things, different styles, programs, tools, until you find some you’re comfortable with. And don’t worry if you’re unsure, this process takes a ton of time, so just keep exploring. Sometimes you just gotta say “This looks bad to me, but it helped me learn this and that.”

Another good thing to do is find a group of friends willing to support you! You could share your shitposts to more serious drawings and get their feedback. Bounce off ideas off each other, find other artists. People encouraging you to push on can do more than you’d think.

This is said. A lot. You hear it everywhere, but it’s commonly said for a reason, y’know? Practice. Practicing is so much of the gig. No one’s going to automatically be amazing at art, which also means that if your art isn’t what you want it to be right now? Doesn’t mean it’s never gonna get there. Try your best to draw everyday! Don’t worry if it varies, do whatever the fuck you want, this is for you. A two second scribble one day and a portrait study the next? Heck yeah.

Last general advice, methinks, is to use references. I’m a huge hypocrite for this because I just. Randomly put stuff down. But don’t ever be afraid to use them. They’re a resource all artists have used.

Onto more technical stuff -

Digital Art Programs (that I’ve tested and would recommend)

-Firealpaca (computer) and Medibang (computer & tablet): Always my recommendations. They’re absolutely free and easy to install, yet they offer such a reliable program. They’re basically the same, to be honest

-Krita (computer): I don’t really know how to use this but it’s free and capable of producing gorgeous pieces of art.

-Photoshop (computer & tablet): I started with this, it’s pretty good, but my personal issues made it just keep crashing, so I’m not very versed in it 😅 but it lives up to its hype.

-Procreate (tablet): Good for painting, but lineart is a little harder, in my opinion. The brush stabilization is wack. But it’s very comfortable and whelming to use, worth the ten bucks. You can also download a fuck ton of free brushes online, always a plus (I SWEAR I get twenty more every day)

-Autodesk Sketchbook (tablet & computer [?]): The interface is very similar to Procreate, so if you want a subsititute for Procreate, go ahead! In my opinion, it’s a little harder to use, though.

-Paint Tool Sai (computer) and Clip Studio Paint (both): Never tried, but probably really good, I know a lot of people who use them.

[Do keep in mind that starting out with free programs is enough, and many extremely good artists stick with them!]

Traditional art stuff -

-Same stuff applies, you don’t need advanced supplies to create good art!

-Hoard sketchbooks like a dragon, eat hot chip, and cry

-A lot of professional artists prefer sketching/inking traditionally and then digitally coloring it

-My favorite traditional supplies are charcoal pencils, if that’s anything? 😂 I find them more comfortable to use than pencils.

-You can tell I can’t do traditional to save my life, I’m SO sorry if you do traditional dhdkhd

-Brushes can be bought cheap!! They’ll still work just as well (many supplies that come cheaper are still good, I got a whole set with paint, a sketchbook, etc. for under twenty USD)

-Some advice I took from a youtube video somewhere: Have two notebooks, one for more serious artwork and one just to do anything in, as we know we all have failures and get nervous to fuck up. This ensures that you unleash your creativity! In that notebook, don’t worry about making your drawings look good, just put your ideas down.

This is getting to the point that I’m just rambling, so I’ll end it here. Hope it helps, even though I should follow my own advice- ❤️❤️❤️ good luck, you GOT this, anon!

[phoorn]

Let me complain about Meson

About Hobbits

Meson’s a build system. Or possibly Ninja, Meson’s backend, is a build system. Let’s just say the whole thing is.

It’s an alternative to CMake, which is an alternative to the Autotools, which is a way to write makefiles that work on various systems for fewer pints of blood and sweat. And makefiles are basically recipes, a convenient way to run shell commands that (most commonly) translate your source code into a binary that your computer can run.

When I first used Meson I went, “Wow”. I was thrilled. I’ve never got my head around makefiles, I think because – well, I’m always saying I’m stupid, so this time I’ll say – I’m lazy. Makefiles aren’t complicated at their core. I think what’s confusing is the many shortcuts you can take with them. Many shortcuts make things hard to learn. You can’t see the wood for the trees. And cruft.

If I do one day finally learn Make, I’ll deliberately restrict myself to the old, more verbose syntax. This general approach is what everyone should take whenever they learn something. Start with the scales (music analogy). I’m a guitarist and I’ve hardly bothered. They’re boring. And you think (’cause you’re arrogant) other people need to start with the scales, OK – and there’s nothing wrong with being dumb! – but me …

Lots of us are like this. We think we understand enough or at least trust our perception of our own intelligence – and rush ahead. When people ask other people how to make computer games they get told to make Pong. “Actually, sorry, no,” says OP, “I’m making an open-world simulation CRPG, thanks. Yes, I know it’ll take me a while.”

You’ve got to make Pong. I’m thirty-six and I’ve known this for years. And yet the game I’m writing is a Zelda clone. However, I have paid my dues, having written approximately 1,00,000 command-line programs.

The problem with bells-and-whistles, do-everything-for-you things (like Meson) is what do you do when you can’t get it to do the thing you you need it to do? Look in its documentation. Or possibly the documentation for one of the many programs/libraries/framewords/apis it uses. And when you do, you find (tenuous metaphor) they’re talking Mario and GTA and the Elder Scrolls and you don’t understand, because you didn’t make Pong.

They don’t want you to make Pong. “Try our system/framework/platform. It’s got x and y and you’ll love it! You’ll never have to bother with all those low-level things again.”

Tom Waits can explain it better.

And you end up dumb as a brick. A user instead of wizard you deserve to be. They took your magic wand.

So why am I ranting away about this? As any mediocre scriptwriter will be able to guess, there has been an inciting incident. I am incited, and an incident is responsible.

Basically, I was playing with Zig 1. No one’s written a Syntastic (Vim linting plugin) checker for it, but there is a Zig language server. So I got rid of Syntastic and got ALE (Asynchronous Language … ?), which does the same job as Syntastic, but asynchronously and with LSP support.

LSP – Language Server Protocol – is a Microsoft thing. A good thing, a way for any editor to offer lots of IDE-like things. We could always do those things, with various tools like Ctags but this does it better. Because it makes use of your actual compiler or interpreter’s output.

Getting it set up’s not easy, though, though it worked for me first try this time. A testament to how much I’ve learned? Maybe, but ALE knew where to look for the compile_commands.json and Meson stuck it in the right place.

I always make an effort to properly introduce technical things I talk about, for the sake of the fictional layperson. I, for one, get bored and stop listening to things I don’t understand. But it’s hard, and I’ve failed here before even getting to my point.

Which is systems like Meson are shit. I’ll keep using it, though. I won’t write Pong, and I won’t use Cmake.

The reason it’s shit is I’ve spent five hours trying to silence a clangd warning. clangd’s the name of a language server. For C and C++. At some point today I completely forgot about Zig.

I use gcc to compile my C programs, and too eagerly use gcc extensions. The language server stuff is all to do with clang. So, though I’m compiling with gcc, clang is being used to LINT 2 my C program.

This should be fine. clang claims to be a drop-in replacement for gcc. But it’s not.

Tom Bombadil

I like gcc’s “-fms-extensions” flag. That lets you include structs that have already been defined as anonymous members of another struct.

struct apple { char *name; }; struct orange { struct apple; };

It’s -fms-extensions that permits the nameless struct apple inside the struct orange. Normally you’ve have to give it a name, like:

struct orange { struct apple apple; };

And refer to it like orange.apple.name = "Frederick". -fms-extensions lets you do orange.name = "Frederick".

It’s just nice. I’ll show you another trick, while I’m on the subject.

It fixes the only downside of this approach, which is that now you can’t refer to the member struct as itself: it doesn’t have name. But!

struct orange { union { struct apple; struct apple apple; }; }

Now you are eating your cake in addition to having it. You can now refer to apple’s members without saying apple’s name. And you can pass just the apple to functions that expect one. By writing orange.apple.

One last thing on this topic. Even without -fms-extensions you can mostly do this. You can define anonymous structs, anonymous unions. You just can’t define a struct outside and then use it inside without its name. You can do this:

struct fruit { char *name; union { struct { float sourness; }; // oranges struct { float crunchiness; }; // apples } }

The Barrow Downs

Right now I’d rather know the language of Make. I would have silenced that warning in a jiffy. I’d be rich by now, the time I saved.

It’s swings and roundabouts. I’m obsessed with this idea. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Programmers (and maybe writers) know this better than anyone.

You do this really awesome thing in an effort to make your program or story better. And it takes ages. And when you’re done you have …

Oh, sometimes you’ll have more flexible code, or more robust code, or faster or more memory-efficient code. But you’ve sacrificed something. Readability, perhaps. Speed. Whatever. It’s gone and there’s no fucking way you’re going back over it again. You’re stuck with it. You’ll defend your decision to the death. You bled for it.

Meson’s big selling-point is it just works. Oh, it’s worth it. I said it was shit earlier – that was a lie. But I’m still mad it took me ages to fix my linter problem.

Hey, Wait, We’re in Mordor?

I’ve got a new complaint.

When I first started programming, I used Visual Studio and Windows. I remember how hard it was for me to compile my first program, which was probably an SDL example. Probably there was Hello, World before that.

Someone said somewhere the hardest thing you’ll ever do in programming is compile your first program. And, oh, I agree. Because there’s all this stuff to learn.

I buggered off to Linux, partly because I’d come to realise if you want to program, particularly in C, it was the place to be. A lot of programming in Windows and Mac is programming in Linux. Users of those OSes use virtual machines, compatibility layers and servers to do it. They have, I am sure, mighty brains, because it’s one thing to compile a program, and quite another cross-compile it, or do it in a VM or container, or do it on the web somehow.

What I didn’t like about Visual Studio was simple: you gave the compiler and linker and build system options by filling out textboxes and picking from menus.

I roared, “But how does it work?”

I felt strongly that Visual Studio’s friendly user interface was obscuring the reality of what I was doing. Now it blindingly obvious to me it’s turning all those textboxes, checkboxes into a commandline, which it’ll fire at the compiler. But I didn’t then.

Meson gives me a strong whiff of that. Look.

add_global_arguments ('-fms-extensions', language: 'c') add_global_arguments ('-Wno-microsoft', language: 'c') m_dep = cc.find_library ('m', required : true) sdl2_dep = cc.find_library ('SDL2', required : true) sdl2_image_dep = cc.find_library ('SDL2_image', required : true) sdl2_ttf_dep = cc.find_library ('SDL2_ttf', required : true)

These are just commandline flags. Meson is taking these strings you give it – “SDL2”, “-fms-extensions”, etc – and appending it to a call to gcc. The cc.find_library function is calling something like pkg-config or cmake. Is all this stuff really better than:

gcc -ggdb3 -Wall src/* -fms-extensions -Wno-microsoft \ -o build/whatever -l -lm \ $(pkg-config sdl2 --cflags --libs) \ $(pkg-config sdl2_ttf --cflags --libs) \ $(pkg-config sdl2_image --cflags --libs) \

Maybe so.

In summary, I could have solved this Meson/LSP/ALE/Vim thing in five seconds flat if I’d written a makefile (or, frankly, since my project is hardly huge, a shell script). But I won’t start writing Makefiles any time soon. I reserve the right to complain about it in the future, though.

a language I definitely approve of, that’s packed good ideas and things done right, that I probably won’t use, because already know how to do the things it tries to solve, and learning new languages makes me feel like a toddler or an old man. Maybe one day! But it’s new, too, and if there’s one solid lesson I’ve learned in my years using Linux and programming it’s don’t use new things. Use old and safely dead things, expecially those whose undead life is regulated by crusty old men and women. Because there’s documentation! And they’re getting round to implementing those features you envy. They’ll get there. And in the meantime, well, you can do it gcc already.↩︎

A linter is a program that looks at your code and points out some kind of problem. Some show syntax errors, some tell you that it doesn’t like your coding style. Some just annoy the shit out of you and you don’t know how to shut them up.↩︎

[ethanjscannell-blog]

3

Apologies, this one is going to be a bit scatter-brained. I’ve been warming myself up to using this like a genuine blog where I can just put my feelings out publicly, but I’m still getting used to it. I’m already starting to feel much better about myself, and oddly enough, more like “myself” again. By that I mean, returning to a state that is as unregulated by a superego / authority as possible. 

Let me begin,

I think that the level of dishonesty that is apparent in any one person is proportional to the amount of unhappiness that the person will feel. Think of yourself as a child, carefree and enjoying the world, playing with your imagination, and having all the freedom to do whatever you wanted so long as you obeyed your parents to a degree (unless you had a shitty childhood idk). 

You were free to act in a totally natural way, including in how you responded to outside stimulus and other people, etc. but over time you needed to put dampeners on those feelings because not everything you did was deemed acceptable by society. And of course not, because bla bla bla, you get it, right? 

so over time you accrue augmentations to your personality by means of conditioned responses to the outside world. that’s fine. but this is also dishonest. it’s not transparent. it’s not really you at all. 

but then we would all act instinctively, like animals, and end up killing and raping each other until we’re full blown tribalism. 

I think there are two modes to the human personality, really... there’s the Id and the Ego, like Freud would say. Every living creature has the Id, which is desires like wanting to survive and fuck anything that moves. Even trees compete for sunlight. 

But what separates us from trees, insects and animals is our possession of the Ego, in other words, consciousness. But let me make it even more simple... it’s called Emotions. 

The state of humanity is therefore proportional to the amount of feelings and emotions we are free to express, which leads me to think that The Freedom of Speech is actually the only thing that matters when it comes to separating us from animals. 

I listened to Jordan Peterson a lot while I was in my alt-right-ish phase. I caught wind of him through other Youtubers and started to listen to his lectures on psychology. He was a really interesting guy, not because of what he was saying exactly, but how he said it. He was giving an accurate description to things and and yet seemed to remain politically neutral on most matters. This was totally different than the other people I was listening to, take Stefan Molyneux for instance (no offense, bro. you’re still a genius). 

Most importantly he was explaining political issues from both sides, as if they were both speaking a language that the other could not understand, and he could be the mediator. This was something I wished would appear in the political climate at the time, because as tensions escalated it seemed that all we needed would be someone to help each side understand the other. 

Peterson had an idea that he mentions as his “message to millennials” which is something along the lines of “clean your own room before you go out and fix the world”. And while this has good merit, and perhaps will lead to some people transforming their lives, I don’t fully agree with it, in part because it’s somewhat of a criticism against people protesting against the powers that be. 

Let me explain, 

Peterson thinks that if we were honest in our own lives and cleared up any dishonesty between how we feel and how we act, eventually this would ripple out in small amounts. First, we would clean our room. Then, we might clean our whole house, then the whole street, then the world. While I like the idea, and like I said, it has good merit... I don’t think it’s very practical. 

Why? Because it’s become incredibly hard (but not impossible) for ANYONE to survive in today’s world without living dishonestly in SOME WAY. We require the help of technology, businesses, money, and all other manner of amenities in order to earn our bread and fucking stay alive. And it’s not entirely clear whether or not these businesses are truly honest themselves.

This is why you have HUGE groups of unemployed people in protests like the Occupy movement. Sure, you may laugh and say “wow, look at them, they’re so pitiful!” But what would your alternative for them be?! To go get jobs and help perpetuate the same fucking businesses that are being dishonest to them? These people are the only ones acting honestly, and your solution would be for them to introduce dishonesty into their lives? 

I sympathize, these people may be acting honestly on real feelings they have, but their actions themselves are pitiful only because they are misinformed. What they should have done (if they were smart enough to make this connection) was go through the courts to make it so each and every business would have to be 100% honest about everything that they do. 

what? that’s fucking crazy! why should a business need to disclose every bit of information about who they are and what they do? how would they compete? how would they survive? 

I’m glad you asked. 

This is where I start to get passionate. 

A business, at its most fundamental level, is a transaction between two people over goods that they own, or whatever. Over time, that business might grow to include more people performing the labor required to make the product, and through this process, the business becomes further distanced from its customers. 

Who cares? Well, it wouldn’t have been so easy to sell your clay pots to Geraldo down the street if he knew you were making them with a mixture of 80% clay and 20% bullshit. But once you become a big business, those kinds of changes become necessary, apparently. 

Do you see what I’m getting at? 

Imagine the Google search engine when it was first created - it just searched for certain keywords and then returned some results. And it was really fucking good. So good, that you keep using it over and over until it becomes necessary to use it when you have any question. 

One day they realize this and think to themselves, gee, we could make some money off this if we compromise our original values and be a little bit dishonest with people. Fuck yeah, let’s do it! So they start collecting your information, lots and lots of it, with your implied permission (why else would you be using it?!). And to this day, Google is running strong. 

But what if they had been completely honest from the get go? What if they had said “we’re going to start collecting information from you because we want to sell it to other companies. Oh, and we’re going to start implementing a user interface that hijacks your dopamine pathways so that you’ll keep using our service, even though there’s no outcome to you for doing this. And there’s some other shit we won’t tell you about...”

If THIS were written explicitly in the Terms and Conditions, don’t you think some people would have slowly backed away? Don’t you think that some group of people wouldn’t have attempted to create a BETTER search engine that doesn’t include this bullshit? So tell me, how does a lack of transparency actually promote competition and innovation? I genuinely want to know. 

I mentioned in my number 1 post that if I mysteriously go missing, you’ll know to investigate the government first. However, I want to edit that now. 

The government isn’t the problem, per say. The problem is their inability to protect me from people who want to enslave me. Ideally, government is supposed to represent the people, and so the start to protecting us would be to stop treating businesses like people and granting them the privacy they need to be dishonest with us. 

Do you think this is ridiculous? The first step to wisdom is to call things by their true name. 

Why do you think that Jesus and Buddha were such monumental figures? What do they have in common?

I like to think of them both as people who were really good at seeing society in its most transparent form. They knew somehow that there was a TRUE way for people to live that was the most natural, and that society was making it impossible for some people to live that way. Jesus and Buddha are just examples of people who wanted to live as true as possible, but their approaches were quite different. 

I would label Jesus’s approach as more of a Revolution approach. He saw that the Romans or whatever were ignoring the fundamental values that they claimed to live by, resulting in large groups of people suffering as peasants and outsiders. He wanted to change it, so he started revealing what the Romans were doing and, out of fear of revolution, they killed him. Woo hoo, sacrifice! The Roman empire collapsed not long afterwards, just like Jesus said it would. 

The Buddha or Siddhartha or whatever you want to call him approached the truth from more of a Protest angle. Whereas Jesus wanted to change the society, Sidd decided that there was nothing he could do about it directly, so he lead by example. He attempted to rid himself of all desires such that there was nothing that society could really offer him. I think this is a less powerful approach, but it effectively does the same job of indicating that there is something wrong with society as it is. 

These are obviously very simplified versions of their stories, but I did this on purpose to illustrate a connection I see with modern day society. 

More and more we see people opting out either through drug use, running away, or becoming welfare basement dwellers. Why? These people have feelings which are totally legitimate and real concerns that can’t be easily answered by society. And so, interestingly, their feelings are forcing them to protest society at the cost of their own lives. Most of them cannot explain it this way, but I believe it is the truth. Modern day Buddhas. 

The others are out in the streets, protesting at rallies and crying out to the people in power to be honest with everyone else. If Jesus was alive today, what do you think he’d be doing? 

Anyway that’s it for now. Hopefully I don’t sound like a guy who’s too overly paranoid or someone with lots of observations but no solutions. I’ve only just started to open up about all my thoughts so there’s more to come. 

As for any dishonest businesses out there reading this and thinking “oh shit”. Well repent now, lawyer up, and do whatever you gotta do, because I’ll be coming for YOU, motherfucker. And if I go missing then you know where to start.

;)

Love, me. 

[archonreviews]

The Archon’s Review of Fate/Grand Order

Fate/Grand Order is a turn-based, party-based(?), card-battling(?), free-to-play role-playing game-type thing for Android and iOS from Delightworks, based on the Fate/ series, which began with the visual novel, Fate/ stay night. In this world, every so often, the Holy Grail appears out of thin air. This triggers a “Holy Grail War”, in which a number of magicians and magic-users summon various figures from myth and legend to do battle. The last one standing gets the Holy Grail. The present year is 2017 (2015 if you’re Japanese or an extreme weeaboo), and the Chaldea Organization, a group of magicians and scientists have been keeping humanity alive with their various pretentiously-named projects. However, their model of 100-years-from-now Earth suddenly goes dark, implying total devastation, and the head of the organization organizes an expedition to a previous time period to figure out what the deal is. Suddenly, everything goes dark and many major functions shut down. You (generic protagonist de jure), a shieldmaiden named Mash, and a scientist named Romani are the only humans left in Chaldea’s base, so you must go back in time alone to figure out why humanity is in peril.

Jegus fuck, that was the longest intro paragraph.

So the Archon is reviewing a not-PC game for once. Will the wonders never cease? Well, I wanted to review this because I think it’s interesting for two reasons. First, there are a couple of elements of this game that stand out strongly to me that I want to address; and second, I’ve actually been playing this for quite some time, when usually I only give a game the standard two weeks.

The gameplay is entirely combat-based. There are dialogue choices in the story, but they mean absolutely nothing, bugger all, squat, zilch. But the combat is fun! You take a squad of Heroic Spirits to do battle against undead, dragons, shadows, and other magical enemies, and sometimes other Heroic Spirits. When it’s your turn, you pick three cards from a set of five, your selection choices being dependent on your squad. Each card has a squadmate and a color; red, green, or blue. Red cards deal more damage, green cards increase your critical hit rate on the next turn, and blue cards increase the squadmate’s special attack gauge. Your squad then makes the selected attacks in the selected order, and then the enemies retaliate. You always go first, which makes combat significantly easier. Furthermore, I find that because each mission is broken up into two to four combat encounters, the optimal strategy is to build up your squadmates’ special gauges, then wait to unleash them on the final battle in the mission. So, the combat is fun, if a bit on the easy side as long as you pick the right missions to complete relative to the power level of your squad.

^(Also, much like Uno, you’ve gotta match either character or color to get chains for additional bonuses.)^

The aesthetics are another great part of the game. See, most mobile games tend not to have graphics. Oh certainly, they have pictures, and sometimes those pictures move slightly, but most mobile games don’t really have their elements move in any significant way. F/GO, however, has it’s models fully mobile, with fluid motion and beautiful backgrounds. It really looks more like a DS or a PSP game rather than a mobile game. This was an unexpected surprise, to say the least.

^(I mean, look at these. The character models look like they belong in a real anime, and those backgrounds... For a mobile game, the graphics are friggin’ stellar.)^

Of course, good graphics and fun gameplay come at cost. First off, those graphics? Probably why the game eats up phone battery like nothing else. Thirty minutes of this game brought my phone battery from 100% to 28%. So, I suppose if you want to play this game in a truly mobile fashion, bring a portable charger.

Also, like most mobile free-to-play games, the interface is pretty cluttered. It’s not as bad as most such games, but it’s still more cluttered than is perhaps wise for a game to be.

^(The main battle screen. Note the array of various buttons and graphics obscuring the characters. I don’t think the devs needed to make the character portraits quite so large.)^

Lastly (and perhaps this’ll be a deal breaker), the game is grind-tastic. It’s not as noticeable in the beginning, when your squad is fairly weak, and you have less need for the items used to boost your dudes. But later on, when you have a stronger team, you’ll be grinding like a fucking fiend for those statues or feathers or XP boosters or what have you. The drop rates for higher-tier items are maddeningly low.

Now, this game being F2P, you don’t just get your dudes for free or from story events. You gain most of your dudes from what, in mobile gaming jargon, is called a “gacha machine”. Essentially, you spend in-game currencies on a randomized selection of dudes, and only once in a very blue moon will you get a truly exceptional one. We’re talking like, a 4% chance of getting any dudes who are above average. That white-haired lady on the left in my screenies? She’s considered a five star dude, out of five, and getting her felt like Christmas in June. In a way, it sort of works in the game’s favor, as getting a four-star or five-star dude to drop feels nothing short of miraculous. You know what they say: “Don’t do drugs.” Also, “You won’t appreciate it unless you have to work hard for it.”

The game has a plot, but it’s a bit understated. All that stuff in the first paragraph? Well, it leads to you going to alternate versions of different time periods where things have gone tits-up as the result of the Holy Grail existing. Your goal is always to restore the time period to its normal state, but in between, you get fairly repetitive dialogue, and for a game that uses figures from all across history and legend, you’d think they could have done more with them.

^(Prepare to see scenes like this one a lot.)^

Of course, there’s the everpresent microtransactions, but here, they’re remarkably unobtrusive. You actually have to go looking for them, and the only thing you can buy is currency for the gacha machine. However, I don’t think the rates are very good, but I don’t have much to compare it to, given my propensity for not buying into microtransactions very much.

I would definitely recommend F/GO, especially if you’re in the market for a new free-to-play, or if you’re a fan of the Fate/ series. In fact, I’m going to continue playing long after this review goes up. Even with the game’s problems, the combat is fun enough, the goodies rare enough, and the graphics pretty enough to keep me going. What social statements this game makes are hard to judge, even harder than usual, this being a Japanese game. Looking through that cultural lens, there probably isn’t anything much to say. Of course, when thinking about American sensibilities, a few things may pop up. Fanservice, while infrequent, can get pretty egregious in this work (looking at you, Mata Hari). That’s really the only social commentary I can make on the game in that vein, but I suppose I should mention one more thing in case anyone gets confused. The Fate/ series as a whole has a peculiar habit of taking male historical figures, making them female, and changing the name slightly. Arthur Pendragon becomes Altria Pendragon, Attila the Hun becomes Altera the Hun, etc. It would be an interesting posit: what if many of history’s big names were actually women? How would that change our view on gender politics and gender roles today? Sadly, the game and the series as a whole only nods to those questions, and it is entirely likely that the decision to make these figures women was born from a desire to give absolute cretins (myself included) “waifu-material”.

Really, this game is pretty rad, and if you’re a fan of F2P games, and mobile games, you should check it out.

^(Eat your heart out, Skyrim; F/GO’s dragons are too massive for the screen!)^

[thehipperelement]

Why Wireframes?

Have you ever wondered why product teams don’t just design the real UI from the beginning? Why do we make wireframes at all? Is it only so less talented designers can work on UI too? Can we skip wireframes if we get more experience? Or do wireframes do something that UI designs can’t do? These are not silly questions.

Wireframes exist for a reason. Understanding that reason might help you understand what your process should look like. And in my opinion, your process is the difference between a website design taking 3 weeks or 3 months.

Have you ever heard the expression “measure twice, cut once?” Comparing UX and UI to making a dress or a suit is not a bad metaphor, actually.

Wireframes are the measuring part. They are not a quick sketch, they are the plan! Just like when the tailor makes chalk marks where he plans to cut. That’s where you should iterate and make changes. Draw and re-draw. Gather requirements. Get feedback. Ask developers. Change your plan. Try different approaches.

Pixel-perfect UI is the cutting part. You should spend time on doing it right the first time, because it's painful to change it if you make a mistake. It's easy to make new plans (wireframes), but once you cut that fabric, it's wasteful to do it again.

The final interface design of your product—with all its pixel-perfect icons, and carefully considered branding, and exact positioning, and layouts, and styles, and delightful details—is time-consuming to make. It just is.

Wireframes, not so much.

****

Think slow, draw fast.

Wireframes include a lot of thinking and ideas. Not everybody realizes that. They are not trying to look like the final UI, they are trying to illustrate solutions to problems. However, sometimes a solved problem is an invisible problem... so wireframes don't get the glory they probably deserve.

The slowest part of your process should be the thinking/researching/planning part at the beginning. That’s where UX really adds value, and that's what wireframes are made of.

Wireframes themselves are fast to draw and fast to update, compared to a full UI design. Your wireframes could use any colors, and any fonts, and they don’t have to be nice-looking or pixel-perfect at all (as long as you stick to the proportions of the device, more or less.)

In some ways, an uglier wireframe can even be a better wireframe! You won’t get stuck in as many conversations about how they look.

Before we go further, I should mention this: Just because it is easy to update wireframes, doesn’t mean those changes are easy or smart to build. Quick changes in a wireframe can be a catastrophe for the product or just plain stupid... so think first, defend your choices if you need to, and only re-draw when your thinking makes sense!

Updating a full UI design based on feedback can take weeks. Updating a wireframe sometimes only takes minutes. I edit wireframes while we’re discussing them sometimes (if the changes are minor).

You can make significant adjustments to a set of wireframes in a day or two. But if you add new pages and menus to a full UI design, it can take a long time to design something different.

But think about that for a second. If the advantage of wireframes is speed and flexibility, and they don’t share any of the technical requirements of final UI designs, that means that wireframes aren’t intended as a step in creating the final UI. They have a purpose of their own: technical iteration.

In other words, the whole point of wireframes is to work with developers. It’s not just a quick-and-dirty version of the interface you hope to do “properly” later. UX wireframes are a technical document!

Do you treat wireframes as a technical document, or do you treat them like the quick way to sketch your UI design? Or do you treat them as the cheapest way to visualize your ideas for the client? 

If you don’t treat wireframes as a technical document, you might be making your own life more difficult, because you aren’t taking wireframes seriously. (!)

****

Information architecture doesn’t have to be pretty.

The reason we do wireframes in UX — and why they don’t have to be pretty — is to sort out the functionality and the information architecture. And since that process should involve feedback and several rounds of changes from developers, business stakeholders, and user testing: wireframes need to be technically accurate but suitable for rapid changes. 

A good set of wireframes—including annotations about the function of every detail—tell the developers exactly how the product should work, from a user-oriented perspective. It allows them to plan the functionality in a technically-oriented perspective, and wireframes inform the UI designers about how the content should be structured. How the pages should be organized, how the different views and content will be loaded, and what data is required when.

Super important. 

****

How it works is more important than how it looks.

In a technical sense, those are the “big chunks” of the front end code. If you only did those parts, the product would still look pretty rough, but it could still work perfectly. Things like styles, animations, images, parallax effects, transitions, responsive elegance are all “surface details” in a way (not exactly, but as a concept). Sure, they can improve the UX (or hurt it), but they don’t change the way the product works.

Changing surface details also doesn’t change the way the interface is built up in a technical way (usually), and you can add or change lots of little details to make the look & feel perfect without making anything different for the overall technical architecture.

Look and feel creates appeal, not loyalty. If you want users to stay, spend time on the functions. Then add the polish, the details, the character, and you magical designer’s touch.

****

Wireframes define features. 

UI design doesn’t define anything, but it communicates everything.

Features can be styled or interpreted or branded in many different ways, and the details added through UI design can make a big difference in the feel of those features, but UI doesn’t change the features themselves.

However, it is the final UI that will communicate functional things like affordance,it will direct the user's attention via motion, it will improve clarity and usability with typography and layout, and UI design will make your app recognizable as your app. That’s critical shit! Not to mention all the clever non-functional details that make users feel like you care about them, and they should give your app a chance.

“It’s huge. Everybody agrees.” — Donnie Trump, Expert in Everything.

I have shit on UI a little bit in this article, but I say it all with love, of course. We're all in this together. The important take-away is: UX work enables UI work to add value, not the other way around. Annotated wireframes (and rough prototypes) are how we define the UX work. The faster we can iterate and improve that UX work, the better it is for everyone. And that's why wireframes exist.

It's also why you should stop making your wireframes so fucking pretty. Diva.

[ellenzone]

On Federated Social Networks and Socialism

Earlier today, I made a thread on Mastodon about why I believe federated social networks are fundamentally socialist and worth supporting. Here's a hasty transcription of that thread:

I want to thank @hermeslispegistus@quitter.no for bringing up the very valid issue that Mastodon's burgeoning popularity may damage the federated system. The responsible way forward is to promote federation in every way that we can. I know there's a temptation to believe in the idea that there can be one simple, easy-to-explain alternative to Twitter that works for *everyone*, but the truth is there literally can't be. Federation is, in a way, a socialist approach to dismantling the control that Facebook and Twitter have over the way people communicate online. It can be hard to explain, but I truly believe we'll develop the language quickly enough. We figured out how to explain what the fuck a social network even *is* in the first place, after all, we can do this too. I feel pretty strongly about Mastodon and the things it does right, but I'm going to be the first person to say that it's not going to work for everybody. The beauty of federation is that it doesn't have to.

Some folks like Mastodon's interface, some don't. Some want a local timeline that's specific to a particular topic. Some folks don't like CoCs. Under a federated system, all of this is actually possible to curate. http://social.guhnoo.org is a great way to figure out which instance does what, and which users they cater to. I like Mastodon for the interface, the local community, the caring dev team, and the CoC. All of these things are important to me and are why I think Mastodon is an instance worth using. There are so, so many others! 

@bleak@mastodon.social brought up a really good point, which is that not everyone has the resources or ability to roll their own instance. That's why I think tools like http://social.guhnoo.org are worth spreading, as they make navigating pre-existing instances significantly easier. My fundamental support of this system is very much rooted in my belief that the world needs publicly owned social networks as much as it once needed publicly owned mail and still needs publicly owned ISPs. Federation is fundamentally socialist because it has the potential to radically shift the way communication is controlled, giving people the potential ability to manage online communications at an individual and community level. While I don't necessarily have the ability to do do this, there is now a theoretical possibility that I can create a system of communication that only intends to conclude those within my personal community (say, my house, or my city, or my state) while still having a connection to a larger system. That's pretty hecking cool. 

Please continue to promote the system, whether that means getting people on Mastodon or encouraging folks to find their own little node that works for them. This system is good for all of us.

This is a list of instances that specifically use Mastodon's interface. Each is described in minor detail: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/docs/Using-Mastodon/List-of-Mastodon-instances.md 

If you appreciate Mastodon, consider donating to @Gargron@mastodon.social https://www.patreon.com/user?u=619786 

In addition, @lambadalambda@mastodon.social linked me to social.guhnoo.org, which is a brilliantly curated list of federated options with helpful descriptions of how each option differs.

[ciaclouddearding-blog]

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[hub-pub-bub]

Our love of libraries is well-documented. Did we mention we feel the same way about librarians? We’re working on a dating app to connect our two core user demographics: INTJs and librarians. It’s called Stackitect, and it’s coming in 2019! Copyright, copyright, copyright. (Copyright law works just like triple talaq, yes?)

We love going to the library in person. Entering a library feels like taking an Adderall. (Again, I assume. I’m lame.) My ass gets FOCUSED! It’s the perfect place to work, read, research, study, and learn. And whatever you’re doing, librarians can be incredibly helpful. They are friendly, knowledgable, and waging a quiet war to protect us from fascism.

But sometimes it’s tricky to physically get to your library. Maybe the parking situation is rough, or the hours overlap with your work schedule, or a trip requires a long series of bus rides. Maybe you find the librarians too distractingly sexy. I’m not here to judge.

Have no fear! In recent years, libraries have made incredible strides into the dense and unmappable jungle that is the internet. There’s a slew of new and constantly-improving apps that allow you to instantly rent and return free audiobooks and ebooks. Including graphic novels! And movies!

As you well know, the only thing we love more than librarians is free shit. Here are some of the top apps. Please go download them immediately.

Free audiobooks and ebooks offered through your local library

OverdriveFor Android, iOS, and Kindle

The most widely used free lending app is Overdrive. It’s the one I use. And it’s great, for a variety of reasons.

Both audiobooks and ebooks are available through Overdrive. I can add multiple library cards, and the system includes affiliate branches in my search results. If I reserve something with a waiting list, I get an email the moment it arrives—and I can set it to automatically check me out and begin downloading. All my books are collected together in a neat little visual shelf. Plus it gives me a lot of control; I can adjust everything from ebook font size and style to audiobook playback speed.

Returns are processed automatically, which is HUGE! This means that there’s no late fines or nagging reminders. (Bless libraries with fine limits because I am both a bookworm and a procrastinator.) Fines have long been viewed as a necessary “stick” to compel timely returns, but recent thinking has shifted. Fines can undercut a public library’s core mission. A $3 fine is nothing to middle class adults, but it can be an insurmountable barrier to a child of low-income parents. In some areas, the accumulation of tiny fines triggered the revocation of borrowing privileges for one in three patrons! They’re a source of inappropriate shame, and a petty reason to block access to learning.

Sorry, had to hit my SJW rant quota. Minimum one per article. Part of our Terms of Service agreement.

Overdrive’s selection depends on your library. For me, it’s fantastic, but I often have to wait a few days or weeks for an in-demand book. It lets you know how far down you are on the waiting list. Usually I’ll be first in line on a single copy, or seventh in line on two copies. There are exceptions, though… I ain’t getting the audiobook version of Fire and Fury until sometime around 2041. Tokyo’s gonna be Neo-Tokyo by then!

LibbyFor Android, iOS, and Kindle

Libby is from the same people who make Overdrive. Overdrive’s interface is fine but not great. It does the job. Libby ostensibly provides the exact same app, just with a cleaner, friendlier interface.

Personally, I don’t find it to be a meaningful improvement. And Libby lacks some of the functionality of Overdrive. For example, Overdrive syncs across multiple devices, while Libby only works with one. And it oversells its book recommendation tool; I look forward to seeing it improve in future years.

Hoopla & Freading

For Android, iOS, and Kindle

Hoopla and Freading are the #2 and #3 most widely-supported lending apps for public libraries. Unfortunately, both of the public libraries I frequent are Overdrive libraries, so I can’t try them out myself. That said, they should do the same job as Overdrive.

Looking at screenshots leads me to believe that Hoopla may have the best interface design. But I’ve also heard that it doesn’t have a waitlist feature, which seems like a deal-killer for people who want to read bestsellers. I’d love to hear from any users of these apps in the comments below!

Free audiobooks and ebooks, no library access necessary

Prime Reading from AmazonFor Android, iOS, and Kindle

I don’t own a Kindle, which is Amazon’s proprietary ereader. I kinda want one though, so if any sugar parents and/or Amazon representatives are reading, feel free to hook me up. Piggy has one, and as a publishing professional she guiltily admits that she adores this Amazon product. Stone the blasphemer.

Luckily, you don’t need a Kindle to access Amazon’s library. If you already have an Amazon Prime subscription, you have access to Prime Reading.

Unlike Overdrive or Libby, their library is fixed. And… it isn’t great. There’s a lot of pulpy genre stuff and self-published novels of questionable quality. I cannot recommend getting Amazon Prime just for the library. It isn’t worth it. But if you already have Prime for other, better reasons, definitely check it out!

Project GutenbergBrowser-based, but downloadable onto other devices

Project Gutenberg is a beautifully shoestring, low-tech offering. They produce free ebook versions of public domain classics. If you’re a high school/college student, an English language learner, or just love smelling salts as a plot contrivance, please check out their offerings! Everybody from Aesop to Shakespeare to Dickens is here.

… Just don’t read the Dickens. Charles Dickens is Alexandre Dumas with all the fucks wrung out. #hottake

You can download them and load them into Apple’s iBooks app. Yeah, that orange icon gathering dust on page seven of your apps!  Once there, they’re pretty easy to use, but loading them in can be a pain. Although Google told me that Apple told TechCrunch that he’s working on revamping that app right now. Those male dominated companies sure do love gossip!

I will say that the quality control isn’t great. I really appreciate good ebook design, and PG just doesn’t seem to have the funds to make that happen. So it’s hit or miss, but again, it’s totally free. And it’s the only one on this list (so far) that doesn’t require any kind of fancy device, library card, or attached subscription.

LibrivoxBrowser-based, but downloadable onto other devices

Librivox is essentially the audiobook version of Project Gutenberg. Users create their own recordings of public domain works and offer them for as free downloads to other users. You can download them onto devices, burn them onto CDs (if your car, like mine, ain’t hep to that MP3 jazz). They’ve recently done a site overhaul and it looks great. It’s easy to download the books you want to listen to, or volunteer to become a reader yourself. Some readers are much better than others, so like Project Gutenberg, it can be a bit of a crapshoot. But at least it’s a free crapshoot!

And please, do not get me started on the whole “audiobooks aren’t books” thing. Audiobooks fill an incredibly important role in making literature accessible. Do not come onto our blog trying to serve that snobby bowl of nonsense. Same goes for ebooks! I was once excoriated by a rude Old at an airport for burying my face in my phone. “If you have to talk to someone, just pick up the phone and call them” she muttered. Well, lady, not that it’s any of your business, but I was reading Thomas Hardy. And that guy lets everybody go to voicemail. Minjabiznas.

This list is incomplete! There are many other, smaller apps out there that my library doesn’t support (yet), so if you have experience with another, please tell us about them in the comments below!

PS: If you don’t know how the whole library thing works, thats okay. You can find your local library here. Visit their website for information on how to join. You usually have to go in-person once to get your card, and some require proof of residency (like a utility bill) or some kind of ID. But others are very relaxed, and allow you to sign up online, or start downloading today and agree to come in sometime within the next six months to formalize your account. You can do it!

[digital-strategy]

https://ift.tt/2sGesCx

Get into email newsletters, they said. It’ll be easy, they said. It’s cost-effective, mostly not algorithmically filtered, and good for turning loyal readers into subscribers, they said.

The last few years’ fervor for email can obscure the production efforts that go into editorial newsletters and the metrics around engagement and conversion — headaches discussed widely among the people actually sending those emails. How much time are those people spending on fiddly work — trying to make the template cooperate, cutting down the size of an image-packed email, worrying about broken links? Trying to recreate stories for the website that were first produced for email? Trying to figure out whether its open rate — to be distinguished from unique open rate — is respectable, or whether it’s a useful metric at all? Trying to guess whether all that hard work ends up hidden in readers’ promotions tab in their inboxes, or relegated to spam, or unsubscribed by a friend who got forwarded the email?

“There’s so much on the production side where things seemingly mysteriously go wrong — anything from a template breaking so people can’t read the emails on their phones, a stray quote that breaks it, an image that’s the wrong size, links that have been changed,” Jacqueline Boltik, cofounder and CEO of the newish digital consultancy Yellow Brim. “Often there’s also a lot of double production going on. Then, there’s so much focus on the daily production of content that it’s hard to take a step back and do robust analysis with any given data across different platforms and formats. For publishers, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit there.”

Boltik and Yellow Brim CTO Charley Bodkin evolved the ideas behind Yellow Brim after their time at the Los Angeles Times, Boltik on newsletters and business development and Bodkin as a lead software engineer there. Boltik left the Times to do digital strategy and data science consulting.

Yellow Brim wants to offer a comprehensive toolbox for dealing with this range of headaches, on top of data analysis and audits the team can conduct for clients (for a fee). Its first much-touted solution is a web-to-email converter it’s calling Osmosys (™, patent pending, Boltik said), which is already being tested by some larger publishers like First Look Media’s Topic, as well as single-person operations like Stratechery and Trump and politics digest What the Fuck Just Happened Today.

“When we looked around, it seemed like there should’ve been a better solution, but there wasn’t,” Boltik said. “The production process is time-intensive enough. You add in the people producing emails manually — it’s such a time suck every day.”

The tool, which starts at $5,000 for setup plus a monthly subscription fee, lets the people producing email newsletters convert multimedia or text easily into an email format, that can then be sent via their publishers’ chosen email service providers. It can work with RSS or other types of feeds. Yellow Brim also provides a customizable, responsive email template. If there are elements in the online version you don’t want to make it into the email, that can be customized, too.

Matt Kiser of What the Fuck Just Happened Today formally started using the Osmosys tool about three weeks ago, but had been able to beta test and work with Yellow Brim on tailoring the way the tool works to suit his workflow earlier.

“We’ve had a healthy back-and-forth over the product, my feature requests, and various workflow changes. They’ve been very accommodating to solving for my specific needs while generalizing the solutions for future Yellow Brim clients,” Kiser told me over email. “For instance, they primarily focused on converting WordPress posts to MailChimp, but I don’t use WordPress — I run a Jekyll blog with an API. They were able to map various fields from the API to the template. This solution was/is being generalized to put the user in control of those mappings in the future.”

Kiser says “this tool has been a game changer for me. It used to take 45 minutes to an hour and a half a day to produce the daily WTF update (cloning a campaign, swapping out all the text, fixing weird WYSIWYG spaces and breaks that crop up, updating links, proofing, not to mention all the self-inflicted wounds that crop up from fussing with the MailChimp WYSIWYG editor over the last year-plus). Now I hit a button, wait 20 seconds, set a few parameters in MailChimp, proof it, and send it. End-to-end, it takes me less than five minutes of production time now, which allows me to focus on the content. I’m saving myself four-plus hours a week — that’s huge.”

First Look Media first brought on Boltik to help with audience strategy and to figure out what might be hampering their email newsletter. Topic, an online magazine which publishes a visually rich email, uses a customized version of the converter that takes the publication’s RSS feed and puts together in Mailchimp a formatted email that isn’t so bloated in size that email services like Gmail would end up clipping it (thus cutting off the tracking pixel inside in the email that signals the reader opened the email, thus throwing off a publication’s analytics).

“There can be so much noise and mess in the MailChimp templates when you use the drag-and-drop interface. We were having a lot of problems with Gmail clipping emails based on where tracking pixels were located, especially since for our Topic brands, we publish a very long original story every week, with a number of images and text, Ryan Chanatry, VP of audience development and intelligence, said. “We’ve been able to work with Jacque to take our RSS, feed it to the Yellow Brim converter, which pushes that to MailChimp, which gives us our CMS layout for a newsletter. We know emails readers get won’t cut off. And if we want to make changes, we can just make them within the CMS of how we want our newsletter to look, and know the converter will take care of it.”

Additional ambitious tools are in the works for release later this year, Bodkin and Boltik said. It’s screening potential clients — the services work for not just publishers, but really any companies with an online content business and email offerings — who could use the data monitoring and insights platform it’s building, which can pull in many types of data sources beyond the email realm and provide guidance and alerts when data is showing something is off. It’s also working on a virtual assistant to potentially deliver non-wonky, clear messages around data points and issues worth noting.

The TL;DR on a few of the email tips that Boltik shared throughout this piece:

Boltik has written up many of these ideas in a comprehensive guide on better data analysis for email newsletters, published last year through the Shorenstein Center, available here.

— Does your “open rate” refer to unique open rate, or total open rate? An open rate may be higher than 100 percent since it can take into account readers opening more than once or forwarding the email to others, who are also opening.

— Have you thought about more tailored metrics goals than open rate? Instead of saying, for instance, we want at least a 50 percent open rate, can you say, we want more than 25 percent of subscribers who have an open rate above 60 percent?

— Maybe your clickthrough rate is bad partly because your email isn’t mobile responsive, and therefore is too small for people reading on their phones to see.

— Speaking of forwarding: Is that “friend” you forwarded an email to hitting unsubscribe, and therefore unknowingly unsubscribing you?

— Check who’s consistently forwarding your emails. Maybe you can do something for these super active people?

— Do you have a lot of potential subscribers in double opt-in limbo, because you require readers to click another button to opt into your newsletter, but after they’ve given you their email, your language guiding readers to do that is unclear?

— Is the email you’re sending too big? If it’s over 102 KB in HTML size, the open rate data you’re getting may be inaccurate.

via Nieman Lab

[swrx-rant]

FORUMS!

THEY ALMOST ALWAYS SUCK, AND THAT HAS LESS TO DO WITH THE USERS THAN THE FUCKING DEVS AND MODS.

SEARCH FUCKING SUCKS - I mean way worse than web-search in general. If you are looking for a specific topic, GOOD FUCKING LUCK. Your best bet is to use a suck-ass web-crawler/search like Google if you want to find anything on a god damned forum.

Searches NEVER USE CONTEXT... if I’m on the page for WINDOWS FUCKING 7, then why are results for versions XP, Vista, 8, and 10 appearing HIGHER in the list?

Searches rarely implement TAGS well, especially the ability to CROSS-REFERENCE TAGS. So, if I search the tags #Tomato #Soup #Recipe, I would actually get ALL AND ONLY recipe results for soups that use tomato, NOT EVERY FUCKING RECIPE ON YOU SITE PLUS EVERY PAGE THAT DISCUSSES SOUPS OR TOMATOES RETURNED IN RANDOM ORDER THAT PLACES THE FIRST RELEVANT MATCH SOMEWHERE ON PAGE FOURTEEN OF FIFTY-THOUSAND!

NAVIGATION FUCKING SUCKS - and this makes the shit-sucking search process all the more painful. Less than 1% of forums are designed with LOGICAL SUB-CATEGORY LEVEL AND RECURSIVE SUB-FORUMS that are applicable to the purpose/theme of the forum. If, for example, you are Microshit and you create a user forum (especially to build free crowd-based help as so many companies are doing rather than staffing call centers with trained and experienced individuals who are competent in the technologies they are assisting with as well as the language the customers are speaking...), then you are EXPECTED to create a Super-Forum and split it first by PRODUCT FAMILY, then split the products into Sub-Forums by PRODUCT MAJOR-VERSION (not fucking build number, jackasses! The same goes for fucking Patch Notes), and then, if you aren’t a total douche you will create an ALTERNATE DIMENSION OF SUBDIVISION, this time by ELEMENT or MAJOR FEATURES - which unless you are a fargin-idgit MUST INCLUDE: “INTERFACE/USER-EXPERIENCE”, “BUGS” (and this one subdivides by the NATURE OF THE BUG AS PERCEIVED BY USERS... these bugs are DISEASES, and like diseases they should be NAMED and CATEGORIZED by SYMPTOMS, but you can skip the Latin names like Mnemitis for an Inflammation of the Memory... which is a fair description of a MEMORY LEAK.), “PERFORMANCE”, “INSTALLATION/ACTIVATION/UPDATES”, “PRIMARY-FUNCTION”, and individually listed USEFUL FEATURES with the ability to add subtopics as necessary ad infinitum. (don’t take that to mean spam us with infinite numbers of adverts)

If you’re not already familiar, check out PHP.NET’s online function reference, its like a hybrid between an authoritarian-wiki and an open forum. Each entry is RELEVANT and EASY TO LOCATE, it has ESSENTIAL INFORMATION and CONCISE EXAMPLES, and allows anyone to give direct USER FEEDBACK//NOTES - I cannot stress the importance of this last part enough, LET PEOPLE TELL YOU WHAT THE FUCK THEY THINK ABOUT EACH FEATURE/ISSUE. You don’t have to automatically make them publicly visible, but you are dipshits if you ignore the extremely valuable resource/insight into your customer-base. Too damned many companies make it unbearably difficult for users to give them FEEDBACK, then they bitch when people switch to a smarter product from a company that actually gives a shit. (hey, that’s not a bad slogan... “we actually give a shit”... the word actually serves to chide the competition here... ;p Along the same vein as, “unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English Accent.”)

THE MODERATORS FUCKING SUCK - I’m sorry, but you guys do. I understand that you’re mainly trying to keep an amorphous blob of bile and twigs from deteriorating into complete crap... but you are FAILING, and its not your fault... the game was rigged from the start, because they were SHIT from the moment they first went online. You guys suck at your jobs because the JOB SUCKS and that’s because the fucking RULES SUCK. Whomever the fuck came up with this shit needs to have a cheese grater ran along their eyelids for an hour each morning.

THE RULES FUCKING SUCK - so of course they turn the mods into assholes and other posters into fuckwads. There are so many issues here, but I will try to focus on the biggest tossers of all the ideas that went into these digital colostomy sacks:

NO NECROS - first of all, if you can bring the dead back to life you deserve a fucking medal, not to be given shit by peers and admins alike, and it’s not like I’m advocating Necro-Larry for President.. though he really wouldn’t be any more scandalous then what we’ve already had. But, more to the point, DO YOU ASSHOLES UNDERSTAND WHAT THE INTERNET FUCKING IS??? (and I’m not being existential here, we’ll leave the philosophical impacts for the future to reflect on). THERE IS NO PAST, THE INTERNET EXISTS IN THE ETERNAL NOW WE CALL THE PRESENT. That means NO MATTER HOW OLD THE POST IS, PEOPLE WILL STUMBLE ACROSS IT IN THE FUTURE. And it will be JUST AS RELEVANT THEN AS IT WAS WHEN CREATED! Especially since BUGS DON’T STAY DEAD, so why should decriers of old problems be told to shut the fuck up? That’s like saying, “Homelessness? We talked about that once in 1932, stop bringing it up already! It’s a dead issue!” (this is the kind of shit you get from people who want to IGNORE PROBLEMS instead of addressing them - FUCK THOSE PEOPLE, THE GENE POOL IS BETTER OFF WITHOUT THEM!) [wow, if you just read the bold that’s really dark... lol. I’m starting to sound like an industrialist.]

LOCKING THREADS - fucking stupid to begin with, especially in response to necromancy, but lets not forget their monumentally fucktarded cousin, the Self-Locking Thread - what kind of cold war cloak and dagger fantasizing bullshit is this? This thread will self-destruct in 5 seconds! I don’t care if its been 10 years, if the problem ain’t been fixed, then SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET TO WORK, don’t cry about someone posting relevant information just because you’ve given up hope of ever fixing it... or assumed no one has noticed.

YOU MUST BE LOGGED IN TO POST - that’s kinda like saying you must suck my ass to breathe... it was a shitty idea when some fuckwad dreamed up that god awful movie, and it ain’t gettin any better. Now, I’m not suggesting anons should be treated the same, but ANYONE should be allowed to post FEEDBACK or SUGGESTIONS whether or not they have an account with your fucktarded forum. Google-Tourists have the right to be heard too! If I find your thread by accident (which lets face it, any result in a Google Search is pretty much an accident), and have something to contribute, I should be able to do so without jumping through 60 billion hoops. I don’t want to be a member, but when a Medical Doctor overhears someone giving Awful Medical Advice or finds someone that ISN’T GETTING THE HELP THEY NEED/ASKED FOR, it is their responsibility to become involved! The same goes for any other profession, I may not be “one of you”, but I know what the fuck I’m talking about so listen the fuck up and be grateful I give a shit (unlike many of you). [wow, that came across conceited... lmao]

REVERSE PAGE ORDER - you lazy, half-assed mother fucking programmers! Shame on you. It might seem like a good idea at the time, but this is one of the biggest blunders you can expound on the web. YOUR FUCKING PAGES MOVE, ¡CAVRONE! Do you understand this??? If a user BOOKMARKS A PAGE, they WON’T GET THE SAME PAGE when they reopen it a year later!!! What does it matter? Go back up and reread the bit about the web being TIMELESS... [take a Physics Lesson while you are at it, this is like asking what was before the Universe... there was no time (as we know it) before the universe, therefor there was nothing before it.] So, when I find your forum in a Floogol search and it links me to page 6 when the actual content it matched is now on page 147, I am understandably PISSED THE FUCK OFF... and the first thing I do is curse Larry and Serge, then I realize this one isn’t even their fault.

I’m sure there are a bunch more rules that are written by simpletons for assholes, but that’s enough for now.

TROLLS FUCKING SUCK - even when they not trying to be assholes, they fail miserably at common decency. I swear I am going to kill the next motherfucker who posts “why would you want to ____” as a reply, especially on a Tech Support Forum. It doesn’t even matter whether its my post, or something I stumbled across after 6 hours of screaming at Serge and Larry’s even less than unhelpful online information location apparatus.

MVPs are Worse than Trolls - how the fuck did these dickshits get the job of officially representing the company? They know less than shit about the product they are supporting, and most of the time they suggest installing questionable third party crapware to solve the problem. (Please don’t confuse “the Microsoft MVPs”, who are actually pretty cool and helpful, with the dumbasses that Microsoft calls MVPs on their fucking support forums... these guys barely speak English and haven’t written a line of code in their life!)

And despite an extra row of Microsoft bashing, this wasn’t targeted at their forums any more than Blizzards or any others... ALL FORUMS ARE SHIT!!!! 

But, hey, you knew all this already... so who the fuck am I even talking to here?

[empressledge]

Today I’m going to begin something I’ve thought about doing for a long time but have never really sat down to do.

Buckle the fuck up peeps, today I’m blasting my opinions obnoxiously all over my little corner of the internet.

Today is the first of the days... where I talk about MMOs.

I am not an MMO afficionado. I begrudingly began my MMO career with WoW but found it intimidating - I played a LOT of Flyff back when I had friends, enjoyed but didn’t have a community for EQ2 and made my home in Rift until the parent company turned it into a cesspool of microtransactions and misery.

However, part of my work is user experience - my job is to take the content that my coworkers produce and turn it into something that is consumable and pleasant for other people to use and look at. I am also highly opinionated about what constitutes good and bad user experience design, even though I’m untrained in the field. I know what I like, and I notice what works and what doesn’t work when other people use tools and play games. I form opinions. And now I’m spouting them. Because my latest and greatest love was Rift, that is the MMO I will be referencing most often. Today, I’ll begin by introducing Rift and talking about one of my favourite mishandled features.

For those of you not familiar, Rift is a pretty typical high fantasy MMO that follows many of the conventions of WoW, EQ2 and their kind. Kill monsters, complete quests, level up, with a typical interface and skills on a hotbar. The core mechanics of Rift are nothing special, but a few things set Rift apart - whether this is still true or not I cannot say.

The key difference that Rift brought to the table when I began to play way-back-when was Rifts themselves - tears in the fabric of the world that split open, pouring a whirlpool of elemental outcropping and monsters whose objective was to take over the world.

Tears in the world spontaneously (or deliberately, with the right skill) split into Rifts from one of six planes - Death, Life, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. These six planes of existence are connected to Telara, the world on which you live and are sworn to protect. Each of the planes covet Telara for lore reasons I cannot recall, so Rifts and their creatures were highly aggressive.

Back in the land of yore, a little low-level character would adventure through the world, following quests and journeying through the zones. You might come across a rift, which you could close yourself or, more likely, with help from someone else. Occasionally, your entire plan would be thrown to the wind due to an invasion - one of the planes would launch an attack on a zone in Telara, opening Rifts across the zone and spewing rampaging enemies continuously, who would set up Footholds in key locations. Large invasions would prevent you from completing quests as smaller quest hubs would be entirely overrun with monsters set on killing you and everything not from their plane. Roads would become battlegrounds between the elemental invaders and the local fauna - both of which wanted to kill you - and of course veering off roads wasn’t much safer, as those were the areas with the densest Telaran monster population. Once an invasion began, everyone in a zone would come together to clear footholds, close the Rifts, defeat the invasion leader, and eventually return Telara to peace once more.

There are a few things about this Rift feature that I think were the most engaging:

Rifts and Invasions were not instanced, but appeared where you were playing

Normal monsters interacted with Invasion monsters, giving them a sense of life and intelligence

Anybody could join anybody else to close rifts and end invasions - there were few ways to drag other players down, and usually any extra bodies in the fight were a positive force

Invasions and Rifts were opportunities to create relationships between other players, but you were not required to already have relationships as you need when taking on things like dungeons and raids

Rifts and Invasions had real consequences and impact - they were temporary, but if you wanted to hand in that quest you needed to clear at least the quest zone. Having consequences made the Rifts seem important, and created a sense of immersion.

Telara had a beautiful world, interesting characters, interesting quests and fun gameplay, but this ability to dip in and out of group content without consequence and without a skill barrier made it a very friendly MMO to play. A changing world - even though the mechanisms behind these changes were quite obvious - helped convince you that this was a real place where your actions mattered, not that you were running around with a toy sword in a city of cardboard buildings.

Now, Rifts and Invasions had their issues too. Players with weaker PCs or slower internet connections had a negatively impact play session when one of these dropped. Players who preferred single player RPG style gameplay, or those who wanted to fast-track to max level, found themselves frustrated at being interrupted. Zones with few players could become unplayable for low-level characters, at least until the timer on the invasion ended, and especially in the earlier days of Rift as there were fewer safeguards against a truly taken over zone - groups of scouts could pile on top of each other on top of footholds, so what initially looked like a group of five monsters suddenly became fifty. These were real issues that impacted players and their enjoyment, and deserved to be addressed!

In response to these issues, Trion - the parent company of Rift - did a number of things:

They scaled down the difficulty of rifts and invasions, making them easier to kill

They changed when invasions appeared - a minimum number of people were required to be in a zone before an invasion could pop, and the more challenging invasions had a higher player requirement

They made invasion footholds and monsters disappear as soon as the invasion timer ended

They beefed up the quest hub guards, making them less likely to be completely annihilated - and if they were, they did not stay that way for long

They added a placeholder mesh for slower computers and connections, meaning that other players and monsters would appear as a single ghostly green cylinder until the computer could catch up with rendering, allowing the player to heal, fight and survive during invasions

Many of these were good changes, but some went too far in the opposite direction. By the time I stopped playing, invasions could and would be ignored - even with a fully populated zone, scouts were easy to bypass, monsters easy to kill, hubs were never taken over or too easily cleared. With no consequences and fewer incentives to participate, players disengaged and the few players who wanted to complete the invasion were unable to close it themselves in time - or, they would struggle to do so with a few dedicated players only to have boss-campers appear only to tag the boss and run away, leaving the people who actually did the work without rewards… which resulted in THOSE players becoming disengaged.

By this time Trion seemed to have placed their focus on Raiders, with encounters and experiences seemingly balanced around them and their feedback. Combined with a race-to-endgame playerbase and server issues, open world content shifted out of focus, and the world lost much of its original allure. When I last played, invasions were an ignored faceroll, only presenting a challenge when they glitched, or when Trion released a new zone and had the invasions tuned towards the too difficult (likely due to balancing around raiders).

Now, many of the changes Trion made for the original issues were positive ones, but there were a lot of other fixes that could have avoided some of these issues and kept the original engagement. Fixes like the green ghost sprites and beefier hub guards were excellent and kept within the realm of possibility for the sprites and lore for the guards.

Invasion strength could have stood some tweaking, but the key issues were:

Invasions stacked on footholds and hubs, resulting in a zerg kill of unsuspecting players

Mobs never disappeared, requiring clearing by SOMEONE - which could be an eight or twelve hour wait on less populated servers

Weaker players, such as the very casual or inexperienced, felt disempowered

Some might argue that slowing down levelling, questing and the rush to endgame were also problems, but I personally disagree with encouraging that particular playstyle and that is a rant for another day.

These issues could have been solved without the mad swing towards easy mode. A few fixes could have changed the game for the better:

Implementing a limit for the number of invasions at a single location, as well as expanding the size of footholds. Rather than a stack of 50 mobs in a 50px area, capping a foothold at say 15 mobs drastically increases the danger and longevity of a foothold while still giving a player a chance at dragging mobs off and killing them one by one. If another group of mobs roll by, they could linger for a minute before rotating onto the next foothold area. This wouldn’t have been a huge tweak to the AI - these paths between rift spawns and foothold spawns were already in place. If all footholds were full, this could have been both a cap for more spawning, and any untethered mobs could simply patrol the area. This makes perfect sense from a lore perspective - what invading force wouldn’t patrol a secured area? Further, smaller patrol paths around footholds could have been created to add interest and decrease the train of mobs on the main path.

Mobs disappearing at the end of the invasion timer was a fix that could have solved most problems by itself, but additional checks for the progress of invasions could have decreased the difficulty if one lone player was struggling against an army. Additional fixes come in my next point, which is...

Rather than nerfing the opponent, empower the player. Temporary buffs already existed within the game and within the lore. An ‘underdog’s advantage’ buff could boost the power of a player who has experienced a set number of deaths within a period of time, or according to other carefully considered metrics that the developers could look at. There already existed a power to summon allies to help you, and this also could have been an alternative to basic nerfs. Calling in reinforcements of NPCs to help you be a hero is much more interesting than cutting through mobs when you’ve done nothing to earn that power.

While these fixes are of course not as easy as the ones implemented, I believe they’re better user design - they engage the player, they keep the lore and consequences intact and improve them in some areas. Players need rewards in order to participate in content, but I also believe they need consequences - otherwise, you have a playerbase that rushes to endgame, forces nerfs into top-tier raids and then complains about being bored… which is one of the reasons I left Rift behind.