#when I work out how to edit it so it works with non vanilla blocks I will be winning

[rainy-rain-duck]

minecraft davincing mod my beloved

[call-me-eds]

The Boy is Mine (call-me-eds version)

I was not tagged in @carolmunson 's writing challenge, and encourage with her for other small writers to jump in and participate in anything that sparks interest or creativity! Find the guidelines here and check out her ongoing masterlist to see all of the other incredible editions :)

Masterlist

A romantic night in at the trailer. 

Fluff | WC: 2.5 K

“I ran out of, like, nice cups, is this okay?” Eddie extended a plastic souvenir cup with the Cubs logo half chipped off, and it took everything in you not to slap it out of his hand. 

The gravity of this night was not being taken seriously by anyone, and it was driving you up a wall. You could only give your own 100%, nothing more, but apparently you’d need to drag the effort from the Munson’s with your bare hands.

“No, it’s not okay! This is a date, you need to make a good impression,” you abandoned your station at the counter to start rifling through cabinets. There were three open bottles of whiskey in the trailer but not a single cocktail glass. Eddie’s soft voice barely pulled your wandering thoughts from wondering how long it would take you to run home to get two of your own glasses.

“Baby, do I need to remind you that neither of us are going on this date?” he asked, avoiding the urge to come behind you and put his hand on your shoulders to manually relax them. He didn’t want to lose a limb and you were dangerously close to the knife block. He looked on, feeling helpless in his own home while you ran around like the queen was coming over.

Whatever, it could have been possible that you were going a little overboard, but all you wanted was for Wayne to have a good night. He was so kind and hardworking, and putting up with Eddie was an exhausting job. The man was a saint.

So you messed with one of the lightbulbs to dim the light, fluffled the one throw pillow that the men had, and convinced Wayne to take his time getting ready while you and Eddie made a round of drinks that didn’t come with a tab or need a bottle opener. 

“We don’t have time for reminders, just line the rims,” you said, carefully putting down the only two matching drinking glasses. They weren’t the martini glasses in your vision, but they would have to do. 

“Vanilla frosting?” he confirmed. “What, is this Christmas-themed?” he joked, but took care in looking at the photo on the recipe you ripped out from an old home magazine you found. He gently inserted the glass and spun it around. No matter how much he teased you, you knew that he wanted the night to go well for his uncle just as badly as you did.

“So what if it is? Who doesn’t love Christmas?” you asked, going back to arranging the food you put on a tray you found that might have been older than Eddie. He finished his task, taking the care he knew you would have, quickly swiping his finger through the sugary substance when you were turned away.

“Everyone does, it’ll be a hit,” he said, maybe just to make you feel better, and licked his finger clean before you could catch him. “But if you don’t relax, you’re going to hit the floor,” he side-swiped you and pressed a kiss to your cheek, going to the sink.

With the self-imposed expectations you put on yourself to ensure your boyfriend’s father figure had a great night was the guilt that came from forcing your man to anticipate your wants for the night. There weren’t any canceled plans, and just a few snippy comments, but you were sure there were other ways Eddie would want to be spending his Saturday night off from work. Between ironing the one tailored shirt in Wayne’s closet and taking your own laundry down from the clothesline, you told Eddie to call Steve and make plans to meet him and Robin at The Hideout for a few drinks. 

Non-peppermint drinks. Which smelled like Macy’s in December and were definitely from the holiday edition of the magazine. You didn’t have time to overthink your out-of-season choice, though, because Wayne was coming out of the bathroom smelling suspiciously like Eddie when you went out on special occasions. A mental note fleetingly popped into your head to buy your boyfriend his own, different scented, bottle of cologne.

“I could have sworn I told you two to scram,” Wayne said, a hint of sincerity in his mocking tone. His eyes scanned over your spread with equal parts appreciation and confusion. Fine, maybe wintery cocktails, carrots, and crackers didn’t exactly go together, but you were working on a tight timeline and whatever you could scrounge up from the Quick-Mart.

“We’re going soon, I swear,” you promised, mixing the combination of ingredients that you thought might be on the sweet side for Wayne’s preference, but were sure that his date would prefer to a Heineken. There wasn’t a cocktail shaker at your disposal, a measuring cup and a fork would have to get the job done.

Eddie could read the two of you like a book. The nervous energy you were emitting had him wanting to stay out of the way, so he washed and dried the few dishes you dirtied in record time. The domestic act may not have been as exciting as ripping a guitar solo, but it was just as sexy to you, especially when you didn’t even need to ask. Not that you were paying a speck of attention to him at the moment.

“Now Sally’s just coming over for a little while before we go to our rummy game,” Wayne said, sounding like he was warning you both to behave before leaving you with a babysitter. “So you don’t have to be out all night, but I don’t want you making her feel crowded,” he pointedly looked at Eddie this time, who couldn’t even pretend not to understand.

The last time the two of you had been around when Wayne’s “friend” Sally came over, Eddie wouldn’t stop asking her questions about her job, her family, her weekend routine, and you feared he was getting dangerously close to inquiring about her medical history and savings account.

“We’ll be out of your hair, don’t worry,” you confirmed, doing one last sweep to make sure there wasn’t a trace of Eddie in the living room. As endearing as he might be, your boyfriend had a tendency to leave anything that belonged to him in the shared space of the trailer. 

“Now listen, here, partner,” the dark-haired Tasmanian devil strode up to his uncle in imitation and smacked a hand on his shoulder. “We’re not going far, so if there’s any funny business going on under this roof I will know about it.” The two of you heard a version of the same speech any time Wayne was going to the bar or leaving for a shift and you two would be by yourselves. It had the opposite effect, making you act all the more quicker so you’d be put back together when he came back home.

“Son, I was getting into funny business before you were born,” he responded, knocking Eddie’s bravado right off its kilter.

“Oh, ew, I don’t want to think about that!” he whined, blush appearing faster than his hands could cover his face.

“Well, if you don’t quit it, we’re going to have a problem, then.”

“Leave him alone, let’s go,” you said, grabbing the bag of snacks reserved for you two from your grocery trip. “Have fun, Mr. Munson,” you smiled. Even though you were setting him up for a night of romance and intimacy, you still couldn’t bring yourself to call him by his first name. 

“Thank you, Darlin’, I’ll see you later,” he said, reaching out to ruffle Eddie’s hair before he was out of reach. 

“Hey!” You opened the door to separate the two before a wrestling match broke out and a button popped or a hair came out of place.

“And if you don’t start opening doors, boy, you won’t even be in amusing business, nevermind funny!” he called after the two of you, making you laugh. He kept walking, grabbing your hand and waving it around so his uncle could see the small act of romance.

The two of you strolled in between the trailers as the sun was dipping below the horizon. You let the stillness of the evening come over you, decompressing from your few high-string hours. The adrenaline seeping out of you made you more tired than you should have been before sunset, and you accepted that your actions were a bit overkill. But you just couldn’t help yourself.

“Your uncle looked really nice,” you commented, smiling at the thought of him deciding what to wear and pulling out his fanciest belt buckle. “Like a real gentleman.”

“And you like that?” Eddie asked. “You’re not exactly dating the swankiest guy in town,” he flicked the hand that wasn’t holding yours up and down, gesturing to his sweatpants and t-shirt. You wouldn’t dignify his self-deprecation with a response, so you just squeezed his hand.

“He was nervous, it was cute,” you deflected. Eddie sat down in one of the chained-down adirondack chairs that the trailer park had surrounding a few singed logs that were last tended to before you had even met the Munsons. He reached down to grab the security measure and tug another chair as close as it could possibly get to his.

“I don’t understand why we couldn’t have just stayed in my room or something,” he said as you sat down. “I could have behaved myself.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, his mumbling was evidence even he didn’t believe it. “Whatever, I’ll just read about it in his little notebook later that he pretends isn’t a diary.”

“Eddie!” you laughed. “Let him have some privacy, he’s a grown man.” As you and Eddie got older, he tended to treat his uncle more like a roommate than an elder. When you first started dating he would have taken his arm from being around your shoulders when Wayne walked into the room, where now he tried to convince you that walking around in his boxers wasn’t weird, it was like wearing your own shorts.

“You love him more than me,” he deduced, flopping in the chair like a depressed fish.

“Aw, don’t be like that. that’s not even true,” you swung your leg over the arms of your chairs, and his hand drew like a magnet to your calf, starting to rub it with the amount of pressure he learned you preferred.

“Yes it is, that’s why you always want to come over to my place. You’re using me to get to him and his union insurance,” he teased, sending you into a further fit of giggles.

“Would someone that bought you your nasty snacks be using you?” you asked, handing him the plastic bag with the beef jerky he loved so much.

“You do always say this will give me a heart attack,” he smiled, ripping open one of the packages with his teeth. The two of you sat in silence for a few minutes, Eddie’s massaging hand lulling you into a level of relaxation that let you both know you wouldn’t be joining Steve and Robin at the bar like you originally planned. With all of his talk of malintentions on your front, you were pretty sure that he was trying to lull you into the state you were in now so he wouldn’t want to go out. 

Eddie talked a big game, but when faced with the decision to hit the town or stay curled up in bed with you, he was hiding your shoes, boiling water for tea, and putting a blanket on the radiator for maximum comfort. 

“Hey, you know I appreciate it, right?” he asked through his chewing. 

“What, the snacks? They were like, two bucks,” you told him. He pinched your skin lightly, chastising you for making him talk about how he truly felt,

“No, you doing all of that for Uncle Wayne.” You kept your eyes on the stars that were starting to dot the sky. It was always so much easier to spot them from the trailer park, even more so with Eddie by your side.

“I was happy to,” you reassured. It wasn’t a secret how much you loved spending time not only with your boyfriend, but with his uncle. He always made space for you in his home and trusted you with the most important thing in his life. 

“I know, but it still means a lot, Sweetheart. I love you,” he lifted your leg slightly so he could lean down and press his lips to your ankle where your leggings separated from your sock.

“I love you,” you answered automatically.

“Next week I’ll make sure he goes out so I can give you a romantic evening,” he promised.

“This is a romantic evening,” you hummed.

“Baby,  I know I’m white trash, but don’t let me drag you down into thinking this is romance,” he laughed. You sighed and finally took the bait from all of his negative quips.

“Okay, what’s your idea of romance, then?” 

“Not helping my uncle get laid,” he scoffed. You pulled your leg from his grasp to lightly kick at his chest. “Alright, alright. If I had unlimited cash I would start by hiring a chef to cook for us so we wouldn’t even need to leave the house,” he started, cajoling your leg back into his grasp to continue his massage.

“Does that mean I wouldn’t have to dress up?” you asked.

“Ideally, you wouldn’t be wearing anything,” he said, fully meaning it. “I’d have a new piece of jewelry come out with every course, so I guess you could wear that. And after we ate, maybe I’d hire someone to play us a concert, like Prince or someone. Then we’d go fly to France for dessert on my private jet and come home to the penthouse and watch the sunrise,” he finished.

“That’s not romantic at all,” you said. “That’s just expensive.” You pulled away this time not to punish him, but to get closer. His hand was warm from the work it was putting in on your muscles as opposed to the normal chill. 

“Okay, so then what was the right answer?” he asked. 

“This, just being together,” you said, knocking the air from his chest and the canned response from his lips. 

It was a simple answer that held much more beneath the surface. What you weren’t saying was that every time you were with him felt like you were winning the lottery. The idea of a five-star meal and some diamonds were nice, but you’d take Eddie heating up a can of soup on the stove, a bracelet made of string and beads, and him playing the same guitar riff over and over for hours over anything he could cook up in his mind.

Despite the nice picture he painted, running through his mind was a more similar scene to yours, except there was a ring on your finger.

“I guess that sounds good, too.”

[open-hearth-rpg]

The TTRPG Year So Far

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks, mostly because I’ve actually had a burst of productive energy. This week I released Danger! Unexploded Spell, a series playset for Girl By Moonlight: “Unacceptable mages drafted by the authorities protect their city from damage wrought by arcane air raids and bombings while trying to survive and create a community.”

Before that I finally cracked down and finished writing up Numberless Secrets, my Hearts of Wulin sourcebook for running mysteries. That came in at about 110 pages, and includes six sample mysteries. I’m really happy with the end results. Of course leading up to that I posted the draft of the new Celestial playbook for HoW on the blog and a tweaked version of the Villain playbook. 

Then in early April ago I put out Veil: Iterations, my version 1.5 rules for The Veil. I’ve had some feedback, but it is a pretty niche release (like all of my stuff). I have to make a couple of tweaks to that. 

Assuming I get this next GBM playtest written up, I have several other things in the queue: a couple new cases for Apocalypse Keys, my fantasy/samurai hack of Free from the Yoke, Hearts of Yokai (PbtA inspired by Changeling the Lost), and maybe more campaign frames for Hearts of Wulin. I’m sure there’s a couple of other things I’m forgetting. 

ACTUAL GAMING

All of that has been in parallel to all of the games which I’ve been running online and locally. Here’s what I’ve done so far this year, 87 sessions total with nine as a player. I have links to actual plays where they’re available. You can also listen to these in podcast format on our Open Hearth site:

Before the Sith: My hack of Before the Storm for the Star Wars minicon. I’d run another hack of this for superheroes before and realized that a four hour block just didn’t work. So I ran this as two three-hour blocks with an hour break in the middle. That helped and gave us room to let the scenes breathe. Even with that, we still ended up cutting out one of the rounds to make sure we had enough time for the ending. 

My Star Wars framing worked, but I think particularly because we had three Jedi and one non-Jedi character. That created a really solid set of tensions and questions. In the end two of the four characters had tragic/heroic deaths in the final battle. The core game’s mechanic for the cards works really well and would be worth adapting for other games. (one session)

Bounty of the Week: We just started this as a stand-in for the Veil: Iterations game I’ve been running on alt-Sundays. I managed to over pack my schedule so I asked if someone else could step in to run something. We did our session zero and I’m looking forward to playing. I’ve played vanilla MotW a couple of times in both editions and dug it. However I found it tough going when I ran it, I think because I have a different approach to structuring mysteries. (not recorded, one session)

Dreams and Machines: Oof. I ran a couple of sessions of D&M from the starter set last year, and even wrote up my impressions. I picked up the physical boxed set afterwards. So when someone asked for a series to see how 2d20 worked, I volunteered to run the full game complete with character creation. It crashed and burned.

I don’t want to go too far into this here- it deserves a full write up. But I only remember canceling one other series in mid-run because the game itself just didn’t work for us (that would be Dangerous Times: Muckrakers and Magic in Old New York). I like 2d20– I have two other series using it on this list. But Dreams and Machines has some serious problems. After the second play session, the group talked about our frustrations. I switched over to a Hearts of Wulin series, to help cleanse my palate. (two sessions)

Dune (not recorded): This remains probably my favorite implementation of 2d20. It has its issues (move as an action, spatial duel set up, slow advancement) but I dig the presentation, resources, and the mechanics generally. We’ve gotten fairly deep in our story. The world our PC house has taken possession of has developed nicely– with interesting ideas about society and ecology. Plus we’ve had some fun interactions with rival houses. We will be hitting a stopping point for this soon. That’s because the group’s schedule can be uncertain and we want to do some short-run things we can likely finish. (six sessions)

Fearful Symmetries: The Second Aethyr: We did a full three-month campaign arc of this Trail of Cthulhu series at the beginning of 2023. I loved Fearful Symmetries' combination of magicians, folk horror, and a specific historical place. Towards the end of that series it became clear we could easily do another arc. 

We took up that story a year later real and in-game time, checking in with our characters and how they’d recovered from the conflict at the end of the last series. Despite the break, everyone fell right back in. We ended up with three “mysteries” (including a country house murder) plus some transitional sessions, and an action-packed coda. I loved it the whole way through. It has renewed my faith in simple, streamlined Gumshoe. 

We decided we would do a third and final arc, even talking in the final session about the framing for the start of the next campaign. We might do this later this year or at the beginning of next. I’ve done some pipelaying already for the campaign, and have been thinking about how to integrate the Bookhounds of London material with it. (twelve sessions)

Girl by Moonlight: On a Sea of Stars: Another one we started last year, though right at the end. It became one of my favorite series; I dig GBM’s approach and mechanics. The group enjoyed it, though I think one of the players significantly less so than the others. We decided to do a two-month series to finish out the campaign this year. I imagined it as a mid-season break for a prestige TV show. On Wednesday we hit our 14th session, playing out the final, world-breaking mission. Next session we will do role-play and epilogues to finish out these stories. 

I really like GbM. The mechanics drive an interactivity which feels right with the genre. Any action can be from the individual, but becomes stronger when you wrap in the other characters. It may be the rpg with the strongest support-class mechanics I’ve ever seen. (four sessions)

Godbound: Sundered Cycles:We finally ran the third and final quarterly arc of this series. I really enjoy Godbound. I love how the wild powers combined with an OSR adjacent system make people think carefully about how to solve problems. It has some wonky bits– and the problem of the flat OSR combat, but overall it works. 

I really enjoyed returning to this because we’d built up the characters and world so fully in the previous two quarterlies. Going back made me a little nervous but– as I mentioned in an earlier post– I’ve found it's much easier to go back to previous games when playing online. We also added a fifth, new player which added a great dimension to the play. They had a unique perspective on divinity and the characters’ role in that. 

Had a great set of epilogues and we tied the finale into events from the Mountain Home game. I like the world we’ve built and will probably go back there again. I used some of the Thousand Thousand Island bits early on, but there’s still a ton of that I could integrate.  (ten sessions)

Hearts of Wulin: Ageless Sin (not recorded): A solid four-part HoW series using the supernatural set up. I ran for three folks I hadn’t before which was great– and everyone really leaned into the genre. Big, hot tragic ending in the last session. (four sessions)

Hearts of Wulin: 3 Mountains, 1 Heart: A great series. This is what we transitioned into when Dreams and Machines collapsed. We used the fantastical materials, even doing an initial playtest of the Celestial playbook (which needs some proofing and tweaking). We had some great characters, including our Celestial. The Fox-spirit PC from Ageless Sin returned and I integrated several elements from that story into this one. We also had a really fun take on the Aware and a PC who used music in a unique way. I’ve had players run musician characters, but I don’t ever think I’ve seen someone lean into performance and musicality like they did. (five sessions)

The Hunted: I need to write up a review of this. It’s one of the best one-shot frameworks I’ve ever played. It uses Forged in the Dark to create an amazing, tense, and propulsive game of characters being hunted by something terrible. Great play structure, dynamite tools for collaboration, and just dripping with atmosphere. Highly recommended. (one session)

Imperium Maledictum: 3 Cycles from Retirement and Plausible Deniability: So I have been running this to justify buying the core book (and the GM screen as it turns out). This is a newish 40K game, clearly intended to be a kind of follow up to Rogue Trader– though it is both narrower and broader than that. It uses the same mechanics as the latest version of Warhammer Fantasy, creating some consistency between the games. 

I’ve enjoyed both series– despite the tradness of the system. There’s enough interesting flexible choices for success and combat to make it really interesting. But it's abstract in a lot of places (like zones for movement and influence as a resource). I originally planned to just run one series during the day, but I had enough interest that I put another on the calendar for the same day in the evening. I’d always planned to do different adventures for the two groups, but having one player in both confirmed that for me. I’ll admit I had some worries going in, but I’m having a great time running this and leaning into slightly-satirical grimdark combined with the 40K elements which attract me. (seven sessions)

Mecha Hack: The only rpg I played besides the newly starting Bounty of the Week campaign. I thoroughly enjoyed this OSR game which combined a dynamite GM with a great group. I had some of the most tense moments I think I ever have. The combat clicked, exploration merged tension with narrative, and the final fully role-play session tied everything together. Plus I learned about Owlbear Rodeo which I’ve been using in a couple of campaigns. (nine sessions)

Murder in the Jedi Temple: I ran this one shot for our Star Wars mini-con. I’d playtested the scenario with a group which helped me trim and fix a couple of things for play. While the playtest went OK (pretty clear one player hated it), the game went well at the table and we managed to get a full, rich story done in four hours. (two sessions)

Pressure: One of the two newish Osprey rpgs I did a two-shot of. I found it decidedly mid but I had a really good time with the two adventures I ran. In particular I dug my set up for the second session and how wild things got. You can check out my review of it here. (two sessions)

Pulp Cthulhu: I did a short series of this by way of justifying my purchase of the Humble Bundle for Call of Cthulhu 7e. I enjoyed the play which adapted and drastically changed an adventure from the book. Pulp Cthulhu is pretty much CoC 7e with a few talents and more ability to spend luck. It’s a minor adaptation. It reinforced for me that if I’m going to do trad-ish Cthulhu I’m pretty off running Trail. 

It’s probably the last time I run CoC, given that Chaosium decided that their best move was to hire an unapologetic shitheel who doxxed folks who were already subject to harassment. After this, despite my love for Glorantha, I’m done with their stuff. (three sessions)

Star Trek Adventures: We wrapped our multi-year 13th Age campaign in 2023– we’d started it well before the pandemic. I pitched out several concepts and this one tied for first. Since I’d already invested in the books I cast the tie-breaking vote. We have a big table (six players). I was worried about that originally but it has been fine. We’ve done four “episodes” so far, each split over two sessions. I’ve encouraged them to keep thinking of this as a TV show– with that kind of dramatic logic. 

One of the challenges has been that we have two people who really know Star Trek, two who know Star Trek, and two who don’t know Star Trek.

Of course shortly after I started (and picked up the last of the physical books) Modiphius announced Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition. I don’t think I’ll switch over– in part because I spent a bunch of money buying sets of Effect Dice which the new edition doesn’t use. (face to face, ten sessions)

Tomb Raider: The Last Guardians: I ran a short playtest of this last year, but only a few sessions. This time I’m running in the Open Playtest with more room, trying out a new adventure and team playbook. I continue to dig the mechanics here– and the character interactions work throughout. I’m hoping that after the playtest period I’ll be able to post the videos. (three sessions)

Tomorrow City:The other Osprey RPG I ran. I did a two shot of this (you can see the review here). I liked the system and the setting’s solid. It’s not a bad start for something simple and dieselpunk. But it is one of those cases where you have to decide if the setting’s something you really want to lean into and learn. If not, then the evaluation’s really on the strength of the system. (two sessions)

Veil: Iterations: This is our every other Sunday game. I started this last year to playtest some of the new elements. However we had a bunch of bumps in 2024 and only got in a few sessions. Right now it is on hiatus until after our Bounty of the Week game, when my time frees up a little bit. (not recorded, three sessions)

[christiansorrell]

Play-By-Blog #5: The Isle by Luke Gearing

Welcome to my ongoing play-by-blog of The Isle by Luke Gearing! We are playing this adventure with its original system, The Vanilla Game (adjusted somewhat to fit the format). You can check out the Play-By-Blog Repository to get all caught up if you wish.

How Play-By-Blog works:

I write up the situation, NPCs, and more, just like a DM.

You vote in the poll to help decide the character's course of action.

I roll the dice, resolve actions, and write them up next week.

So on and so forth for the rest of the adventure!

Notation:

[Text in brackets is out-of-character/GM text!] "Non-italicized quotes denote text from the original adventure!" "Italicized quotations denotes NPC dialogue."

Our character: Medon Girou - Magic Cutpurse

Our map: The Isle

[You can use the link's above to find Medon's Character Sheet and map of the Isle. On the map, you are currently at B.]

Now, back to the adventure!

You continue watching the monk for a few more minutes. He is a capable fisherman, easily baiting his line and casting well (far better than you, anyway). He pulls a small fish up, dropping it in bucket resting near him on the jetty.

You feel like this may be your best chance at a favorable introduction with the monks, better to at least approach one and see, rather than face down the monastery itself. Still, best to keep your true purpose here quiet.

You step out from behind the rocky cliff side and holler down from the staircase leading down into the cove proper.

"Ho there! Beautiful day for it, isn't it?" It wasn't a beautiful day really, but it seemed nicer than most on this gray, wet rock.

The monk turns to you, surprised by the sudden noise and then shocked when he lays eyes on you and realizes you aren't a fellow monk. That you shouldn't be here at all.

He jumps to his feet, reaches into his robes, and looks towards the monastery, seeing the rocky cliff side of the cove blocking the building from his view entirely. He's too far from the others for them to hear him, but he yells anyway.

"INTRUDER!"

He draws a crooked fish-gutting knife out from under his robes. You can see a crude tattoo of a siren on his inner forearm. This monk carries himself like a sailor and one who certainly knows his way around a blade. [Reaction Roll: 3 - Violent]

[Initiative: 1 (Odd) - Enemies act first]

"I've seen your kind before. Here to put me and mine in the dirt, take our lord's wealth, put out the flame. Good luck then."

He rushes up at you, quickly scaling the short set of stairs leading up towards the path. Why couldn't you have followed a more elderly monk?

He swings in at you with the knife [Attack Roll: 5 (under AV of 10) - Success, Damage Roll: 5-1 (for small weapon) - 4 damage] and connects, slicing away at some of your traveling clothes, nearly striking a deep flesh wound [You have 3 Grit and 6 Flesh remaining]. You know that if you try to pull away from him, he'll strike at you again [This is called a Free Attack and you can do the same to him].

[Because you took damage this round, you cannot cast a spell due to the time and danger involved. You can do anything else though. For the purposes of the Play-By-Blog, I am going to create poll options that are overall goals for the combat - so we don't have to play out each round week-by-week.]

EDIT: [If you'd like to fight and subdue (but not kill) him, please vote for one of the Kill Him options and we'll adjudicate that in next week's poll - sadly, I can't alter the poll after the fact. Sorry for overlooking that option!]

[An exciting turn of events! See y'all next week! - Christian]

[existentialterror]

I regret to inform my followers that I've fallen headlong into Dream SMP lately, and it’s one of the wildest media experiences I’ve ever had. Some of it reminds me very much of the SCP Foundation experience.

It previously existed in my consciousness as "that fandom that shows up on my dash as either a very weird textpost, or fanart that's 50/50 about Dream SMP or Homestuck." The actual media delivers on inexplicability. I think of it as the Untitled Goose of fiction, because every aspect of it radiates chaos and it causes problems everywhere it goes.

In brief: The Dream SMP is a private multiplayer Minecraft server. A bunch of Twitch/Youtube streamers roleplay on it regularly. It grew a “plot” based on improv which later became somewhat scripted in advance. There are arcs, seasons, worldbuilding, factions…

Some meta reasons I love it and compare it to the SCP wiki:

Non-linear.

If you want to get into it, your best bet is starting with a list of youtube videos on a carrd. Or watch 20 million hours of livestream vods. Or summary videos / “movie” edits made by hardworking fans. Either way, you will miss some stuff.

Everyone is literally the protagonist of their own streams.

The in-character/out-of-character line is blurred.

It didn’t actually become a roleplay until a while into the first “season”. Only a few events are scripted, and I get the impression the “script” is pretty freeform.

Obviously this sometimes becomes kind of a problem for, like, inappropriate fan interactions, which is tough and which I don’t want to trivialize.

Anyhow the line is very blurred within the universe too.

E.g. Technoblade canonically hears his Youtube livestream chat as voices in his head. Nobody else does, except for when they do.

Decentralized ownership and storytelling.

Canon is a spectrum – some things are clearly comedic “bits” and some things are well-established worldbuilding – but there is so much leeway in there.

E.g. At one point, there’s a marriage. The streamers in the marriage now disagree on whether the marriage was canonical or not. But it's not a big deal.

This is real SCP wiki "there is no canon" energy.

You can watch the same event from various character's perspectives and get totally different takes on the same event. (short non-spoiler example)

Unusual delivery format.

You don’t expect emotional depth or great creativity or horror or etc out of a Let’s Play… but my god, you will get them here.

Fun exercise: Grab your boomer parents and try to explain your latest interest to them.

Amateur storytellers.

I mean, they’re making a living from it, so they’re professionals now. But the average server age is 22 and it grew out of a casual hobby, and you can tell.

Every single stream, including the very dark introspective ones, have a bunch of chaotic banter and dick jokes.

There are these really serious bits except that the characters are named things like “Quackity” and “BadBoyHalo”.

This is the polar opposite of a polished narrative.

Many of them – and I say this with great, great love – are not amazing actors. It still works. The vibe is more “a bunch of friends fucking around” then, like, "watching a professional TV show.”

Mechanics are integrated in interesting ways.

Sometimes for plot:

Ability to gather resources – skill, the amount of time they spend digging for material, cool builds and contraptions, etc – do influence how much power they have.

But also sometimes for storytelling or expression - this is Minecraft, you know, the Blocks Game - the actors don’t really have access to normal body language. But it turns out you can fit a lot of meaning into crouches, gentle hits, jumping, looking around, what item you’re holding, what you’re wearing.

Sometimes this is hilariously dissonant:

E.g. Someone saying “look at me” to make emphasis, and the streamer has to look at… the expressionless minecraft head of the person? It’s such a vibe.

Sometimes it’s delightfully innovative and format-specific.

E.g. There are no chairs in minecraft, but there are a lot of occasions in real life where people sit, so people will use staircase blocks as dining chairs, couches, etc, and then either crouch or stand on the block to "sit". In a recent stream, during a conversation, one character went to a crafting table, made a staircase block, put it on the floor (of the other character’s house), said “you’re going to want to be sitting down for this one,” and then refused to proceed until the other character was standing on the staircase block.

A lot of these players are really good at the game, among the best in the world. Some aren’t, or at least aren’t on that tier, which is also endearing.

So if you know Minecraft, then there’s a lot of competence porn, but it's interspersed with a lot of very familiar gameplay.

They also do some non-Vanilla-Minecraft elements. They’re not common, but they keep you on your toes.

And most of them are subtle but also, like… for characters living in a minecraft world, if you’re familiar with the game, the phrase “canonical access to Creative Mode” will and should strike fear into your heart.

[maizumis]

— HAIKYUU BOYS WHEN THEIR CHILD SAYS THEY ARE NOT THEIR FAVORITE PARENT

ft. timeskip!miya atsumu, suna rintarou, iwaizumi hajime, bokuro koutaro, osamu miya

note: reader refered as mom ‼️ not edited cos I'm sleepy </3 enjoy hotties 😽

•ATSUMU opened the door with his daughter in one hand while the other had a huge blue balloon she wanted, hearing the click of the door you turn around and see your little bundle of joy running with open arms to you "mommy! I missed you" event if the two of them went out for an hour and a half, you really missed her too "aww darling! I missed you too! I'm your favorite, right?" she gave your cheek a sweet kiss with his tiny hands in your jaw "yes! mommy the best" at this scene, atsumu was long forgotten on the door, amused about what his daughter just said "and what about papa? he bought you this balloon!" he moved his hand to make presence of it, slightly jealous of you "papa is very good too! it's just mommy is always the best" you let go of her embrace, tucking her brown hairs behind her ear "why don't you go and clean yourself? I can make a choco milk!" she didn't need to be told twice that was already running to the bathroom " ‘tsumu you know she doesn't mean it, right?" pouty atsumu came walking to you "a know but a want to be her favorite now!" chuckling at his childhood behavior, you make sure to peck him before going to the kitchen, even after all this year's you never failed to make him blush "you can be her favorite tomorrow ‘tsum, come hug me now"

• SUNA had his daughter on his lap, paw patrol playing softly on the TV in front of them, you always tease him about how he is more into the show than his own daughter but he is quickly to change the subject, everytime "how was your day at school baby?" the little girl raised her head from his chest, messy hairs blocking her sight " ‘t was okay, I missed mom" his hand was already on the hairs in front of her eyes, using the hair-band he always had on his wrist just in case something like this popped out "and you missed dad too I like to think" she hummed before resting her head on his torso again, little hands roaming around his body like she was caressing him "I did, but mommy is my favorite so I missed her more... I'm gonna go to sleep daddy, wake me up when mom ‘s home" and with that she was out, leaving suna with wide eyes and lots of questions filling his brain, the clack of the open door scares him, even knowing it's you coming home from work, he was deep in thought "a penny for your thoughts, rin?" he sighs before patting the place next to him on the couch, you gladly obey and lay your head on his broad shoulders "she told me you're her favorite" you interlaced your fingers with his, giving him a little squish "you know she is just a child, right? she lives you so much, everytime you're away she only talks about you" a little hope came back to his eyes "really, she talks about me?" you hummed, assuring him he is the one of the biggest thing in his daughters mind "lots, rin"

•IWAIZUMI was playing with his daughter in the backyard, his hands on both sides her waist while he throws her up and down the air "higher daddy! higher!" her little giggle brought life to his ears, this kid was gonna be the death of him "I wanna fly! like the birds we saw in the park!" "that's very high, sweetie" she was screaming her lungs out, non-stop laughing, toothy smile on her face that had a little of chocolate that Hajime gave her after lunch as a secret between the both of them. to lost in their own world, they didn't notice your arrival, they were having the times of their lifes "I'm home! where's my sweet girl and lovely husband?" her eyes got wider than they already were and her smile impossibly bigger "mama! you're home, put me down dad I wanna go hug mom!" he placed her down on the grass and her little legs were running as fast as they could "mommy! we had such a funny day! we saw lots of things outside?" you could tell hajimd was a proud dad, his daughter being talkative and smart, she sometimes reminds him of tooru "yeah? and what else" "I was telling daddy I wanted to be a bird but I missed you so much! you know you're my favorite, mom" hajime's lips were pressed into a thin line while his brows got a little down, you could tell he was feeling a little insecure so a little assurance wouldn't make him wrong "go inside and change your clothes then we can do something together, how does that sound?" she went inside the house screaming he was gonna wear her favorite blue dress, you giggled at her cute actions "hajime, the entire neighborhood can feel you, she doesn't mean it, she is just a child, we did the same when we were her age" he went towards you and placed his big arms around your waist, placing his head on the crook of your neck "I know, but we were having such a good time" your hands came to his face so you could make him see you "and we are gonna keep having a good time! we have to make sure you're her favorite by the end of the day, come on big boy! we are in this together" and with that you started running inside the house, holding his hand in the way in, the feeling of love and pride fulfilling his heart, happiness and love could be described like this exact moment, he thinks

•BOKUTO happily took his son out, ready to spend a little ‘daddy-son day’ as he called them, sometime they would go to his practice or to the aquarium! to learn everything they can about the infinity of animals the ocean has. today they decided they would be going for an ice-cream then straight to the park to play a little "okay bud! what flavors do you want? one or two?" the kiddo look up to the list of flavours that were in front of him ‘so many choises’ he thought before speaking "chocolate and vanilla please!" his choose of flavors made bokuto think about the old days, when you would wait for him in highschool after every practice to go on a date, you always, and he means always, wanted to eat vanilla ice-cream, I didn't matter the occasion "you know, your mom loves vanilla ice-cream! what if we buy a little for her?" his little golden eyes were shinning at the mention of his mom "yes! she's my favorite so she deserves ice-cream for being a good mommy" mid way taking his wallet out of his pocket, bokuto stops, looking directly to the floor "I'm sorry, your favorite what?" "my favorite parent! duh" he tried, he really tried not to have an episode in front of everyone but his deflated hair was exposing him "oh, that's good! your momma is perfect!" "she indeed is, dad!" the laugh of his son made him feel a little better, but ache on his heart was still there; after both of them has their ice-creams in hand, they started walking towards the park hand in hand "yummy! daddy this is delicious! you're absolutely my favorite!" like that? kids changes of opinion that fast? either way, his heart was pumping with joy "of course I'm your favorite! let's go play and the we can buy more ice- cream!" needless to say, you had a fridge full of icecream that night and two sugar rushed boys

•OSAMU has one twin in either side of him, his little girl with two pigtails while is beautiful boy had a green apron on "I know mommy will love this!" the little boy exclaimed, his daughter quickly following behind "uh-huh! mommy always love when we cook for her" osamu was happy he had this life, he didn't expect to have twins the first try but here he was, bragging about his perfect set of kids to his brother every chance he had "yer mommy loves both of ya so much" the kids were trying to make the onigiri shape with the rice while giggling "I know mommy love us! she is my favorite indeed" osamu's heart skipped a beat after hearing is daughters words "ugh she is my favorite too! I love it when mama let us sleep with her" but why is he saying this when he lets them sleep with him too? "that's right! we need to make this onigiri perfect so she is proud" nervously chuckling to erase a little the tension he was feeling "okay, daddy keeps going from here, go set the table and change yer smelly clothes!" the kids were racing to their respective bedrooms, yelling how they were gonna be prettier than the other one. the younger twin was so deep in thought leaning on the kitchen counter that he didn't acknowledge your presence "samu, baby, I'm here, everything okay?" his features relaxing when he saw you, gently placing one hand in your chin to kiss you "everything good sweetheart, the kids just told me yer their favorite parent so am just thinking a lil" you were laughing at his concern, those same kids told you this morning that his papa was their favorite "you want to know something fun ‘samu?" he raised a brow before his hands found home on your waist, gently pressing your chest to his "what, love" your hand came to play with the hairs he has on the forehead "this kids told me this morning you were his favorite, don't take to seriously what they said ‘samu, they love you unconditionally" taking your advice, he pecked you before hearing little steps coming to the room "our alone time has ended angel, a love ya" finishing his words with a sweet kiss

[come-on-shitty-boys]

//fatherhood headcannons//

Characters: Kuroo Tetsurou / Bokuto Koutarou / Daishou Suguru

Warnings: none 

Word Count: 1.7K (~550 a piece)

Notes: don’t come for me and my self-indulgence. Also >:C if you’re of age and living in the United States, go fucking vote.  i am not asking. 

Kuroo Tetsurou

He goes into this whole fatherhood thing with complete and utter confidence.  Kuroo Tetsurou is convinced that he doesn’t need to have a single parenting book.  How hard can it be?

It’s all just making sure his kid doesn’t die, right? R I G H T?

He tries really hard to understand all of your discomforts during the pregnancy, but wowowow he’s bad at it.  You were complaining that your feet were sore and he just looked at you weird.  You had just gotten out of bed?  How did your feet already hurt?  Your back hurts? How? You’re laying down?

He recognizes that you’re in discomfort and he, of course, doesn’t look past that.  He’s going to do whatever he needs to do to ensure your comfort, but he just struggles to comprehend it.

I promise that Kuroo was so calm and cool and collected throughout the entire pregnancy and honestly, even during delivery, he was there to tell you how great you were doing, holding your hand, letting you crush his fingers in your tight grip.  He would pat your head and occasionally give you little kisses on your temple.

But when the nurse asks if he wants to hold his new little girl and places her in his arms, oh he’s crying.  He doesn’t even realize that he’s crying until he feels the tears stream down his cheeks.

It was in the following weeks that he realized just how hard this whole parenting thing would be.  Sleep?  Kuroo didn’t know her.  The baby religiously started crying every night at 2:27 a.m. and it would take nearly an hour to get her to fall back asleep.  By the time that hour passed, he was already back to being wide awake and would just lay in bed, unable to fall back asleep for hours.  

The first time he ever had to change a diaper, he had to pull up a YouTube video to figure it out, but he’s not about to tell you that.  

He has no idea how to dad, but Kuroo ends up being a really incredible father.  While he may be lacking in the basic skills like knowing the correct formula temperature or how to properly hold his daughter, he makes up for it with his constant companionship.  

You’ve walked in on him in the nursery so many times.  He’s really not even doing anything.  He’s just leaning against the crib, running his fingers across his little girl’s skin, still not believing that this is real and that that little baby is his, something that he helped create.  Oh, it just makes him so soft to think about.   He talks real quietly to her, telling her about his day, like she has any idea what he’s saying, but he still smiles so wide when she looks at him.

His little girl is his entire world and I just know that he’s an incredibly protective father.  He knows that the world is a scary place and he wants his daughter to be able to grow up having the best life possible, even if it is difficult.

Bokuto Koutarou

It was an accident.  It was 100% an accident.  But, the absolute joy that lit up his features when you told him your happy news, well, you don’t think you had ever seen him smile so wide.  He had picked you up to spin you around and covered your face in kisses.  Bokuto had set you down and immediately squatted down to place a kiss on your non-existent baby bump, telling his little baby how excited he was to be their papa.

Bokuto does prepare, well, at least a little. He owns one book, but he has read it cover to cover.  When he was reading through it, he would stop at something that he found particularly interesting and show it to you.

He didn’t really know how best to take care of you, but he tried his best!  He would rub your shoulders or feet when you asked.  He would make dinner after practice.  He is absolutely running to the store in the middle of the night because you had a sudden craving for Cheetos and vanilla ice cream.  Bokuto thought it was best not to ask what the hell you were doing when you proceeded to dip the Cheetos in the ice cream.

Bokuto forces you on walks.  He read in that one pregnancy book that walks can help induce labor, so in the time leading up to the due date, Bokuto was taking you on strolls around the block multiple times a day.  

But, he gets really busy with MSBY ;-; like. . . a lot.  He wants to be there every step of the way, but he just can’t.  Even after the baby was born, it seemed like there was rarely a day off for him to just spend with you and the baby.

Nothing hurt more than seeing the video of his little boy taking his first steps, knowing that he wasn’t even there to see it for himself because he was stuck on a bus in another city for a game.

This boy B R A G S about his kid all the time.  Sakusa might just beat his ass if he has to hear Bokuto coo about his son one more time.  

Games that happen at home are Bokuto’s favorites because he knows that whenever he looks up into the stands, you’ll be there, the baby in your arms, a tiny black knit hat with gold detailing pulled over his head.  It always made his heart so warm and he seemed to always be on top of his game just so he could secure a win quicker.  He just wanted to rush to you and cradle his little one in his arms.

He likes to toss his little bean up into the air, but he has absolutely bonked his son’s head on the ceiling and then proceeded to fail to catch him because he was so in shock that he just hit his son’s head on the ceiling.  Insert one (1) bokuto koutarou suddenly regretting every life decision that he has ever made.  

Surprisingly, he’s a really good parent?  He understands the balance between being caring and supportive, but also having a firm hand on discipline.  He isn’t much for punishments, because he’s going to feel bad, but he won’t hesitate to sit his son down and have a talk if he needs to.  

God Bokuto is such a good dad please i’m so soft i just know that he would sob his eyes out the minute the baby is on its way

Daishou Suguru

please i don’t even want children, but i would make an exception for daishou suguru

Suguru is so?? stupidly?? prepared?? 

Like the two of you decided that you wanted to have a baby and this man went to the bookstore and asked one of the workers which pregnancy books were the best.  The poor high school student had no idea

He took notes and was just constantly studying up on things.  You’d think he was back in university again with how much he poured himself over these books.  

While Daishou may have all of the technical stuff down like knowing the exact female reproductive anatomy and how it all works to produce the baby and he can definitely change a diaper with his eyes closed by now, but-

When the time came to put together a nursery- oh the boy was lost.  He had no idea what to do.  He’d never built a crib before.  He wasn’t really sure why he was expecting it to just unfold or magically form together when he took it out of the box, but now he was just sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by bits and pieces of a baby crib, pouring over the instructions, only to get more confused.

Please go sit with him in his time of need.  He’ll rest his head on your shoulder and rub tiny circles over your bump.  

Suguru probably jumped a foot in the air when he felt that itty bitty kick against his hand.  It took him by complete surprise and his eyes were as wide as saucers, but this really slow smile took over his face and you don’t think you had ever seen him so happy, a complete smiling and laughing mess.

He takes the best care of you b y e 

Morning sickness?  He’s right there to pull your hair away from your face and get you a glass of water.  

Too bad he spent all this time looking up information on the actual pregnancy and had no idea what to expect for actual childbirth.  Overnight bag?  He said, “How long does this take?”  He had no idea what to do during delivery.  His dumbass just stood there until you demanded that he give you his hand and definitely screamed when you nearly crushed his bones in an absolute death grip, nails digging painfully into the back of his hand, but who was he to object.  He wasn’t the one pushing a child out of his body.

Oh, did I say child?  Try children.  Suguru nearly fainted when the nurse said that there was “one more.”  He didn’t remember seeing a second little peanut on the ultrasound, but maybe he just forgot in the overwhelming panic of the moment?

He was so good all throughout the pregnancy, but the minute the kids are born?  It’s like he completely forgot everything that he read over the past nine months, but the softness in his eyes and the gentle smile on his lips the very first time he got to hold his kid?  It made it all worth it.  He didn’t know that it was possible to love someone so quickly, but he looked at the faces of his newborn children and he couldn’t have been happier.

Daishou has fallen asleep in the nursery chair more than once when he was up with the babies.  You’d get up to see what was taking so long, only to find him leaned back, his head lolled to the side, two tiny bundles held securely to his chest.

In conclusion.  I love daishou suguru and he would be a really good dad once he figured it all out

{Taglist: @moncymonce​ @nicka-nell​ @celosiiaa​ @kuronekomama​ @lovinnoya​ and @nekxrizawa​ @boosyboo9206​ bc you both got me thinking about them as d a d s and now i can’t get it out of my head onyx please take this as a bribe to receive the daishou suguru hip dermal edit you made i need it}

[mizmahlia]

Taking turns saving the day

Summary: Despite not being a meta, Lois certainly acts like one, and Jon learns there’s more to being a hero than being half-Kryptonian.

AO3

  This time of year, Waterfront Street was usually deserted, which is exactly how Lois preferred it. Whenever she wanted to clear her head, or if she needed time alone to think about a story she was working on, a walk along the water helped. In the nicer months, her route was full of tourists and students on their summer breaks. But in the autumn, the tourists and students cleared out and left only those who enjoyed the cold, salty air along the water.

Lois shoved her hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket and stopped when she spotted a lone figure standing about a hundred yards up the street. He was leaning on the guardrail with his eyes closed, tilting his face up toward the late October sunshine. Before she could even consider saying hello or ask him why he wasn’t in school, he beat her to it.

“Hey, mom.”

“Jonathan,” she said, glancing down at her watch with a frown. “What are you doing out here?”

He pushed off the guard rail and bent down to retrieve two insulated to-go cups from a nearby coffee shop next to his feet. She hadn’t noticed them and smiled; Jon’s obvious attempt at a bribe coming at a perfect time. Her hands were cold, and she could use the pick-me-up. He held a cup out and she saw a hastily-scrawled ‘mom’ written on the side.

“Venti non-fat vanilla latte with one pump of toasted marshmallow syrup.”

Lois cocked an eyebrow and accepted the coffee, savoring the warmth of the first sip. She rarely ordered it for herself; usually Clark got one for her when he wanted to apologize for something or wanted to ask for a favor. Jon was watching her closely, waiting for some kind of acknowledgement he got her order right. She hid a smile behind the cup as she took another drink.

“Either you’re in trouble, or you want something,” she said. “And your father told you this would be a good way to sweeten me up.”

Jon blushed and he scrubbed one hand through his hair, his cheeks turning pink.

“He might have, yeah.”

“I’ll have to thank him for that- I needed the extra caffeine today.”

“He probably already heard you. He’s always listening when you’re out on these walks of yours.”

She grinned and rolled her eyes. She hooked her arm around Jon’s and gently tugged him along as she continued walking, leaning into him to ease the tension. Though he’d been back for weeks now, she still wasn’t used to Jon being so much taller and bigger than she was.

“I need to walk a bit further so I don’t get cold.”

Though she and Clark didn’t want Jon taking off into space with his grandfather, Jon convinced them both he needed the trip. She went along at first, but came home early- right before Jor-El and Jon wound up on another Earth, with Jon being held hostage by Ultraman. So while on this earth they were only without Jon for three weeks, time went faster where he’d been, and he was seventeen years old.

If she ever got her hands on Ultraman, there’s no telling what she would do to him for taking her son from her for that long. Kryptonian or otherwise, no one messed with her family.

They walked in silence for another block before Jonathan had the nerve to speak again.

“I’m not in trouble, mom. I just wanted to talk.”

She looked up at him and couldn’t hide her worried frown.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

He nodded.

“Yeah. It’s just—” he glanced to his left out at the water, struggling to put his thoughts into words. His gaze wandered back to the sidewalk in front of them and he sighed. “I’m not quite sure where I fit now,” he said quietly. “Not since I came back. Things are different.”

 Lois finished the last of her coffee and let go of Jon’s arm just long enough to toss the cup in a nearby trash can before taking his arm in hers again. This time, she held it with both hands, squeezing as hard as she could as she leaned into him. She didn’t have to look at him to know he was smiling. He always did when she got affectionate.

“I can see why you’d feel that way, sweetheart. It’s going to take some time, but your dad and I will be here to help you through it.”

They got to an intersection and stopped at a red light, both of them looking out into the harbor again. When the light changed they continued walking and Lois took note of the neighborhood they were entering. At the next block, she decided they would turn back. Getting mugged wasn’t something she wanted to experience today.

“Damian said something like that, too,” Jon said with a grin. “After he chucked a batarang at me, anyway.”

Lois tensed and her grip on Jon’s armed tightened again. With his other hand, he patted her cold fingers gently.

“It’s okay. He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Still, he knows how I feel about that kind of stuff. You and your dad may be strong,” she said, giving him a knowing look, “but it doesn’t mean Damian can whip sharp objects at your head.”

Damian laughed and rolled his eyes. Another block passed in comfortable silence and when they got to the next intersection, Lois turned them around to go back the way they came. Just as they were about to cross the street again, a man dressed in all black appeared from a decrepit parking structure and pulled a handgun from his waist band.

“Wallet, purse, jewelry, you know the drill. Hand ‘em over.”

Jon’s entire body tensed, and he stood motionless as he glared back at the man with the gun. Lois knew he was absolutely livid, and she stepped forward, putting herself between the gun and Jon. She slowly raised her hands.

“Alright, take it easy. Just give me a second and you’ll get what you want.”

He jabbed the gun at her and glanced around, making sure they were still alone. His body language was all over the place, making him unpredictable.

“Mom, don’t,” said Jon, still glaring at the mugger. “I can handle this.”

He looked at Jon over her shoulder, sizing him up with a sneer.

“Yeah, right, kid. You ever learn that the one with the gun is the one in charge?”

She felt Jon rest a hand on her shoulder, ready to step in front of her and teach the guy who he was actually messing with.

“You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into—” Jon started. Lois reached back and covered Jon’s hand with her own, squeezing hard.

“Listen, dirt bag. You threaten me, fine. Whatever- I’ll deal with it. But you threaten my son, and you’ll find out just how angry a mother gets when you do that.”

She stepped forward when the guy backed up, lowering his gun off to the side. He looked to be second-guessing his decision and she decided to press the advantage.

“Now, if you just toss that gun over the rail into the water, my son and I will walk away, and you can do the same. No need to get the police involved when there’s no crime, right?”

He looked down at his gun, his posture visibly deflating. Lois remained still and Jon’s hand was still on her shoulder. She knew it was more of a readiness thing than affection at that point- if he needed to get her out of the way, he was primed and ready to do so.

Just as he was about to drop the gun, however, he decided against it and raised his hand. As he pulled the trigger, Jon pulled her out of the way and hit the man square in the jaw, sending him to the ground in an unconscious heap. The gunshot echoed in the empty streets and Lois flinched, ducking her head and reaching out for Jon. He was there in an instant with a horrified look on his face.

“Jon? Honey? What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” She looked him over, eyes scanning every inch of his clothing for signs of an injury.

“Mom, what’s that?”

He was staring at her right arm and she followed his gaze to her upper arm. There was a small tear in the fabric of her coat, and she poked her finger through it to find her shirtsleeve wet. When she pulled her hand away, her finger was red.

“Must have nicked me,” she replied with a shrug. “Didn’t even feel it.”

Before she could laugh at the absurdity of what had just happened, Jon stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, hugging her as tightly as he could without hurting her.

“I should have been faster. Dad wouldn’t have let that happen,” he said into her hair. “I’m so sorry—”

She tapped Jon’s back several times until he let go and she stepped back so she could look up at him. The panic he felt moments earlier was gone, replaced with a guilt-ridden frown. She brought her hand to his cheek, running her thumb along his cheekbone.

“Hey, I’m fine, Jon. Really. You did what I’ve always taught you, and that’s to let your mom handle it.”

She flashed him a grin and he snorted softly, rolling his eyes. But he leaned into her hand and put his hand over hers before she could pull it away.

“Your hands are freezing,” he said. “Let’s call dad and get outta here.”

“Do you want to do the honors, or should I?” she asked.

Jon turned and looked upward, taking an overly-dramatic deep breath.

“Hey, dad? We could use some help down here, if you’re not listening already.”

He glanced over his shoulder at Lois as a blue and red blur raced down the street toward them.

“Told you.”

She felt the bed dip beside her, but continued reading through her work. She was nearly finished editing and was cutting it close; her deadline was in a half hour. When Clark trailed his fingers up her arm to the bandage, she couldn’t help but smile. She tilted her cheek up toward him and was rewarded with a light kiss on her temple.

“Almost done for the night?” he asked hopefully.

She nodded.

“Just about. One final read-through and I’m good.”

He worked in silence, allowing her to continue working as he removed the dressing over the stitches on her arm. The alcohol wipe stung at first, but the pain didn’t last long as he immediately blew on it. The chill in his breath sent goosebumps spreading down her arm and Lois shivered.

Clark laughed as he took the first aid kit and spent bandages into the bathroom. She finished reading, hit ‘send’ and closed her laptop with a yawn. It was early by her standards- just past ten-thirty, but she was exhausted. As she settled back against the headboard, Jon knocked on the door and peeked his head into the room.

“Heading to bed?” she asked. Jon nodded and walked around the bed, leaning down to give her a hug.

“In a little bit, yeah.”

She returned the hug and squeezed hard, making him laugh.

“Don’t be up too late.”

“I won’t.”

Clark wandered out of the bathroom and he smiled watching her refuse to let go of Jon.

“Mom?”

She let him go with a final squeeze and ruffled his hair.

“Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.”

Jon fixed his hair and hugged Clark.

“Yeah you do.”

Lois leaned over and grabbed an extra pillow. She chucked it at Jon, and it hit his back with a quiet thump.

“Goodnight, kiddo.”

He tossed it back to her and went back down the hall to his room.

Clark crawled into bed and opened his arms, waiting patiently for Lois to settle in against his side. She switched off the lamp on her side of the bed and laid down, closing her eyes when Clark’s arm wrapped around her. Truth be told, this was one of her favorite places to be- in his arms with her ear above his heart. He rested her cheek against the top of her head.

“If you’re going to scold me, Clark, just get it over with,” she teased. “I know you want to.”

The rumble in his chest as he laughed made her smile.

“Actually, I was just going to say that after all this time, you continue to amaze me.”

She raised her head and craned her neck to look up at him.

“Who are you, and what have you done with Clark?”

He smiled and brushed her hair back behind her ear, studying her face. Her cheeks flushed pink and she glanced down a moment before looking up at him again. She knew he could hear her heart fluttering in her chest and was grateful she didn’t have to say how she felt. Because even now, after all the years they’d been together, she still had some trouble telling him how much she loved him.

“You’ve got such a strong instinct to protect others, Lo. You’re just as much of a hero as Superman, if not more so. You’re willing to do the same things I do, but without any of the same abilities.”

She propped herself up on her elbow and leaned up to kiss him.

“Why do I feel like there’s a ‘but’ coming?” she murmured against his lips. He smiled and kissed her again.

“But I do wish you’d stop using yourself as a human shield.” He ran his fingers gently over her arm, his gaze turning serious for a moment. “You aren’t bulletproof.”

“Point taken,” she said and settled in next to him once again. “Mama bear-mode kicked in and I couldn’t help it.”

“I’m not mad at you, Lois. I’m proud of you.”

He reached over and turned off the light, his fingers finding her hair again. She smiled tiredly and felt herself relax against him, though she still had one question on her mind.

“Does this mean I get a cape, too?”

Clark tried really hard not to laugh, but she could feel his abdomen tense as he tried to hold it in.

“Good night, Lois.”

[camgirlsurvivalguide]

Camgirl 101 - 2019 Edition (The Absolute tl;dr)

I wrote the first “Camgirl 101″ nearly 6 years ago - wild to think that so much time has gone by! So much has changed about this industry, and yet in many ways, so much has stayed the same. Since my initial “How 2 Cam” post is a tad outdated at this point, and since I have the time to kill typing away on tumblr dot com today, I figured I’d do an abbreviated, updated 2019 edition of the basics of the basics of webcam modelling, as well as my top tips and tricks to making the most out of your initial push as a camgirl.

What site should I cam on? The site I cam on is MyFreeCams, but there are other popular sites out there, such as Chaturbate and Nood (just to name two of many, many more). I would suggest sticking to sites that have been established for a while to be on the safe side, as many new sites are opening, but not all actually attract much in the way of traffic. MyFreeCams is female-only, where Chaturbate allows males and trans performers as well. Nood is a higher quality streaming platform, but you’ll need to be OBS savvy before starting, so it’s better for people who already know what they’re doing, at least to some degree.

Because I work exclusively on MFC (and have been doing so for the better part of six years), the advise I give is specifically about MFC. While most general advise can be extended to other platforms, things like payment processing and technical support I know nothing about outside of MFC. 

What do I need to get started as a cam model? You’ll need a steady internet connection, a webcam, some sort of a lighting source, and yourself. You do not need fancy equipment, a perfect cam space, a complicated profile or an ungodly amount of self confidence to get started - while these things can help, they’re not required, and are things you can amass over time as you become more established.

How do I make money? Camgirls on MFC make money in tokens. One token = $0.05USD earned by a model. You make money by persuading paying patrons, known as Premium Members, to tip you tokens. Payments are processed on the 1st and 16th of each month, and can be sent to you via cheque, wire transfer, or through third parties. I advise you choose cheque or wire transfer, because third party payment processors have been notoriously unreliable over the years. For US models, you can also have your income direct deposited. For international models (aka anyone outside the US), you’ll either need to ‘make payout’ for a wire transfer, which is earn a minimum of 20,000 tokens ($1000USD), or you can opt for a cheque in the mail for free after earning a minimum of 400 tokens ($20).

Camgirls do not get paid hourly. All earnings come from tips. 

What can I do to encourage people to tip or talk? Generally speaking, you entertain. Camgirls entertain by engaging in conversation, showing off their bodies, stripping, and doing live masturbation or sex performances, in addition to selling homemade content, whether in the form of videos and photos, or over apps like snapchat. The best way to increase your odds of making money is to make people like you. For this, you’ll need social skills, physical attractiveness, patience, and business savvy. While it may seem simple, this process is incredibly dynamic and complex; for this reason, I (nor anyone else) can tell you with any guarantee how to make money. My best advice is to read this blog for inspiration, watch cam models to see how others are doing it, and then most importantly, try it yourself. There is only so much you can learn by watching and asking questions: the rest you will have to figure out as you go. 

Do I have to show my face? Yes. You cannot wear a mask, or hide your face; it’s against the Terms of Service of the site, and you can’t build relationships with human beings when you have a bag on your head. That’s just not how it works.

Do I have to get naked or masturbate? No! You don’t. While these things are definitely the norm on the site, there is no rule that says you have to get naked on MFC. You can literally log on and just stare at the camera, unmoving, silently, for hours on end if you want - no one will stop you - it just obviously wouldn’t be particularly entertaining, and would be unlikely to make you much money. If you choose not to strip, or choose to restrict your stripping to certain environments (only in private, only with certain people, only at certain price points), you’ll have to figure out how to entertain in other ways. I would like to highlight that this is not only something non-explicit models have to figure out: the best of the best on the site do far, far more than just strip. Sexuality is part of it, but not the whole story.

How often should I cam, and for how long? The most successful models on MFC tend to rely mostly on the support of their repeat customers, known as ‘regulars’, for the bulk of their income. Making regulars is an important part of camming, because members who return again and again build a relationship with you, and those who have supported in the past are more likely to support again in the future (a psychological concept known as the ‘foot in the door’ phenomenon). Rooms that have groups of returning regulars are also more attractive in a community aspect, because the members aren’t only returning for the model for a sense of togetherness and familiarity, they’re also there to talk with their other member friends. 

In order to build a base of regulars, you should aim to cam relatively consistently, and at somewhat similar time slots. There are no real “best times” to cam - the best times to log on are times where you can expect yourself to be the most consistent over the long term. This way, people know where and when to find you. As far as how long your cam shows should be, this is up to you for the most part. I prefer to cam between 3 and 4 hours at a time.

What is camscore? Camscore is a rating system that is based off of tokens earned per hour. Every new model starts with a camscore of 1000, and depending on how many tokens she makes each hour, her camscore will either raise or drop. The goal is to make as many tokens as you can an hour so that you can raise your camscore - this will sort your icon higher up on the main page, making it more likely that random passerby’s will see your room and hopefully enter it. While camscore is important, it isn’t the only way that members find model’s rooms. For the first six hours of broadcast time (NOT account life: broadcast time, as in time actually live streaming), models are given a ‘new model’ badge on their icons, which can attract members to check out the room. While ‘sort by camscore’ is the default settings for members, they can also choose to sort by other styles, meaning a low camscore isn’t always a low placement on the page. Lastly, models can use social media to boost their visibility. All that said, a low camscore can make things increasingly difficult and frustrating for a model; please read here for more details on overcoming low visibility:

http://camgirlsurvivalguide.tumblr.com/post/169514561900/how-to-overcome-low-visibility

Will camming hurt my chances of getting a vanilla job? Depends on the job. There is always a chance that the people you know will find out that you cam. The best things you can do are weigh your options carefully before starting, geoblock any areas that you don’t want watching you (you can block regions from accessing your cam, but this doesn’t protect against VPNs, and doesn’t stop people from taking screenshots or recordings of your streams and uploading to other unblocked sites), and take caution not to use the same photos connected to your real name as you do for camming - but there is no way to ultimately protect yourself from the stigma of sex work. Facial recognition software is becoming more accurate each and every month, and I feel that soon, programs like google image reverse search will be able to quickly and easily pull up any and all profiles connected to certain faces; take that as you will. 

Do camgirls pay taxes? Yes. You are in charge of your own business, including filing and paying your own taxes. This is different in each country/region, but it’s a good idea to save 30% of everything you earn for tax purposes. Hire a tax accountant to do it for you properly so you don’t get audited.

Do you have any additional tips to share? Why yes! Yes I do. Here are some miscellaneous shit knowledge that I’ve picked up over time. Enjoy.

- I cam using a mac. Before I cam, I’ll often take 10 to 15 cute selfies using the photobooth app, which I then quickly edit using VSCO cam on my phone. I upload these to an album on my MFC Share (the content hosting ‘store’ page that MFC has) so I can sell these cute photos to people for cheap. Often I’ll make a monthly selfie album that I upload photos to as the month progresses, which encourages members who purchase it early in the month to keep checking back for more photos. It’s a good way to hype myself up and feel cute before cam, while also creating content to sell that fosters the building of my regular base. 

- Also with respect to camming and my mac, if I do something sexy on cam, like a strip tease or a bath show, I’ll hit record on my photobooth app while I’m streaming to record my webcam’s output. I can then edit this footage after I log off cam to sell for cheap, or to give to members who contributed toward my goal or something. 

- It’s good practice to reply to all offline tips. While I might not reply to video or photoset sales through MFC share all the time (sometimes my inbox gets super busy), it is important not to let offline tips go unnoticed. Appreciating people’s tips makes them want to tip again. Ignoring them makes them not want to return. 

- Do not just sit on your phone when you’re bored on cam. Get up, dance around, show off your body, talk to yourself about nothing. You’re not there to be entertained (although it’s fun when you are, of course) - you’re there to be entertaining. Shake off the anxiety and shake ya butt instead.

[tariqk]

More Minecraft grumping

Cut to spare the dash.

Things I really don’t like about Minecraft, honestly:

The early survival game is inaccessible

Here’s the thing about early Minecraft survival: you’re plonked in the middle of the wilderness, with absolutely nothing, and literally the first thing you got to do is punch a tree and find a safe place to spend the night before you get beaten up by monsters.

That’s it. You could spend the night hiding in a hole, probably crafting and mining something in the middle of the night, while hostile mobs wander areas that aren’t lit up, waiting to, basically, kill you. And you’ll stay in this precarious situation for at least a few days, as you 1) make a place to sleep, 2) build shelter, 3) get supplies to venture out, and 4) don’t die, because if you die, you lose your stuff.

This is a game marketed to mass audiences. For children, even. And it can be so manifestly unpleasant I have no idea how it got popular so quickly.

I don’t actually have a problem with this, actually! I positively enjoyed some of that experience, and some of that tension makes for some fun gameplay and entertaining stories — like the one where I found a white horse, tamed it, named it, and then proceeded to take it to a foolhardy exploratory quest before it fell under a hail of arrows (RIP Binky 2019–2019).

And I don’t even have a problem with the learning curve, because I’ve learned and thrived in environments like Dwarf Fortress. I use emacs for gods’ sake. Low accessibility and high difficulty environments are my jam.

But getting here involved more than a dozen start-and-stop moments of gameplay where I literally quit the game, deleted the save, and went to bed in disgust. It’s stupid. It’s aggravating. I can’t believe that this was ready for mass market, what with the lack of telegraphing and the pretty damn high stakes from the start, that the only people who’d play this would be gamers who are familliar with the tropes, already know a little about Minecraft lore, and are invested to try and try again.

To be fair, they’ve made some things easier: they’ve included guidebooks with recipes to automatically load items you already know into the crafter, there’s an official guide online, and if need be, you have cheats. But consider:

If you need to cheat to get the game accessible, there is something wrong with the core game loop.

You can’t create a guidebook and then rely on players gaining “enough experience” to access them to make the game more accessible.

You can’t just bloody have a guide that a person needs to open a browser, or buy the book, to get by.

Survival is very much a non-starter if Minecraft is your first serious game, you get frightened or suffer from anxiety in trying to stay alive, and you have difficulty optimizing your moves to get the best result.

Redstone is a mess

Actually, I have no opinions on how redstone is implemented on a purely technical basis. It’s a system, it’s mostly Turing complete, that's… interesting. What pisses me off is how the Technical Minecraft community is… well, frankly, hard to get into, hard to gain proficiency in, and looks fairly clannish, insular and… honestly a drag to Minecraft’s further development, if Minecraft was to get developed further.

Like I’ve talked about this before, but the existence of the Technical Minecraft is entirely dependent on a class of software behavior that you could make an argument are actually bugs. Zero-tick pistons, anomalous sticky piston behavior with blocks, quasi-connectivity… these weren’t intended consequences for the developers of Minecraft, and they’ve said so before.

Say what you want, but honestly if the only reason why a developer reverted a bug-fix because a bunch of small, clannish, insular, and loud minority were making complaints, I’d honestly ask how much value those people should have in how you run your business.

But that isn’t all. I had taken to writing down notes because I wanted to figure out how certain redstone constructions worked, and even the simplest designs suffer from the following:

There appears to be no standard way of sharing schematics and designs for redstone creations.

Most of the instructions are in video, which is a terrible medium to instruct in, because you don’t have a way to skim through the resource, the presenter literally doesn’t have to say anything more than what they do on video (and thus can be as vague and contradictory as they want).

Most of the instructions are in the nature of, do everything this way, except this section, in which you need to do (flurry of movement as the presenter puts in a slightly different design that you better be able to catch). It’s “simple”. No, it’s fucking not.

Another thing that bothers me is that, fundamentally, most redstone designs are hand-crafted, which is mind-boggling. For one, if you are just starting redstone in Minecraft, you’re going to be sitting with the same toolkit that the most experienced users of redstone are. You’ll still be laying down redstone lines and putting in comparators. You’ll still be dealing with the janky and inconsistent behavior that experienced redstoners are. You’d still be debugging your creations with the same tools experienced redstoners are. And like, you’d be doing it with nary any institutional or technical support, because… reasons?

It’s like you progress from electrical engineering to low-level programming to high-level programming to virtual machines to virtualization… so that you can get back to electrical engineering again? Using skills that may or may not transfer well into other fields? Why?

And there are consequences for this as well, which I’ll get to in a bit, but also, I need to talk about how the community gets around this problem, which is basically…

Modded Minecraft replaces the problems vanilla has with other problems

Specifically? One of them is performance.

I don’t know if you’ve tried 1.12.x and then compared it with 1.15.x, but the differences are night and day. Like, I run a potato computer, mostly because we’re broke af and don’t have the scratch for a l33t gaming machine, but… well, yeah. What’s occasionally janky in 1.15 is literally unplayable in 1.12. What takes 5 minutes to load in vanilla takes up to thirty minutes in modded Minecraft.

And sure, this will sort itself out as modders eventually take advantage of the new architecture and optimizations within 1.15, but in some other ways, it won’t. Mostly because the nature of modded Minecraft is that it literally has to interface with the literal source files to generate or insert new code, and since mod-makers don’t have access to the code pipeline and the tools that they can use to optimize the game, well…

And we’ve only talked about the Java Edition, and not Bedrock, which I suspect will be even more tightly incorporated into the platforms that it runs, at the cost of having less open infrastructure, and as a result, more consequences to mod performance and stabilty.

But another thing that bothers me about modded Minecraft is how so many mods are just… Minecraft, but more. More power, more game mechanics, more technical additions, more mobs, more enchantments… but half the time the resulting game feels bloated and overly-complex.

This is funny because it literally sounds like I’m contradicting myself over the fact that early Minecraft survival had too little in terms of letting itself be accessible, so you’d think I’d welcome mods that worked out some of these gaps with things that made player lives easier.

But what I’m looking for is a realignment of how the game approaches players, not as a punitive, inaccessible system where difficulty is a mask for what is ultimately shallow gameplay, and what we get from modded Minecraft is more stuff. Sometimes, in some modpacks, just so many things that several mods do the same thing that the other mods do.

It’s kind of telling that every time I see a modpack that includes Draconic Evolution the first thing I think of is I better not get into Draconic early, because if I do the rest of the game will literally break, because I have no idea what the hell the mod creators are doing there, but when your damage scales allow you to three-shot the Ender Dragon final boss, that mod breaks the game. Doesn’t matter if you make a boss that’s three times tougher than, say, the Wither. Game’s fucking broken.

There are some good approaches: FTB Academy and other questbook mods do give players a chance to orient and align themselves with what to do, without forcing players to have to go through the anxiety and terror of not knowing what to do, and keeps them engaged far longer than they should be, but honestly… ultimately what you’re doing is more stuff, just through the lens of what the mod wants you to do.

Plus FTB Academy has Draconic and you can literally two-shot the Guardian of Gaia, which is supposed to be so tough that metal music starts playing and it can cause effects that are twice as worse as the Wither… well.

Is it just me or are there only dudes in this party?

If I have to count the number of people who weren’t cis men or boys in the time I’ve been lurking around Minecraft’s YouTube channels, I can quite literally say that the number would be less than half a dozen.

That’s very bad. When your visible community is 95% cis dudes and everyone else aren’t there, it tells me that:

The game alienates literally everyone who isn’t a cis dude

The player base are driving away anyone who isn’t a cis dude

Part of the reasons for #1 are, well, I’ve mentioned them above: it only really allows people who have the time and wherewithal to plug into an activity that offers no real benefit outside of the game itself, most of the fantasies it caters to is power fantasies of vanquishing more and more powerful opponents, and there’s barely any community support for newcomers.

So that’s no surprise that the kind of people who are popular Minecraft YouTubers are dudes who are either bad at explaining what they do, are inarticulate, or… well, to not put it too unkindly, dicks. I mean, Minecraft’s recent rise in popularity and relevance was, sadly, because PewDiePie was playing it. So that tells you everything.

And we haven’t even gotten into the fact that the playerbase looks pale as fuck, so you know that’s a thing. I’m seeing a few Indonesian-language Minecraft tutorials on YouTube, so that’s neat, but otherwise… it’s pretty white-dominated.

And this all assumes that the causes are all because of structural inequalities, not active fuckery against marginalized folks. I honestly don’t know how often that happens, though I wouldn’t honestly be surprised if it did. I mean, it’s not as if the game isn’t associated with nasty folk like PDP… and hell, even the original creator, who, to their credit, Microsoft and Mojang have sidelined, is a homophobic and racist dude.

But, yeah. I mean, $CHILD_1 and $CHILD_2 are still at it with Minecraft, and I’ll be around to help them through, hopefully to steer them away from the nasty stuff. But still, ugh. There are so many reasons to be grumpy about this game.

Mind you, at least it isn’t Roblox.

[t-baba]

The most popular JavaScript links of 2019

#469 — January 3, 2020

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The holiday season is rapidly coming to a close and we're looking forward to not only a new year but the entirety of the Roaring Twenties. Rest assured, the JavaScript world is not going to look the same when 2030 turns up so watch this space! 😄

We'll be back as usual next week, but this week we're taking a look back at 2019 and the most popular things you clicked on. If you didn't read every issue in 2019 (we wouldn't expect you to!) you'll hopefully find a few things worth revisiting here.

Thanks for supporting us — we look forward to keeping you up-to-date in the years to come.

— Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

📈 Our most popular links of 2019:

1. The TypeScript Tax: A Cost vs Benefit Analysis — As much as we love JavaScript, this was really a strong year for TypeScript, with it seeming to become the de facto way to bring strong typing to JavaScript. Back in January, Eric Elliott asked "is it worth it?" and presented some critical, data-driven analysis to establish its viability. It was your most clicked link of 2019.

Eric Elliott

2. New ES2018 Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know — We're now looking forward to ES2020 and we've had ES2019 in 2019 too, but this post remains packed with interesting examples of spread properties within object literals, asynchronous iterators and asynchronous iterables, Promise.prototype.finally, and other features that are still not exactly common to see in the wild.

Faraz Kelhini

The Complete ⚛️ React Learning Path — Take your React to the next level to find out what it is fully capable of with this comprehensive learning path.

Frontend Masters sponsor

3. 43 JavaScript Questions, With Their Answers Explained — Whether for fun or a job interview, this remains an interesting set of JavaScript-related questions, complete with explanations of the answers.

Lydia Hallie

4. I Don't Hate Arrow Functions (But..) — Arrow functions (=>), as introduced in ES6, have generally been a much welcomed addition to JavaScript but Kyle Simpson reminded us they’re not suitable in every scenario and created an ESLint plugin to help you keep a handle on their use.

Kyle Simpson

5. Responsible JavaScript: A Three Part Series — We originally only linked to part one of this great series where Jeremy Wagner plotted a course to avoid the unnecessary bloat and inaccessible patterns of modern JavaScript trends.. but now you can enjoy part 2 and part 3 too, where he went into more technical depth on bundling and handling third-party scripts.

Jeremy Wagner

6. What’s New in JavaScript — At this year’s Google I/O ’19, Mathias Bynens and Sathya Gunasekaran of the V8 team gave a fantastic 30 minute ‘state of the union’ talk on the state of JavaScript as a language and what new features are being baked in.

Google I/O video

💻 Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

Senior Software Engineer, Frontend — Use the latest tech to mold an innovative, empathy-centric experience for creators to order fast, high-quality parts (forging space robots to animatronics).

Fictiv

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

📘 The most popular articles & tutorials of 2019

The Cost of JavaScript in 2019 — Addy Osmani presented a 2019 update to his Cost of JavaScript in 2018 article in both video and article forms. If you still want to get a feel for where the true bottlenecks are with JavaScript, this is a must read.

Addy Osmani

Should We Rebrand 'JavaScript'? — This thoughpiece provoked quite a bit of discussion in the community over the problems (or not) with ‘JavaScript’ as a name. I think we'll see more on this front in 2020.

Kieran Potts

First Online Mentored Software Bootcamp w/ Job Guarantee — Get a job or your money back with Springboard’s online bootcamp. Benefit from 1:1 mentorship, our exclusive curriculum, and top career coaching.

Springboard (Software Engineering Career Track) sponsor

When Should You Be Using Web Workers? — Web Workers provide a way to run JavaScript in background threads in the browser and you’d think using them as much as possible would be a good thing.. right? Current frameworks make this tough, says Surma, who shows us why we should be working to change this ASAP.

Surma

Practical Ways to Write Better JavaScript — You’re not necessarily going to agree with all of them (e.g. “Use TypeScript”!) but this is a reasonably solid batch of points to think about overall.

Ryland Goldstein

JavaScript Symbols: But Why? — Not played with symbols (a new data type introduced with ES6) yet? This is a gentle way to get up to speed with not only what they are but why you might use them.

Thomas Hunter II

Make 2020 the Year to Master MongoDB. Try Studio 3T Today — Generate driver code for JavaScript, Python, Ruby and more? Build queries fast with our drag & drop editor? Of course.

Studio 3T sponsor

Using Native JavaScript Modules in Production Today — “now, thanks to some recent advances in bundler technology, it’s possible to deploy your production code as ES2015 modules—with both static and dynamic imports—and get better performance than all non-module options currently available.”

Philip Walton

7 Tricks with Resting and Spreading JavaScript Objects — Using modern JS features to merge objects, organize properties, and more.

Joel Thoms

📺 The most popular videos of 2019

▶  Why I Was Wrong About TypeScript — Smells like an opinion-driven talk, but actually covers the history behind compile-to-JS languages, how we got to a point where interest in TypeScript is growing strongly, and why it’s worth taking seriously.

TJ VanToll

▶  Why 0.1 + 0.2 === 0.30000000000000004: Implementing IEEE 754 in JS — Head to your node CLI right now and type in 0.1 + 0.2. If the answer confuses you, this is the video for you. And even if you know why, working with the building blocks behind floating point representations is just cool anyway.

Low Level JavaScript

Video Developer Report - Top Trends in Video Technology 2019

Bitmovin sponsor

▶  Keep Betting on JavaScript — Kyle Simpson presents a history lesson of JavaScript, looks at how a variety of features were (or weren’t) introduced, and compels us to think about the future of the Web and JavaScript as we contribute and ‘place bets’ on technologies.

Kyle Simpson

▶  A Look at Deno: A New(ish!) JavaScript Runtime — Ryan originally created Node about ten years ago but over the past couple of years he’s been working on Deno, a non-Node compatible, TypeScript-focused runtime with some interesting features. (Note: Poor audio until a few minutes in.) I suspect we'll hear a lot more about this in 2020.

Ryan Dahl

🔧 The most popular code & tool releases of 2019

Svelte 3 Released: Rethinking Reactivity — Svelte is one of the most interesting UI frameworks out there as it’s not scared of taking a unique approach. Rather than running in the browser, Svelte runs at build time, compiling your app into more efficient runtime JavaScript. Svelte 3 took some major steps forward, particularly in helping you write less code.

Rich Harris

Mithril.js 2: A JavaScript Framework for Building Brilliant Applications — Mithril is a really neat alternative to things like Vue, React or Angular. It’s very compact and fast (so ideal for mobile), runs a bit closer to vanilla JS than the alternatives, and is great for tying together vanilla JS libraries rather than needing its own alternatives.

Mithril

RunJS: A JavaScript 'Scratchpad' Tool for the Desktop — Write and run JavaScript instantly. Useful for learning, experimenting, or perhaps even creating screencasts, tweets, or similar educational content. Originally macOS only but now supports Windows and Linux too.

Luke Haas

Pixi.js 5: Create Beautiful 2D Web Experiences — Boasts the ‘fastest, most flexible 2D WebGL renderer’ to let you take advantage of hardware acceleration without getting involved in WebGL or 3D concerns. Check out demos for what the code looks like and what you’d use it for. There’s also a Pixi Playground for quickly crafting your own experiments.

PixiJS

Babylon.js 4.0: The (Very) Powerful WebGL Graphics Engine — Such a significant release that they released a 2 minute video trailer for it! Want to play? Enjoy this editable live demo.

Microsoft

Postwoman: An API Request Builder and Tester — A free alternative to Postman, a popular app for debugging and testing HTTP APIs. Postwoman works in the browser and supports HTTP and WebSocket requests as well as GraphQL. Insomnia is a similar tool if you want to run something as a desktop app.

Liyas Thomas

FlexSearch.js: A Full Text Search Library — Claims to outperform all of the alternatives while supporting features like multi-word matching and phonetic transformations. Happy in both the browser and Node.js.

Nextapps GmbH

Just: A JavaScript Task Library from Microsoft — If you’re familiar with Ruby’s rake, it’s a bit like that. Define tasks in JavaScript, run them with just (which works fine without installation using npx) and you get a bunch of nice features like logging and task composition.

Microsoft

Node-RED 1.0 Released — Node RED is a flow-based, visual programming tool (aimed primarily at hardware automation) that’s built on top of Node.js. Despite only reaching 1.0 in 2019, it’s a mature project used in numerous real world IoT projects.

Nick O'Leary

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[suzanneshannon]

Five Methods for Five-Star Ratings

In the world of likes and social statistics, reviews are very important method for leaving feedback. Users often like to know the opinions of others before deciding on items to purchase themselves, or even articles to read, movies to see, or restaurants to dine.

Developers often struggle with with reviews — it is common to see inaccessible and over-complicated implementations. Hey, CSS-Tricks has a snippet for one that’s now bordering on a decade.

Let’s walk through new, accessible and maintainable approaches for this classic design pattern. Our goal will be to define the requirements and then take a journey on the thought-process and considerations for how to implement them.

Scoping the work

Did you know that using stars as a rating dates all the way back to 1844 when they were first used to rate restaurants in Murray's Handbooks for Travellers — and later popularized by Michelin Guides in 1931 as a three-star system? There’s a lot of history there, so no wonder it’s something we’re used to seeing!

There are a couple of good reasons why they’ve stood the test of time:

Clear visuals (in the form of five hollow or filled stars in a row)

A straightforward label (that provides an accessible description, like aria-label)

When we implement it on the web, it is important that we focus meeting both of those outcomes.

It is also important to implement features like this in the most versatile way possible. That means we should reach for HTML and CSS as much as possible and try to avoid JavaScript where we can. And that’s because:

JavaScript solutions will always differ per framework. Patterns that are typical in vanilla JavaScript might be anti-patterns in frameworks (e.g. React prohibits direct document manipulation).

Languages like JavaScript evolve fast, which is great for community, but not so great articles like this. We want a solution that’s maintainable and relevant for the long haul, so we should base our decisions on consistent, stable tooling.

Methods for creating the visuals

One of the many wonderful things about CSS is that there are often many ways to write the same thing. Well, the same thing goes for how we can tackle drawing stars. There are five options that I see:

Using an image file

Using a background image

Using SVG to draw the shape

Using CSS to draw the shape

Using Unicode symbols

Which one to choose? It depends. Let's check them all out.

Method 1: Using an image file

Using images means creating elements — at least 5 of them to be exact. Even if we’re calling the same image file for each star in a five-star rating, that’s five total requests. What are the consequences of that?

More DOM nodes make document structure more complex, which could cause a slower page paint. The elements themselves need to render as well, which means either the server response time (if SSR) or the main thread generation (if we’re working in a SPA) has to increase. That doesn’t even account for the rendering logic that has to be implemented.

It does not handle fractional ratings, say 2.3 stars out of 5. That would require a second group of duplicated elements masked with clip-path on top of them. This increases the document’s complexity by a minimum of seven more DOM nodes, and potentially tens of additional CSS property declarations.

Optimized performance ought to consider how images are loaded and implementing something like lazy-loading) for off-screen images becomes increasingly harder when repeated elements like this are added to the mix.

It makes a request, which means that caching TTLs should be configured in order to achieve an instantaneous second image load. However, even if this is configured correctly, the first load will still suffer because TTFB awaits from the server. Prefetch, pre-connect techniques or the service-worker should be considered in order to optimize the first load of the image.

It creates minimum of five non-meaningful elements for a screen reader. As we discussed earlier, the label is more important than the image itself. There is no reason to leave them in the DOM because they add no meaning to the rating — they are just a common visual.

The images might be a part of manageable media, which means content managers will be able to change the star appearance at any time, even if it’s incorrect.

It allows for a versatile appearance of the star, however the active state might only be similar to the initial state. It’s not possible to change the image src attribute without JavaScript and that’s something we’re trying to avoid.

Wondering how the HTML structure might look? Probably something like this:

<div class="Rating" aria-label="Rating of this item is 3 out of 5"> <img src="/static/assets/star.png" class="Rating--Star Rating--Star__active"> <img src="/static/assets/star.png" class="Rating--Star Rating--Star__active"> <img src="/static/assets/star.png" class="Rating--Star Rating--Star__active"> <img src="/static/assets/star.png" class="Rating--Star"> <img src="/static/assets/star.png" class="Rating--Star"> </div>

In order to change the appearance of those stars, we can use multiple CSS properties. For example:

.Rating--Star { filter: grayscale(100%); // maybe we want stars to become grey if inactive opacity: .3; // maybe we want stars to become opaque }

An additional benefit of this method is that the <img> element is set to inline-block by default, so it takes a little bit less styling to position them in a single line.

Accessibility: ★★☆☆☆ Management: ★★★★☆ Performance: ★☆☆☆☆ Maintenance: ★★★★☆ Overall: ★★☆☆☆

Method 2: Using a background image

This was once a fairly common implementation. That said, it still has its pros and cons.

For example:

Sure, it’s only a single server request which alleviates a lot of caching needs. At the same time, we now have to wait for three additional events before displaying the stars: That would be (1) the CSS to download, (2) the CSSOM to parse, and (3) the image itself to download.

It’s super easy to change the state of a star from empty to filled since all we’re really doing is changing the position of a background image. However, having to crack open an image editor and re-upload the file anytime a change is needed in the actual appearance of the stars is not the most ideal thing as far as maintenance goes.

We can use CSS properties like background-repeat property and clip-path to reduce the number of DOM nodes. We could, in a sense, use a single element to make this work. On the other hand, it’s not great that we don’t technically have good accessible markup to identify the images to screen readers and have the stars be recognized as inputs. Well, not easily.

In my opinion, background images are probably best used complex star appearances where neither CSS not SVG suffice to get the exact styling down. Otherwise, using background images still presents a lot of compromises.

Accessibility: ★★★☆☆ Management: ★★★★☆ Performance: ★★☆☆☆ Maintenance: ★★★☆☆ Overall: ★★★☆☆

Method 3: Using SVG to draw the shape

SVG is great! It has a lot of the same custom drawing benefits as raster images but doesn’t require a server call if it’s inlined because, well, it’s simply code!

We could inline five stars into HTML, but we can do better than that, right? Chris has shown us a nice approach that allows us to provide the SVG markup for a single shape as a <symbol> and call it multiple times with with <use>.

<!-- Draw the star as a symbol and remove it from view --> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="display: none;"> <symbol id="star" viewBox="214.7 0 182.6 792"> <!-- <path>s and whatever other shapes in here --> </symbol> </svg> <!-- Then use anywhere and as many times as we want! --> <svg class="icon"> <use xlink:href="#star" /> </svg> <svg class="icon"> <use xlink:href="#star" /> </svg> <svg class="icon"> <use xlink:href="#star" /> </svg> <svg class="icon"> <use xlink:href="#star" /> </svg> <svg class="icon"> <use xlink:href="#star" /> </svg>

What are the benefits? Well, we’re talking zero requests, cleaner HTML, no worries about pixelation, and accessible attributes right out of the box. Plus, we’ve got the flexibility to use the stars anywhere and the scale to use them as many times as we want with no additional penalties on performance. Score!

The ultimate benefit is that this doesn’t require additional overhead, either. For example, we don’t need a build process to make this happen and there’s no reliance on additional image editing software to make further changes down the road (though, let’s be honest, it does help).

Accessibility: ★★★★★ Management: ★★☆☆☆ Performance: ★★★★★ Maintenance: ★★★★☆ Overall: ★★★★☆

Method 4: Using CSS to draw the shape

This method is very similar to background-image method, though improves on it by optimizing drawing the shape with CSS properties rather than making a call for an image. We might think of CSS as styling elements with borders, fonts and other stuff, but it’s capable of producing ome pretty complex artwork as well. Just look at Diana Smith’s now-famous “Francine" portrait.

Francine, a CSS replica of an oil painting done in CSS by Diana Smith (Source)

We’re not going to get that crazy, but you can see where we’re going with this. In fact, there’s already a nice demo of a CSS star shape right here on CSS-Tricks.

See the Pen Five stars! by Geoff Graham (@geoffgraham) on CodePen.

Or, hey, we can get a little more crafty by using the clip-path property to draw a five-point polygon. Even less CSS! But, buyer beware, because your cross-browser support mileage may vary.

See the Pen 5 Clipped Stars! by Geoff Graham (@geoffgraham) on CodePen.

Accessibility: ★★★★★ Manangement: ★★☆☆☆ Performance: ★★★★★ Maintenance: ★★☆☆☆ Overall: ★★★☆☆

Method 5: Using Unicode symbols

This method is very nice, but very limited in terms of appearance. Why? Because the appearance of the star is set in stone as a Unicode character. But, hey, there are variations for a filled star (★) and an empty star (☆) which is exactly what we need!

Unicode characters are something you can either copy and paste directly into the HTML:

See the Pen Unicode Stars! by Geoff Graham (@geoffgraham) on CodePen.

We can use font, color, width, height, and other properties to size and style things up a bit, but not a whole lot of flexibility here. But this is perhaps the most basic HTML approach of the bunch that it almost seems too obvious.

Instead, we can move the content into the CSS as a pseudo-element. That unleashes additional styling capabilities, including using custom properties to fill the stars fractionally:

See the Pen Tiny but accessible 5 star rating by Fred Genkin (@FredGenkin) on CodePen.

Let’s break this last example down a bit more because it winds up taking the best benefits from other methods and splices them into a single solution with very little drawback while meeting all of our requirements.

Let's start with HTML. there’s a single element that makes no calls to the server while maintaining accessibility:

<div class="stars" style="--rating: 2.3;" aria-label="Rating of this product is 2.3 out of 5."></div>

As you may see, the rating value is passed as an inlined custom CSS property (--rating). This means there is no additional rendering logic required, except for displaying the same rating value in the label for better accessibility.

Let’s take a look at that custom property. It’s actually a conversion from a value value to a percentage that’s handled in the CSS using the calc() function:

--percent: calc(var(--rating) / 5 * 100%);

I chose to go this route because CSS properties — like width and linear-gradient — do not accept <number> values. They accept <length> and <percentage> instead and have specific units in them, like % and px, em. Initially, the rating value is a float, which is a <number> type. Using this conversion helps ensure we can use the values in a number of ways.

Filling the stars may sound tough, but turns out to be quite simple. We need a linear-gradient background to create hard color stops where the gold-colored fill should end:

background: linear-gradient(90deg, var(--star-background) var(--percent), var(--star-color) var(--percent) );

Note that I am using custom variables for colors because I want the styles to be easily adjustable. Because custom properties are inherited from the parent elements styles, you can define them once on the :root element and then override in an element wrapper. Here’s what I put in the root:

:root { --star-size: 60px; --star-color: #fff; --star-background: #fc0; }

The last thing I did was clip the background to the shape of the text so that the background gradient takes the shape of the stars. Think of the Unicode stars as stencils that we use to cut out the shape of stars from the background color. Or like a cookie cutters in the shape of stars that are mashed right into the dough:

-webkit-background-clip: text; -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;

The browser support for background clipping and text fills is pretty darn good. IE11 is the only holdout.

Accessibility: ★★★★★ Management: ★★☆☆☆ Performance: ★★★★★ Maintenance: ★★★★★ Overall: ★★★★★

Final thoughts

Image Files Background Image SVG CSS Shapes Unicode Symbols Accessibility ★★☆☆☆ ★★★☆☆ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ Management ★★★★☆ ★★★★☆ ★★☆☆☆ ★★☆☆☆ ★★☆☆☆ Performance ★☆☆☆☆ ★★☆☆☆ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ Maintenance ★★★★☆ ★★★☆☆ ★★★★☆ ★★☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Overall ★★☆☆☆ ★★★☆☆ ★★★★☆ ★★★☆☆ ★★★★★

Of the five methods we covered, two are my favorites: using SVG (Method 3) and using Unicode characters in pseudo-elements (Method 5). There are definitely use cases where a background image makes a lot of sense, but that seems best evaluated case-by-case as opposed to a go-to solution.

You have to always consider all the benefits and downsides of a specific method. This is, in my opinion, is the beauty of front-end development! There are multiple ways to go, and proper experience is required to implement features efficiently.

The post Five Methods for Five-Star Ratings appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Five Methods for Five-Star Ratings published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[sugasweetmochi]

The Boy Next Door {part 1}

Member: Min Yoongi (suga) x Reader

A/N: This is my first fanfiction, i hope you enjoy it. I want to make this into a series, but depending only the feedback. My boyfriend helped me write this. (he was obviously jealous lol) 

fluff, i guess? lol

 some cursing. 

You lived in a loft by yourself in the edge of the downtown area. You always liked the view of the sunset when it reflected off the nearby river. You were a photography major in college, on your sophomore year. You worked part time at a café a block away from your apartment.

               One winter day while walking to work, you had your camera out taking pictures of the people passing by. You always saw something lovely in the natural beauty of non-posed expressions of the people around you. Then you saw him. The man with mint green hair, he would occasionally wear his black framed glasses. He was a regular at your job, you’ve seen him a many of mornings. He always ordered the same thing. A Caffe Americano with a shot of caramel, and two shots of espresso; some days he would order a vanilla bean scone with his coffee. He was out on the patio, enjoying his drinking while writing in a journal. He would always be writing in that journal. Loudly sighing whenever it would get to noisy inside the café. On days like that, he would force himself to sit outside; no matter what weather was casted onto the city.

You had always wanted to sneak a picture of him, while he was hard at work. His concentrated face was always so appealing to you, you had never really seen him smile. Today was the day, so you decided to snap of few pictures of him. You quickly looked through your photo, smiling. Your photos came out amazing. You slipped pasted him as you rushed into work.  You slightly turned your head to notice him staring at you. You felt a small blush creep onto your cheeks.

The work day had passed quicker than you had expected, you walked home while watching the people rush by you. You finally arrived in front of your complex, you greeted the doorman with a smile. You rushed to the elevator as you saw the doors about to close.

“Wait, hold the doors please,” you yelled. A hand appeared from inside the elevator that reframed the doors from closing. You ran inside, trying to catch your breath wanting to thank the stranger for holding the door. Once you regained your breath, you looked up to the stranger. Only to have the breath snatched from your lungs again.

It was him, the guy from the café. Your heart rate started to pick up. You realized that you had been staring at him this whole time. “A thank you would be nice, also close your mouth before a bug flies into it,” he said with a smirk. You felt your whole face go red. You swallowed the lump in your throat and mutter a small “Thank you” as you ducked your face into your hands to hide the embarrassment.

“What floor do you live on,” he asked while staring at you intently. As you picked your head from your hands, and look at him in the eyes. “F-four,” you stuttered. He smiled. You slightly gasped. “He has such a cute smile,” you thought. He had already pressed the number four, you noticed that they weren’t any other numbers lit on the panel. Your mind started to wonder, “Does he live on the same floor as me?”

He cleared his throat, which caught your attention. “Do you work tomorrow,” he asked smoothly. “No,” you mumbled. You could see his face contour. “Oh well, I guess I won’t see that beautiful smile of yours’ tomorrow morning then,” he sighed. Your face went red. “W-well um if you’re not too uh b-busy tomorrow, we could uh p-possibly hang out,” you stuttered out. He grinned. “I would love that, what number are you in,” he questioned. “204,” you muttered.

His smile grew, “I’ll stop by after I get myself a cup of coffee, by the way what is your name?” “Y/N,” you said quickly. “Hello, Y/N its finally good to know the name of the girl who makes the best coffee in the city,” he says happily. The elevator dinged, letting you know you finally reached your floor. Once the doors open, he wistfully walked out; you tailed behind him. When you realized that you were heading down the same hall, you began to wonder “Is he walking me to my door?”

It was then, that you realized he lived right next door to you. You came to a halting stop in front of his door, as he pulled out his keys. With a hand on the door knob, he turned around to look at you with a smile. “Well, I will see you tomorrow then,” he grinned. You just nodded, unable to speak. He was half way through the door when you finally spoke up, “Wait, I didn’t get your name.” He chuckled, “Its Yoongi, my name is Yoongi.” You grinned, “Such a lovely name, I’ll see you tomorrow Yoongi.” You walked to your door, unlocked it, and rushed inside. Your apartment was a mess, and Yoongi was coming over tomorrow.

“Fuck!”

It’s time to clean.

The Next Day

It was 7:00 AM, when you forced yourself out of bed. You had spent most of the night cleaning your apartment, staying up till 2AM. In other words, you pretty much didn’t get any sleep. Your mind was constantly thinking about Yoongi. You could feel the butterflies in your stomach. You finished fixing a few things here and there, before hopping into the shower. By the time, you were done getting ready it was 8:30AM. You were about to start cooking breakfast when you heard a knock on the door. “Give me a minute, “you yelled.

You rushed to the door, taking in a few deep breaths before opening it. “Good morning, Yoongi,” you smiled. “Morning beautiful,” he said smoothly. You couldn’t help but blush. You lead him, through your apartment. Guiding him to the kitchen.

“Um, would you like me to cook you some breakfast,” you asked shyly. He sipped on his coffee and giggled, “Yeah, that would be nice.” You had made breakfast for both you. Due to the fact of you not having a dining room table, you lead him to the living room where you normally ate all your meals.

“Would you like to watch anything, I have Netflix,” you asked. “I’d rather watch you,” he smirked. You couldn’t help yourself, but giggle. Instead of watching television, you both sat and talked about random things through the morning.

“Hey is it possible for me to get your number,” he asked coyly as he handed you his phone. As you typed your number into his phone, you couldn’t help but look up at him too see him blushing. “Here you go,” you said as you handed him back his phone.

“I’ll text you when I have a chance,” he smiled. You just nodded your head, as you gazed at this facial features intently. You just loved his smile, it was like the sun was rising.

Yoongi, looked down at his phone to check the time to only see that it was already 1PM. You watched his face, as he released a sigh. “Hey, what’s wrong?” you asked.

“I have to go to work, I really don’t want too,” he whispered. You sat there and watched him as he ruffled his hair with his hands. You gathered both of your plates and shuffled to the kitchen, he followed.

Suddenly he wrapped his arms around you, pulling you closer to him. He rested his head into your hair. You were enveloped in his scent. He gently placed a kiss on your forehead, and pulled away. Only to see you, frozen with your face flushed. He walked out, apologizing for having to leaving so soon.

As soon as the door closed, you stumped on to the floor. You couldn’t help yourself, but smile.

A Few Days Later

               You hadn’t really seen or heard from Yoongi. He had only stopped by your job to get coffee like he always did every morning. You were trying hard not to feel upset over it, you figured he must have been busy with work.

               It was 5:00PM, as you sat there at your computer; editing your photos you had taken days ago. You stumbled upon the pictures, you had taken of Yoongi. You sat there frozen at the sight of them,  found yourself breathless. You could feel the pang in your heart grow.

               Suddenly, your phone vibrated. You checked it, and it was a message from a number you didn’t recognize.

5:20PM

Unknown Number: Hey Y/N, its Yoongi. I hope I’m not bothering you.. (:

5:21PM

Y/N: Hey Yoongi (: You’re not bothering me.

5:22PM

Yoongi: what are you doing, exactly? If you don’t mind me asking.

You sat there, staring at your phone. You couldn’t admit to staring at photos of him, that would make you sound like a creep.

5:30PM

Y/N: Uh, yeah, it’s fine. I’m just editing some pictures I took a few days ago. Without thinking, you typed away.

Y/N: Hey since we really don’t know anything about each, do you want ask each other a few questions. Is that fine?  

5:35PM

Yoongi: Sure (:

Y/n: what’s your favorite color?

Yoongi: White

Y/N: Mines, Y/F/C

5:36PM

Yoongi: How old are you?

Y/N: I’m 22, what about you?

Yoongi: 25

5:38PM

Y/N: what’s your favorite type of dog?

Yoongi: Corgis, DUH!

Y/N: Same lol

You smiled. You were really enjoying your conversation with Yoongi.

5:40PM

Yoongi: what’s your favorite thing to do?

Y/N: Take pictures

Yoongi: Sleeping

You had busted out in laughter! Sleeping? Is sleeping even consider a hobby?

5:41PM

Y/N: what do you do for a living?

Yoongi: I’m a rapper, but I also have a day job where I am a part-time producer at a studio.

Y/N: WAIT! WHAT? You’re a rapper???!?!?

HOLY SHITEU!!! Yoongi is a rapper!!! No wonder, you always heard music thumping in the middle of the night. You were freaking out, so much that bumped into you dropped your mug. Causing it to fall and shatter on your floor.

“FUCK!” you yelled.

Suddenly, you heard someone knocking at your door. You walked around the shattered porcelain, to answer the door.

“Who could that be?” you wondered.

[technacad-blog]

The Best, the Rest, the Rare: 100 AutoCAD Tips You Should Know

From Cadnotes.com by Edwin Prakoso 

We all want to use AutoCAD better, more productive, and easily solve problem when we have one. So I compile 100 AutoCAD tips in this article, and I hope can help you. Many of the tips were written by other great CAD bloggers, you may want to follow their blog/site as well. So this is it: the best AutoCAD tips, the rest that many of us miss, and some of them are very rare. If you happen about my age, you might know I pick the name from Helloween compilation album ;)

Create and modify

Tip 1. How to: Create an Arc with Specific Length

Everybody knows how to create an arc in AutoCAD. If you need to draw an arc with specific length, do you know how to do it? See this tip how you can create an arc with specific length!

Advertisement - Article continues below

Tip 2. Align Tool: Move, Rotate, and Scale Your Object at Once

Align is often overlooked by many AutoCAD users. Instead of using move, rotate, and scale separately, you can do it at once using this tool.

As Robin Capper said, it’s a forgotten AutoCAD hero! See the animation how to use it in Robin’s post.

Tip 3. How to Control Linetype Scale

We use linetype to control the object appearances. It can be dashdot for center lines, dashed lines for hidden lines, etc. Sometimes we have a hard time to control the linetype scale. And we can’t see the linetype as we expected. It is not that difficult actually.

See this tip: Controlling Linetype Scale is as Easy as 1,2,3!

Tip 4. 10+ Ways to Select Objects in AutoCAD

When you use modifying tools, you need to select objects. Selecting objects sometimes can be tricky, especially in quite a complex drawing. This tip have 10 ways how you can use the object selection. Useful for beginners, and some methods might be missed by advanced users. See the complete list!

Tip 5. How to: Create Angular Dimension Larger than 180 degrees

Do you need to create an angular dimension that shows angle larger than 180 degrees like below? You probably have found that you can’t create dimension with angle larger than 180 degrees after selecting those two lines.

You can actually… You can create it by selecting the lines’ vertex. Read more, and see the animation how to do it here.

Tip 6. How to Match Only Selected AutoCAD Properties

MATCHPROP is a great tool to match object properties. I used to draw everything and match the attributes later. It was quicker sometimes (but I won’t recommend you). The most obvious is when we get a drawing that is created with different standard. Sometimes we want to match only some properties between objects. Many of us don’t realize that we can choose which properties to match. I found this a couple years ago, quite late I guess. There is See the options below.

Read the complete tip here.

Tip 7. How to Link Cells Between AutoCAD Tables

We can create and use tables in AutoCAD almost as powerful as in Microsoft Excel. We can also use formula and do simple calculation. But do you know that we can use the value from cells in other table?

See the detail article in JTB World by Jimmy Bergmark.

Tip 8. How to Maintain the Attributes Value when Exploding

Block attributes is a nice tool to have. We can use it to preserve text style and size as annotation block. Drawing title and title block is a good example. The problem is when we need it explode it somehow, we will loose any information we put in the attribute.

To preserve the values, do not use explode. Use BURST instead.

Tip 9. How to Maximize Your Hyperlinks Usability

Hyperlinks are very useful to provide information for your objects. You can link any object to the manufacturer/support website, technical support email, specification documents, etc. See the tip how to reference to objects using hyperlink here. JTB World blog also has a good basic tutorial how to use hyperlinks.

They even write in very detail tip how to extend the capabilities. You can refer to a specific page in pdf, specific sheet and cell in Excel, etc. Find out the details in this page on JTB World Blog. Murray Clack also gives a tip how you can use hyperlinks to navigate between paper space and model space. See tip no. 12 here.

Tip 10. How to: Enable Snap to Hatch

Old AutoCAD version allows you to snap to hatches. In later version, this is disabled by default to optimize performance. However, if you want to enable this, you still can turn it on in drafting settings.

This behavior is controlled by OSOPTIONS system variable. Read more here.

Tip 11. Import XY Coordinates from Excel into AutoCAD

Do you need to draw lines using coordinate from excel file? The best application to do this is Civil3D or other site modeling software. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it using vanilla AutoCAD! Read the

details in Shaan Hurley’s Blog

.

Tip 12. Change Your MText to Lower Case or Upper Case

You might made a mistake and want to change the text case… either to lower case or upper case. Do you need to re-type it? No way! It is easy to do.

Right click in the editor and select the CHANGE CASE option.

Alternatively, press [Ctrl] + [Shift] + U to set the text to upper Case OR press [Ctrl] + [Shift] + L to set the text to lower case

Thanks to Brian for the tip!

Tip 13. Group When You Gotta Keep ‘Em Separated!

If you need to modify object together, selecting them could be tedious. Especially when your drawing is quite complex. Block is an option. However, working with blocks mean that we need to edit in as a whole. Group might be more appropriate for this purpose. There are some benefits that you can get by using groups when you think block is not the right solution. See below. Block will only allows you to have one grip point, unless you create dynamic block. Groups will maintain the original objects’ grip, but you can easily select them in one click.

See Brian’s tip about group in this article. And that is a funky title Brian!

Tip 14. Eleven killer AutoCAD macros for viewport

Do you work with viewport and layout? Paul Munford shares eleven great macros to make you even more productive with viewports! Read all the eleven killer macros here.

Tip 15. Get the Most of Multiline Attributes

AutoCAD now allow us to use multiline attributes. This of course will take many advantages from multiline text (not all), not just using simple single line text!

Now we can use text mask.

Now we can create stacked text in attributes.

And more multiline advantages!

Note: To enable stacking in block attributes, we need to change the system variable ATTIPE to 1.

This tips was submitted by Murray Clack in our contest before.

Tip 16. The Forgotten Dimension: DIMROTATED

Do you ever have problem when dimensioning when the objects are staggered? Using DIMALIGNED can’t do this. A great tip from Murray mention that we can use DIMROTATED. See the comparison between DIMALIGNED and DIMROTATED below.

There is no documentation or toolbar about it. It might be forgotten, but I’m sure you will find it really useful! This tips was submitted by Murray Clack.

Tip 17. Fillet and Chamfer for Quick Modify

OK, you know what are fillet and chamfer for. Do you know that we can use fillet and chamfer to quickly modify objects?

Trim and chamfer can be used to quickly create a corner. Use 0 as the radius (or chamfer distance). They will extend or trim the lines. Hold [shift] to override the radius/distance to 0 temporarily.

The method above will join the lines as polyline, if one of them is a polyline.

Use fillet to create arc to close parallel lines, regardless on the radius defined.

Tip 18. Align Texts Using Quick Properties Palette

Do you hate quick properties palette? Don’t! I know that many users immediately turn it off because it makes AutoCAD slow and when the palette appears, it can block your view. However, you should consider using it after read this tip. You can use it to quickly align texts using quick properties palette. See this nice tip on CAD Forum.

Tip 19. Filter Objects Using Quick Properties Palette

Another reason to use quick properties palette. We can use it to quickly filter our selection. Orhan Toker shares this nice tip on Daily AutoCAD.

Tip 20. How to: Create Multi Colored Line

Do you need to create a line that has multi color like below? It looks impossible, but yes you can make it!

A nice trick by Vladimir Michl. See how to do it here in Xanadu!

Tip 21. How to: Convert Spline to Polyline

Do you need to convert your splines to polyline? The easiest way is if you have express tools installed. You can use FLATTEN to quickly convert them. However, there are more ways if it fails. See the other ways to do that in CAD Panacea.

Tip 22. How to: Modify Objects With Non-Uniform Scale

This is a challenge for me before. I tried to create a circular railing. In elevation view, it should be getting tighter like below.

The solution is quite simple. But it’s a boring repetitive task. You need to create the railing panel as a block, then insert it with different scale on one axis. See the complete explanation here.

Tip 23. How to: Create 2D Isometric Drawing in AutoCAD

AutoCAD has a setting that allows you to draw 2D isometric diagram. You can activate the ‘isometric mode’ by changing the snap grid style. See the details how to set it in this post: Isometric Drawing in AutoCAD

Tip 24. How to Create Isometric Text and Dimension

In tip 23, you know how to create isometric drawing. But do you know how to create isometric text and dimension like above? See how you can do it in AutoCAD Isometric Text and Dimension

Tip 25. How to: Create Isometric Dimension Arrow

Many people may not notice about this one. See the dimension arrow in the isometric drawing. It doesn’t look right. It suppose to look like below.

This tip will show you how to create an isometric arrow for your dimension. This tip can also be used to create your own dimension arrow. See the tip here: Isometric Dimension Arrow

Tip 26. How to: Force Styles to Match Your Standard

One problem we have in daily work: we need to match some drawings to our styles. Creating new drawing to match our dimension styles, text styles, layers, etc is easy. The problem is when we already have a drawing with different styles. Or worse, the styles have the same name but the properties are different! This tip probably can help: enforcing Dimension Styles Across Your Drawings

Tip 27. How to: Select Objects with Windows Behavior

AutoCAD is a very unique application. It has different way to use shortcut. It has different way to ask input from the users. While other application use dialog box, AutoCAD use command line. And selecting objects is different to. In most Windows application, when we select a new object, then the previous selection set will be cleared. We need to hold [ctrl] or [shift] to add objects to selection set. You may not use AutoCAD that much, so you want AutoCAD to behave like other application you have. You can set the selection behavior by changing the PICKADD system variable to 0. The default value is 2.

Manage

Tip 28. How to: Set All Objects’ Properties to ByLayer

I never like when I receive drawings with many of the properties are overridden. Especially if they are all are drawn in Layer 0! Sometimes I need to change the properties back to ByLayer. It should be easy to do, just select the objects and change it from the properties drop down menu… right? Not really! Objects’ properties within blocks will not be changed. We are lucky that we have this tool: SETBYLAYER.

If you have problem using it, see the detail here.

Tip 29. How to: Purge Persistent Layer

Purge is the first tool that come in mind when we need to purge our layer. However, some layers are persistent and can’t be purged. If this annoys you, then this tip can be the cure. See this tip how to remove the persistent layer in JTB World.

Tip 30. Which Objects are on Which Layer?

When we have a quite complex drawing, it is become hard when we need to check which objects are on which layer. Our hero to easily check this is Layer Walk or LAYWALK.

See the animation how it works here. Mark W Kiker also write a detailed tip on his blog here.

Tip 31. How to: Place Dimensions or Hatches to a Predefined Layer

Managing layer standard sometimes very hard to do. We might miss changing the layer accidently before placing our dimension or hatches. If you do care about layering standard and want to prevent your user from making mistakes, Vladimir Michl shares this tip. This is 5 ways you can do to prevent the mistakes in Xanadu.

Tip 32. How to: Create Layer List from a Drawing to Excel Table

Need to report all your layers and their properties to an Excel table? Don’t be afraid… It’s easy to do! You can use this tip by Jimmy Bergmark.

Reusable contents

Tip 33. Reduce Your File Size by Using Block

Block is one of the most important productivity tools, I wrote many tutorials about it, even write an e-book to cover only this topic. Using reusable content is faster, easy to manage, and can be used for many automation later.

What interest me is Robin Capper found that using block will also decrease your file size significantly. Thank you for sharing Robin. If you have more than one instance of your object, consider to use blocks. Especially in 3D, it can reduce file size significantly.

Tip 34. How to: Create Tool Palettes From Block Libraries

If you already have a drawing that you consider as a standard, you may want to use the blocks from that drawing. The easiest way to manage the blocks is using tool palette. So do we need to open the drawings, drag and drop each block to the palette? No way! You can use design center and create the palettes just with a few clicks! Open design center, find you file. Expand the (+) sign, right click on blocks. Do you notice the ‘create design center’ tool? Click it and you will have all blocks in that file in a palette!

This is why you should consider to have drawings as block libraries.

Tip 35. How to: Re-path AutoCAD Drawing Reference Files

How can you update and re-path AutoCAD drawing reference files such as other drawing files, fonts, or plot configuration files after a path has changed? Reference Manager is the answer for this mess.

See the details in Shaan Hurley’s Blog here!

Tip 36. How to: Duplicate Block Definition

When we want to create a similar block from existing block, how do you do it? Explode it and recreate block with different name? You will have a lot of problem when you have block with many dynamic block parameters and actions! In dynamic block editor, we can save the block as different name. Yes, there is ‘save block as’ tool in open/save panel!

Thank you for Murray Clack for the nice tip!

Tip 37. Using Mask and Alignment in Dynamic Block

Dynamic block can be very useful. There are so many tricks that we can do with dynamic block actions. In this tip, you can use align tool for schematic drawings (P&ID, electrical schematic, etc).

Not cool enough? Add mask so when you place the symbol, your line is automatically ‘trimmed’. When you need to move it, you don’t need to modify the line, because we never actually trimmed it! Read the tip here. See another magic with masking in door block here.

Interface and accessing tools

Tip 38. Using Shift Key Combination

Every body want to work faster. And probably using less key or tools. Have you used the [shift] key to speed up your work? You can access shortcuts, override tools, etc by using [shift] key. See the common 6 [shift] key combination here.

Tip 39. AutoCAD Command Alias

The most powerful shortcut in AutoCAD is the command alias. You simply need to type L then [enter] to activate line. C for circle, etc. If you are interested to see the complete list of the command alias… or may be want to customize it, you can see and edit your acad.pgp file.

See how you can see and manage this alias commands.

Tip 40. AutoCAD Keyboard Shortcuts

Almost all AutoCAD users (99% I believe) know the AutoCAD pgp shortcut. At least how to use it. But do you know the shortcuts using function keys (F1 to F12), using [ctrl], [shift], or [alt]? CADForum has the list. See the AutoCAD shortcuts list here.

Tip 41. How to Cycle AutoCAD Commands

If you new to AutoCAD, and saw how the veterans and AutoCAD ninjas using the command line, you probably want to do the same. The problem is AutoCAD has so many commands and system variables. Someone told me it was like 900 something. The good thing is, most command in command line also use similar name in ribbon. Then we can cycle to find the tool. For example, you want to create a rectangle. You tried to press R [enter], well it’s not the right one. Neither is RE. No need to guess like that. Enter the first (or several) character and press [TAB] to cycle between commands!

Tip 42. How to: Control Mouse Wheel Speed

Do you ever feel your mouse wheel is zooming to fast? You can change the ZOOMFACTOR system variable. The default is 60, higher value will increase the zoom speed and lower value will decrease the speed. 3-100 is the valid value. Thanks to Shaan who share it on his blog.

Tip 43. How to: Reverse Mouse Wheel Direction

And do you ever feel the wheel direction is going the wrong way? If you use Inventor primarily, then you want AutoCAD to behave like Inventor, not the other way. I know you can reverse Inventor wheel. But you can use ZOOMWHEEL to control this behavior in AutoCAD. Shaan Hurley shares this tip in Between the Lines.

Tip 44. Optimize Your Palette Placement

Autodesk has introduced palettes in AutoCAD. The advantage of using palette is, you can change the value on the fly, without having to click OK and close it like in dialog boxes. It is much easier to use, and you can always let it open and put it somewhere on your screen. The problem is having all the palettes open will take a lot of screen space. This tip will share how you can optimize the palette placement. So you can have the advantages without sacrifice your screen space. Read the detail here.

Tip 45. Setup Your Workspace with Initial Setup

Workspace is very useful when you need to work with different environment. Or at least when you need to set your own interface, template, etc. Since AutoCAD 2010, Autodesk introduced Initial Setup. This is a wizard that you can use to easily setup your settings. What I love the most about initial setup is we can easily define our template and industry. Read about initial setup in Brian’s blog.

Tip 46. Pin to Make It Stick!

Do you have favorite files or favorite tools? You can make your favorites sticky in application menu or other part of your screen. See the pin icon?

If you like it, then pin it! Brian shares this tip on his blog.

Tip 47. Control UCS Icon Position

When we open a new AutoCAD drawing, UCS Icon becomes available and will be locked at the origin. However, if the origin remains in the middle of our drawing, UCS Icon will disturb us as it will always be in the view. The solution is very easy… You can change UCSICON system variable to Noorigin.

Try to see UCSICON properties too. You might like what you can change here.

Tip 48. Control Extended Tool Tip Behavior

Since AutoCAD has ribbon, Autodesk introduce ‘extended help’ when you let your pointer a while on a tool. This is a great feature for people who just learn using AutoCAD, and when we want to know a quick explanation on a tool.

For the veteran users, this extended help might not be so great. You might feel the tool tip disturbs you. See how Brian’s shares his tip to control this behavior.

Tip 49. How to: Use Classic Layer Dialog

Layer Properties dialog box is now using palette. You can change anything without having to close the dialog box to apply the changes. However, if you for any reason the palette and want to use the classic dialog box… don’t worry. You still can have it.

It’s all about system variable. See how you can control this behavior in Daily AutoCAD.

Tip 50. How to: Use Ribbon Shortcut Key

Every application has shortcuts. AutoCAD might be has unique shortcut in command alias. But now we can use ribbon shortcuts that can be applied to applications that have ribbon! Microsoft Office applications have this shortcuts, and all Autodesk applications with ribbon also have it. See how to Maximize Your Screen and Speed Up with Ribbon Shortcut.

Tip 51. How to See Complete AutoCAD System Variable List

In many cases, you can change the options through option dialog box. However, there are many that requires you to change it in system variable by typing it in command line. And if you seriously want to create custom command or going further to programming, you need to know the system variables. System variable might change from version to version. Even if you are a veteran programmer, you might need to check them from time to time. Read this tip: how to: see Your Complete AutoCAD System Variable List

Tip 52. How to backup system variables

If you have express tools installed on your machine, then you can see the system variable list and change the system variable easily. You can open a dialog box that show you the list, show you the current value, initial value, and the description about what it does. The nice thing about this tool is you can backup and restore your system variables when things go wrong!

Read how you can backup system variables here.

Tip 53. Cool Way to Open Your Drawing: Drag and Drop Your File!

Sometimes I just hate to open files from dialog box. Some files are not easy to find from a small dialog box, so I need to find it from my Windows Explorer or doing search/find. It would be a waste of time if I have to point my open dialog box to that file location. So what do I do? Just drag and drop to open it! This is also useful if you have several application that can open the same file type. You can drag to application that you want to open it. See the other way to do it in this tip!

Tip 54. How to: Use Sub Object Selection Filter

Autodesk now allows us to modify objects using the sub-objects. We can use sub objects to quickly modify objects, either in 2D or 3D. To easily select the sub-objects, you can use the object selection filter.

See how to use sub object selection filter and modify your objects here.

Tip 55. How to: Protect Tool Palettes

Currently I and my colleague are trying to submit a project to develop a drawing system. It means we are going to create their reusable contents, templates, drawing standards, and some customization tools. Then here comes a question: How we can protect the tool palettes?

See this tip how you can protect your palettes!

Tip 56. Make Your Ribbon Panels Sticky!

Having ribbon interface sometimes so annoying when we have to move to different tabs frequently. We can just tear off some panels I use frequently, and stick to home tab. See Shaan Hurley’s tip on AutoCAD 2010 Sticky Ribbon Panels.

Plot, publish and share

Tip 57. Pack Your Files as an e-Transmit

We are now living in 21st century (unless you read this in the next century). Most of us rely heavily on digital data. Also when we work with AutoCAD. The problem when we send our files to the others is sometimes we left our files behind.  Either a reference file (XREF), plot style table, custom fonts, etc. Don’t worry, AutoCAD has the right tool to pack all files that relate to the drawing to a zip file, ready for you to send. You will not miss any files again! Read the detail here.

Tip 58. How to Rotate Viewport in Layout/Paper Space

If you are a surveyor, civil engineer, or architect, we need to draw in model space the real-world coordinate and orientation. However sometimes we want to rotate the drawing orientation to match the paper for plotting/publishing purpose. See this tips how to rotate your viewport in Xanadu.

Tip 59. Five Steps Preparing AutoCAD Plot

Setting up plot for beginners often become confusing. Using scale, setting up title blocks, etc… Plotting is actually very easy. Simple. Just click plot or publish then you’re done. But there are some rules and steps you have to do when you draw and arrange your model in layouts, it’s already started when you create your file! See the tip how you can prepare your AutoCAD plot easily

Tip 60. How to: Render 3D Drawings as Wireframe

This question has been asked a couple times. Can I render my 3d drawing as wireframe image? Not really. But you can plot your drawing to image… as wireframe, sketches, or anything you can define as visual styles. Read how you can render Wireframe Image from AutoCAD

Tip 61. How to Plot .PLT or .PRN file

Do you get .plt or .prn file, and want to plot it? This is a tip on Xanadu how to plot your .plt or .prn files.

Tip 62. How to Create High Resolution Image From AutoCAD Drawing

Do you need to present you drawing in Word or PowerPoint document? We need to create an image from the drawing. The common way to do it is by capturing the screen, but the image is not good enough when we place it. We want to have high resolution image and apply our plot styles. Have you ever try to plot it? AutoCAD has Publish toWeb plot drivers, so you can get JPEG or PNG format! If you need more file format, you can also add new plotter drivers, so you can get uncompressed image like TIFF, TGA, or BMP! Read the detail here.

Visualize

Tip 63. How to: Create Sketch Like Drawing

The image above was a regular drawing. I didn’t actually create a sketch, but we can manipulate the visual styles, so it looks like a sketch. See how to create the sketch here.

Tip 64. How to: Show Bump Maps Real Time in AutoCAD 2011

AutoCAD has developed further than just a 2D drawing application. The biggest advantage is when you use it as vertical product platform like AutoCAD Architecture. But in vanilla AutoCAD, you can also can impress people with the 3D capabilities. In AutoCAD 2011, you can show bump maps in real time. Shaan Hurley shows you how to do it here.

Tip 65. How to: Create Different Drawing Representation with Layer States

Do you need to turn on/off layers frequently to show different drawing representation? Or do you need to represent your drawings differently in different viewports? You can do that easily using layer states. See how you can create different drawing representation here

Automate and customize

Tip 66. Take Your Drawing to the Next Level with Data Extraction

Again, AutoCAD can be used further than just as drawing tool. You can use the data and create reports such as schedules, set out points, part lists, and holes table. This is a post that list how you can use data extraction. Shaan Hurley also give an example to use data extraction for creating part list.

Tip 67. How to: Quickly Count Your Block

Although DATAEXTRACTION can give very detailed information, sometimes you need to just quickly count your blocks to give an idea about your design. BCOUNT is the right tool for this. Brian Benton mention this tip in his blog.

Tip 68. Reporting Hatch Area With Field

Text field is also a useful automation to report almost anything in your drawing. In title block, you can use title block to automatically show the plot date, file name, etc. You can also report area using field.

Shaan Hurley wrote a nice tutorial about this here.

Tip 69. How to Create Your Own AutoCAD Linetype

AutoCAD already has many linetypes. However, to fulfill your needs or to match local standard, you might need to create your own linetypes. If you have express tools installed, it is not hard to do. Read the complete tutorial here.

Tip 70. Georeferenced Image in Vanilla AutoCAD

This functionality only available for AutoCAD Map, Civil3D, and Raster Design. If you use vanilla AutoCAD, you can use this free utility. See the details and download it here.

Tip 71. Translate Your Text Object to Other Language

Need to translate your texts to other language? This is a tool that’s design to do that!

See the details and download it here.

Tip 72. Using AutoCAD Startup Dialog Box

Do you miss the old AutoCAD startup dialog box? I love the startup dialog because we can choose our template before let AutoCAD create a new file. For the simplest template, we can choose metric or imperial. If you want to show this dialog box every time create a new drawing, set system variable STARTUP to 1.

Tip 73. AutoCAD Info in Windows Explorer

Every file has meta data information. The information can be useful to have a quick look before you actually open the file. You can set the windows explorer to show the meta data when you choose to view details.

See how to do it here.

Tip 74. Working with DWG Properties

This is the advanced tip of exposing the file meta data. Further more, you can customize more information to show on windows explorer.

Interested to see more? This is a very nice detailed tutorial how you can optimize this DWG properties.

Tip 75. How to Set Previous Version as Default When Saving

Do you have different AutoCAD versions in your company? If you do, one problem that you will find is the file version. You need to save it as to lower version. Sometimes you forget to do it, and your colleague can’t open it. To prevent that to happen, you can set AutoCAD to save the files to older version of AutoCAD, by default. In the file dialog box, select tools>options.

In this example, I set it to AutoCAD 2000.

Tip 76. DWG TrueView: Open and Convert to Any DWG Version

This is the opposite problem from tip 75. What if you have older version of AutoCAD, but you receive files saved by later version? One file might be easy, you can ask someone to convert it to old version. What it you have dozens, hundreds drawings?

You can use DWG TrueView, a free DWG viewer. Not only open DWG, you can save the files to older version. You can also batch convert all files in a folder. Download DWG TrueView here: http://autodesk.com/dwg

Tip 77. How to Add Your Own MTEXT Symbol

If you right click your mouse when using MTEXT, you will see a contextual menu that allows you to add predefined symbols. You can add your own symbols or text to that menu.

To put your own symbols/text, you can use this AutoLISP code here from JTB World.

Tip 78. Using Custom Field

Field is very useful in many cases. Many drawing and object properties can be shown by fields. However, you might need to create your own field. Brian write this step-by-step tutorial how you can do it here. Brian uses sheet set custom properties on his post.

Tip 79. How to: Create a New Command in AutoCAD

If you want to learn how to create a new AutoCAD command, this tip could be useful. This is not an advanced tutorial, but at least can give you a quick look how to do it. This tutorial use some simple macros, changing the current layer’s properties to ByLayer. See the tip here.

Tip 80. How to: Add Command to Contextual menu

Now that you know how to create a new command, how can we add it to contextual menu? We want to select objects, right click, and see the tool. If you want to know how to do it, read this tip here.

Tip 81. How To Create A Ribbon Panel

Now you can create a new command on toolbar, new command on contextual menu. How about creating a ribbon panel? If you do love using ribbon, then you would like you have your new command on ribbon. See Brian’s tip how to create a ribbon panel.

Tip 82. How to Use Local Help File as Default in 2011 Version

AutoCAD 2011 (and other Autodesk products) now use online help file as default. For some reason, you probably don’t like it. You can change the default help file to local help file. It is still using html file, but at least it always use local file. See How to: Set Local Help File as Default in 2011 Version If you still don’t like the html help file and want to use the old chm style, see the tip from Shaan Hurley here.

Tip 83. How to: Label Coordinate in AutoCAD

This is a tip how you can use dynamic block and field in vanilla AutoCAD. You can easily place an annotation block to label your coordinate. It is very easy, and you only need AutoCAD to do it! This is quite popular tip in CAD Notes.

Read how to do it in How to: Label Coordinate in AutoCAD

Tip 84. How to: Report Multiple Coordinates in a Block

This is similar with tip 83. The challenge here is having more than one set out points and report them from a block. The example is extracting set out points from a Gully.

Read this tip: Reporting Multiple Coordinates in A Block

Troubleshooting

Tip 85. AutoCAD Installation Troubleshoot

Having problem installing AutoCAD? Then you are not alone. Installing AutoCAD mostly is easy. But there are many prerequisite that installed before AutoCAD installation. Most of the installation failure happen at that stage. You may want to check everything before start installing AutoCAD. Or you can check this list when the installation fail. Read the installation check list here.

Tip 86. Troubleshooting AutoCAD Graphic Issue

Every year AutoCAD configurations get more complex. For example, one large jump in complexity happened in AutoCAD 2007 when Autodesk introduced Hardware acceleration. This is a check list of troubleshooting AutoCAD crashes that could be graphics related. See the information here on Between the Lines.

Tip 87. AutoCAD is not Accurate

If you work on a large drawing or draw objects far away from 0,0,0; you might find out that your drawing is no longer accurate. To solve this problem, you can try to reduce the coordinate number by do the following:

If you don’t need to use global coordinate for your model location, then move your model closer to 0,0,0.

If you need to use global coordinate, consider to use larger unit (m or feet, or even larger. This occur mostly in mm unit)

You can also consider to draw your model at 0,0, and use global coordinate in master plan only. Place your model as external reference (XREF) using global coordinate in master plan.

Another good workaround suggested by Dave Wolfe: We can draw the model at 0,0. Then create a saved UCS to define project location. Anytime you need to retrieve coordinate for project location, you can activate the saved coordinate.

Tip 88. Fixing AutoCAD Ribbon

Sometimes ribbon is just broken and you will see only this text: The ribbon does not have any tabs or panels currently loaded.

If you see that error, this is a tip how you can fix your ribbon in JTB World.

Tip 89. Enabling/Disabling Multi Processor in AutoCAD

Have you used your Workstation multi processor support for AutoCAD? Not sure? See how to control the system variable in Xanadu.

Tip 90. How to Improve Sheet Set Manager Performance

If you feel your sheet set manager (SSM) has a performance issue, then this might be able to help. Read the complete tips to improve Sheet Set Manager performance.

Tip 91. Clear ‘Sticky’ Sheet Set From Recent Document List

Even if you select “Clear Recent Document List” the Sheet Sets comes back to Recent Documents in the Menu Browser after a while. They actually comes back if you run the Sheet Set manager (command SSM) and have anything in that SSM Recent list. A side effect is that today’s date is used even if you have not even used that Sheet Set for a long time.

If you have problem getting rid of the AutoCAD sheet set from recent document list, try this tip.

Tip 92. Open File Dialog is Missing

Have you ever find when you try to open or save file, you don’t see the dialog box? Instead of dialog box, you see the text below on command line or dynamic input.

The problem is system variable has changed. Type FILEDIA in command line then press [enter]. Enter value 1 then [enter] again. You should now see the open file dialog box back to normal.

Tip 93. Open Multiple Documents in A single AutoCAD Session

AutoCAD can open multiple files in one AutoCAD session. We expect that AutoCAD will open another file in opened session when you double click a DWG file in Windows Explorer. But what if every time we double click a file in explorer, it will open the file in another AutoCAD session? To make AutoCAD open the file in one session, you need to set the system variable SDI to 1. If it still doesn’t work, try this tip from a discussion in CADTutor Forum.

Tip 94. Speed Up the Print Process

AutoCAD 2008 introduced to us BACKGROUND PROCESSING for plotting. The theory behind it is that it will free up your computer while printing so that you can continue to work. It sounds good. I like it when I am publishing something or batch plotting through the sheet set manager. The problem is that when you print behind the scenes, it takes longer. It takes longer because the computer is processing the printing, and processing your work. So I tried it. I switched it off and WOW!! The old printing speed returned. I have kept it off and my printing is much faster. See the complete tip from Brian how he optimize the printing speed.

Tip 95. Mouse Pointer is not Moving Smoothly

Do you ever find your mouse pointer not moving smoothly and jumping all around? If you take a good look, the pointer is actually snapping to drawing grids, and jump to the next grid intersection. You probably turn on the grid snap by accident. Press [F9] or turn it off from drafting settings.

Learn and knowledge update

Tip 96. A Simple Guide: 12 Steps to Master AutoCAD

Learning AutoCAD can be difficult when you try to learn by yourself. This tip has 12 steps you can follow to learn until you finally mastering AutoCAD. Do not rush it. No body can become a master in anything overnight! Read A Simple Guide: 12 steps to Mastering AutoCAD

Tip 97. Ten Ways to be More Efficient at AutoCAD

While tip 96 talks about the steps to learn AutoCAD, Brian Benton shares a tip to learn to be more efficient or productive with AutoCAD. It is a nice guide after you follow tip 96. But don’t jump to this tip if you just starting to learn! Read Ten Ways to be More Efficient at AutoCAD

Tip 98. How to Stay Up to Date with AutoCAD

This is a guest post by Ellen Finkelstein on CAD-a-Blog. This post shows you many channels and resources you could follow to stay up to date with AutoCAD. There are so many of them, either online or offline. Read How to stay up to date with AutoCAD

Tip 99. New Features Workshop

Do you update (I would say UPGRADE, but new doesn’t guarantee better) your AutoCAD software regularly? Or do you update it in intervals? Regardless, it can be difficult to know and understand what the new version has to offer. There is a built in tool inside of AutoCAD that will help you know and understand the new features and improvements in AutoCAD. It is called the New Features Workshop!

Tip 100. Using Info Center to Follow Your Favorite CAD Resources

The last one. We spend most of our time using AutoCAD (well, some of you do). When we get busy, we miss the updates from our favorite CAD resources. Don’t be! The good thing about web 2.0 technology is RSS. We can see the updates using RSS readers, or even AutoCAD! If your computer connects to internet, do you notice the pop up from info center on your right screen? It is the updates from predefined resources!

[minrcrafter]

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★ About Us ★

  Website

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  You should apply if one or more of the following applies to you:

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  ★ Server Basics ★

  MobGrief and FireSpread are OFF

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Players get 1 warp after 10 hours of play time

Warp signs are extremely limited and cost money to use

The End will be reset once a month

Fully functional nether hub that also serves as a hub for player warps.

Land claiming -- Griefprevention & Lockette

4000 block world you can see on our DynMap

Map generation and mob/treasure spawn rate is 100% vanilla

Plug-ins do not overwhelm vanilla players.

No hidden plug-ins! Unlike some servers, we list our plug-ins that you have access to all up-front so you know exactly what server you’ll be playing on. You can find a detailed list of our commands here

  ★ Server Perks ★

  New map! The map was created August 2017 in 1.12.

We are newbie friendly! Just starting MC or perhaps switching from console? We’d be glad to have you.

A chance to help build a new community and meet new friends!

Small map, with chances to grow!

Discord, voice chat optional! Ability to access Discord text chat via in-game chat!

Caring and mature staff members! (Yup, we’re all adults here.)

Weekly events or contests!

Loyal members (play time = 10 hours+) are awarded one warp from their home to the hub.

Website and wiki to archive fun and keep you updated.

Option to play with semi-vanilla plug-in perks or opt-out and play strict vanilla.

  ★ Future Plans ★

  Adding Multiverse for Creative & PvP Worlds

PvP Games

September – The End Opening & Ender Dragon Fight

October – Brewfest, Special Event & New Brewery Additions & Casino Grand Opening

November – Fishgiving, Special Event involving fishing & competitions

December – Minecraft Advent Calendar & Secret Santa

  ★ Rules ★

Community

Be kind and courteous to all members. Displays of toxic behavior that affect the community negative will not be tolerated.

Keep chat relatively family-friendly, occasional swearing is fine. Just remember, everything in moderation.

Players must be ages 18+. No exceptions.

Recruitment of the server is the sole duty of admin and staff.

No griefing. This includes stealing from claimed/unclaimed chests, pranking players without their consent, harvesting farms or animals that belong to other players, mass terraforming/deforestation in unclaimed areas, or destroying builds/items placed by other players.

Mechanics & Lag Prevention

Keep the map pretty. No stray torches, floating trees, abandoned boats/craft benches, or 1x1 towers.

Do not build or harvest within two hundred blocks of other players without consent. This includes mining. Mining should be in your claim and the general 200 block buffer from your claim. Do not mine long tunnels near players or cutting across the map unless you have permission from players to mine near them. (This is because our map is small right now.)

Animal/mob rooms should be kept at a reasonable entity number or they will be culled. Redstone devices should be controlled by an on/off switch and not left on. Floating redstone machines are not allowed.

X-ray, flying, hacking mods, or the use of in-game exploits is strictly prohibited.

Circumventing the AFK timer kick is prohibited.

  (Read Server Policies if you have any questions.)

  ★ What Our Members Say ★

  "To everyone still not sure if they should or not join this server i have been on for a little less than 6 hour but i can tell you already that the community is awesome and that this server got a lot to give us in the future so you should all apply and get on the server to come play with us!" - poker134

  "I've already got 20 hours of ingame time, and I'm enjoying myself so much. - The admins are very dedicated and friendly, and I'm looking forward to enjoying so many more hours together with the wonderful people who so far have joined the server. I've built a base on top of a mountain, opened a shop - supplying whoever needs it with lots of eggs, and are now starting to prepare for exploration of the world! If you play Minecraft for the sake of being social, and being part of a nice community, this server is 100% for you! Join our server, and buy my eggs!" - DeviantLilja

  "So I just joined this server yesterday morning, having a great time. To be honest I think the fact that I've been in game active for approx 14-15 hours so far testifys to how good it is here. Ive never met a more friendly and willing to help admin team. You have an issue, drop a message on discord and you'll have a pleasant and helpful response on minutes. The community is great, you can very much tell it's an adult and mature community when you first join there server. Before I took my first step after spawning in, I'd been greeted by numerous people and welcomed. Theres a well thought out tour when you exit the initial spawn building, guiding you on different aspects of the server. Theres books pre written to guide you on anything the tour may over look. If if your looking for a vanilla with sprinkles minecraft server, your over 18 and willing to get stuck in with a social group. Come join us. i look forward to playing with you." Glasi13

  "Hello everyone I am oldchuck, and this is a server you must try out, then get addicted to and play non stop. It is a economy based survival server, and it has so many features! Let's start with the spawn, it's beautiful and has plenty of signs to navigate and even a automated tour! There are hidden Easter eggs and secrets, shops and of course the magnificent train station. The map is fresh, it has alot to be left to explored, and it isn't cluttered with random buildings. Your items are grief proof with. Your claim block, but the community is so friendly there isn't a need to worry about it. This isn't your average server, I've been to plenty of servers where you have buy items with irl cash and gain a huge advantage, but that's not the case with this server. This server does have a donation option, but the price is 5$ and is totally optional and does not give another player a huge advantage not make them OP. I am a newish minecraft player to PC, and the staff has been so no d to guide me and teach me about the server and policies and gameplay, which is above and beyond for any staff. The rules are simple and so easy to follow, I've never even had to question if I'm breaking them. This server thrives off simplicity and a great support team. Please, do the hard working staff, the community, and yourself a favor and come try it out! My in-game name again is oldchuck and id love to build with any friendly players" - oldchuck

  Apply for Whitelist on our Website OR Apply for Whitelist on MCForums

  Please take your time and write enough in your application to give us a good idea of your personality.

  We look forward to seeing you in game! :)

[lalegumiste]

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

The man may be gone but so glad the music is still with us! This is not about David Bowie, of course. It’s about change. And how well some of us may or may not accept it. Or how quickly or not we accept it. Or how intensely we begin to crave it after too many years of sameness or indecision.  And how in the end we all adapt, one way or another. I just realized this is my hundredth post here, so the topic seems very apropos. It’s been waaay too long a time coming, and in the blogosphere, I believe I have achieved glacial pace. Although I’m pretty sure even glaciers these days are moving (errr, melting) faster than I do when updating this poor blog. 

Change is the only sure thing, and for me, accepting that has always been problematic. I’m a little better about it these days, but it will probably continue to be a work in progress for as long as I’m around. Anyways, I had lots to say about it, and typed it all out here, but ultimately decided that part of the post would be better located after the jump. If you want to skip directly to the recipes(don’t blame you), they are after the jump as well, and clearly separated from this more meandering portion.

Moving on to some food related changes. I may have written about this before, but I can’t remember and do not want to go back through the posts and figure it out. I come from a place with lots of food traditions, most of them involving meat, which I no longer eat. One of the biggest feasts takes place at Easter, and other than the dyed eggs and dessert, pretty much every dish involves meat. As my ties to the proverbial old country are getting older (I mean that literally), I am becoming more intent in trying to preserve some of the old recipes, but changing them to vegetarian versions, so that I can, in the future, uphold at least some of the links to the place I came from.

And so this past Easter, I made two of the traditional dishes, and changed the recipes to be both meatless, in the case of one and to use available ingredients, in the case of the other.

The first dish is a savory one called drob. It’s hard to describe it exactly, the closest I can come is to say that it is somewhere between a quiche and a mince pie, with a lot of herbs. Traditionally, it uses no dough, relying instead on a large piece of lamb’s intestine to hold the whole thing together. The filling is made by finely chopping all of the lamb’s entrails and mixing them with a lot of chopped fresh parsley and dill. The top gets brushed with a beaten egg, and the whole thing is baked until the top begins to brown. I will say this for my people - they really subscribe to the waste not/ want not mentality. This is an example of that mentality applied to the Easter lamb - every bit of it gets eaten or used. Still, this didn’t help me any when I got a craving for this “pie,” since the only thing I’m interested in doing to a lamb anymore is petting it. The changed recipe contains absolutely no meat or entrails, relying instead only on mushrooms and eggs. And a very large amount of fresh herbs, because that’s where the flavor really comes from.

The second recipe is for a traditional Easter dessert called pasca, which is essentially a cheesecake, a well flavored but not terribly sweet one. The funny thing is, growing up I refused to touch it, preferring chocolate or sugar eggs for my festive sweets. Then when I went back to visit Romania as an adult, my godmother made something  like pasca and after I tried it, I had to wonder why I’d refused it so strongly all those years ago. The traditional pasca is made with a fresh cow’s milk that I can’t purchase in the US. The dough, which is similar to the dough of the walnut cake we traditionally eat at both Easter and Christmas, is apparently  very involved and temperamental, and so far I have been dissuaded from even attempting it. Even if, according to family lore, my paternal grandmother was a master at it. Of course, no one has her recipe. This very special dough is used both as a bottom and a top for the cheese filling of the pasca, but since I was not going to be using it, I decided to use only a bottom crust in my adaptation and opted for phyllo dough in order to keep it thin and end up with those crunchy brown edges. Obviously, I also changed the type of cheese. 

Whether you read this far or skipped straight to the bottom, the recipes for both my vegetarian drob and cheesecake-like pasca are after the jump. I hope you enjoy them.

                                                       ***

This is not about how I will change my ways, and be more diligent about posting here, and getting on a schedule, etc - because I already wrote about that, and obviously it did not work and now I feel a bit like an errant kid.

This is more about some changes I’ve encountered that may or may not be related to my lapse in posting. If nothing else, it might help me sort out some thoughts, and what else is a blog good for if not for brain dumping into the world?

First of all, I became very enthralled with Instagram. Obviously, my writing here is not of the highly edited and fact checked variety, but after getting used to how easy it is to just post a picture and add some hashtags, using an actual keyboard to write out thoughts, spending more than two minutes putting something together before posting, well, it started to feel more and more “involved.” Which I guess is not something I felt like being for a bit. So, one of the changes was that I started posting pictures on the gram box regularly, and stopped even attempting to write here.

Second, I think I hit some kind of writer’s block/ boredom/ disenchantment as far as writing about food was concerned. I just couldn’t think about anything food related that I wanted to write about. Yes, I know how pretentious and borderline stupid that sounds, but it’s the way I felt. I did not want to write about my take on the chia bowl, or my adventures with non wheat flour baking, although I engaged in both. I felt a little bit like no one around me was eating real food anymore, and while I continued to cook and eat (of course!), I didn’t have much to say about it. So I didn’t. And yes, I know this is in part to spending too much time on Instagram.

Third, I started to question the validity of my posting here. It used to be that this was just something I did for me, giving me an outlet for my thoughts and maybe a bit of practice at writing, because we all know practice makes perfect. Ha! But after a few months of instantaneous likes on my Instagram posts, I started to feel a little miffed at not getting the same response here. Good old tree falling in the forest dilemma. Not sure why I couldn’t get past it, since it didn’t bother me before, but, there you have it.

Of course, after the extensive, although believe me, not exhaustive, rant, I guess I could have kept it a lot shorter and to the point: I’ve been neglecting my blog because of Instagram! But it’s never been my way to be quick and to the point, so I see no point in editing down this rant.

                                                      ***

Vegetarian Easter Pie (Drob)

1 lb mixed mushrooms (such as shiitake, cremini, oyster, button), finely chopped

1 bunch fresh dill, finely chopped

1 bunch parsley finely chopped

3 scallions, finely chopped

1 onion, finely chopped

2 hard boiled eggs, diced small

2 eggs well beaten

1 t fresh ground pepper

2 t salt, more to taste as needed

2 T olive oil

1 T butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Chop all the mushrooms, including stems, and place together in a large bowl.

Chop the parsley and dill and place together in a bowl.

Heat the olive oil and butter in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add the chopped onion and scallions and cook until softened, about 2-3 minutes.

Add the mushrooms and salt, stir to combine, and cook until the mushrooms have released all their moisture and any liquid has evaporated, about 5 minutes.

Add the dill, parsley and chopped hard boiled egg and stir to combine.

Remove from heat.

Beat the two eggs and add to the mixture, stirring to incorporate. Add salt and pepper and stir to combine, adding more salt if desired.

Coat the bottom and sides of a 9 inch pie dish with butter.

Pour the mushroom mixture into the pie dish and bake for 35 minutes or until the top begins to brown and the edges of the pie begin to come away from the pie dish.

Let cool to room temperature. Slice and serve with a green leafy salad - my favorite is torn butter lettuce leaves, red onion, and a simple red wine vinaigrette.

Cheesecake-like Pasca

1 32 oz container ricotta

1 oz cream cheese

1.5 T sour cream (optional)

4 eggs

1 cup raisins

4 t sugar

3.5 t vanilla sugar

zest from one lemon

rum (optional) or water

5 sheets phyllo dough

2 T butter, melted

*Note: This is less sweet than a typical cheesecake, although the raisins provide added pops of sweetness. You may want to taste the mixture after adding them to decide if you want to add more sugar than the recipe calls for.

Bring the rum to a low simmer over medium low heat. Remove from heat and pour over raisins in a small bowl, enough to cover the raisins with liquid. Cover with a small plate and set aside to steep, at least an hour. Drain the raisins very well in a fine mesh strainer. Follow the same steps with water if using instead of rum.

Preheat oven to 380 degrees F.

In a large bowl, using a hand mixer on low speed, mix together the cheeses, sour cream (if using), sugars and lemon zest.

Beat the eggs in, one at a time, until well incorporated.

Stir in the well drained raisins. Set mixture aside.

Brush the bottom and sides of a low 10 inch pie dish with melted butter. Layer a sheet of phyllo dough in the dish, centering it as well as possible, and press lightly so the dough adheres to the dish. Brush with melted butter, turn the dish slightly clockwise, and repeat with the next sheet of phyllo, brushing with butter again. Repeat until all phyllo sheets are in the dish and brushed with butter. Trim any excessive overhang around the pie dish, but leave some in order to be able to fold it around the filling.

Gently pour the cheese mixture into the prepared pie dish. Going around the pie dish, fold any phyllo overhang, almost as if braiding it over the edge of the filling, to create a bit of a decorative element. Brush the top of this braid with some melted butter.

Bake for 40 to 55 minutes, until the edges of the dough are browned, and the filling has become solid and slightly puffed.

Remove from oven, allow to cool to room temperature, slice and serve. It may take a while for the pie to cool to room temperature.