#when i downloaded these tools to do this i was NOT expecting this

[kittleskittle]

so. i used the horizon forbidden west camera tools and will never be the same.

all they do is smile at each other this entire fucking conversation and i can't handle it

the lingering looks just kill me now

[exeggcute]

the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators;  reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

[sgiandubh]

The Only Exception

I am back home, with a very dark, strong coffee under my nose.

None of your reactions disappointed. Some were enthusiastic. Others, less so: egos clashed, agendas were unsettled. This is not my problem and I am not going to comment further. Those persons are free to think whatever they want, of course. The Anon I was not sent apparently made the rounds in the shipper community: others got it and have their own take on what they saw - again, that is their point of view, not mine. I was simply sent a link to a YouTube clip and told to look for a possible hug at around the 01:00 mark. Suffice to say I had no particular expectations: in fact, I found that DM on my #silly way to the bathroom, at about 03:30 AM, local time. And then tried to make sense of it. That took me four hours.

This is the link I have been sent :https://youtu.be/h6lcHzBCFkM?feature=shared. And this is the clip. It is aerial footage (drone? I am not a specialist), taken live from the Paramore segment of Taylor Swift's Edinburgh concert:

First of all, I would like to walk you through my own steps, trying to make sense of it. Before anything else, I downloaded it from YouTube, using a basic free downloader, in 1080 p resolution, mp4 format, Full HD:

Then, as I told you, I simply used the VLC media player (https://www.videolan.org/) and its very easy, intuitive options:

Red arrow is the 'take a snapshot' button. Blue arrow is the 'frame by frame' button. I have patiently clicked frame by frame, and took tens of snapshots. Seeing all these in order gives you a very clear idea of what happened and one more time: I know what I saw. And then I opened the snapshots, zoomed on the tent where the cast was and snipped the S&C relevant portion of the image.

I have not brightened the images. I have not sharpened any contrasts. I did not want to adulterate anything. Zoom was an issue, because what you gain in focus, you sometimes lose in clarity. I have no idea of compression, resolution and such things.

Certainly not the best method and perhaps crude tools. I am NOT an expert videographer. I have NO formal training in that field. I just wanted to be of service. If you think you know better and can do better, by all means: be my guest. But do better and show arguments. Also, try to be civilized and do not insult me or come in DMs to tell me that somebody else saw something else, parroting that person's POV: I simply do not care. This is what I did, in all good faith and I take full responsibility for it.

The Screeching Banshees have asked for specific footage, thinking (like some Shippers) that I only had pics. That is not true, as I just explained. It is their constitutional right. All I could do was to crop the part where the band is looking at the tent zone:

You are free to do whatever you want with it. As far as I am concerned, I have seen a loving couple who could not help themselves. I have seen joy. I have seen an open secret and the John Bell/Joey pretorian guard protecting that open secret.

I have given you all the information I could, to the best of my abilities. Again: do better, be better than me. If you have better knowledge and/or better tools, USE THEM. If that could help ALL OF US, Shippers, have more clarity and less doubts, so be it. I have no ego when I am very serious about something and I take NO credit (and use NO watermarks) for anything, only my responsibility.

I am not fishing for any compliments and I expect more insults and more doubts to seep in, for various reasons. I thank all of you who reacted positively from the bottom of my heart. But I will stand by what I have seen with my own eyes and for me, it is enough. This, nobody could take from me.

[dengswei]

your gifsets are perfect, I'm always in awe of what you can do and you're creativity!!! Could you please explain how you made the broken glass gif with different gif in it on photopea? https://www.tumblr.com/dengswei/754916132337729536/userdramas-creator-bingo-green-asiandramanet?source=share and would it be possible to do something similar with other shapes? Thank you for your lovely creations <33

heyy thanks so much!! and of course! i have to admit the way i do it might be a little bit tedious compared to like everyone else (though i don't know how photoshop users or other photopea users might do it 🤣) okay this is gonna end up being so long because of the way i do it so i'm sorry about that and i hope it makes sense 😭

okay i have to admit i couldn't find the texture i've seen people use for the shattered glass effect so i actually used a photopea default brush from this pack

to download the brush set go to window -> plugins -> brush and then search for wall cracks brush (it's literally the only wall related brush set in photopea so it'll show up the moment you download it)

so for the gif i did above i did my giffing the usual way of creating & colouring for different gifs seperatly and then adding them all to one project (it doesn't have to be 4 gifs i just chose 4 because that's what i wanted to show in this gif)

i've done this twice once for this set and another time for this the blood of youth set and i have to say the most important part of this is keep multiple versions of the brush in the position you want as you can so once you've used it to test it out and you like that version keep it because unless you can manage to position the brush in the exact same place every time you're gonna need to reference those (or even use the magic wand tool for it later) and also you need to keep at least a white on black background version for the outline

in the brush pack the one i used was this one: (3564, crack b 9)

for this part i just say play around with both positioning and sizing of the brush, it automatically opens with the size 3000+ which is fine i think with the tushan jing one (the green gif above) i stuck with that size and just kept clicking around until i got the positioning i wanted (this is another reason why i said what i said in the paragraph above because if the brush size is bigger than 1000 it's doesn't come out in the exact positioning as you expect it too

i decide the positioning of the gifs on the way i like the brick brush looking rather than the other way around, this is the positioning i went with if you're curious & would like to use it if that's easier 🤣

you'll need to keep this as a seperate layer at the top, i had it set to screen and then added a colour fill layer clipped on later so that i had the outline for when i was masking

so to start off i have the base gif which i do nothing to, that stays as it is, with the brush layer above set to screen

next is where you want to position your other gifs it may benefit to figure this out all at first before doing any of the masking so you know which parts you want to erase and which parts you want to keep

so this is what i decided with my positioning looking at where each of the cracks are

now comes the tedious part, in some ways the way i do this is a lot similar to how i do grid but it's not as easy (for grid photopea automatically locks onto the squares making it easier to mask, here you have to do it all manually)

first put a raster mask on all of the other gifs except for the base gif & use the magic wand tool on the brush layer so you get the outline of the brush and you mask that away from your gif (so if you turned off the brush layer it should look a little something like this: (it's not perfect but it won't matter that much because you should have the original turned on at the end anyway) (you don't have to do this step tbh i just did it because i thought it looked better)

so with the brush layer turned on you can use that as a template to which parts of the cracks you want to erase, you can either use the magic wand or the paint brush tool it really depends on how much of a perfectionist you are and whether or not the sharp edges bother you (plus some of the cracks have small openings so it might erase another part you don't want if you use the magic wand tool so it really is another instance of playing around and seeing what you like, and it might also change once you add the other gifs too)

so this is how it looks after i've done that (notice in the middle you can still see the edge of the gif? that won't matter because one of the other 2 gifs i still have yet to mask will cover that) & just repeat the same thing for the other gifs you want to add

this is how my masking folders look if you're curious

& last but not least i added a green colour fill layer clipped to the brush layer and set that to darken to get the green effect (make sure that the brush layer is still set to screen)

& once you've merged all of the gifs together you should get your desired outcome like the gif above (make sure that all the gifs have the same amount of frames too)

when it comes to other shapes i'm sure you can! like i did a tutorial with the grid version here, i guess it'll just be a lot of trial and error & finding a texture or brush with different shapes to try it out with kinda like how i did with both versions of this (i definitely did it a lot better this time around compared to the first version i did of this)

hopefully this wasn't too long or too confusing, if anything is please feel free to ask me again and i'll try and explain it a little better 🤣

[tarotwithdanise]

What qualities do you bring in a relationship?

1 - 2 - 3

SOURCE AND CREDITABLE : All of the pictures are collected and downloaded from pinterest , I don’t own any of them but credits goes to the rightful owners however edits goes and the reading itself belong to me. I use the editor tools canva and ibispaint for the header and divider. If saved/downloaded the divider use a proper credits and tag/mention along my acc @tarotwithdanise. Expect grammatical errors with this reading, bear with it because english isn't my mother tongue.

💌 check out my back-up account @danisetarot bio ; click the link, choose your favorite deals that you wanted to purchase and then send all of them to my email account (daniseallure@gmail.com)

PILE ONE

Right off the bat, you will bring harmony with this relationship. It's like you were the one who will balancing this relationship, I see that you will going to mirror each other most of the time. You maybe bring this possessiveness and jealously towards your partner when they're with others, well that's okay though and that's valid. Your love language is maybe act of service and physical - you were probably like helping them out with their garden or cleaning their house windows. Also, sitting alone in a couch just feeling each other or holding hands while waiting for sun to rise. There's a lot of things can be happening between the two of you when you are alone. As well, with the hermit card here this talks to me that you two prefer to have an alone time, like discussing about your future plans, getting to know each other more and etcetera to build a strong romantic relationship with them.

Your partner probably likes your jokes, you might be a jokester. You were type of individual who is happy as clam, you enjoy every moments you will have with them perhaps that you maybe someone who is likely resist of change? yeah change, you kinda afraid of changes. I see that almost of your all your cards talks about ‘stability and security’, so I'm not quite sure where this insecurities you have for this relationship come from? where your partner make sure to love and give you the best care as they can. It may not be perfect but atleast they're trying their best, maybe from your past? You are like all in one package, you will bring flaws and good points for this relationship to build stronger and longer as you can.

PILE TWO

The first thing I noticed with your traits is that you have this motherly nature, regardless to your gender. You also like to initiate the conversation with your partner, you probably nourish every romantic relationship you have or will going to have. You also like to explore things or other places, it's soothing for you. And maybe you may want to travel with your partner in every places, cities or countries someday. I do see here you like get aways, you and your partner will be like best buddies at the same time lovers.

They will learn many things from you and so they do too from you. While, if you are single currently you are ready to mingle or if not, you are open with any romantic connection. I also feel, you were type of individual and lover where you like to fit-in with your person standards, like you were trying your best to be your person ‘ideal type’ in reality. You will also make your person as whole and complete individual. You will make them the best person on the earth. I do feel here for this pile the first up until the last seconds, you will love your person is about strong and unconditional love. Like a beautiful flower growing, the more it's grows the pretty and blooming it is.

You probably thinking that every person that come on your way is important. You were also a fighter or maybe someone who is ready to fight who everyone that will try to come across with your relationship. You don't give a f*ck about will others people will says about your relationship you have with your partner. You are good at starting conversations, you are not afraid to tell what's in your mind ; someone who can be very honest. You are charismatic and nurturing person that makes your (every) partner to fall in love with you way deeper.

PILE THREE

This is somewhat a heavy spread. Okay, you maybe feeling unlucky when it comes to love and it seems like you are not yet ready to take risk and embrace change, you are waiting for change to come but you aren't taking the first step to continue your journey when it comes your relationship with others. You are not going with the flow as your Guides and Angels wanted you to do so, it seems like you are just sitting there and waiting for change to come. Changes when it comes to love won't come on your way if you are not taking any actions for it, the possibilities of you getting on a relationship keeps delaying and delaying by itself.

You not even trying yourself to keep learning, you are putting boundaries, restricting and trapping yourself in a cell of negativity which is stopping you to start a new beginnings. Well, about the qualities you bring in a relationship? You will be a great partner to them. Someone who is willing to give everything all of they have with their partner. Aside from that, you may have trust issues and lead a relationship like be a dominant. You prefer a partner who is under to you rather than you will be under to them in a good or bad way because that's depend on you. I also do see here that you are finding someone who is sharing the same interest, hobbies and mindset like yours.

© tarotwithdanise ── all rights reserved. do not copy, translate, alter, or repost my work in any other social media platforms with or without my explicit permission.

[alllgator-blood]

ohh my goodness can you pls pls pls do a brush tour?? i love ur art so so much its so cruncy >:]

Yes I can, I appreciate your interest!! I use paint tool sai 2 which is kind of archaic, but I've been drawing on a wacom pen and touch small + using paint tool sai since 2012 and I'm too stubborn to move onto something better. I actually only use three brushes so I've made a little drawing where I only use one brush per character to show the differences:

Gonna put the screenshots of the brush settings below the cut cause it got longer than I expected:

I drew my three big faves cause frankly I am sick of looking at kallamar and narinder's smug faces lmaoooo ANYWAY. GOING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, WE HAVE THE CHUNKY BRUSH. I use that brush for messily coloring things in, doing big blocky background shapes, or just adding texture to a drawing. It's my favorite brush to paint with but I have not....finished a painting for this blog yet...

Then for the crunchy brush, it's a tool I use half for lineart and half for coloring. I use it for stuff like changes in fur color/markings, drawing all the lines in the backgrounds I do, and finer details the chunky brush can't handle. It's also the lineart tool I use for my drawings where the lines are all on the inside of the chararacters but not the outside!

As for the smooth brush, this one only ever gets used for lines but it was created when I was so bored of my lineart tool I stopped drawing for a while. I wanted a calligraphy pen and had to work around SAI's limitations, so while it doesn't have that thin-thick angular effect that calligraphy pens have....I manually apply the pressure and it looks passable enough. I hope.

The brush settings are visible in the pics but uNFORTUNATELY I DO *NOT* remember where I got my stupid brush pack from. I literally downloaded the files before I was even a teenager but I *do* remember they're from deviantart. If anyone is for some reason kicking and screaming to acquire this ancient, crusty brush pack I'm sure I could throw it in a google drive

I have other useless information about my process if any of this is remotely helpful: for the anaglyph effect on my lines, I literally take a full 120 seconds to copy+paste two copies of my lineart, color it red and cyan, and then slightly move them up+down beneath the black lineart to get that 3dish effect. My flat backgrounds are just another sai preset texture, usually the checkerboard one cause it's swag. The rest of my brushes are just for utility or to fill in the gaps, that scroll bar leads to a bunch of empty space. They're not worth showing off just because they don't ever get used, or it's just like. The bucket tool. The select tool. A binary pen I never use. And lastly, for my usual lines, I actually go back and mess them up myself to get them to look more chaotic...my lines are usually smooth + even but it's so boring to look at and time consuming that I'm trying to unlearn that.

here's a wip of what my lines USUALLY look like with the smooth brush. You can see for the background I mostly used the chunky brush for shapes and then the crunchy brush for the finer lines! But yeah it takes forever to do smooth lines because I have nerve damage in my arm (it's why my stabilizer is maxed out...) and I refuse to use the line tool. In a professional setting I definitely make sure my lines are polished but this is just my goofy fanart blog and I want everything to look like it's been laced with crack.

I HOPE ANY OF THIS HELPS?? OR JUST SATES YOUR CURIOSITY, I try to not gatekeep the way I do my art so I have literally no secrets tbh

[thezombieprostitute]

Tech Tuesday: Curtis Everett

Summary: Curtis decides to take the next step and ask if you're willing to meet offline.

A/N: Reader is female. No physical descriptors used.

Warnings: Meeting someone from online, Mentions of past bad experiences. Please let me know if I missed any.

Previous

Series Masterlist

"So, what all has been going on with your computer? Did you bring it with you?" Curtis tries to keep his tone calm. He's been eager to meet you in person for months but has worked hard to make sure you feel safe to do so and that means not pushing you into it. He tries to keep his excited fidgeting to a minimum but he's worried it just makes him look even more suspicious. He's so used to keeping his features schooled into a scowl, but that's the last thing he wants to do to you.

"Basically it'll go for a while but then start freezing, stuttering and I have to force it to shut down before I can do anything else," you answer while sipping your coffee. You can't believe his eyes are as blue as the photo he sent. "I tried to see if it was because I was running some heavy duty games and maybe I was using too much RAM. I cleaned up so many programs, uninstalled a bunch of games I don't play anymore, but it just keeps happening."

Curtis rubs his beard as he thinks. "It might be a hardware issue. It's not my strong suit, but I can still take a look. At the very least I can ask my buddy, Mace, for help. He's a whiz with the hardware and could probably get you a good deal if any upgrades are needed."

"Oh yeah, you've talked about him before," you reassure yourself. Having him mention another stranger worried you but Mace has been brought up several times before, especially when Curtis mentioned getting upgraded tech.

"You definitely don't have to meet him," Curtis affirms. "He can be a real grump. And coming from me, that's saying something." He gives a light chuckle as he sips his coffee.

"Snow, I work at a hospital," you counter. "Ain't no kind of grump I haven't had to deal with before." You give Curtis a look that says 'I'm stronger than you'.

Curtis smiles fully, "absolutely fair, Heart." He struggles a little bit to not turn shy. That look, that strength, that self-assured smile has him weak in the knees. "Still," he coughs, trying to regain control of himself. "Still, uh, when...did you bring the computer with you? Would this be an okay time to take a look at it?"

"Friend of mine at the library is keeping an eye on it for me." Best to let him know you've got allies nearby. He hasn't really given anything to make you worry about, but his reactions to your safety protocols could be telling. Of course, if you were expecting him to look scared or upset at this news, Curtis happily defied those expectations as his eyes lit up.

"Oh, that's really smart! We can borrow one of their laptops to run some tests. That way my laptop's settings won't mess with your computer."

You smile, genuinely, for the first time all day. Curtis is very different and you couldn't be happier about it.

"Don't you need your diagnostic software?"

"If it's called for, sure. The basic versions are free to download and they'll help me pick up if it's actually a software issue. Plus, the libraries regularly wipe downloads after use, right?"

"Okay, everything's plugged in so let's get this running and see what happens."

After looking over the hardware Curtis had found no obvious reasons for the failure so you had gone to your friend and loaned out one of the laptops. Curtis's computer bag had an impressive collection of tools, wires and connectors. You always appreciate when a person is prepared.

He works in relative silence and it gives you the chance to really look at him. He's definitely handsome, as Cassandra pointed out when she loaned you laptop. You weren't normally one for lip piercings but it seemed to work well on him, even though it was partially hidden by his beard.

The quiet between you two isn't so uncomfortable. It's how you spent a lot of time when you started gaming together. Talking over comms almost always resulted in a bunch of idiots either hitting on you, calling you a 'fake gamer,' lobbing insults at you, or all three at the same time. Snowpiercer was one of the few gamers who didn't care that you were a girl gamer. For him it was about how well you worked together. Given that the two of you could get high scores without having to talk over comms, it was no wonder the two of you started playing together more and more.

Even after you'd started voice chatting while playing, there was always a level of respect. Something you hadn't gotten from Chase.

Curtis gets out of the chair and gets a closer look at each of the fans, stopping at the one closest to the heat sink. "There it is," he intones. "This fan is dying. It's easy to miss because, by the time you know something's wrong, the whole computer's shut down and all the fans are stopped."

"Well, at least it's an easy fix," you comment. "Thanks for taking a look at it."

"Not a problem at all," he assures. "I'm happy to help."

You smile, "are you always this nice?"

"No," he shakes his head. "Definitely not. I'm not an ass, but I'm definitely not this nice to everyone."

"I'm honored."

He chuckles at that. "Like I said, I'm happy to help you out. You're the best teammate I've ever had and it just isn't as fun paying without you."

"I appreciate that, Curtis. So, what do I owe you?"

"Nothing."

"Don't do that to me, Snow. You know how I feel about owing people." It was a wound from Chase that had yet to heal. His use of favors as manipulation made you wary of anyone who said you don't owe anything.

Curtis sighs and nods. "Tell you what, there are some pastries at that coffee shop we were at that I avoided because I didn't want you to see me covered in crumbs. Wouldn't make for a good first impression." You smile at the thought. "Just get me a couple of those while I shut everything down here and return the laptop?"

"Deal." You stand to get moving but turn to him before you leave, "and thank you, again. Not just for the computer fix, but for...for respecting the boundaries."

He looks at you with those gorgeous blue eyes, "not a problem."

Next

Series Masterlist

Tagging @alicedopey; @delicatebarness; @ellethespaceunicorn; @icefrozendeadlyqueen; @jaqui-has-a-conspiracy-theory;

@late-to-the-party-81; @lokislady82 ; @peyton-warren @ronearoundblindly; @stellar-solar-flare

[storgicdealer]

rolls up sleeves. today's short guys.

the short brought me SO much to think about — particularly, how the news outlets DO exist in the outernet, and how the showdown was seen from the stickcity — which does confirm that if they were around, it was impossible for vic not to see at least bits of it before.

so in this post i am . once again . compiling my thoughts into a big victim theory that tied in my Head

victim theory: the point the show went down

again. warning this is me going on a RAMBLE that is so insane that i constantly switch from one topic to another. expect insanity

in case i interpret something incorrectly in your opinion, or forget a major detail — feel completely free to add on! my memory is horrible

so. presenting the thing that the outernet and the internet are connected with each other, yet still have a barrier in-between them there is a possibility of outernet citizens not having access to it full-time. at the same time, so much stuff is digitally reliant on pc tech that i doubt outernet sticks wouldnt know about it at all

im thinking that when victim has been ‘unsaved’, one way or another — they couldve gotten into the outernet, also one way or another (this is a raw supposition that it would happen that early but). which made them separated from the pc/internet in the first place — severing them from knowing about how things really work there aside from what they learned when needed to survive, as well as knowing about the existence of other cursors.

and given the last, when showdown happened — this was their first cue to become involved in the whole hollowhead tragedy. a thing they didn't know before due to being out of the pc — which was also the point where they became obsessed with revenge.

we now DO know that the outernet has news outlets; whether they saw it on the news or themselves, this was their first step into getting revenge. (at the same time, seeing it on the news would sort of? elaborate on why rocket tech most likely also streams news n such. perhaps as some weird kind of thanks "for showing me where my torturer was" or, perhaps, wanting others to see what has been going on too/how much of a danger cursors are. it would support the freedom guy=victim theory just a tad bit if victim Did care about stick rights prior showdown)

(another point — i must mention that we now know that sticks have phones, and most likely their own in-gadget social media now — but we don't know if they have the same internet as humans do. honestly the whole reason why the theory of sticks not having full access to internet didn't crumble yet.)

going to investigate, either by themselves or having already been in rocket — they could've possibly found the tech dark owned (as well as the mega blaster that literally shoots things in the ip sky) and, importantly, dark's own portals to the internet — and perhaps, have used them, for minor things and scraps or, something bigger. like actual travel.

whether by connecting the cursor with alan or not, by the point of them getting into the internet they DEFINITELY saw what happened with them, chosen, dark. (ava 4 as well, but it is talked about later.)

and thats the point where theyd get the adobe tools = i believe they would have to go to a pc to get them, but i also am not against the possibility of them just. downloading it cracked or something. they got the tools and. if thats the point where they left the pc/internet and didnt come back (perhaps, danger of another user) it mightve been the reason they didnt know about the powers of second.

this whole thing elaborates on why they found the showdown in chosens memories first — having seen what happened, they wanted to fully understand what went down — perhaps where such power came from. it was kind of.. impossible to see sec from such distance? and there werent any news outlets seen next to the showdown site itself, which could explain why they didnt know about secs powers once again.

the thing that makes me doubt this in a way is the reason why they didn't go to alan right away, having acquired the adobe tools. but there is a thing i believe might explain that — victim saw, and realized that chosen, dark and them are peas of the same pod; that they managed to destroy alan's computer — and that they don't have such power to do the same ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(:{)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

having came back to the outernet, with the adobe tools — they might've started to enact the plan of getting revenge by gaining power that they first lacked, now especially that they had some tools to do so. them getting the instruments that outernet citizens didn't have before, perhaps didn't fully know about — they could've been seen as someone who brought something special to the outernet. they could've been a person that, aside from revenge, would want to protect sticks (it would genuinely clash with how they treated chosen, but at the same time i can believe it was their own anger of not getting what chosen "had". power and ability to get revenge on their creator.) — being seen as some sort of saviour or, at least, someone powerful — this is how they could've gotten up the career stairs of rocketcorp in the first place.

what makes me think of the box episode — this could've been the point they have acquired enough power to challenge alan, causing them to FINALLY hang up posters after 5 years (sorry it just tied in so well in my mind thats why i capitalized it. like holy shit thats the reason for posters being late as shit)

knowing about the showdown, they wouldn't put up dark as well, whether she was mia or . yknow.

what EXACTLY the power to challenge an animator, a god requires. oh this is a brainworm of mine.

knowing about the showdown#2, perhaps having investigated it itself — could bring back the theory of dark being captured by rocket and, perhaps, being in her weak state — used by victim in order to gain more power that they lacked. victim could've known about how challenging dark was to beat + how chosen and dark managed to destroy chosen's computer = a recipe to gain power to go at alan themselves.

and have finally gained enough power, whether with dark or not — they could've went for chosen, who WAS active — and difficult to beat.

finally being ready to go at alan, they went to get the only person alive that was connected to him.

i could also bring in the fact that they COULD'VE possibly tried to go at chosen for using his own powers for themselves as well — at the possibility of them being "good and powerful" in the eyes of society, being a "saviour" — capturing a well-known terrorist, moreover brainwashing citizens (a raw assumption, but perhaps even rocket) into thinking that they need to get him to get revenge on a person that murders sticks — that it is something that they were okay with doing. at the hands of their own, bitter desire for revenge.

one thing that contrasts it all, however — showdown has happened when ava4 already happened. and in case victim went to investigate their roots — it would've been impossible for them not to know about sec. but at the same time, orange used his own wit (and a small sprinkle of chosen silhouette flashing) to try and defeat noogai — and he didn't !! alan has trapped and spared him on his own !! which could've made them think it's not someone worth paying attention to, someone isn't powerful enough that they may need.

i must mention that it is possible for victim to gain the adobe tools without looking at the hollowhead's history after they were created at the time. for example, stealing the app and not opening youtube to do so, lol — but the whole existence of alan's tv makes it at the same time impossible, and at the same time — so confusing on why victim did not know about sec's powers.

im clutching my pearls . oh god this is so long

im going ins

i would APPRECIATE ALL of your input!!!

[anbaisai]

Unrelated to twst but I absolutely adore your art. Your lines are so crisp omgg, do you have any tips on how to keep them clean? :>>

Thank you!!! I put a lot of effort into my lines because I admire a lot of artists with beautiful linework, so I'm really happy to hear that you think so 🥹

Obviously steady practice & time will naturally help you improve, but here are a few tips that I personally found helpful!

Try being more confident & fast with your brush strokes - I find that the more that I slow down and hesitate, the more wobbly my lines end up being and it doesn't retain the same "crisp" feel (unless I set stabilization to high, but then the brush starts lagging so I tend to leave it on the lower side). Try drawing a line really fast then doing the same thing again slowly and comparing them, and do it with lines of varying lengths since it’s likely more apparent with long lines than shorter ones, but I hope that makes sense!

If you work digitally, one thing that can help with the above is zooming out - it might feel easier to draw a line on a smaller-looking canvas because you move your hand less, vs. dragging a line across a really big canvas.

Use your whole arm, not just your wrist - think of it like changing the tool you use depending on the type of line you need to draw. Smaller, shorter ones are ok to use your wrist for, but you’ll likely have a harder time if it’s a long continuous line, in which case try using your elbow or shoulder to help. It’s a bit hard to explain without you trying it out for yourself, but with enough practice it should become muscle memory.

Play around with brushes & brush settings - Yes, I know artists shouldn’t expect a brush to solve all their problems, but it’s no lie that some brushes feel like utter crap in my hands and nothing I draw looks or feels right, whereas other brushes feel like they were meant to be. My guess is that it just really depends on your habits, like your speed, how much pressure you use, etc., that mesh well with some brushes and less with others. I myself seem to enjoy brushes that have less variation with pen pressure, so it’s worth messing around in your brush settings or downloading new ones just to see if they feel any different to use! It won’t be as influential as just practicing your technique, but it’s an extra little thing that could help you.

I haven’t done much of it myself, but doing targeted practice where you just draw lines over and over (like you're just cross-hatching) has been something lots of people recommend for improving linework & hand steadiness, so you can try doing that when you’re bored e.g. doodling in the margins of your notes, on scrap paper, etc.

Hope some of these tips help, and have fun lining! ❤️

[portraitoftheoddity]

Beginner Hiking Guide Part One: Find Where You Want to Hike

Access to wilderness and trail systems varies a lot depending on where you live. And while there are trails and places to walk all across the country, knowing where to go and look for them when you’re new to hiking can be tricky. So here’s some tips for getting started! (Note: this guide will be US-centric, since that’s where I live and hike)

Places to Hike:

National Parks If you already live near a national park, you live near Hiking Nirvana and we’re all jealous of you. Congrats! If you’re traveling to a National Park, check out the park’s website with the National Park Service and research the trails to find one whose length and challenge level is a good fit for your ability and comfort. 

State Parks There are a lot of State Parks throughout the US with well-maintained trail systems. Check out your state’s Parks Department and see if there are parks, preserves, or trails near you!

Conservation Trusts These are nonprofit organizations that acquire and steward land for the purposes of conservation. That aren't state-run, but a lot of them have wonderful volunteer-maintained trail systems. See if there are any conservation trusts in your area, and if they have maps of trail systems online!

National Forests Oddly enough, National Forests aren’t actually parks, as the Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture and not the National Parks Service. So while there’s big swathes of National Forest out there with a lot of great trails, maintaining them for visitors isn’t the Forest Service’s priority, so you might need to use other trail finding tools rather than their websites. That said, there are a lot of awesome Forest Service volunteers out there doing great work! 

Town Forests There may be areas of state-owned or town-owned forest near you! Look online, check out your town’s (or neighboring town’s) website, or ask around -- there may be some nice woodland walking trails if you live in an area that isn’t highly urbanized. Your local library is a great resource for information on the local area. 

Where to Find Trail Information:

It can be tempting, if there’s a park with hiking trails nearby, to give in to the temptation of impulsive wanderlust by just driving out, picking a trail, and setting out to explore.

Please do not do this.

I get it, I have lousy impulse control and love the romance of simply walking off into the woods too! But the romance wears off quickly once you realize you’re lost and it’s getting dark, or that you’re in way over your head on a trail that seems to have something against you personally and is determined to break your ankles. Take some time to look up info on a trail ahead of your hike so you know what to expect in terms of length and difficulty (and can pack appropriately), and get a map so you know where you’re going and how to get back. There’s a lot of resources for finding trail information out there!

Parks / Conservation Trust / Town Forest Websites As mentioned above, most of these national, state, municipal or nonprofit orgs will have their own websites, and will often have detailed trail maps you can view or download!

Guidebooks & Published Maps You’d be surprised how many published hiking trail guides (many with included maps) there are out there! Look up hiking guides for your state or region, and see what books come up. Ask around at your local library, or locally-owned book stores! You’ll want to check to see what the most recent edition is to make sure any copy you find isn’t a few decades out of date (trails change), but printed trail guides tend to be reviewed more rigorously than a lot of online resources, and contain more detailed information on terrain, difficulty, etc. 

AllTrails AllTrails is a useful starting point for finding hikes and popular trails near you! That said, I emphatically do not recommend relying exclusively on AllTrails for trail info. It can be a great tool to look up hikes in your area and their general length and elevation gain (the difficulty ranking system on AllTrails is nonsensical though -- ‘Moderate’ can mean anything from ‘it isn’t paved’ to ‘not a sheer vertical rock face’). The comments section can also be useful for recent reports of trail conditions. But it crowd-sources information and some people are dinguses and will upload their crazy bushwhacking or simply provide inaccurate data, and the app isn’t great about indicating what blazes to follow when you’re on interconnecting trail systems, so you can get a lot of inaccurate or incomplete information on there that can get you lost. I highly recommend that you always verify trail maps and data you get from AllTrails with other sources, especially as you get further into backcountry! 

Other Hiking Apps to check out:

FarOut (formerly Guthooks)

GaiaGPS

Hiking Project

(Safety Tip: If you’re going to be anywhere remote and you’re using virtual sources, Print Your Maps. Many apps only work in their free version if you have internet service, and may not function once out in the wilderness. Even if you screenshot things and have them saved offline, your phone battery may die or your phone might get wet and decide not to work. Have an analog backup in a ziploc bag to keep it dry!)

Next Part: Knowledge is Power >>

[lacefuneral]

hi reddit. here are some tips.

i will be putting these below a "readmore" - which is the first lesson. on desktop there is a button for this. on mobile you type :readmore: followed by a linebreak. it is considered common ettique to shorten your long posts in this way.

by the way, are you reblogging a long post that isn't under a readmore? tag that as #long post so users can blacklist it and not have to scroll for five years.

(weird gaps in bullet points due to character limits lmao)

Title. Icon. Banner. blog description. (look around if you need an idea for what to put in your blog description.) Blogs without this information (ESPECIALLY the no icon + no title combo) gets you blocked immediately. This is because tumblr has always had a severe bot problem. Just grab a meme from your camera roll or a picture of a character you like from google.

also, because most users have their pronouns in their bio, it is expected that you will look there to check before addressing them, out of courtesy. don't just default to "they" - only do that if a person's pronoun's are unclear or if the pronouns listed ARE "they."

Disable public likes. the like button is for personal bookmarking. very often, people will like posts they have not read yet, so that they can read them later. a person's likes is not always reflective of their stances, and if your likes are public, people may use them against you in an argument. think of your likes as your browser history. tumblr users value privacy in this instance.

unrelated to the above point: likes are also used to show compassion for a user going through a tough time, or to say "hey, i thought this joke you made was funny." this use of likes is more for friend-to-friend communication.

Disable anything in your settings that is algorithmic including seeing posts based on other people's likes (one, because algorithms exist to make you mad and two, as part of respecting privacy)

set "following" to appear before "for you" (and overall avoid "for you")

Snooze Tumblr Live (sorry. you have to do this once a week bc tumblr sucks.)

Open your askbox so people can communicate with you. Decide if you want to allow anonymous asks and/or public DMs.

Enable the desktop version of your blog. This makes it so that when you use a computer and go to [yourusername].tumblr.com you can have a website with HTML and CSS. tumblr has tried very hard to kill blog personalization but you can find many helpful users posting in the tags, as well as pre-made themes you can install. tumblr users are the ones making the bulk of neocities websites, and in general tend to be friendly in redirecting you to resources.

enabling your desktop blog also allows you to insert links and do very basic editing (like inserting line breaks) in your blog description (we call "bio") which translates to the mobile version of your theme. you have to do this in the editor for the desktop on a computer. also, editing your theme on mobile (like changing color, font) will undo your HTML. your best bet is to edit your mobile theme first and THEN do the HTML/link stuff on a computer. i know it sounds a bit convoluted but you'll figure it out. (this website is made of duct tape)

also while you are on desktop: download xkit rewritten. it won't work on mobile but it gives you a lot of helpful features. also consider installing ublock origin if you haven't already, because tumblr will sometimes add annoying widgets to their website and that tool will allow you to block them. i also use "palettes for tumblr" to customize my dashboard color. tumblr DOES have built-in dashboard themes but i do not like them personally.

pinned posts. you can pin any post you make or reblog. some people use this to pin a funny meme, and other people use the pinned post as an extended bio (or otherwise an alternative to it). a tumblr post made on desktop can hold up to 30 images (the limit is 10 on mobile.) you can also embed links, a video, and even audio. you can change text color, have bullet points, and increase font size. as such, you can express yourself much more in a pinned post than in your mobile blog description. a typical pinned post may include information about the user, a link to an external website (like a carrd, neocities, or linktree), and sometimes an image or two. tumblr allows you to disable reblogs for a post, so most pinned posts are set this way so it just stays on a user's blog.

DNIs (also called "BYF"). not everyone uses them, and they can be divisive. it stands for "Do Not Interact" - and is a boundary set to keep people away. this may include age (example: "minors DNI"), political opinions (example: "prolifers DNI"), and sometimes deeply niche online discourse. DNIs are also sometimes a joke (example: "DNI if you like tuna salad"). there is actually a meme where someone will write a post with a very long, unreasonable DNI and users will count how many apply to them.

If you would upvote a post on reddit, you would reblog it here. If you see something and you think it is cool, you think it is funny, or you think it is helpful, reblog it. Some users have sideblogs (you can have infinite sideblogs attached to your main account) to organize all of the posts they reblog. Others simply use a tagging system for organizational purposes (and so users can blacklist ("filter") those tags in their settings if they don't want to see the post). For example, if I followed a user for Star Trek, but they also posted a lot of Star Wars, I might add "#star wars" to my list of filters. This way, I am only seeing the Star Trek posts. Tumblr's default way of handling this is to display a box that says "this post contains #Star Wars" and you can choose whether or not to open it. on desktop with xkit rewritten, you can have it hide those boxes entirely. please use filters. your sanity will thank you.

In a reblog, Organizational Tags are for /you./ I see a lot of confusion about this from new users. If you reblog someone else's post and add 500 tags..... it's not going to get picked up in tumblr search. You're not going to get any sort of exposure. Because it is not your post. Those tags are only for /you/ - if you want to find the post again.

tags are also used for commentary. most tumblr users do /not/ talk in post replies or in the comments of a reblog. most of them talk in tags. tags have a character limit so these messages are broken up in fragments. tumblr uses a comma (,) to make a new tag, so users often use either no punctuation or a period (.) or a hyphen (-) to break up thoughts. two apostrophes ('') are used instead of quotation marks (because they dont work in tags). this is also where "tumblr writing style" comes from. we all began to write in lowercase and use punctuation in. a weird way. like. for emphasis. there is also the Tumblr Comma, a special unicode character that resembles a comma and works in tags when copy+pasted or put there with a keyboard shortcut. but this is often not used. here it is: ‚

also here's an example of tags. you will notice that commentary goes before organizational: #GOD DHSHSKDDJDL #i cannot BELIEVE i forgot about this. what the fuck #star trek #spock

when leaving tags, most users talk to themselves. but please remember that tags can be seen by anyone, including the original poster. in general, it is discouraged to traumadump or be rude.

"prev tags" (which tumblr staff is trying their damnest to erase sadly) is when a user reblogs a post from another user and tags it simply ''prev'' or ''prev tags" (meaning "i agree with the previous user's tags"). sometimes it's because a thoughtful observation was made, but usually it's a way of saying "hey! that was a funny joke!" without putting the user on blast by screenshotting the tags. it's most common between friends and mutuals (users following each other). i would say it is equivalent to users whispering to each other and giggling rather than getting up on a table and shouting. "prev tag chain" is when users reblog "prev tags" "prev prev tags" - and so on. however, sadly, tumblr has removed the feature of moving backwards in a reblog chain on desktop. i have not updated my app and refuse to, so i so not know if it is gone on mobile as well, but it probably is. EDIT: the browser extension Xkit Rewritten has an option now, in "tweaks" called "restore links to individual posts in post header." it should be the first option. prev tags, on desktop at least, is saved!

screenshotting someone elses tags and adding the image in a reblog is known as "passing peer review." it is, however, considered to be Greatly Annoying to accompany those tags with unnecessary commentary (ex: "these tags pass peer review!" "WHY WOULD YOU LEAVE THIS IN THE TAGS" "LMAAOO THIS IS SO FUNNYYY"). the tags can stand on their own. the only instance in which this is different is during a serious discussion, when you want to build off of another user's perspective. in which case, you address them as normal. some people credit taggers, some people don't. crediting tends to occur in discussions.

when making an original post, do not use irrelevant tags for Exposure. this is Greatly Hated by the userbase and is also against the TOS. you will get blocked at best, reported or yelled at at worst. only add relevant tags, and do not go overboard.

reposting other people's artwork is highly discouraged and is considered the Highest Offense. if you do any sort of reposting, you should credit and link to a creator directly. however, tumblr loves reposted videos, especially ones from tiktok. there are entire accounts dedicated to posting those.

sideblogs! it is possible to have multiple blogs under one email address. tumblr treats these blogs as proxies of your main blog. this means that sending someone an ask/commenting in the replies of a post will always appear with the name of your main blog, your likes will appear with the name of your main blog, and that if you follow someone you will appear on their followers list as your main blog (so you may be mutuals with someone and not even know it because their sideblog interacts with you, but isn't on your follower's list... because their main blog is listed there instead.) however, DMs DO appear as the sideblog name. you cannot swap your main blog with your sideblog. and right now, there is a bug where deleting a sideblog will delete your entire tumblr account so. don't do that lol. anyway, the amount of sideblogs you can make is literally infinite and i think there's just a Daily Limit of creating 10 of them or something. some users make a sideblog for each interest they have. others have no sideblogs and reblog everything to main. and then you have people like me that do both. somehow. some users will make sideblogs to hoard URLs. also sorry i'm just introducing this now, but that is what our usernames are called. because when tumblr was more desktop-oriented, every blog was literally a Personal Website. so ya. we call them "URLs." anyway, if someone wants to hang onto a URL for later, they might save it on an empty blog. this usually pisses people off. a "canon URL" is when someone has a URL that is like One Word or a Company Name or a Fictional character. hypothetical examples: "ketchup" "burgerking" "lukeskywalker." these are highly rare, coveted, and you look cool as hell if you have one.

tumblr's /\/SFW policy (/\/ is an N. i've censored it.) is best described as ???. posts that are safe for work get marked as /\/SFW and hardcore p0rn somehow persists. in general, be very wary of posting even artistic nvdity (even though it is supposedly permitted.) never deliberately mark your own posts as Mature. this is essentially like walking directly into a bear trap and waving a big sign at tumblr staff saying "hey! make it so people can't find my blog and i'm far more likely to get banned!" also do not tag posts with "/\/SFW." too many of those will get your entire blog marked as mature (which makes your posts pretty much invisible to other users.) tumblr users used /\/SFT (/\/ot safe for tumblr) for a long time, but staff caught on. there is now no consensus and people use their own personal tags for it. just pick something and people will catch on and blacklist it if need be. (btw you CAN type whatever you want on this website. i am only censoring in the hopes that this will allow my post to appear in the tags. this isn't tiktok lol)

while it is possible to disable reblogs on a post, this is a very RECENT addition and most users forget it exists. as such, please use common sense. if someone has written a post about, say, how sad they are feeling because they got in a fight with their family... that's not a good post to reblog. a like would be better here, like a pat on the back.

we LOVE polls. we love them. they are like sports to us. most of them are popularity polls - who is the better character? but people also use polls for, say, making bug emojis "race" each other. or "lets build a cake." other people use polls to write poetry, or learn about regional differences, or even to draw a pen!s. if you tag a poll as "poll" it will most likely be seen and voted in, because users look in the tag to find buttons to click.

there is unfortunately a T3RF (this one censored specifically to protect my notifs lmao. 3 is E) presence here. report, block, ignore, move on. common courtesy for users to inform each other if one is accidentally reblogged from. it also helps to blacklist tags related to them to avoid them. use shinigam! eyes browser extension on desktop.

there is NO equivalent to reddit awards on this website. as the userbase hates the staff, it is considered blasphemous to spend your money on checkmarks, etc. - buying them as a gift for another user is seen as a hostile act. it's like receiving a "kick-me" sign. once owned, badges cannot be deleted. thankfully, tumblr now allows you to disable checkmarks and other badges from appearing publically. that said, some users also give checkmarks unironically to show appreciation??? and others buy checks for themselves???? so yeah. tumblr doesnt actually have a verification system - these exist to mock twitter and to make a quick buck.

tumblr blaze. essentially, tumblr has a system in place to showcase user posts instead of advertisements sometimes. this is done by the user paying money. the higher the amount, the more impressions. tumblr users can now also blaze OTHER PEOPLE'S POSTS. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BLAZE DISABLED!!! blazing another person's post (without asking first) is seen as a hostile act. why? because most blazed posts result in rude comments from strangers who are annoyed to see the post on their dashboard. unless it's like, a cute picture of a cat. or something genuinely helpful. boosting your soundcloud or a selfie or a rant about fandom does not typically garner positive responses. you can blaze just like. watch out. and also always ask the OP if you want to blaze someone else's post. (there is a reason this feature is called "blaze pvp")

tumblr merch is also frowned upon, as tumblr staff steals ideas from the userbase and profits off of them without financially compensating or crediting the users. there was a meme on here, "vanilla extract", that tumblr turned into water bottles while the person who made the meme was having to fundraise to survive :(

BLOCK. LIBERALLY.

umm i think thats it for now. but like if you have questions feel free to launch them into The Void with some tags and users are pretty quick to help out! hopefully i covered some stuff that other ppl haven't

[ghostpalmtechnique]

I expect Trump to get curb stomped. But one should prepare for the worst even when one is not expecting it. Rather than entertaining unrealistic (and frankly, unpatriotic) plans to flee to Canada, here are some things I think you should consider doing sooner rather than later.

Download Signal and get in the habit of using E2E-encrypted communications before Trump comes to power and either bans the apps or starts monitoring who is downloading them in the immediate aftermath of his return.

Optionally, you may want to learn how to procure and maintain a burner phone, but the former has become quite challenging and the latter requires a considerable amount of know-how to do properly (e.g. do not turn it on within range of your home wi-fi).

3. If you are a member of a targeted population or have neighbors who are members of a targeted population, consider doing contingency planning (in person or over Signal) in advance regarding, e.g., hiding spots for people if a raid is occurring.

4. You should already be doing this for disaster purposes anyway, but have a go bag ready at all times with a water bottle, a change of clothes, a flashlight, a battery pack, a multi-tool, a first aid kit, etc. If you aren't living hand-to-mouth, I would suggest having some large-denomination cash on hand in case you need something quickly and without questions, or because you want to be able to get around without being immediately tracked by your purchases.

5. [One more possibility that I will not put in writing.] If you expect civil conflict, use your imagination here.

[alaezasmystery235]

Pac :- You ; Narnia Edition

꒰ ♡ ꒱ 𝓅𝒾𝒸𝓀 𝒶 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝒹 ; YOU . Basically this a reading about you and what's happening in your life .

Welcome to my new PAC . This is a gift from me on completing 1 whole year on tumblr . I'm feeling super grateful for all the reblogs and likes you have given and most importantly love and support. I heartily thank you and I hope we continue to celebrate more 🍀.

⪩ ⪨ ⠀⠀♡ ⠀⊹ · 𓋜⠀ ⠀⠀!

rules, disclaimer and notes ☆

⋆·˚ 𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 ⋆·˚ ----- All of the pictures are collected and downloaded from 'pinterest' i don't own any of them but credits goes to the rightful owners however edits goes and belong to me only @alaezasmystery . I use the editor tools canva and kapwing for the header and divider. Extra credit to @daninixx for giving permission to use her rules and disclaimer.

⋆·˚ 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐫 ⋆·˚ ----- This reading was made for entertainment purposes only. this is obviously a general reading so takes what resonates and leave when it doesn't, you don't need to force your energy to read this and leave such a bad comment just to say it doesn't resonates with you at all because the answer is very obvious!

 ˚˖   𓂃 𝗥ҽαԃ ࿐ 🗝️

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐏𝐀𝐂 𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐥 6 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 . 6 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 , 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 . 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐚 𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐞 ❣

𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓽 ' 𝓼 𝓲𝓽 𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮 ?????

𝓛𝓲𝓴𝓮 ----.... 𝓐 𝓛𝓾𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓬 !!!!

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔 :- You feel everything is a constant battle at the moment, but persevere and you will triumph in the end. Expect some good news that will help you to keep going until you achieve your goals.This is a time of movement and change and of conflicts ending in victory. You may well consider a journey that relates to work or go for that new car you've been looking at.

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗕 :- You are feeling that things will go your way. You believe in fairness and justice in all things. If you are considering partnership issues, personal or professional, dealings will go well. Perhaps you are about to sign a contract or legal document - this will be beneficial to you. If someone has done wrong to you it will be put right and you will feel justice has been done.

(:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅[̲̅:♡:]̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅)

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔 :- I'm getting that what you most want at this time is to know what to do, as well as companionship or a lover if you feel somewhat lonely or isolated at the moment. Perhaps you are feeling exhausted and in need of a rest - if you have been ill this is a time for rest and recuperation.

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗕 :- I'm getting that what you most want at this time is to have it all! Why should you have to give something or someone up? Perhaps you feel a victim and that events are not going as planned. Trust that this is a passage from one phase of your life to another. If you are not sure what or who you need to give up, trust that things will resolve themselves over time and whatever the outcome it will ultimately be to your benefit.

(:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅[̲̅:♡:]̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅)

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔 :- You are afraid that it's out of control. You simply cannot resist this passionate attraction. Despite the fact it's addictive and unlikely to be right, you just can't stop yourself. Whatever it is, a passion for someone who's not good for you, money deals that are too good to be true or any other kind of temptation, try to resist, as it is unlikely to have a positive outcome. If you're feeling low in self-belief and self-worth and doubt your abilities - don't! Have confidence in yourself - it's not too late to change direction.

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗕 :- Are you really your best counsel? Probably not at this moment in time. You are worried that you will sell yourself short and agree to something that you don't feel morally comfortable with. For example you may really desire marriage but the offer has been 'let's live together'. You may be looking at a job or business opportunity but you question how ethical it is. Seek out an advisor you can trust such as a teacher, priest, parent or anyone you have respect for. They will be happy to help.

(:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅[̲̅:♡:]̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅)

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔 :- You are about to enter a period of peace and harmony in your relationship, career or life in general. You will find a way of handling difficult circumstances with calm confidence. Life is flowing at this time - enjoy it.

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗕 :- The Sun is shining on you - it's your time for success, joy and happiness. You will feel confident and full of vitality. It's a time to celebrate with friends and loved ones, perhaps enjoy a well-earned holiday, a time of pleasure and good news around children or the conception or birth of a longed-for baby. If you are not feeling this way take heart, you will enter this period soon.

(:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅[̲̅:♡:]̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅)

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔 :- A run of bad luck here, perhaps already evident or there are certainly signs that things are not going your way. The responsibility of important decisions weighs heavy with you where there are choices to make. Trust your intuition, and even if you have to make the painful decision to give up something in order to move on, then have the courage to do it. Trust that The Wheel of Fortune constantly turns and whilst it may be against you at the moment, it will in time turn and bring you good fortune.

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗕 :- However hard you try to control events they just won't go your way. Unexpected challenges, upheaval and disappointment will bring expectations to an end. Subconsciously you may have wanted a solution - you just didn't expect it to happen this way. Use this period of change as an opportunity for a new beginning. If you have been planning to move home you will be experiencing setbacks.

(:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅[̲̅:♡:]̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅)

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔 :- Success, fulfillment and conclusion are near at hand - the successful outcome to a venture, satisfaction in a relationship and efforts rewarded. It is a culmination of events and indicates material wealth and greater spiritual awareness. You may decide to purchase your dream house, act upon a wonderfully-fulfilling relationship offer or embark on a self-actualization journey.

𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗕 :- Expect success and achievement of your goals: this is a time for fulfillment of your ambitions. If you have placed your trust in your father, husband/partner or another man of significance in your life, they will come up trumps for you. If you have been the victim of ill-will, don't worry, you will win in the end.

(:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅[̲̅:♡:]̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅)

© @alaezasmystery ── all rights reserved. do not copy, translate, alter, or repost my work.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⇄ ◃◃ ⅠⅠ ▹▹ ↻

[mehavethoughts]

Tips For People Whose Families Won't Stop Violating Boycott Guidelines

Obviously, some of us are financially dependent on family. As someone who's been navigating this scenario for a while, here are some tips I've been using to try to avoid contributing.

-Request store brand food items only, or items you specifically know don't violate boycott guidelines

-Refuse to eat/use anything that does. If it is safe to do so, make clear your reasoning is because of those guidelines, and offer alternative products you will use. (For example, instead of Dove soap, propose another brand). This one is key!!! By doing so, you enforce that it is a waste of money to buy those things for you.

-Buy your own things as is possible, if you cannot convince family members to avoid boycott guidelines

-Download the 'No Thanks!' app for use when shopping. It's a great tool that lets you scan barcodes, and if the product is registered in their database as one that is being boycotted, it'll let you know

-Suggest alternatives before the topic comes up. If you're discussing where to order food, for example, try suggesting local restaurants. For this, you can use the insane prices of Doordash and similar locations as your argument, or argue that the food from these establishments is more filling. This is especially helpful for those whose families may not listen to pro-Palestine arguments, or who may be in danger if they show support around family

-When it comes to birthdays, holidays, or other times when you expect you will be given gifts, provide a clear list of things you would like that you have already vetted. If possible, request that people do not go off-list, or that if they do, they use the No Thanks app to be sure the item complies with boycott guidelines. If you receive a gift that does violate these guidelines, return it. I know that sounds harsh, but the point of this is the same as the point of refusing to eat anything you're brought from offending restaurants or grocery stores: if you accept these items anyway, you're sending the message that your stance is optional, and that they can ignore it, which will lead to repeat incidents

-On the birthday/holiday gifts note, consider using thrift stores to your advantage. Give a guideline of things you usually like and ask people to thrift an item for you, especially if that's the sort of thing your friends/family members would like to do. For example, I might ask someone thrift me a nice teapot or some teacups, because I like thrift store finds better than store-bought anyway

-When it comes to electronics, do not buy until your old devices are no longer functional. Then, consider buying refurbished, or avoiding brands that are bad. When it comes to computers, AMD is terrible, but INTEL is worse, so go for an AMD processor. If your charger broke, consider going to a thrift store. I know my local savers often has charger cords for much cheaper, and they do work in my experience. Note that the Salvation Army is incredibly queerphobic and should not be used as an alternative to corrupt businesses, as it is one itself

-Request, if possible, items not be purchased for you using Amazon. A great way to avoid this is to, when preparing lists for holidays, birthdays, etc., give online purchase links from places other than Amazon. This is especially effective if you pick things from small businesses with no Amazon-equivalent, such as pieces from small artists, because it means they can't find a cheaper price on Amazon

Note that this guide was designed based off my personal experiences with a mother who does not care about Palestine, and refuses to boycott. I am using these methods myself because they are the only way I can avoid putting money into the wrong hands as a person who is financially dependent on family.

If they seem hand-holdy or overbearing, that is because they need to be. I am prioritizing not sending money to the Israeli apartheid regime above the comfort of myself and my family, because lives are more important than a few awkward conversations or coming off as ungrateful.

I also recognize that not everyone can safely follow these guidelines, especially minors in abusive situations. That is why I presented some non-Palestine related arguments in these suggestions, like Doordashing McDonalds being more expensive than getting food from a small pizza joint for less filling items, or thrift store items being preferable on a personal note.

If you can't argue for Palestine, it still means a lot to simply avoid these businesses using whatever means necessary.

[fairycosmos]

Oh boy, things are extremely rough atm. Can you recommend any healthy coping mechanisms? I literally don’t know a single one that works for me except for self destruction and being on my phone until I don’t feel anything anymore. And apparently that’s not what we’re supposed to do when we’re sad

ok so unfortunately all of my healthy coping mechanisms only half work for me and it's a total gamble whether or not they're going to on any given day. and none of them ever cure my mental illness which is annoying. like they're not fail-proof solutions and a lot of the time they're simply frustrating in fact it often feels laughable to even try them. a walk is not going to make any of this better. but consistency DOES strengthen your coping skills like a weak muscle. like even after 3 days of practicing them i'm like Ok well i feel like shit but i survived without hurting myself and that was the whole point. not a cure but a tool. ok i'm just going to list them because otherwise, i will ramble forever. btw it's ok to do like, even half of one of these per day. there's no need to overwhelm yourself at all :) coping is coping.

meditation - it sounds and feels like bullshit but i follow this youtube called great meditation and they upload 10 min guided meditation sessions and they have truly gotten me through a lot of low moments at this point. sometimes i feel much better after and sometimes i barely notice a difference but the point is i've sat and breathed for a bit

journaling - i thought i needed some sort of mental health diary for this but then i just opened a google doc and followed these mental health journal prompts ( just one every other day, nothing overwhelming, and no pressure to write a lot or to write anything in particular) and it helped me organise my thoughts and notice the patterns i was/am locking myself into. there's also trauma processing prompts online if that is what you're after.

free writing - again just opening a word doc but this time you just write without thinking literally letting go and putting down whatever words your fingers type - no judgement no curation no performance no expectations.

submerging my face in cold water, holding ice cubs - good for grounding.

crying my eyes out, purposefully listening to sad songs or watching sad movies in order to do so - cleansing, painful, tires you out and can make you feel renewed briefly.

breathwork - again there's some great youtube vids for this. i do this 20 min nervous system reset somewhat often, but there's shorter ones that are also very effective. box breathing also helps if you just need a simple go to - breathe in for 4, hold for 4, our for 4.

lie down on a hard surface or the floor with your back straight - another grounding thing. to occupy your mind during this you can name 5 things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one you can taste.

pat your arms, legs, stomach, head, chest gently and breathe deeply - again it can be grounding.

watch trail cam vids of cute animals, use the wikipedia page generator to read up on smth you've never really thought about before, download duolingo and start learning a language. not to become fluent just to get your mind out of the place it's in, even for 5 minutes.

literally just move around especially outside - HATEEE to say it but stretching on your bedroom floor, going for a walk, following an exercise video etc - it can really help you feel a bit less stale and myopic. if it's too much, opening a window is a good start. or simply standing outside your house for 2 minutes and going back in. the air will feel good.

make sure all your bases are covered - have you eaten, have you slept, have you showered, have you talked to someone in the last few days, are you hydrated? if not, make a small move towards doing one of those things. feeling like crap physically only compounds how crap you feel mentally and so the cycle perpetuates.

scream, punch/throw pillows, snap pencils, stab at paper with pens.

affirmations - i'm trying to build a list of ones that resonate with me specifically because a lot of them don't LOL. but there's a lot of good resources online for this. one of my favorite current ones is: doing a little is better than doing nothing. a job half done is better than a job not done at all.

do something creative - it's not about being an artistic genius it's about doing something tangible with your hands and getting out of your head and using the space in your brain to focus on something that doesn't feel doomed. drawing, singing, cooking, playing an instrument, writing, whatever you want. you don't have to have done it before. you can just do it.

talk to someone you trust/care about, let them in even a tiny bit. it's ok to verbalise these things. give them a fair chance to be there for you the way you'd want to be there for them. i know it's hard, all of this is, but it's not impossible. also, look for any communal resources you can find - support groups, local therapists who may offer sliding scale prices that are affordable. it all sucks but it's something.

will add more when/if any come to mind. i'm sorry you're feeling like this and i sincerely hope it all becomes a bit lighter for you soon. sending so much love. x

[tarotwithdanise]

WHO IS SHE?

꒰⠀sections

[ 1. ] who is she?

[ 2. ] what's her divine feminine message to her?

[ 3. ] what's her traits that most people look on her up the most?

how to choose pile?

꒰⠀from left to right ; intuitively choose the pile your mind, heart and soul desire for. if you are having trouble choosing the right pile for you, here’s some tips you can do ; (1) take a deep breath (2) close your eyes (3) ask guidance from your guides (4) finally open your eyes and you can choose the right pile for you by the guidance you ask from your guides. if you are still having trouble by choosing the right pile for you let me know because i am willing to help and guide you.

PILE ONE PILE TWO PILE THREE

rules, disclaimer and notes ☆

[ 1. ] just a quick disclaimer : this reading was made for entertainment purposes only. this is obviously a general reading so takes what resonates and leave when it doesn’t, you don’t need to force your energy to read this and leave such a bad comment just to say it doesn’t resonates with you at all because the answer is very obvious! i don’t own any these pictures i collected them from pinterest so credits to the rightful owners.

[ 2. ] please ignore any grammatical errors on my reading since english is not my first language, thank you for understanding!

[ 3. ] third to the last one, if you are not an avid fan of this kind of readings and not totally 100% agree about the outcome of this pac please just ignore this post and don’t engaged anymore, this pac can contains harsh, hurtful comments about you so don't take it seriously since this is general , so kindly read at your own risk and take how it’ll resonates.

[ 4. ] lastly, be happy and enjoy reading my works — feedbacks, comments, likes, reblogs and follows are really appreciated by the reader. (that’s me, lol :3)

for tips, donation and paid readings ☆

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[ ♡ ] check out my second account @danisetarot.

SOURCE AND CREDITABLE : all of the pictures are collected and downloaded from pinterest , i don’t own any of them but credits goes to the rightful owners but edits belongs to me. i use the editor tools canva and ibispaint for the header and divider.

deck and tools used : waite-raider tarot, the light seer tarot, the divine feminine oracle, charms, intuition and alphabet and numbers 100 pcs wooden scrabble tiles + pen and paper for channelling the names and physical appearance.

PILE ONE

[ who is she? ]

temperance-the emperor-ten of sword rx-eight of wands-nine of swords.

She finally mastered the art of loving and appreciating herself more. She began to concentrate on her long-term ambition and goals. She has attracted a lot of attention, and people think she is fun to be around. Despite the fact that she is viewed as pretty and delicate by others, she also has insecurities, and for some reason, she has a tendency to believe that she will not be able to keep up with them. Before the sunset vanish, you'll occasionally catch a glimpse of her before she returns to her familiar surroundings, the moon and stars. She's very impatient, so she usually juggles many things at once and expects immediate results. She has shrunk the pain from the past and accept the truth, she experienced numerous tears and heartaches as a child and the empty existence she was led deep within her inner soul, with only few pleasant memories, that have left her exhausted throughout her childhood life; however, she now realizes that everything happened for a reason. She needed a long time to comprehend this significant substance. To emerge from the gloom, she had to go through a lot of hardships. She is now applying what she has learned from her previous difficulties and was trying her best even it's small or little progress.

She is also mature and old now. She doesn't want other people to go through what she have gone through, but she wants to use her skills and abilities to help other people like her. She is the kind of person who brings out the best in others. She will lead very different lives as an adult than she did as a child. She adheres to the rules; seems like a winter before becoming a ravishing spring, and she pursues her dreams and goals in the same way and with the same level of class and honoring her dignity. There is no need to rush anything that is taking place on her; everything is meant to happen. From her past, she has always preferred to remain out of the spotlight and kept her identity a secret, she anticipate becoming an excellent communicator when she is got older. Despite being a she, she possesses a strong masculine energy. She will be self-assured and certain of her own worth in the right time and ready to take charge of any circumstance.

[ nutshell/keywords ]

fear of showing their talent, impatient, masculine energy, moving from one place to another especially foreign countries, have a habit of walking, eating or talking fast. lesson learned, daddy issues, peace, anxiety and balance.

[ who is the divine feminine that have message for you and what are their message to you? ]

The Divine Feminine, Thecla and Mary Magdalene, have a message for you. You should know that your life is in your hands, according to your divine feminine. To do this for your own benefit, you don't need permission from anyone else. Right now, you hold the power. You are in controller of what you want for your future. Don't allow other people to rule over you. You are free to cut ties with those who are no longer serving you, if you just choose and wanted to. Your divine reminds you of your soul's mission for this lifetime and wants you to know it. They also want you to accomplish all of your goals. You can be anything you want to be. You won't have to worry because they will support you spiritually. They also want you to know that love, the love you had for yourself, is your true power. They want you to have self-confidence and stop doubting your abilities and talent. Because love is your power, it will never ends and will always reside within your heart. You are still a human being, so forgive yourself and accept who you are.

[ what traits that most people look on her up the most? ]

the lovers-ace of wands-the world-five of pentacles.

You are loving human, you like demonstrating or sharing your values to others is one of the qualities that people most admire to you. You may come across to some as someone who puts a lot of effort into their appearance. However, you are someone who listens with insight, openness, and honesty. I recently came across the phrase "on my way to my self-love," so perhaps some of you have made significant progress in your own personal development. Numerous issues that had previously held you back have been resolved. Just keep practicing self-love and acceptance. While if you have current partner right now, they look up your romantic nature. Do you really want to relocate, perhaps to another country? because there is always a sign that someone is moving here or moving to another location/place. People also do look up to you because of your abilities and upbeat demeanor, if you frequently travel to other countries you'll likely to impart your knowledge and skills. You also have a passion for learning; In fact, you need to continue learning in order to feel happy and better. Learning is an integral part of your journey and life. If you have colleagues/coworkers they look up on this trait of yours where the fact that you can be counted/lean on and can be trusted in every important matters of them to you. They also adore your success in achieving your goals, particularly your glow and self-acceptance. These people who love you the most will see how far you've come and how hard you try to keep up, but the end result is well worth it. You will ultimately be someone who rises from the bottom to the top.

significant zodiac signs : their chart have a strong gemini and sagittarius. aries, scorpio, aquarius, virgo, cancer and capricorn. (sun,moon,rising.)

initials/names : J-J-S-M-A-P-D-S-B-E-C-T-B-H-H-U-I-Z. ( pearl, sam, bea, kaori, ayemi, emily, pari, aadhira, emilliana, phoebe, sol, selene, diana, jenny, meera, thalia, ann, cordelia, joy, jade, denise and madison. ) I hope they were spelled correct, please me know if they don't.

possible physical appearance : deep dimples, brown/light shade of eyes, chubby with curves body type, long nails with nail polished, wear eye glasses/contacts, short hair to medium hair length that always tied up or only have one style, pretty hands, significant nose, reddish cheeks(maybe from make-up), moles on face, chest part and hands, might have rings(2-3), necklace with small pendant, flat/rubber shoes, likes to wear neutral color of clothes, pimples on the back, shoulders or face, nice and teeth straight, hair color is brown/black but might dyed into pink, red or purple shades.

extra messages : intimidating, cold, childish, type of person take a long of time to get the joke of someone but laughing of it like it was the best joke they ever heard in their entire life, might love cats rather than dogs, boyish, anime, quite type, kpop, taylor swift, paramore, melanie martinez, broke, might have problem on menstruation, intelligent, likes and enjoy to eating foods, abundance coming on her before this year ends.

songs that i picked for this pile :

Thank you so much for reading, let me know your thoughts, feedbacks as well tipping and reblogs is well appreciated !! ♡

࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚ 𝓞 ops you already reached the end. ࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚

PILE TWO

[ who is she? ]

She is unhappy in her current situation, and her lack of mental stability prevents her from pursuing pure happiness. Additionally, she lacks self-motivation, which results in missed opportunities that would otherwise satisfy her needs and desires. She feels distant and disconnected from others because she have lacks of trust. She believes that whenever she confronts them, people always speak negatively about her. People perceive her as aloof and quite but all she wanted was to defend herself from those who were attempting to harm her. She has a kind heart and is willing to lend a helping hand to anyone she thinks might benefit from it. She enjoys showing respect and class to others. She will be an effective leader and will thrive on financial security. She believes that anything is possible, no matter how difficult her life is or what she is going through at the moment, and no one can take this kind of nature away from her. She can sell sand in the desert if she wants to, and she might succeed in the business world.

She has a tendency to overthink a lot, but she has big dreams and moves well in any direction she choose. She can set trends because she appears to have magical powers and can turn anything she touches into gold. Somehow she is cruel to herself in some way and always pities and judges herself, but she was unaware that she is born as an alpha. She doesn't realize it yet but little she don't know is that she will be. She needs to believe to herself that she can do everything she wanted to be, she got a strong manifestation abilities.

[ nutshell/keywords ]

throw her in pack of wolves, she'll comes back leading it, manifestor, rought to themselves, dancer/singer, strong mindset for goals, kind, generous, can be a great business owner, missed some important things, likes to spread happiness but deep inside was hurt, ask univers to tap the bigger forces to make her desires come true and unstable.

[ who is the divine feminine that have message for you and what are their message to you? ]

The divine feminine that has a message for her are freyja and rita of cascia. You spent many days, hours and minutes of your life by choosing wisely which one is better and good for you. You know what is good for you, you understand the timing of divine and you have fully trusted it. Your divine feminine wants you to say yes only to where you think it's worth to have for and don't be afraid to say no so that you can only say yes what will nourish you. They want you to choose the life you want to have right now. They want you to know that every second you spending is very important. Be a warrior and not a worrier, always believe anything is impossible from this world and know that you are capable to do everything freely, don't lock yourself in a cell. Don't be a prisoner with a chain on their feet. Forgive yourself and others, forgiveness is about setting yourself free. Don't lose hope, keep praying and trust the divine timing.

[ what traits that most people look on her up the most? ]

queen of wands-page of wands-justice-seven of pentacles.

The fact that she puts in a lot of effort is one of her most admirable characteristics. You have a very upbeat attitude toward other people, especially with your friends. Despite having a lot of friends, you've thought that you were an introvert or a very introverted person. Despite this, people always try to figure out who you really are because they think you are mysterious. And the fact that you are always there for your friends when they need you is one of a trait that they admire in you. You may have been like a mother figure to this group of friends, which is why they see you as one of their closest and good friend. Everywhere you go, you bring harmony and equality. You wants lust for life, as I said, and she will be good at bringing everything she wants into her life. You adore the outdoors and find that a place like this brings you such inner peace and tranquility—perhaps for some of you it's your grandparents' property well maybe you visit often. People also admire you because you have a lot of patience and might want to plant seeds for a long time in the future. I'm not sure if you're the kind of person who doesn't want to be the center of attention but ends up being one. People adore the fact that you have a big heart and you don't hesitate to express how much you care about your loved ones. You are about to end a routine but are continuing to do the same thing but in new ways and strategies.

significant zodiac signs : aries-gemini-aquarius-cancer-taurus-capricorn-virgo-libra-sagittarius-scorpio. (sun,moon,rising.)

initials/names : M, V, Y, Y, S, M, T, D, H, I, A, A, A, B, P, C,R, U, U, U, Z, & K. ( ishi, victoria, may, melissa, dalia, dorothy, anna, alexa, ruby, athena, rose, chloe, leah, rhea, kyla, khyra, saira, sara(h), sandy, megan, belle, luna, lily, iris and ivanna. )

possible physical appearance : long curly/perm hair, hoodie eyes, light/dark color set of eyes, scars, tattoos, always have hair pins on their hair, lips is not too big nor too thin, smaller/average of height, hoodies, shorts, might have a stretch marks, hairy body, might have brace, have like a elephant moles, crop tops, long skirts, noticable eye bags, small bags or purse, red and black colors are significant for them.

extra messages : kind but can kill if anyone hurt their loved ones, somehow popular or well liked by others, type of someone who'll forgive but will never forget and no more second chances, end up making healthy choices when it comes to love and life, strong will for financial abundance, have many options right now, karmic relationships and lessons and missing the old happy and memorable memories.

songs that i picked up :

Thank you so much for reading, let me know your thoughts, feedbacks as well tipping and reblogs is well appreciated !! ♡

࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚ 𝓞 ops you already reached the end. ࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚

PILE THREE

[ who is she? ]

You can call her if you want to see someone who likes to be silly around with other people and laughs at their own mistakes. When she's around, she always makes everyone around her feel happy. She is the kind of person you can rely on when you have work to do because she is committed, dedicated, and fully focused on the task at hand. She'll be friendly and likely leave a big impression on others. She is strong, successful, and mature. She always looks for the good in every situation, and I can't blame her for being brave as a lion. She doesn't even question it when she thinks this is right. She continued to live her life, despite the times when she felt down, thanks to the strong motivation of her family and friends.

She will seize the power and opportunities. She makes every effort to improve herself and there's a high chance of her to establish an empire. She will succeed by working for herself example making her own business.

She enjoys having parties and getting to know new people. As long as they are the center of attention, she typically has a large group of friends with whom they enjoy interacting. People are most likely to fall in love with her frequently because of her style, beauty, and charisma, which will make them stand out wherever they go. She is most likely asleep when she vanishes where you can't see her everywhere and when you can't hear her loud and raucous laughter, conversation, or voice.

[ nutshell/keywords ]

a loud friend 24/7, might feel ugly and insecure with their body sometimes, positive individual, type of someone whom you can't turn down that easily, party people, well liked and loved, have a lot of secret admirers, considered themselves already successful person and dedicated with their works.

[ who is the divine feminine that have message for you and what are their message to you? ]

The divine feminine that has a message for her are kali and perpetua.

Kali and perpetua are the divine feminine beings who have a message for her. Your divine feminine urges you to remove anything that no longer serves you because doing so will be beneficial to your own well-being. They don't want you to waste any more time proving who you really are, but you're doing fine right now. You come here to show respect, love, and care to others. They want you to know that you don't have to be afraid of everything and that your purpose in life is not to please others or make them proud of you. There is wisdom and truth within you, so if you believe you are not on the right path, you can begin again. Being real and authentic is your greatest power. Writing can help you express your inner voice, whether you already have a journal or want to start one. And as you dare to live the truth, that voice transforms into your own light—a fire—that calls you and claims you.

[ what traits that most people look on her up the most? ]

the fool-six of pentacles-the heirophant-strength.

I adore how each pile allowed for its own puzzle to be solved. Okay, people look up your originality and uniqueness, and yes, I can understand when you act childish at times. You are able to see the good in everyone, and this ability of yours, you have an access to make people more likely to be taken advantage of, if you use to. You are not as concerned about the material world as the rest of society, which is frequently noticed by others. People see you as creative, and your ability to think outside the box helps you succeed. Because of your generous and caring nature, children will admire you and adore your presence. They've always wanted to be near you, even though you don't want to be with them. Some people think you're good at singing because of your beautiful voice.

People adore that you are an open-minded individual who is open to other people's ideas and beliefs. Last but not least, these people will admire your bravery—not only are you open about the beliefs of other people, but you are also not afraid to stand up for yourself when other people try to get in your way.

significant zodiac signs : leo-virgo-taurus-gemini-aquarius. (sun,moon, rising.)

initials/names : G, G, T, P, J, C, A, R, Y, U, K, L, L, V, Z, X, X ,I ,E, W, & S. ( jane, julie, patricia, ross, ysballe, ymir, zoey, catherine, shane, genevieve, geneva, lou, louse, angela, emilia, ella, eva, ena, kaye, urja, urshita. ) let me know if they were spelled right.

possible physical appearance : significant chess part, petite, long arms and fingers, tshirts, sweaters, likes to appear dark and light feminine, might have hair highlights, crooked teeth/nails, short nails but may have nail polish/colored, have a strong smell of perfume, might wear eye glasses and noticeable veins.

extra messages : funny person, likes bird, dogs, cat, have a crush start with j, m, t or p, eating chocolates, savage, light colors is their favorites, eating noodles and schedule is their wallpaper.

songs that i picked up :

Thank you so much for reading, let me know your thoughts, feedbacks as well tipping and reblogs is well appreciated !! ♡

࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚ 𝓞 ops you already reached the end. ࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚࿙‌֒࿚

⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ ⠀:¨ ·.· ¨:⠀⠀

Hello, everyone! It's been a long time since i uploaded my latest pac. I hope everything that i've said make sense about you even though I know that this is a general reading. I send a message to Universe that may everyone will be blessed, stay healthy and happy everytime they come across with my account. Happy weekends, expect more pacs contents to be posted. ૮꒰ ˶• ༝ •˶꒱ა ⠀ ⠀⠀ ⠀⠀

⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀ `· . ꔫ

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