#would have added more text but this was hell to compress for tumblr

[melmedarda]

Manipulate, mansplain, manslaughter.

⸻ part 1/? of phrases in threes, arcane in meme.

[cherry-bomb-ships]

I rlly want to know how you did you're header cuz holy fuck it looks so cool!!!

OK OMG SORRY FOR TAKING SO LONG TO ANSWER THIS BUT. First of all, thank you so much 🥺💖💖 Second, I'm more than willing to answer so I can brag about my header cuz I worked SUPER hard on it and would love to share my work process 💖💖💖 This is gonna be a liiitle complex, so here's the TLDR version of my process with a full explanation under the cut (plus some other fun info under the cut!)

I made the colored overlay in my art program of choice (Illustrator) and made the colors partially transparent, while keeping the black lines 100% opaque to have solid separations between each clip. I also figured in advance that I'd fit 5 boxes in the frame at a time so I sized them appropriately

I used my video editing software of choice (Sony Movie Studio) to place each clip in and manually crop and pan all 13 of my selected video segments to make sure they fit in their respective boxes. This was the biggest chunk of the work tbh :0

My original plan was to export the clip as frames and place them into a gifmaker, but this thing was such a beast at 15 seconds and 449 frames that it exceeded the frame limit of any gifmaking site, so instead I exported the clip as a video and used an MP4 to GIF converter.

The final file came out to 34 MB (which is HUGE for a gif) so to get it under Tumblr's 10MB gif limit, I had to compress and optimize the hell out of it by shrinking it, cutting the colors down and adding lossiness, and the final file in my header right now is a bit under 9MB

There we go, that was a condensed version of my whole process!! But under the cut I've got some screenshots of the editing process if you're interested :3c. Give it a look, I worked super hard on it!

Here's the original file of the colored overlay! The canvas dimension started at what I knew would be the width of my GIF, so I started at 720px and measured 5 boxes within the space. Afterwards, I copied and pasted the boxes until I had 18 total, and I resized the canvas to fit the entire thing accordingly. See how the five boxes on the end are the same colors as the five at the beginning? That's where the GIF loops in the final product!

And here we have the video file I used to create the GIF! Fun fact, I actually intended there to be a text overlay of my url, but I decided to remove it at the last second. In my opinion, the finished piece looks much better without text uwu But you can still see the layer up top that had the text in it!

It's really hard to describe how much work this actually was unless you're familiar with video editing software, but basically everything you see that moves in the final gif, well, there's no automatic process to make it move in that way. To put it simply, the easiest way I could do it was to tell the editing program to move the clip from point A to point B, but those two points had to chosen manually. This was much easier on clips of my f/os who stayed in one spot, like Tom, Massimo and Robotnik's clips, but there were clips where my fave moved around so that they wouldn't still be inside the box if I only gave the clip the "point A, point B" command. That means that there had to be multiple other movement points in between, and some up these clips move a LOT so they ended up having to go from point A to, like, point H. (Discord's is actually kinda messy in my opinion, as I was trying to keep his head in frame even when he threw it back to laugh, so you'll understand what I mean if you go back to that one in particular.)

But I also had to make sure that the clips didn't overlap each other, so for every single clip I had to crop them using a cookie cutter video effect, which I also had to, you guessed it, give a point A and point B to move across. Also, you may notice the top five clips that I had to cut to go at the end and beginning of the GIF so that it looped properly, and for all of those clips, I had to make sure the end and beginning had the exact same frame, and I had to copy-paste the position coordinates as well to make sure that the loop was nearly seamless. In the final product you can notice a slight stutter where the gif loops, but in my opinion it worked out much better than I thought it would!

Okay that's pretty much it for the technical stuff but lastly, I wanted to show off the notes I was doing on my little desk notepad to keep track of stuff during this whole project. Fun fact I started this project a little bit before I added Massimo as an f/o, which is why his name is kinda reluctantly squeezed in on both pages. On the left you can see my process for deciding the colored box I'd assign to each f/o; my starting number was 12 faves so I tried to do 2 shades of each other the rainbow's colors. You may also notice that Hopper's color ended up being Massimo's, and I changed Hopper's to more of a forest green!

On the right I had the order the clips were going in, as well as some various coordinate notes to help me remember where to place a few clips. You can also see I wrote down the conversion site I used to turn clips I found into MP4s, cuz sadly youtube to MP4 sites are becoming an endangered species ;-;

Aaaand that's about everything I can think of! I'm very happy with the final product and I'm very glad that a lot of people seem to think it's cool! 💝💝💝

[xtremedespair3d]

Should I move to WordPress?

This is kind of a sudden thing for me to talk about, but it’s something that I started thinking out of the blue this Thursday afternoon and I think I’m so close to make the final decision to actually do it because it’ll benefit me better for my blogging hobby in a better platform with better features, I might completely switch to WordPress for good.

For starters, the WordPress I’m talking about is the freemium version, WordPress.com, there’s no way I could use WordPress.org because I need to make a domain for it, and I don’t have the money to afford one and I think using WordPress.org might still require some coding to tweak some things, which is a hard pass.

I breifly talked about some things about moving to WordPress on my Twitter, but I think it’s best to explain in more detail as to why I want to move to WordPress.

Why should I move to WordPress?

As much as I like the theme I’m using in Tumblr, there’s this big problem with the pictures where it gets compressed so bad that the pictures look incredibly small. Just look how small it is.

And the worst part is if you click to view the picture, the compression really affected the actual resolution.

I’ve been running a test dummy website in WordPress and I chose this theme that I think it looks really cool, it has the style I like, but it still has the same problem with the image resolution when reading posts.

Although I think it looks somewhat better, it doesn’t look incredibly small compared to how Tumblr looks, but what’s better is that the compression doesn’t affect the resolution of the image when you click “View image” on Firefox (Or “Open tab to view image” in Chrome) and at least the placeholder tier shown here is normal, but when I put other images and I click “view image,” there’s this forced WordPress.com thing with menus all over, and no matter what you do, you can’t look at the bare image in your browser. Let’s just hope for the best that it doesn’t affect the resolution when you save those images.

Basically WordPress offers far better formatting options than Tumblr does if you’re using the Rich Text editor, and that’s what I’ve been using for my whole life, I don’t even bother using the HTML editor because I don’t know anything about coding at all. WordPress has this neat text editor where any item you put, some text or an image and they’re all set in blocks and it gives you some options right off the bat, we all know the basic text features like bold, headline, etc, but the headline is a life saver because I can make headlines at different sizes to balance the topics and stuff and that’s something I wouldn’t do in Tumblr’s rich text editor. I can even put images with no problem and the “Featured Image” option in WordPress works really good if your posts have thumbnails, I always tried to emulate this with Tumblr by just adding the picture on top of the text as if it was a thumbnail, it worked fine but I guaranteed it’s not as good of actually setting up your thumbnail as an option.

There’s also the option to add dividers which is something I really need for Tumblr, Tumblr did use to have dividers but for some reason they removed and I’ll just have to add pictures or something.

I did try a different theme on WordPress and the images look far better than this theme I’m using, but the problem with WordPress as well as Tumblr, is that 99% of the themes aren’t even that good, they just focus way too much on galleries and even the blog focused ones are just very cluttered with junk I don’t even need and defeats the purpose of wanting to make a blog site, this WordPress theme, the Rowling theme, is the kind of style that I like, I like my blogs to be like this classic style with the widgets like search, archive and such on the right while I get the posts and stuff on the left. It may not be as cool as the Tumblr one I’m using and the Rowling theme still has some flaws but it’s still going to do fine.

The other theme I tried was the Penscratch 2 theme which gears towards more blogging and it’s the kind of style that I like, although I used to like the theme but now I grew tired of it because I didn’t like how it looked anymore and the color options are extremely limited. The Rowling theme, on the other hand, allows me to customize 3 out of 5 options, I may not change colors in some areas but for the most part it’s far enough for me to use the theme.

Tumblr is a dead site

Another reason why I want to move on to WordPress is for the potential to get better attention unlike Tumblr which is non-existent (I mostly share links of the posts to some Discord servers I occasionally interact with, but I do wish the posts by themselves would get some tractions, I don’t know if it’s the tags but they should get something), mainly because no one on this day and age uses Tumblr anymore because they nuked all of the NSFW content, and that’s probably what caused people to boycott Tumblr for good.

Another problem Tumblr has is being owned by different companies like Yahoo and Verizon which served no good, especially after the porn content purge, but I COMPLETELY forgot that Tumblr was recently acquired by Automattic, the company that owns WordPress. Well, this post has already become quite the irony considering I want to move to WordPress, although I don’t think they’ll do any favors to Tumblr, and as the title of this category implies, Tumblr is dead at this point.

Despite Tumblr being bought by the owner of WordPress, it doesn’t really do anything for me, they’re not even adding some quality of life improvements to redeem Tumblr, hell, they probably won’t even redeem Tumblr, so might as well switch to WordPress which works far better as a blogging platform.

What about the posts I published throughout the years?

I originally thought I should rewrite every single post I made on the website for archival purposes, but I realized there’s a lot of them and it would be a pain in the ass to copy and paste everything, especially my New Year 2021 post which is probably the longest post I’ve ever made in my life (And nobody even read that, all that effort I put gone to waste).

I think it’s for the best to start from scratch, I was planning to launch the site with the HajiKo Anime Winter 2021 post (The Cells at Work Black + Cells at Work season 2 thing is a teaser), but at the same time I should make the first post being about my move to WordPress and I’ll leave a link to my Tumblr if anyone wants to read all my previous posts.

Conclusion

The more I’m trying to build my website with a dummy domain, the more I feel like I’m close to actually make the decision to actually move to WordPress for good, though it won’t take a while until April where I’ll launch the site with my new anime review post, like I mentioned earlier.

Despite the flaws the Rowling theme has and amongst other things, it just takes time and figure out what pages I’m going to make and other things and I’ll have a nicely polished website to completely move on from Tumblr for good.

By the way, I’m mainly going to use the free plan on WordPress, I don’t think I would like to spend money on upgrades for more features, even though I would like to have a good domain, SEO and even make money, I don’t think it’s going to be worth the investment if I want to pay for the plan religiously (I’m already financially struggling with paying for Netflix, Disney+, Arknights month pack, Ogata Tei’s Fantia and Sky-Freedom’s Subscribestar anyways).

For the moment I still have yet to finish my dummy site to get a better picture for how will the website turn out so I’ll eventually publish the real thing, so please wait patiently until that happens.

UPDATE - February 20th: I’m seriously having a hard time trying to make my website look good because every time I’m making a new page from scratch, the way the titles are formatted and everything just looks god awful! Everything is so narrow and it’s nothing like how the Rowling theme’s live demo is supposed to look like!

Look how gorgeous the live demo of the theme looks!

Compared to the absolute trash from making a page from scratch! Everything is so narrow, I hate this!

This is seriously disappointing me so bad to the point I don’t wanna move to WordPress anymore, there’s no other themes that I like to choose from.

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My Carrd.

[zecaffeinatedmumbler]

First Text Post In A Fucking While.

Hoping your 2017 is going alright! 

Haven’t actually updated my blog in a very long while, save for selfies, so what better way to start than right now? I felt prompted to type and write this down in regards to a handful of recent conversations, in addition to a long phone call to a dear friend earlier on this week.

Now, I've made it very clear about my own dislike for New Year's Resolution and jut the overall "Temporary" feel of them, You believe in them, hey, I'm not meaning to bring anyone down.

However, a goal will always be a goal, no matter how temporary or long term it means to you in making personal ends meet, to which I must confess and swallow some pride for a bit.

Every day of the year, even if it has dragged for so long due to uncontrollable circumstances (and/or my own sense of insecurity towards where this will all lead to in the end), my lifelong goal hasn't changed for a bit, which was to use every day to progress and grow myself steps closer (no matter what size said-step was) towards my journey as a filmmaker and a storyteller.

It's been working more or less so: I've learned things, half of which are new, and the other half being things I'm fully aware that I should've known by now, but have accepted not to beat myself down for it; I've gotten some networking done over the past year with fellow artists, partly thanks to being back working at WB; finally, I was able to somewhat renew a sense of creative brainstorming and proactive willpower, partly thanks to some hard truths and revelations.

Alas, though my hopes were high in said-proactive vibes to treat 2016 better and wiser and get more shit done, it wasn't enough and the situation became fickle, not to mention, how dysfunctional things felt by the wayside once we reached the latter half.

As I've mentioned, whilst I'm not going to be in denial in the fact that more should've been done, as well as wanting to feel regret, I'm not going to worry over the spilled fucking milk.

Which is where the phone conversation and the explanation towards why I'm typing this at 3AM comes into place.

During our phonecall, we talked about said-mess of 2016, and I guess my unwillingness to do as much creatively than intended, as by this point, being a natural rambler who never gets to the point, that age-old questions comes ringing into my head:

Who the Fuck Cares To Read What I Say.

I chose not to post as many text posts, as I had already developed an inward belief that I've said all the things that I've needed to say during my time typing away on social media. As a result, I haven't even updated my Tumblr as much either, which I had treated as a diary of sorts to any wandering schmuck on the interwebs.

If I had continued I'd just feel like I'd be in a loop, and I had already disliked explaining bits and bobs of myself.  

My own tangent finished, being the kind soul he always was, he, of course. takes the time to fill me in otherwise.

He feels that whilst I believe that I write bullshit, he defends that he has good faith that there plenty out there who would feel otherwise. He believed that I have this strange, unique way of seeing every day living in the universe and its surroundings, and turning it into something any one would want to hear from a person like myself one day, as if I had pull all the stops just to keep anyone invested.

As much as I want to disagree, because, y'know, artist insecurity and spilled milk, it hit resonance and nerve within.

Whilst I've bitched and moaned and moaned about writing and the creative process, I can admit something true to the heart.

Ever since I had been seeking help for depression almost 4 years ago, with it rooted and blossomed the sense to write creatively, over time. Not only was I able to conjure things I thought I was not capable to do with words and fiction before, but it proved to be a surprisingly therapeutic and somewhat-euphoric experience. It felt beyond adding a final tool to my creative arsenal, something that I never thought I had within me or was capable of even doing.

Flash forward, regardless if it was through pen and paper, or digital text like what I'm doing here, my hidden and compressed feelings felt free and unlost whenever I wrote or typed what I was feeling.

To which my friend heartily reassures me that one day, should everything turn out well and dandy, there's bound to be people out there who would be invested in what stories I have to tell...it all just starts with getting it out any way I can.

That said, if I'm to hit the start of a so-called creative zenith, I'm going to have to start getting everything out there and feel like who I was beware when started this journey to tell the best damn stories, which most definitely means plenty of writing, wandering, spontaneous conversations with strangers, and practicing my camera game, among other things...I guess, my return to form.

This isn't going to be the most easiest thing, let alone, transitioning to those old habits will be a bit excruciating, and hell, I may need to ask for help with getting around after a while, but...

It doesn't hurt to say hello again, right?

Guide Me, Universe. *sending peace, love & positive vibes always* <3