smorgasbord again no problem

[a_flyleaf]

Been a bit!

Mini boost first: Found via vriddy’s Community Thursday (A+ way to find new places to poke around here, btw), findingfriends is a neat community; a lot quieter than addme or addme_fandom, probably because the template is a very thorough questionnaire. Which I like a lot!! I will have to poke around there more some time.

Okay, we now return to your regularly-scheduled… uh, “whatever this person has been doing/thinking about lately.” Yes, that has an excellent ring to it. Very concise.

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ongoing writing struggle

Turns out there actually is a deadline, cool! Also turns out, even when I try ~public accountability~ things, my work process continues to be “get a lot of work done in an extended sitting or two, don’t touch it for several days between bursts.”

Uhh, I read more stuff on the 19th, wrote more a couple days ago finally, and everything’s still shaky but we’re getting there. Wanted to write more today, kept getting distracted, said I would either write or catch up on Dreamwidth stuff aaaaand here I am! Good use of time either way, and the evening’s still fairly young….

At any rate I am liking the rewrite and the direction it’s going now, and I have no idea how it’s going to turn out length-wise but it’s getting somewhere \o"/ Finished, Not Perfect…!!!

artstuffs

Still don’t know how I want to approach putting art here, but for the record, uploaded a couple drawings to my fansite between now and the last one. Art #1 is a comic which spoils the relationship between main characters & alludes to events which don’t occur until the latter half of the game, but it’s also in 90% Croatian so (assuming you won’t understand that) idek if it warrants a spoiler warning. If you have neither game nor linguistic context then you will simply see two people standing around talking, and the framing is ominous sometimes. Hooray!

Art #2 is a complete and total shitpost that calls for no context whatsoever. Very mild spoiler (loosely alludes to something you’d probably notice within an hour or two of playing, pace depending) in the description.

Bonus art, exclusive for you guys because while I’m here why not, has not been published in full yet. It’s a shitpost also but I like the faces specifically.

^These two own my brain a little, btw.

web design is my passion

I am very much aware that my current theme here, and default website layout (test page here, because it will inevitably change at some future point), is Empty Minimalism Hell. Part of this is because, during graphic design school, I started to see it as Peak Design (less the fault of the courses/professors, more on me being perfectionistic about everything); but I also genuinely like the clean look. It keeps your focus where it should be (The Content), and by extension lets The Content speak for itself.

However!! It's not like I don’t enjoy some degree of decoration, and as long as there’s no gifs or sparkly cursors (dear lord those grabbed me like a moth to flame on tumblr) I don’t find, say, the unconventional layouts of various Neocities sites too distracting. I’ve also been poking around the RP scene here, and damn am I impressed by some of the stuff people use for layouts! Like,,, !!!!!!

There’s no particular Point that I’m getting at here, really. Code Fun. And also, somewhat tangentially, I do want to tweak my journal theme to show various links that I steamrolled hid with impunity. Even though I’m still not crazy about the public reading list, the calendar and tag pages are pretty useful! And maybe when the tweakage happens I will get a little more ~personalized~ with it, like sticking in a giant fucking anime character that covers all the posts ahaha jk jk I wouldn’t do that to you guys :-)

maybe for April Fool’s or something—

(Pleasantly surprised that post still exists, btw. How does it only have 8k notes, it has made residence in my long-term memory because it is The Peak ~2015 tumblr theme experience.)

also, re:internet…

Did you know the internet is fucking scary, btw? Recently and without remotely trying I found the state a complete stranger lives in, just by browsing some of the stuff they’d posted—and this wasn’t someone whose About is a laundry list of personal information, either!! And earlier today, in search of a theme code source (over at style_system, for the curious), I tracked down the current accounts of someone who went inactive on LiveJournal years ago.

This was not hard, in either instance.

I feel like I shouldn’t have been able to do that.

And like, I know I overshared like a motherfucker years ago, and basically I’m just constantly reminded of this one tweet by Dreamwidth’s cofounder Denise (rahaeli @not-twitter, though I didn’t save the specific tweets in question) about how most people online are probably much, much easier to dox than they think they are.

There’s this one blogger I used to read, ms-demeanor, who posts about techy things and being smart about the internet—and also happens to use a selfie avatar and talked frequently about Actual Job and dog and such. When asked about this (not something I have a link to either), their response (as badly paraphrased in my memory) was essentially “they already have my info, might as well.”

I don’t even know, honestly. Internet is scary.

…And on that comforting note, this post’s current music features an old earworm :D If I could fit the capslock CSS in the box I would have titled it “Reeses Puffs Reeses Puffs”. Enjoy~!

Comments

[jellyfishlover]

Good luck with the writing!! \o/

The atmosphere in Art #1 is so neat! (well, I mean, to be more accurate it’s more vaguely unsettling, but still really neat to pull off!) The limited pallet you’ve used plays into it really well! That one panel of Basil(?) with the “camera” framing the clouds behind him is lovely…! And Art #2… just pure beauty! XD The faces in the bonus are just too good, as well! The way you draw expressions in general is really nice!

Oh my god…. the anime girl layout…. XD Love that the first bullet point is minimalism, it sure is!

Gah, yeah. I remember seeing an old post (on tumblr, I think. I’m not sure I could find it again.) of a person demonstrating how easy it is to find a location just based on offhand comments. Sometimes it just feels like the barrier of elbow grease (or lack of doing anything with the information) is really the only hoop to jump through to get personal information like that…
Of course, there’s ways to obscure that a bit and personal comfort levels of What Is Known Online about the self and whatnot. I guess everyone just sorts out the risk-reward level they're willing to go to.

[a_flyleaf]

Thank youuu \o/ Haha, the limited palette is largely a byproduct of me not wanting to spend 500 years on it, so I’m glad the colors that are used establish an atmosphere anyway! Basil is the one with the sunflower, so I think you got ’im right. And expressions are always fun~

Look, I’m not saying that it’s apparently entirely possible to make the anime girl layout from hell work on Dreamwidth, but you could absolutely pull off the anime girl layout from hell here on Dreamwidth (minus the cursor sparkles, anyway). CSS is magic :-)

Sometimes it just feels like the barrier of elbow grease (or lack of doing anything with the information) is really the only hoop to jump through to get personal information like that…

Pretty much, yeah >_> And it makes such a fine and ever-wobbly line to walk when it comes to disclosing stuff about yourself! It’s a pity more granular privacy options aren’t mainstream (e.g. only logged-in users can see X, only people on certain lists can see Y); wouldn’t undo any existing damage, but it’s really nice to have the options.

[vriddy]

Heyyy thank you for the shout-out :D And good luck with the writing!! The faces on that art piece are most excellent :D :D XD So expressive!!

[a_flyleaf]

Happy to boost :D And thanks, on both fronts! The writing (for this particular piece) is done now but I’ll never be done drawing silly faces ;P

[batiferrite]

I haven’t gotten around to playing Omori yet, but the art is nice! Like other commenters have said, very cool atmosphere.

In regards to web design, I’m kinda stuck between wanting the page to be practical and efficient to, as you said, let the content speak for itself… but, on top of that, I want something that looks cute, y’know? I’ve found a nice middle ground is to use a very basic layout for the main site, then make little journal pages and other spin off sites that are more stylized and funky. I’ve specifically trolling Spriter’s Resources to find cute graphics from old games and that’s really been working for me! d(^～^)

Yeah, I can’t believe that post only has 8,000 notes, either! Also, somewhat related, due to wasting my childhood and early adolescence on Tumblr, I’ve internalized the default redux theme and associated edits as Peak Web Design, lol.

…I know that privacy is important and you should never share your full name online and avoid doing the little phishy things like “What would your porn star name be?” based off the street you grew up on and name of a childhood pet, etc, and everything. But, is it really that bad to share your state? I feel like that should be general enough to be harmless…

[a_flyleaf]

Thanks! \o/ Also, if you ever get around to playing please feel free to tell me anything you think about it. It made me experience the entire gamut of human emotion and I am only being slightly hyperbolic :3c

I like your web design solution a lot, and honesty I think that’s what had me thinking of the whole topic when I wrote this! Full palettes and background pictures and lil corner sprites add so much personality to a page; makes for a real delight to browse, :D Gotta see ’em* all (*the various layouts)!

Re:redux theme, oh my god same boat do you remember when everyone and their third-mutuals-twice-removed had a redux edit theme??! (I mean, I’m sure redux edits are still in use, but last I checked they’d fallen way out of fashion.) Sidebar image, simple little link buttons, posts with shadows and optional semi-transparency… The Most Theme Ever™✨

Anyway mood whiplash, re:privacy— I mean, I was raised on “don’t tell internet people Literally Anything about yourself or they will stalk you and you die;” being hyperbolic for humorous effect, but that’s still more or less what kid-me got from it. So I tend to draw my own public line at age and country, maybe time zone if activity-relevant, but it’s different for everyone!
On state specifically, my first thought is that it depends on how big/populous your state is? To throw darts at a map, I’d imagine New Jersey or Hawaii would be bigger potential giveaways than Texas or California. But it’s probably not a damning thing on its own even then; like, is other location-relevant info (neighborhood photos, local school, big events associated with specific dates (e.g. big concert tour in town, maybe catastrophic weather)) “closeby” enough that it’d be easy to connect the dots? All that might not give anyone an address, exactly, but it narrows the range more than I’d personally be comfortable with.

[batiferrite]

Yeah, totally! I remember when OMOCAT first announced the game way back in like 2014 and I was so excited, so I'm not even sure why I've been waiting so long to play it now that it's actually out...

Yeah, it's a really fun way to study HTML / CSS, too! Experimenting and researching the best way to achieve the specific effect you want, and trying something new every month.

*wistful sigh* Ah, the good ole days (even if you couldn't actually read half of them). It's not even necessarily that they're out of style now, but rather it seems like pretty much everyone just uses Tumblr mobile. By default, people don't even have an actual desktop theme anymore; you have to fiddle around in the settings to have the option come up. It's very weird and sad, because that was literally like the essence of Tumblr culture back in the day, was making / showing off your theme, and now that's all gone...

Oh, I see your your point -- there really are some weirdos out there, unfortunately... And now that I think about it, I've probably gotten too lax about sharing personal info over the years, actually. Might have to go delete some things.. brb.