Envoy of the Ayatan

quips

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 15:29:41 GMT

The thing about working with a little TTRPG/Role Play group, is that I am working on sooo many things and have so much art that I cannot share until they get revealed in-game so I'm doing so much work that won't be seen for a while.
(I might not even be able to share them here because I got one friend joining the server and it needs to be a seeeecret secret.)

Rainer cherries are about the only cherries I like and nothing ever uses them in flavor or mixes of anything.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the garbage disposal in a sink is for trace foods that are still on plates, not whole meals and leftovers. The majority of your food (and grease) should be thrown in the trash first, then washed.

signed: lady who had her skin back up to the point of being unusable twice this month due to her neighbors dumping incomprehensible amounts of food down their drains.

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Open Source and the Forgotten Creator Tools

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 03:53:42 GMT

Griping about tech again

Okay, so the 'Tech Review' industry is.. Massive. It's been around arguably long before youtube, but youtube has really expanded the reach and scope of the Tech Review industry. From retro to modern day hardware, from computers to peripherals and gadgets; there is a large assortment of tech to review and people that do it. They put hardware through the ringer with extensive testing comparing features and price points in relation to those features. A great resource for all of us that don't have the money to take the gamble on new tools ourselves! But the thing that ALWAYS gets left behind, are the creator tools:
Drawing Tablets (screenless and screen), Tablets and Laptops with pen inputs, Scanners, Screen Calibrations, Printers, and Monitors from the perspective of color accuracy.

If you want any insight into real use cases for these bits of hardware you either have to go through word of mouth or gather up scores of scant blogs of creators talking about their use of just one object and then compare notes and hope you interpreted them in the right way to make sense to you.

Large format scanners are by-far the most difficult thing to shop and research for, because their price ranges from 400$ on the low end, to 5K-12K otherwise. This jump in price is STARK, and not something the average creator can afford to risk. But many can't afford a 400$ risk, either. So it would be nice if someone with money could purchase the range of these large format scanners and test them with a control of different strong colors at different DPIs and the scanning software to give the rest of us some frame of reference for what would suit us best for our budgets and what we need without taking expensive risks. But no. There is not a single video out there like this but you sure can find 20 videos comparing 20 year old GPUs published this year. I can't even find a blog with a comprehensive break down of the different large format scanners and their actual in-use quality. I sure can find a bunch of keyword dumped lists and videos, though.

And not just videos, what about hardware spec listing and documentation? When I try to look for monitors that may hope to capture the same color space my CRT once did, I would look for how good the black levels were. You know the spec that is least likely to be documented? Black levels!!! Oh sure they'll tell you that they have a 98% accurate Adobe RGB color space, but without the right light balance, that means nothing! There are massive monitor spec documentation websites and they list so much in the way of input and refresh but not the black level.

There used to be a single community with a single master thread that would test and catalog tablets and convertible laptops and what type of digitizer they had, along with their specs and price ranges so that you could make an informed choice on the hardware they got and what to expect and the kind of drivers they would need. tabletpcreview.com now no longer exists thus the forum is now gone and all that remains is this copy I made of their spreadsheet and this archive of their thread. The community still exists in some way on reddit, but it all seems to have mostly died as of two years ago and there doesn't seem to be the wealth of documentation it once had. You can find laptops and tablets with all their specs listed out except for the digitizer.

And you can tell not just the 'tech review' community but the larger tech community in general that are not illustrators themselves seems to just forget these tools are important or are a factor to be supported. The Unix ecosystem rarely accounts for scanners, like sure there's SANE, but you could be one hardware revision away from being supported at all, or supported but completely non-functional for the use cases needed for illustrators and designers. And even if you do have something that works, compatibility for scanning on an Open Source OS tend to be judged by how it scans documentation, where color quality and DPI don't matter as much, and leaves any information about that sparsely documented if documented at all. Tablet drives that aren't Wacom are a pain to come by, drivers for anything with a built-in screen can be even more of a struggle. This is compensated by Krita having its own driver which works with most tablets out the box, which is great! But if you want to use your tablet for literally anything else? LOL I guess. And calibration tools? I haven't even dived into those but I know they only offer Windows and Mac versions of their software of the ones I have checked.

It just gets so frustrating to see Tech Enthusiast communities completely ignore vital parts of the creative process in the same field. And it feels even more pronounced in open source spaces. And so much those communities, Tech in general and Open Source specifically, really seem to gather around Gaming, and little else. With regard to open source OS, I get why, I really do. When trying to appeal to the wider public for adoption of the platform, something that is important for long term growth of the services, gaming is going to be the biggest net and has often been the largest deciding factor for what OS to use. Low adoption to the platform for decades IS the primary reason why Unix Native software so rarely is developed. And also I know a MASSIVE driving force behind the current push to get more games supported on Linux is largely due to Steam and its deep pockets and all that wasn't brought on by some sort of altruism, it was to advance the viability of their own hardware. So like I get why things are the way they are.

But it sucks that such incredibly vital tools for creative works (creative work that often goes into those games..) are just an afterthought in the greater tech industry.

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Pillowfort ):

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:53:55 GMT

Soooo Pillowfort is shutting down.
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/8413273

I'm sad but I've been kinda waiting for this to happen. I paid for my services on the platform but I couldn't seem to get large scale adoption despite what it offered. It was great for community interaction but individual that wasn't fandom was just dry and that was it's real downfall, I think. Just sad to see another long-format platform that accepts adult content, go down.

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Text and Command Lines

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:33:39 GMT

It is so difficult to get others to understand my struggle with recollection with a sequence of letters and numbers, especially people in the tech field when I try to describe my issues with the command line. I keep being talked at that repetition and familiarity are what I need and it works for everyone and I just want hold their face and look at them like 'no. no it doesn't'.

And I'll have people point out 'well you write dialog well' and 'but you code HTML/CSS in text' and it's like... I desperately need you to know it's not the same.

You know why I am so good at dialog? Because the characters are having audible conversations with one another in my head. And when I'm reading, it's converted into 'sound' in my head, it doesn't remain text. It's easier for me to remember the concept and context of a thing, the idea of a thing, than the literal words used to express that thing.

When writing, it's easier for me to write dialog than descriptions because dialog sits in my mind back as audio, even if it's made up, and there's a direct translation of audio to words. But descriptions sit in my mind as pictures and feelings which does not have a direct literally translation. Sure I can list out the objects as they exist, but that isn't exactly very narratively compelling.

And when I'm writing HTML/CSS, I heavily rely on cutting and pasting, autofill, not to mention visual differentiation and indenting to make sure I don't loose my place. But almost none of it I can do from memory. There's a reason why I use Phoenix Code, and not like, notepad, I don't think I'd be near as good at it if I did.

You want to know how I remembered Phone Numbers as a kid? I remembered the dial tone sequences. I could be in a situation where I would not be able to repeat the phone number back or write it down, but get me in front of the phone and i touch the keys and hear the tone and then I remember the sequence without even looking at the numbers. I feel like my brain works in Raster and coding and command lines expect me to work in Vector. Like I know the approximation or idea of the thing, but I don't have the actual file, like the difference between a text file and an image of a text file.

And this makes the command line a nightmare.

For Example, this is the steps one has to take to add a new website to Apache.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/domain.com/public_html
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/domain.com/public_html
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain.conf
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain.conf
sudo a2ensite domain.com.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

I absolutely cannot remember this sequence if I were to write it all from scratch without a reference. And its not because I don't understand what is happening, I know exactly what it does!

Make a new directory
Change the owner of said directory to the user account
Copy and paste the default conf file to make a new one for a new domain
Edit the new conf file using Nano
Initialize the new site config
Restart Apache

The problem is, if I were to write all these out from memory it starts to become something like this:

sudo makedir -p /var/www/domain.com/public.html
sudo chown $USER /var/www/domain.com/public_html (this step can often be forgotten entirely)
sudo c p /apache2/sites/default.conf /apache2/sites/domain.conf
sudo nano /apache2/sites/domain.conf
sudo a2??site domain.com.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

And that's on a good day!!!! It feels like how it feels when I'm being asked to spell something without writing it down. Which may I point out, I've been historically very bad at spelling. It is extremely common for me to remember the vague approximate of the letters that exist in the pile of the word but completely loose track of where they are in the sequence they exist. The very act of writing feels like sentence that float above my head that I have to keep leaping up to pull it back down a letter at a time before it disappears from me entirely. It took me till my 30's before I could spell Necessary correctly without spell check, and even then I can't spell it without a visual in front of me.

So once you start getting into commands where it's like ` -u dphp -p` Man like.. I can't.. I can't remember that

d's can be easily mis-remembered as b's, h's, p's can be easily mis-remembered as q's a's o's depending on the text and some letters can be just completely forgotten in the sequence entirely.

In an environment like the command line where there is no room for error, that it must be exact and perfect every time, file paths must mirror 100% what exists it is an active source of stress for me to use the command line. I have to switch my brain into the OCR gear that barely functions. And there is nothing there to remind you or autofill or suggestion when you're typing, something that would remind me the things I'm forgetting, something I rely on heavily when I'm coding in HTML/CSS.

You know how I write anything? How I write this post? How I code? How I write scripts. I jump around! I started in the middle, worked at the beginning, I add to the end, I move things around. I do the same with HTML, too. I edit non-linearly

The command line, is live. There's no previews, no double checking, once it's in, it's in. And if you screw up, sure you MIGHT be able to fix it, but in MANY cases, you can't or might not know there's anything TOO fix until you're so deep into it you don't know where you made the mistake. Deleting files/directories is the most NERVE RACKING thing you can do on a command line, I wish I could do that visually x_x

I know a possible solution to some of this is to get a different shell to do the command line interfacing from, but I don't even know what to use and if any of them has like.. a guide to tell me what it will do before I commit the line to active? like 'these commands will result in this happening' sort of feedback, I'd feel a lot less lost with something like that. x_x

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Philosophy

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 03:00:49 GMT

It gets so difficult to express interest in philosophy because it's so easy for people to get weird about it. Like, I just want to discuss the intricacies of life to both explore and critique, but so many of the people 'into philosophy' (including many philosophers themselves) approach it like unlocking the super special secret code to life that only you the most special and enlightened one could ever conceive of and only those of equal '''''intelligence''''' could ever hope to understand, let alone it perceive it at all.

So announcing you like Philosophy either attracts aforementioned people that really think like that, or makes others believe you are one of those people.

and it's like, man

I just think it's cool to consider why we do what we do and the different perspectives we could have about that.

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Have a Map

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:19:04 GMT

Okay, new TTRPG tag that I probably should have had, ages ago.

So, with doing all this GMing, I've needed to make maps.
I picked up DungeonDraft some time ago and have really been liking it.

I've made a lot of 'default' maps for various territories that can be used easily for random encounters by the whole GM team. Recently one GM had an Bounty related expedition that had to deal with a killer that could make clones of themselves and would be hidden throughout the map. Since there would be a lot of searching and stalking I was like 'why not pull from a Dead by Daylight map for inspo, and that's what I did, and used the Grim Pantry for inspiration for the map.

( Cut for Map since it's kinda big )

I have the Dungeon Draft file available for download but I have no idea how it impacts people that do not have the assets or mods that I do.

Map making, expedition planning, class re-works, new subclass creation, rule refining, lorecrafting, plotting, have all been consuming much of my time. Busy Busy.

Oh, and I made a World for Mossberg on Toyhouse so that we could have a quick way of getting a view of Non-Player Characters and Player Characters, alike.

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Command Line is like Spelling

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:23:03 GMT

Started to think of an analogy that really encapsulates what is so frustrating to me about Linux and Coding related trouble shooting.

Back in gradeschool, I think starting around 3rd grade, I had great difficulty spelling. I could read well but spelling things from memory was exceptionally difficult and if I didn't have a means of writing it down it was near impossible. I'm pretty sure I only scored 100% on maybe one of my spelling tests. So when writing essays or for homework I would often ask how something was spelled and then I'd get told 'look it up in the dictionary'. A thing parroted by multiple adults in my life.

For example, any word that started with a PH. How was I supposed to know that the F sound was a PH sound if I rarely ever encountered the word in writing? Even things I did encounter, I couldn't retain the letters of the word in my mind, it was always stored as an approximate. So the instruction to 'look it up', did me no good because I didn't even have the foundational knowledge of where I'm supposed to be looking in the first place.

This is what it feels like to trouble shoot in Linux. I have an approximate knowledge of so many thing, that it makes it difficult to know where I'm even supposed to start searching at all. Asking questions about it can be a minefield of people that will certainly help and point you in the right direction, and just as many people that tell you to look it up just like all the adults that told me to look it up.

Add this to the way that my mind stores text-like information where it's all a fuzzy blob of an approximate until I can SEE something, and it all makes the whole process very taxing. And is so, very exhausting, to try to get other people to understand this.

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VLC, BluRay, and the sorry state of tutorials in the Open Source space

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:50:56 GMT

So, VLC, great program, probably more than half of all desktop users rely on it for videos. It’s straight forward, can’t complain….
Until I get to the matter of blurays.

Now, my complaint isn’t so much that BluRay support isn’t baked in, that’s an issue that’s more to do with the copy protection system Sony saddled it with, not a fault of VLC as a player. No, my issue is that the solutions for it are convoluted in how you’re supposed to install fixes for it and how it highlights a pervasive problem in open source projects.

When looking for solutions on how to play BluRays on VLC, you are most likely to run into this:
https://www.videolan.org/developers/libbluray.html
And you think ‘yay cool this’ll fix it!’
Then you see there are different codecs that need their own codes too
https://www.videolan.org/developers/libaacs.html
https://www.videolan.org/developers/libbdplus.html
And then you download the files and then you are struck with the notion that you don’t actually know what you’re supposed to do with them.

Now if you’re a linux user with access to flatpak it has a means of installing it, but if you’re not then you know you’re supposed to put them somewhere but it is unclear as to where. All the documentation provided is for understanding the service, not where to put the files so that the application can use it. It’s as though it assumes you already know what to do with the files.

So you start digging around for documentation or guides on how to get this to work, even the FAQ itself and you get pointed to this:
https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/
And it’s like, yeah it makes sense you need a database of the keys, and it’s great that it tells me where to put them, but there’s still the issue of the above files and where they’re supposed to go.

Then you might find yourself on Doom9’s forum
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=176924
and you see 1 new instruction

>Put the 32-bit or 64-bit libaacs/libbdplus DLLs (all 4) in the corresponding VLC directory

Okay so does that mean you put them in the directory intact as their own directories, or do you put the contents of the directories into the VLC directory? There are no screen shots of what the directory should look like when it’s done so it’s unclear how the files are supposed to be placed in said VLC directory.

I had followed these instructions and made so many guesses as to what I was supposed to do or put things and none of what worked. And looking around for guides all repeat the same thing and not a single one bothers to show what things are supposed to look like in the VLC directory when you’re done. The only screenshots I ever see are with the AACS files.

Looking round more you see others asking the same question ‘where do I put libbluray’, and the responses are ‘just follow the instructions’ and ‘you need to download the files’ and ‘just use a flatpak’ and otherwise treating the asker like an idiot and it is EXHAUSTING.

And this. THIS is the problem I have with most instructions on OpenSource projects.This is the problem I have when asking for help with these projects. There are so often fundamental gaps in instructions and the assumption you’ll just intuitively know what to do with the bare minimum of information. And getting lost or not knowing the connective tissue gets you treated like an idiot that knows nothing about computers, and it makes people give up and never come back again.

Not only that, but so many open source tutorials are allergic to screen shots. Screen shots are often my anchor to ensure I did something correctly, so when they’re not there, I have no way of confirming if I understood the steps correctly other than ‘does work or not’ and if not work then I have no idea where I went wrong because I have nothing visual to hold up side by side to what I’ve done.

When I made my tutorial for how to Rip a CD, I included screen shots with every step, even a photo where appropriate so that as many people as possible could understand the menu to a new system and new concepts that they might not know intuitively like the CD Serial Number. Because I know how it is to tread into unknown territory without landmarks to help assure you you're on the right path.

To get back to the topic, I then ran into this script that was supposed to install all the files for you.

https://github.com/CarsonGMcLaughlin/vlc-bluray-setup-script

And I tested it out and it Also! Didn’t! Work! Not only that, but it couldn’t download the javascript menus because it’s looking for .JAR and there are none of that file type in the VLC directory, only .TAR a thing absolutely no one makes comment on but keeps pushing you to go there and download.

Like this whole ordeal almost made me shell-out for Power DVD, had I not found this alternative:

The most painless solution I’ve found for playing bluray discs without paying out the nose or using a shady service, is this
https://www.makemkv.com/
It requires a key that isn’t purchasable, yet, but beta keys can be found here:
https://cable.ayra.ch/makemkv/
After it is installed go to Settings > Integration > and then check VLC. (you can also check System and System 32 if you'd like to be able to directly browse the disc)

Just have this program running first, then open VLC, and you should be able to play BluRays without issue.

It is absurd it took me weeks of testing and searching just to find this solution, so I provide this all for you.

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Trillian Updates

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:22:00 GMT

https://trillian.im/changelog/windows/6.6/

So Trillian has added a whole lot of new features recently such as Message Edit, Message Reactions, Voice Call, and Video Call. It won't replace things like Discord, doesn't have the group chat features, but it's still great for direct messages IMO. Just wish I could get more people to use it.

Also It's admittedly not as friendly on mobile if you don't have the paid account, since message persistence isn't as easy to handle there as it is on desktop.

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Acceptable Apps

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 05:27:52 GMT

I, as much as many people, am tired of the amount of things that force itself into app-hood, but there are a couple things I've installed on my phone as apps that I'm glad I did, namely, the Wikipedia app and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary App.

So much of small searches are either just checking spelling, a thesaurus check, or fact-checking on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia app's been great because it saves tabs of all my searches if I want it to, and the Dictionary app is great because it gets right to what I need it for, word checking that I have too often done with a search engine and have decided they don't need my clicks.

Just nice utilities to have around.

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Save The Optical Drive

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:20:30 GMT

Honestly, I feel a Kind Of Way (negative) about platforms that pride themselves on giving power back to the owners and they still can't be bothered to offer anything with an optical drive.

Services Like Frame Work and System 76 talk a big game about being able to build out your system however you like, which is mostly true, unless you want an optical drive. Worse still, their desktop cases don't even accommodate space to install it on your own. Especially for a desktop, what's even the point of getting it through them when places like microcenter and newegg (Or your local PC repair shop!!!! Support your local shops!!!!!!!!!!! ) will build the thing for you so what's their benefit really if they can't even give you space for an optical drive.

And yes, the ability to have built-in access to or means to install an optical drive I think is pretty dang important. An External Drive is something you use in a pinch, not a permanent solution. And I hate hearing 'you don't need one' excuses when I bring up this problem. Yes! I need one! I wouldn't be looking for it if I didn't! I wouldn't have gone out of my way to purchase a case with room for a drive bay if I didn't use it. I very frequently re-watch my DVDs as well as archive my music.

I'm reminded of this issue every time I watch Venture Brothers with Z. See, we don't really have space for a couch so the only way for us to watch something together and cuddle, is on the bed. But to watch it on the bed, we have to use the laptop, but to watch my DVD collection on the laptop, we need to use an external optical drive.

Out of curiosity I went looking around for laptops with optical drives. Turns out! Most stopped making laptops with optical drives back in 2019!! I had been hoping services like Frame Work and System 76 might rekindle that but it doesn't look like they even intend to go in that direction :/

And I'm sure this isn't intentional just opportunistic coincidental, that access to optical drives have scaled back as access to digital streaming services scaled up. It's really important that we keep access to physical media, but it's becoming an uphill battle to play it.

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Microthoughts aka Quips

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:46:09 GMT

I could use the social medias for these microthoughts

or

I could post them here. (using tag Quips for these microthoughts)

Any time I'm listening to a really great song in a minor key that flips to a major key for the chorus, I feel so disappointed. The reverse is alright, though.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners Season 1 is a lesson in what happens when you don't listen to your partners when they caution you to take care of your mental health.

The more I experience and learn, the more convinced I am that most self-ascribed 'empaths' are just people with elevated OCD and Anxiety that have never done anything about it.

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All About Mossberg

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:00:40 GMT

Alright that Mossberg thing I mentioned, lemme see about elaborating.

So Mossberg is a hybrid Text Role Play and TTRPG (table top role playing game) that was founded in April 2020 by an artist named Proxicute. It uses a combination of Roll 20 VTT (virtual table top) for the TTRPG, and Discord to host the prose-type ‘play by post' text roleplays, voice calls for Roll 20, & inventory/economy. Due to the bank system players may only have a total of two characters. The system used is a highly custom D20 system where total level is determined by the gear rank, not experience. Characters have three items of gear, (Armor, Weapon, & Tool) and they are upgraded with resources you earn. The TTRPG sessions are referred to as ‘Expeditions’, and one must participate in expeditions in order to both gain resources to upgrade as well as interact in major story points in the world. Due to the limitations of the inventory and bank, players may only have up to two characters, max. So, as you can see, it's a rather complex and involved system.

As for the staff arrangement, the server owner is someone named Jizzus. Apart from that we have three departments: Chat Mod Team, GM team, and Lore Team. Chat mods are what you expect of any discord community and are responsible for moderating server conduct with some interaction with the economy. GM is, as you might expect, Game Masters; the ones that manage and run expeditions and are a significant element for the story of the server. Lore team purely focused on documentation, building out lore and setting, though they also run minor oneshot expeditions. Staff members can be in more than one team. All members of staff may make and play NPC’s. (Non Player Characters)

The overall ‘story’ of the setting is that it is some extreme derivative of the Hollow Knight setting. Extreme in the sense that it takes place both before the games and far away from the setting of the games. As such the characters are not present, neither is the story. There are a few scattered references but not much else. That aside, the game is about the settlement of Mossberg, which resides at the mouth of the underground place known as The Fern.

The Fern, is a massive, magical, lush, underground cavern consisting of varied biomes that resides under a vast scrub desert. It has existed for hundreds of years, with its own history and people, and players take the mantle of an outsider that has come to the settlement of Mossberg to explore. All characters are some form of invertebrate, all fauna are invertebrates. We don’t have any fixed ‘species’, but the characters are anthropomorphic in some way, and we provide a lot of flexibility to how these differences manifest. Character origins and backgrounds can be made wholesale by the players.
This is the document we use in the server to introduce people to the server:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f_4vDcKcyjs-U3yJsIi3nkgQJywgd6a815sO03Wq04Q/

My friend Doc has been in the server since about its inception. He started as a player then began running campaigns and is now head GM of the server. I had been hearing stories about events in the server for a few years before I finally joined. Technically I joined in 2023, but because of the gallbladder issues (resolved, now), I wasn't able to participate for about a year. In 2024, I was made part of the Lore Team staff in early 2025 after the original server owner, Proxicute, left the server unexpectedly.

Since then I’ve been working a lot on documenting so many things for the first time. See, Proxi hardly documented anything and what documents we had were sorely out of date. We didn’t even have a joint account to keep all the documents in question.So much lore and plot points and world info had been told to people randomly in voice calls that were still expected to be ‘canon’ in some way. And I’ve been trying to wrangle all of that. I’ve also put a lot of work into organizing the server and taking audit/inventory of characters and players. That’s in addition to adding NPCs and helping with plots and assisting with the setting. As I’m sure you can imagine, that’s a lot of work.

In addition to that, I’ve made a whole spreadsheet of characters, players, the class they have and when they were last played. I’ve been slowly going through it and reaching out to people who have been absent to see what they would like to do and what can be set up for their characters and their availability. I’m trying to find ways to make it easier for new players to find their footing which leads to the other thing that’s been taking much of my time, running expeditions.

And most recently, I’ve been very much embroiled in taking a GM role and running small things.I have never GM’d anything before, so this has all been new to me, especially considering this is such a custom system. My hope is to provide more options for new players to have access to and participate in the Expedition system. I have a wide range of availability, so I can offer these things at odd hours that not as many on the current GM staff are able to provide. In addition to this I’m trying to find some way to schedule VC stuff to help people get familiar with and integrated into the server and plot out how they can meet people.

Since I took on the GM role, I grabbed myself a copy of Dungeon Draft and have been building up a library of assets in addition to learning the program. We haven’t had much in the way of custom maps so I’ve been working on making some reusable maps for the setting. I’m also about to embark in making custom Dungeon Draft assets that are specific to our setting so that we can add more of that unique flavor of the setting to both the maps I make and any maps made by others on the staff.

And this is just the broad strokes of it. To get into just the history of my own character, Naelynn, could honestly be it’s own post, lol.

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pokes head in

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:36:48 GMT

I have so many longposts in my head that I need to sit down and write but lemme tell yah, I've been so embroiled in this hybrid TTRPG/Role Play server (of which I'm the head of the lore team staff) it consumes a lot of my freetime.

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When I say I don't like PVP, I Mean It

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:06:28 GMT

There is a very frustrating thing that occurs when I say that I don't play or like PVP games and that's for someone to follow up with stating their particular game of choice 'isn't that bad' rather than just letting me be, it gets exhausting.

The only time I have ever played and enjoyed PVP is in closed circuit games where it's a lobby of just yourself and your friends and you're just goofing off with no real stakes or losses. Like old deathmatch arenas and fighting games with friends. There's no ranks, no stakes, and no progress to loose. Or the occassional 'party game'. And even then, I can only put maybe an hour or two into it and then I'm disinterested.

I am not 'great' at video games, I have to fail an awful lot to be any decent at it and even then I'm only mediocre. I'm fine with this. Failure on its own doesn't bother me. What bothers me is loss of progress and my teammates being upset with me because I fumbled. This only amplifies when PVP is involved. When it's free for all pvp, then it's frustrating because I'll just get no where because most people are better than me and I'll make no progress and have to sit through more and more matches just to meet bare minimum requirements to progress. Or if it's not match based but still solo PVP, the whole act of playing it feels on a razer wire because I could loose progress at any time and then what even is the point? And if it's team matches, then I have the anxiety of failing people in the team.

In parties of 4 it gets very easy to see who the weak link is, and because of the nature of PVP, people are very unkind to failure. People will claim that they're okay with it, but I hear it, I hear them trash talk their teammates when they're not up to snuff. Never giving space for people to learn or just be bad at something for a while until they get better at it. And they think that this doesn't effect the other people around them. I know what you all think of people that play poorly, and I play poorly, why do you all think that kind of talk would have no impact on me? So every time I loose in a team I think of how they would think of me, how they're angry at my failure, how they wish I weren't playing so they wouldn't be 'stuck' with someone so bad at the game. I am okay with failure, (unless I loose progress but that's it's own vector) but some people really, really are not. And in PVP, the need for success amplifies even more so than in co-op games because people's ranks are on the line. Take all that anxiety I already get with high stakes team play and then add the element that you're now also playing with other people, and that all gets amplified.

The only PVP I've been able to tollerate is ones with a strong PVE element which has only been possible in Gambit in Destiny 2, and World vs World in Guild Wars 2. Because in these I can largely focus on the PVE part and not the PVP part. Gambit's PVE is really important, so being good at that helps the overall match and I don't feel like a complete failure. Guild Wars 2's World vs World is a little less PVE intensive but the PVP part is handled by being in large swarms, so my personal failures don't stand out and I don't have people in chat yelling at me. More importantly, both games do not result in me loosing progress if I die. I can die dozens of times without penalty. That being said, if I could play those games without touching the game modes at all, I absolutely would. I only played those modes for certain progress requirements, not because I enjoyed them.

And then there's the matter that I just don't enjoy it. Sure I could triple up on anxiety meds and maybe not feel like my chest is caving in when I play a PVP game, but it's also just not enjoyable. Why waste my time on the potential that I might feel a high with certain big stakes when I could, instead, play a game I actually enjoy playing without the crushing weight of anxiety. So not only is it anxiety inducing, it's also just not my idea of fun.

So all that said, it gets really exhausting, when I say I don't play PVP and someone still tries to sell me on their PVP game. 'Oh it's not that bad', 'Oh I don't usually like pvp but'

I DON'T LIKE PVP!!
FULL STOP!!!
IT IS NOT FUN FOR ME!!!
STOP TRYING TO SELL ME ON YOUR PVP GAME!!!

Stop trying to apply your perception of mild aversion being the same as my intense level of discomfort and anxiety I have around the game type. What might be 'not that bad' for you, is still pretty dang bad for me and I'm tired of it being brushed aside like my discomfort and ability to enjoy it a all isn't even a factor worth incorporating.

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Ertakar Adoption

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:58:10 GMT

So there's this worldbuilding prompt thing on Bluesky now and it posed this question
https://bsky.app/profile/oc-world-asks.myatproto.social/post/3meniu5sckk2t

Is adoption a concept in your constructed world's civilization(s)? Is it a legal process? Is it stigmatized? Do the peoples in your civilization(s) see child rearing as a community project, or more private? Does trans-lineage adoption exist? How about trans-species adoption?

I made a small response on the platform but I hate truncating my speech and making annoying long threads so I am going to address this question with the depth id deserves, here.

First, I think we need to address the issue of what causes a child to require being adopted in the first place. At its most vague it is because the child is abandoned either voluntarily or involuntarily. From there we have to interrogate those factors.

What would cause a child to be abandoned voluntarily?

The child is unwanted, for reasons that can include:
- The pregnancy itself was unwanted and could not be prevented before birth.
- The child is behavioraly difficult to care for.
- The existence of the child causes social conflict.
The family unable to care for the child.
- Housing is insufficient for another child.
- They are unable to keep the whole family fed
- Health is too expensive to keep up with

What would cause a child to be abandoned involuntarily?

The parents are either dead or missing.
The parents were deemed unfit and the child was removed.

I went through all the effort to itemize these caveats because as I start to explain the specifics of Ertakar social structure and world view, you'll have a better understanding of what I mean when I say, abandoned children are extremely uncommon in Ertakar society.

First is the matter of pregnancy itself. Contraceptives and other birth control is something that is freely available, easy to access, and socially accepted as normal and important. This means the chances of there being 'unwanted' children by way of undesired pregnancy is exceedingly rare. Related to this, medical assistance is very easy to access and not monetized. This means any complications with the pregnancy, disability, health, and so on are taken care of as needed without one's income status being a factor at all.

After that, is housing. Territories exist, so there is 'ownership' in that, but the idea that individuals monetarily own land is absurd to them across all cultures. Because of this social perception, the very concept of providing some currency or exchange just to live in a place is absurd. Pay for the labor of the home to live in, sure, but to remain there? Of course not. This means the fear of loosing housing is nonexistent, if you have a home, its yours. And especially in the case of the capital my story will take place in, housing is open and divvied out to anyone that asks. You put in requests for what you need and move as much or as little as you need. This is important for matters of disability, where residents are provided the home that meets their needs, so any family with a child that has certain disabilities they can be provided housing that accommodates them and thus ease the strain on the family as a whole. Other communities of Ertakar are of similar minds to provide as a community even if they do it in different ways with different expectations.

Finally, is food. Ertkar are active hunters and facultative carnivores. This means their diet even in their 'modern' day consists of prey they hunt themselves. This means there is no 'food industry' which mean food isn't something you pay for so the factor of hunger is only caused by environmental factors, not artificially constructed ones. If you can hunt you can eat, and if you can't hunt there is community there to help you hunt or do it for you.

All these factors make the effort of childrearing far less stressful, which gives families more means to address any interpersonal and behavioral conflict with the care and attention it deserves and gives a lower stress threshold to start with to be able to handle that. There can still be abandonment for behavioral reasons but this is very uncommon.

And then there's the structure of child-rearing in Ertakar societies.

The concept of the family is very flexible in most Ertakar. While it varies between societies, on the whole Ertakar aren't strict about things like marital status and structure. With the long life they live, it is considered common to have an average of three long-term partners. Parting ways because one wanted to raise the child and the other didn't isn't uncommon, though communication is often still kept with old partner. Even more than that, some Ertakar societies participate in communal child-rearing. In these communities, if a child's family is indisposed they would be taken in by one of the families already participating in their rearing, so there would be no need for formal adoption as they already had familial connections with others even if not related by blood.

Now after ALL of that, what happens in the case of a child that has no one in a non-communal rearing environment? In many cases, adoption is pretty informal. Probably the most 'documented' of the cultures is the capital the story takes place in. In which case, adoption would be a series of special community handlers investigating the reasons for said abandonment (since it's already so rare) followed by some paperwork for the purposes of tracking the child's residence. Probably also some work to see if any new housing would need to be arranged for those taking in the child. Because of the communal nature of the society, it is extremely uncommon that a child is taken in by complete strangers.

So all this to say that for Ertakar, adoption isn't stigmatized, the legal process is loose if nonexistent in some cases and most of the society sees community as important to the raising of children but the extent of the involvement differs.

And then.

There's the humans.

So I'm operating on the 'current day' of the society, where the comic will take place in. Humans have been on the planet for about a century by now, and some culture has shifted to the Ertakar way of life, but some of them still cling to ideals they brought with them from Earth, such as value placed on monetary wealth which still causes some friction with the Ertakar and of course, each other.

They receive many of the same benefits of the Ertakar: Free housing and free medical care. This does eliminate some of the conditions that might cause one to abandon a child, however it does not eliminate social pressure.

The social pressure to have a child at all is something many Humans struggle with. (Such as the pressure to 'repopulate' on the planet but that's its own can of worms.) And because of the carried over desire for capital, there is still a few smatterings of financial instability to struggle with. So while he child abandonment rate for Humans is higher than that of the Ertakar, it's still not something that requires an institution like an Orphanage to handle.

Also, child abandonment for humans is more loaded than for Ertakar. With the population as small as it is, it's almost impossible to do without the whole community knowing. Despite not being on earth they still want to handle much of it like they would have on Earth in hopes of reaching contact with their home and being able to smooth everything out legally. However, if an Ertakar took the human child in? That can be major social conflict depending on the company kept.

These are all important factors that relate to why it was so difficult for Talon's mother, Tlakanok, to adopt a child. Her home where she came from raised communally, but she was deemed more important to work as a guard and was not permitted to be part of the child rearing group. She left for the capital where she heard the growing population of Humans had some issues with tending to children and she was happy to help there, but then war broke out.

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What's Going On With Discord

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:34:08 GMT

By now, some of you may have heard about the Age Verification changes on Discord. And some of you likely may not have actually read everything about it and have only read the ranted summaries of others. I'm gonna compile this into one place so you can't look away.

First, here is the announcement: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally

Before I really get into things, I would like to highlight this passage because it'll be important later.

Additionally, Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age. Some users may be asked to use multiple methods if more information is needed to assign an age group.

Naturally! This sucks! But, if you've actually bothered paying attention to what's been going on around you, you would know this outcome with Discord would have been inevitable.

This has been a looming spectre since 2017, back when the Digital Economy Act was passed in the UK. (something they were in the talks about back in 2015.)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/curbing-access-to-pornographic-websites-for-under-18s
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Online_age_verification

The UK was the first country to implement such an act and it is the event that caused other governments to weigh the possibility of doing the same. It is imperative that you do not forget this in all future conversation and conflicts with age verification. But getting anyone to pay attention to this (that wasn't the already ever-vigilant community of controversial fiction creators) was like pulling teeth. And then we had the global shutdowns and people were hooked into the Internet more than usual which was great for ignoring the fact that the compliance date for the Digital Economy Act 2017 was quickly approaching. And then other places started to dig into the possibility of gathering personal information for themselves, with depressingly little push-back.

When Australia started testing the waters with it's social media restriction, it was met with a 77% approval!!!

And then there's the numerous states that have implemented varying awful and dangerous age verification laws and they keep cropping up faster than I can keep up with.

Did you know that this Jan the UK is also working on an under-16 year old social media ban like Australia?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/19/uk-ministers-launch-consultation-into-whether-to-ban-social-media-for-under-16s

Newgrounds managed to figure out a way to satisfy some of the age verification requirements by using the old credit card checks as well as account age specifics. They managed to satisfy the UK this way.

https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1549829/1
It is very likely that Discord's ability to use an age inference model now, but not back when the compliance date loomed last year, was because Newgrounds was able to do this. So, bless you Newgrounds, thank you.

And then there's all the stuff that isn't implemented yet but will be soon

Did you know the EU has been working on digital identity wallets?
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification
Did you that this is happening in Mexico, too?
https://www.reddit.com/r/mexico/comments/1ns29nu/nos_est%C3%A1n_quitando_la_transparencia_y_obligando_a/?tl=en
https://idtechwire.com/mexico-approves-national-biometric-id-system-after-two-year-development/

This isn't going away, it's only getting worse and every major social media service knows this.

This is an issue that is bigger than Discord. They make a lot of money, sure, but not enough to survive with the fines placed on them by the UK, Australia, and the scattered US states by just not complying. Never mind loose their bank, you know, the thing processing their transactions, or their ability to operate as a business at all. This isn't something you can survive by just 'not bending the knee'.

I have been warning people about this for years and I was continually shut down.

Don't believe me? Maybe some insight from someone that has more personal experience with the issue regarding the quickly growing age verification issue:
https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3meiroz6nk22w

( Transcribed for convenience. )

Now, I'm sure by now you've been around the conversation, you may have seen some people say 'Keep cancelling, Discord is walking this back!' lying to themselves thinking their cancelling their nitro will change this. I'll link the post in question:
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1r05vkj/discord_will_require_a_face_scan_or_id_for_full/

( Transcribed for Convenience )
Here's the thing though, if you read through the initial post, you can see they're not walking back anything at all. The comment is alluding to the section I quoted up at the very beginning, that Discord will implement an age-inference feature. They are, of course, not going to list the specifics of what the criteria is for this but it might be more accessible than you might expect. So for as awful as this all is, I appreciate that Discord is doing what it can to find avenues to verify users' identities without acquiring sensitive information. Time will tell of course.

Oh they also added an addendum to their announcement about this
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally#age-assurance-clarification

And because I'm sure someone will bring it up, yes, I know about the data breach with Discord. Except, that statement is inaccurate, the data breach was on Zendesk.
https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/10/discord-warns-users-after-data-stolen-in-third-party-breach
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/discord-users-data-stolen-by-hackers-in-third-party-data-breach

If you actually bothered reading any of the articles about it, you would have known that for yourself. This is a very important distinction, because this means the fault and vulnerability lies with Zendesk, a helpdesk service that hundreds of companies use.

Now, just to be clear, this isn't to shill for Discord. (They're going publicly traded company, that alone is reason enough to seek other services) This is about having concise and accurate information for making informed choices. Knowing that the breach with Zendesk, and not Discord servers, is important because it means you need to be cautious of Every Single Instance of Zendesk you interact with. If you jump ship from Discord just to go to another service that also uses Zendesk, you are not any safer than you were before.

So sure, cancel your subscriptions, jump ship, convince yourself that'll save you. But if you do not fight the law itself at the source, it will come for every service you retreat to. We should not resign ourselves to 'only' avoiding the problem. If all you do is cancel monetary support and jump ship, and do absolutely nothing to aid the protest on a legal level, then nothing will be solved and you will run out of hiding spots to retreat to. We desperately need to work on establishing foundations of privacy, together.

That all aside, I believe fostering alternatives to major is vital for a healthy internet, no matter how 'good' the major service is. (I love and Adore dreamwidth, but I still mirror to InsaneJournal.)In that vein, I found this article to be very useful
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And this thread
https://rpanons.dreamwidth.org/100974.html?thread=288623470#cmt288623470
Be warned, many of these alternatives are lacking major features like Threads (vital for massive RP servers, also I just like them), and some of them don't permit explicit content. There are a lot of self-hosted ones but you have to know HOW to self-host them and have the money for it. You could open yourself up to a lot of vulnerabilities if you don't in which case none of the privacy forward structure will even matter if it's compromised.

I still long for the day the https://ircv3.net/ project finally has all its features implemented and all clients can support them.

Slightly related, I'm always on Trillian. It excels as a DM IM service, but I have always greatly prefer DMs over group chats.

Just, please. Pay attention to your rights, to the changes around you; read all articles in full, and seek context, always.

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Helpful Webish Links

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:31:16 GMT

https://fonts.bunny.net/
an alternative to google fonts for off-site font hosting

https://aphyr.com/posts/403-blocking-claude
A string for preventing claude from scraping your site.

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/surprising-truth-about-pixels-and-accessibility/
A really nice article that spells out all the pros and cons of Pixel and EM/REM in terms of both fonts and element size. A lot of this I already figured but a few areas I was less clear on but this lays it out really nicely and is a nice reference.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/panelparty/comix-cleric-the-indie-way-to-host-indie-comics
I currently have the ComicCtrl engine installed for my future but with Hiveworks blowing up as it is and service itself having not been updated in several years, I went ahead and backed this project. It's another crack at a standalone comic host that is easy to use. They're also offering hosting services and you can donate to other's hosts as part of the backing. It's been fully funded and then some but they're keeping late backing open until some time in Feb. When it's completed it'll be free so the backing is for early access. Something to keep an eye on.

https://justthebrowser.com/
This has been going around but also sharing here, the site as more info. Personally I prefer to just use Waterfox, but it's a nice option for those that don't want to switch their browser.

Oh and

My birthday is on the 7th of February.

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Deep Space 9 and Voyager

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:11:15 GMT

Over the last few months I've given thought to watch Deep Space 9 and Voyager. I've grown up with original Trek due to my father so I've been pretty saturated with trek stuff all my life but I haven't really ever watched it on my own, largely due to disinterest. After my father's scripts were stolen for The Next Generation, we didn't have any further iterations of trek airing in the house as much. So while I knew some things here and there I didn't know anything in extensive detail beyond OG trek. But I've thought about giving some things a watch that would be easy to watch while I was drawing so I looked into those.

I've been mildly curious about Deep Space Nine, not so much about Voyager, so I started off with that one first.

First, some thoughts that extend to both series. Watching both these shows has reminded me, once again, why I tend to be very disinterested in live action shows, especially when I was growing up. I get annoyed enough with poorly portrayed relationships in cartoons, but they at least in kids cartoons they aren't so horribly contrived and drama-saturated as prime time programming. Every issue I have with society's perception of sex and gender is amplified 10 fold in typical prime time programming that's at least dulled in kids cartoons. I already had a poor expectation to begin with so the blow of the obnoxious portrayal of these aren't as bad, especially knowing how media has improved, but this really would have pissed me off so much more as a teen and even young adult.

But man

Some of this is BAD

Okay, onto Deep Space Nine

( Deep Space Nine )

Voyager is... frustrating.

( Voyager )

So yeah, I def enjoyed Deep Space Nine more than Voyager, but Voyager was at least less bad than I expected.

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It keeps happening.

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 14:45:20 GMT

It keeps happening!

And by It, I mean, people who have no problem using He pronouns with strangers and friends, referring to me as They. People that interact with me frequently enough to know how I identify, referring to me, as They.

'Oh but I use They for anyone'

Incorrect!

Every time I've been referred to as They, it was by someone that has no such hiccup referring to any that uses He, as that.

Which means one of two things: Either you have an aversion to using She even for those that want it, or you do not percieve me as a woman. One of these things hurts a lot more than the other.

I've never been a They. I love identifying as a woman, it brings me joy to identify and express womanhood in my own way. And it pains me every time someone I thought knew me, denies me that identity.

Sometimes I wonder if some of the people that do it, think they're doing me a favor. Like I read like all the other She-Turned-They mutuals in our social circle and maybe these people assume I'm the same because I don't read 'feminine' and are attempting to 'validate' that, but it's the opposite of validating.

I'm not nonbinary, I'm not agender. These labels do not give me joy, and make me feel alienated when used to refer to me by people I thought knew me even a little bit. I am a woman, I love being a woman, especially being a woman My way. Being gender nonconforming doesn't remove my identity as a woman.

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The Case of Affinity

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:44:42 GMT

So, I like Affinity Studio, I like the products a lot. I like the interface, I like what they do, I like the ease of use with vector tools, I like the range. They're very close to being an actual replacement for Photoshop in ways no other application has been before it. I purchased the total suite of Affinity 2 at launch for 100$, an incredibly affordable price and well worth the tools for photo editing, vector work, and page layouts.

Some time ago, the Affinity suite of applications' parent company, Serif, got acquired by Canva. There was concern about this, a lot about what Canva stood for and the growing amount of generative tools being shooed in with little oversight. But for a time Canva left the Affinity Suite alone and it made some wonderful advancements. Affinity Publish is a big reason why I was able to start making zines, as it's interface was easy to pick up on and especially intuitive.

A couple months ago, Affinity was made into a singular program and released for free, and I have some mixed feelings about that.

NOW

I have no complaints about the fact that they made free something that once was paid. I don't think that's a bad thing, I don't feel I'm 'owed' anything. I paid for a digital license, not exclusivity. I still have the installs and backups, I can install it wherever and whenever. And in some ways, I think it's a good thing.

When trying to teach people basic photo editing, there's an ease of use that simply does not exist for Krita or GIMP. You can certainly learn to use those two, but there's a very stark learning curve that can get incredibly frustrating. And then, there's the text tools. There's one thing very few free services have gotten right and that's text tools, GIMP is a lot better than it used to be, but both Krita and Inkscape have some very odd controls for text editng. I've guided a lot of tech-inexperienced people through a lot of applications, and the truth is, Affinity and Photoshop have consistently been easier for tech newbies to pick up on than GIMP and Krita.

When the announcement hit about Affinity being rolled into a new program and it would be free, the first thing I thought was.. 'Oh I finally have a free tool I can point a whole lot of people to that they'll be able to pick up pretty easily and learn from. I know a lot of 'non artists' that would benefit greatly from being able to have a tool to do minor image editing. I can make PSD templates and they'll work completely, intact text layers and all, in affinity. And that's before even getting into how people that want to make Zines and don't have the money for fancy software can now look to Affinity. Most the free zine makers are for the really small zines, and then scribus is free but it isn't nearly as robust as Affinity. Like, in a lot of ways, Affinity going free is honestly, kind of amazing for the overall accessibility of design.

The thing that I'm actually concerned about this distribution model, is the long-term access.

With the applications I pay for, I typically get access to previous versions that I can install as needed if a change happens that I don't like. This type of free model, one that isn't open source, these companies rarely allow for access to previous versions which means if it changes, you're often unable to roll back to a previous version if you don't like the new changes. And if they ever decide the project isn't worth it to keep onto anymore, they can scorched earth the whole thing and there'd be nothing for it. Or they can switch back to a paid model, but only subscription once again locking others out of the ability to work on their projects lest they conform and hope they have it saved as another format.

So while I'm very excited for there to be something viably comparable for matters of graphic design for anyone low or no income, I'm very wary about the future of what that might mean and the access to the tools in question.

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Actual New Year Post

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:42:58 GMT

Okay so like, informative stuff aside, hello

it is new year

That means my birthday is like a month away. (February 7th, to be exact, turning 41, wheee)

Goals is post more here, draw more, and work on the pile of things I've had since last year:

Finish archiving my descriptions from DeviantArt to my website
Work on a lot of other website projects
Finish my '30 Years of Talon' Zine
START THE FIRST CHAPTER OF MY COMIC AT MINIMUM, DANGIT

Over the year or so I've had a few people follow me here and poke their heads in from time to time so

People new here! (generally new as of the past yearish) sound off and let me know about you in the comments!

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If you haven't backed up livejournal, do now

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:44:17 GMT

Something is going down at Livejournal

This morning, Dreamwidth Co-owner Rahaeli/Denise made this post: https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3mbebi2xfxc25

( transcription below )
Sooo yeah.
I just went ahead and archived a community of mine, one I had been meaning to.

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Romanticising the Old Internet

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:29:00 GMT

So, I started using the internet around 1995 ish. And there is a lot I love about it and a lot that was extremely difficult. But many people now will look back and see it as some perfect idyllic time of free information exchange, as though there was nothing wrong with it and that's... simply not true.

Now, there is a lot I like about the old internet, don't get me wrong. I like that capitalism hadn't got it's claws into it, and the lack of centralized services made people forced to carve out a place for their own. But it had.. so many hurdles and was so inaccessible in a lot of ways. So, here's a bunch of things that irritated me about the internet in 1995-2005 that I think is, in-fact, a lot better now. I'm gonna babble about my own experiences with this era to give an idea for those that didn't experience this.

Technology

The truth about the internet is that to use it, it is in conversation with the technology you use. Want to digitize your art? That's gonna cost you a 1400$ scanner and a SCISI card. Want to draw on the computer directly? Well you better hope you know someone in the AutoCAD industry to hook you up with an Intuos tablet and that you have a free serial port to use it. Or wait a few years and get one of the USB ones. (Also likely setting you back a few thousand dollars) For people that didn't grow up in this era, they have no idea how incredible it was to see drawing tablets in any sort of tech shop, this used to be a direct order specialty shop sort of deal.

And then there's the computer that runs it all that you use to access the internet in the first place. Putting together a computer was more of a hassle then, than it is now. I'm sure people that didn't grow up with it find it confusing now, but back then? There were way more points of failure and chance for incompatibility between boards, CPU, and RAM. Now, you just have to make sure the motherboard's socket matches the CPU and maybe the voltage in a few higher end cases. The RAM and GPU are pretty much plug and play with the only setback being possibly throttled by the board if the board isn't strong enough, but at least the computer will work. For older systems, a mismatch like that could cause it to not even start.

And then the SCISI card... oh the SCISI card. It's an expensive piece of hardware that was terribly finicky. I had to write a BASH script to stop something related to the Scanner from initializing so that I could actually boot into windows without safe mode because it'd fail every time otherwise. Little errors on devices these days pale in comparison to the catastrophic failures hardware from 1995-2005 were capable of.

After 2005, USB was more ubiquitous, scanners were both affordable and easier to use, and computers were easier to build and troubleshoot.

Software

I don't know how many people even in their 30's really appreciates the breadth of software we have accessible to us now. When I was getting into this, there was Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, the extremely rudimentary OS-provided imaging programs. Both Photoshop and PaintShopPro would set you back a couple hundred dollars. I will say the upside to this era was the copy protection wasn't nearly as extreme. You could get away with burning a disc and pass around the same key and get it installed on all your friend's computers without issue. GIMP entered the scene around 1998, but access to it was pretty much only for the especially tech savy that could compile their own version for their OS, or for those on an OS that was supported by others. But if you think GIMP was limited now, it was more limited, then. And while technically Pixia was around, unless you were at least somewhat familiar with Japanese, you were unlikely to be aware of the software, let alone be able to use it, but if you could it was one of the few free options that real. I am of the opinion the existence of Pixia in 1998, is why the digital art scene in Japan was so big.

openCanvas released in 2000, and became wildly popular for it's networking and overall nicer brush controls. Paint.Net hit the scene in 2004, followed by Mypaint in 2005, Krita in 2005. So as you can see, options were pretty thin until the end of this era. Now a days, there are a wealth of both free and affordable applications for anyone can use and I feel like this gets taken for granted far too often.

The Internet Itself

In the internet around 1995-2005, the options you had for sharing your art were... slim. After you got past the hurdle of technology and software to even make the art in digital form to begin with, the places where you could share and host it was minimal. You could.. build a website (which many did), post to a forum (which still often required that you have that art uploaded somewhere first, in order to even show it because many 'forums' did not have direct uploads), or be good with IRC and it's file transfer. (I did not use IRC). But your options were limited and required some amount of technical skill, and if you didn't have those technical skills, well.. your options were more thin. I'm going to list a timeline of what was available, and maybe you'll see what I mean. (I can only speak for the English side of things, I'm afraid)

Newgrounds 1995, Okay so technically this site itself pre-dates the others but it started out as only a collection of Flash works and they had to be manually submitted and uploaded to the service. Art wasn't openly accepted until about 2000 and accounts didn't happen until about 2001 but art submissions were still directly sent. Direct uploads for art to Newgrounds itself didn't happen until 2010. (from what I've been able to garner from a cursory glance on web archive, because FOR SOME REASON, THERE IS NO HISTORY OF NEWGROUNDS ON FANLORE.ORG)
Elfwood 1996, a gallery that was high-fantasy-only and then kinda branched out into scifi later, was jurried, (in other words every submission was reviewed) and required the disclosure of your legal name in order to make an account. They didn't allow fanart until 2002 (my guess was the advent of DeviantArt pulled a lot of their Traffic)
Epilogue.net 1998, A competitor to Elfwood in that it was even more strict on what it accepted because it only wanted 'the best' art.
MediaMiner 1998, This was first a fan fiction service and then later added a fanart gallery. It was so much easier to use than Elfwood that it was such a big deal to me at the time.
Side 7 1998, a fan BBS turned art gallery, that I only knew as a Sonic Fan Art gallery so I never used it.
VCL 1999, A very rudimentary gallery site for furry art. No comments, but made for a nice archive. But only furry art.

DeviantArt 2000, Unless you were on the net at this time, it's difficult for me to describe just what a Big Deal DeviantArt was. Up until this point the galleries most people had access to were restricted in some way either by access or subject. (as you can see from the list above) DeviantArt was the first multi-media gallery site that you could just make an account and directly upload to. Every other site before it was Juried, had strict restrictions on subjects, were cumbersome to use, or lacked a feature here and there. DeviantArt had ALL the features, NO subject restriction, and was a place that Writers, Photographers, Sculptors, Designers, Crafters, and genuinely any medium that could be artistic. (There was an absence of music but that's because of some weirdness with the other project DA had going which honestly is a shame.) Many of these niches had NO WHERE to share their work before this as so many curated art services were only Illustrations or Fiction. Photographers, Crafters, Interface designers, were all forgotten.

And then, SELLING stuff? Well, there were no easy plug and play merchant services until PayPal hit the scene in 2002, and even then it was feature limited compared to today. Before that you had to apply for a merchant service, I don't know if you've ever done that but it's a pain. And the cart services they had available at the time? Absolutely jank. To make your own store you had to pay for hosting, set up your own cart, purchase an SSL cert (most services didn't offer free ones at the time), pay for the merchant service, and then have the technical skill to keep it all running. And of you wanted someone to do all that for you. And hey if you wanted to do it on the cheap, you could take credit cards over the phone or have people mail you checks. A surprising amount of people did both these things. You have no idea how PayPal's embedded purchase buttons changed the scene unless you were deep in the weeds of everything else, but that wasn't until near the end of that 10-year span. Self-service sales platforms like Etsy didn't exist until 2005.

And then, use of assets without attribution was rampant between 1995-2005. There was a whole movement in 1998 to protest this problem called Grey Day, where artists would collectively change their site to remove all graphics from the site to show what it would be like if they all stopped making what they do. The only request was attribution. There's def still an issue with use without attribution but image search makes it a lot easier to find the source. That didn't exist in 1995-2005.
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These days, people take for granted the ease of access. Coding a website now is easier than it ever has been, even side-stepping the fact that there are very few WYSIWYG options, there are still free CMS and the code itself is easier to understand than it used to be and I say this as someone that's always struggled with code. There are more options to set your roots down, you have more control over where you want to go. Hosting is incredibly cheap, as are domains, nothing is stopping you from making your own house and that used to be much more difficult in 1995-2005.

It's easier to build a PC than it used to be, there are videos with guides, archives of drivers, and a whole bustling community of alternative OS options with more users dedicated to making drivers for those OS than there ever used to be in decade I'm referring to. And we are spoiled for choice for both software and hardware. 3 viable competing tablet companies! Making stuff that won't knock out your entire paycheck!
Even with the way things are now, with the content restrictions and age verification, we've been through this before. There was a whole era of Credit Card Verification, and that crashed and burned as well. Of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't require us to fight for it :U As difficult as some things are, turmoil is important for lasting change, but you gotta do something about it. It sucks right now, but I know I for one am determined to make sure the now isn't permanent.

The internet has never been a perfect place for anyone. There are some aspects that had their heyday were great and better than some of what's going on right now, without a doubt, but like everything, once capitalism sinks its claws in, it dies.

IDK I think it's better to learn to the past than yearn for it. Romanticing the past doesn't help our current or our future, it prevents us from learning from our mistakes.

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Search Engine Sources

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:24:50 GMT

I don't think many people are aware of just how many search engines pull from the same ones.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/

Even ones people speak highly of, such as Kagi, still get their sources from the larger services.

The upside is that this has now taught me about Mojeek and Yep, which I had never heard of before.

And https://metasearx.com/ looks to be like a modern version of Dogpile (if you all remember that one)

I hope this little map/product updates more, I feel like there has GOT to be other ones to put on there, both in the form of the niche ones like https://marginalia-search.com/ and non-english speaking search engines.

Edit:
aflatmirror linked me to this fantastic article that was published in 2021 but has been kept up to date as July of this year.
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

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