Daily Shaarli
April 21, 2024
Personal website manifestos
Icon post: 180 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Tifa Lockhart only. This is Part 1. Screencaps from Capseroo.
336 icons of the works of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). There's a duplicate icon in there somewhere, I'm too tired to find it. This man liked ships and putting the cruxifix in weird places.
From the Final Fantasy VII Remake final trailer.
Welcome to more of William Morris's beautiful and classic English Arts & Crafts wallpapers - the best wallpaper designs ever, in my view, and the greatest architectural and decorative art aesthetic style. If you like these, you may be interested in my previous two posts of Morris wallpaper icons.
Feel free to use, modify, and share; credit is appreciated (not required).
Credit appreciated. Free to use, modify, and share.
Textures for use in making icons and wallpapers, made with my own photographs of light and water.
As promised, Rosa and Kain icons galore!
STOP. ICON TIME.
Art from the Japan book by 天野 喜孝.
Icon post: 180 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Cloud Strife only. This is Part 2. Screencaps from Capseroo.
Icon post: 60 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Tifa Lockhart only. This is Part 2. Screencaps from Capseroo.
Cloud Strife, Aerith Gainsborough, and Barret Wallace in the latest Final Fantasy VII Remake trailer.
24 Final Fantasy X-2 icons
Old computer stuff for people who really need icons of old computer stuff (e.g. me!).
I was actually trying to find 1980s fantasy art, but stumbled across this series of Japanese advertisement/book cover art from the 1970s/1980s, and couldn't resist making some icons out of it.
I wanted to make a rainbow set, so I did.
For my first theiconquest set I thought I would focus on the adventure that takes place in Final Fantasy IV, the first Final Fantasy I ever played. I picked parts out of the story that I found interesting and used them as inspiration for most of my icons (latter ones are just misc), as well as pieces of music. I've included the little quotes in case anybody's interested. I also included which class I'll be getting points for at the quest.
I had the chance to go to a very interesting talk recently by a guy named Cory Doctorow who is mainly a sci-fi writer but has an interest in tech and the place of tech in society -- what I would call "broadly Electronic Frontier Foundation-type issues." He talked about a kind of typical lifecycle of tech/social media giants (a kind of preview, I guess, of his upcoming book), where benefits originally offered to users are gradually withdrawn in favor of being given to advertisers which are then gradually withdrawn in order to accrue to the company itself and its shareholders, a process he calls the "enshittificaton" of social media. Given that, uh, two major social media sites have had meltdowns in the last month (Reddit's CEO implementing new policies regarding third party apps leading to a protest and exodus, plus Twitter's extended ongoing shitshow, the latest development being that Twitter started capping how many tweets a user can load, possibly due to a shoddy code rollout or because Twitter refuses to pay its cloud computing bills (either way, some kind of cost-cutting measure no doubt led to this situation)) and that I generally like ranting about the sad state of modern social media, I thought I would write a DW post summarizing the talk / his points because it seems relevant!
I've been thinking about fan space bullshit for a while (just not posting it anywhere lol), so I felt like now might be the best time, and this might be the best place, for me to get some of these thoughts down. I'm sure nothing I'm saying is 100% original, as I've seen many others express the same gripes with modern fandom, but I think this kind of thing can be talked about and rehashed at any point for the sake of d i s c o u r s e.
Via bluedreaming, I came across a fair and very thoughtful post observing the impact AO3 has had on smaller archives, and by extension on fandom-specific communities. I love AO3 and everything it stands for and was born of, and I want it to keep existing. I also see a lot of commentary on the lost feeling of "community" in fandom spaces these days, and this post offers interesting insights into AO3's unfortunate contribution to the trend.
Anon: Hey so I have a question. I asked one of the forensic psychology college professors (i'm a psych major) if l0li/sh0ta counts as cp and she said that it does because even though they are animated depictions, they are meant to represent children. Made me feel weird, what is ur stance on this?
I just submitted my essay about the early FromSoft game Evergrace to my editor at Sidequest. Huzzah!! Let me share some of the reading I did in the process of arguing why it's important for this game to be preserved and documented.
if anyone's tried looking for old icon posts on dreamwidth and livejournal, they likely have ran into icons hosted by photobucket. and because photobucket is annoying as all hell, they make it near impossible to save those icons, by slapping watermarks on them, fucking with the urls, and somehow disabling something as simple as ctrl+s to save a fucking image. i've had my workarounds for downloading an icon manually, but downloading an entire batch at once has basically been impossible because of these limitations. but i think i finally figured it out, so i'd like to share how i did it and maybe help other people running into the same problems lol
Written for the "ghost" prompt over at spook_me. As I was writing this I realized this was more inline with my big Dion character study project and decided to cut this story down to a sweeter size. This could be a companion fic to Visiting Statues. Post-game.
I have a mate who's thinking of venturing into the smutty end of fan fiction writing.
A few days ago I created a custom mood theme, but it took me a little while to figure out how to create a custom theme without having to copy & past hundreds of links... I'm probably not the only one experiencing this problem, so I thought I could share my newly acquired skills with other Dreamwidth:ers ^^
"I can't speak French," announced pop group Girls Aloud in 2008, "Je ne parle pas Français," for the more educated amongst us. Like Girls Aloud, I also cannot speak French, and like any other English person, I am haunted by the spectre of French sophistication, by Françoise Hardy, by France Gall, by Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Isabelle Huppert—wow, that's quite a dark summation of French pop culture I've laid out before you. Regardless, I do not speak French, and yet long had I been aware that France, during the '80s and the '90s, received a lot more releases of things I came to love during that period also—in fact, my first encounter with the Sailor V manga was in collected French editions that a friend sent me, because, at the point, no one here had considered that a girl and her cat fighting diamond thieves and monsters might appeal to children. This is a long, rambling way of telling you that recently I made the decision to re-watch one of my favourite sentai shows, Chojuu Sentai Liveman, and decided to spice things up by watching the French dub. In doing so, I discovered the world of French pop star, Dorothée, and Club Dorothée.
bye bye miss american pie!
2023 noteContext: I was having a slightly shite time living abroad, doing a job I didn’t really like, and couldn’t wait to go home for Christmas, so I busied myself with finding a nice piece of Christmas music every day of December. I actually went home on the 22nd, so this playlist has only 21 tracks in it because after that I stopped relying on it as the sole sustainer of my mental health.Nearly all of these are choral music; one is jazz, but that’s the furthest from classical that it gets. Quite a lot of them are things I’ve sung with various choirs; some are additionally ✨meaningful to me✨ (shoutout to the Boar’s Head Carol towards the end there).
"The unknown journey continues."
39 icons of wolves I found in a very ancient folder from when I made icons on LJ in the early oughts, so... yeah. :D I'll post more of the icons I found in the archive just for fun. No promises on quality now or later.
William Morris's "Strawberry Thief" was and remains his most popular pattern. Designed in 1883 as a printed textile for curtains and wallcoverings, it was inspired by a scene of thrushes stealing strawberries from the garden at Kelmscott Manor. The initial design had been drawn in the 1870s, but it took ten years to achieve the first successful printing because of the intricacy of the design and Morris's insistence on traditional methods.
Proto-fantasy novelist and pre-Raphaelite William Morris is the father of the Arts & Crafts movement (my favorite architectural and decorative style), and his textiles and wallpapers were wildly popular in Victorian homes and today are ubiquitous in yuppie remodels and with set dressers creating interiors of the period (partly because they are probably the best-known designs of the period and are widely available because his company, Morris & Co, is still printing his designs from the original wooden blocks. They were not nearly as widespread as you'd think from tv and movies of recent years though, nor have they ever been affordable enough to be).
Hello hello~
I picked up playing Pokemon Go again due to the lovely weather and finally being in a more walkable neighborhood, and it got me itching to make some icons with Pokemon card art, bc the card art is so cute. So here it is! (Though most of the Eevee art comes from entries of the 2018 Pokémon Card Game Illustration Grand Prix)
Icon post: 165 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Cloud Strife only. This is Part 1. Screencaps from Capseroo.
Icon post: 85 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Rufus, Zack, and Red XIII only. Screencaps from Capseroo.
Icon post: 190 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Aerith Gainsborough only. This is Part 1. Screencaps from Capseroo.
This set has a few non-computer but still vintage tech things, mostly pulled from Tumblr aesthetic blogs (ha). Did you ever think a stack of VHS tapes could look so cool?
Final Fantasy VII [1 - 20]
Aaah, sorry I've been so terrible at putting up icons lately, guys! I've had like, no inspiration so most of these (with the exception of maybe 14 or 15 of them) are contest entries from the past month. I'll certainly have a vg20in20 claim up in the next couple of weeks that is Final Fantasy related, so stay tuned for that!
Oh shit did I almost forget to do this again?
Okay, so I have Opinions about AI and I know they are not 100% shared by all of my friends and AI controversies caused drama in at least one Discord I'm in, so I'm going to put this under a cut and you can read/engage with it if this is a thing that's interesting to you, or not. It also deals a little bit with bad things happening to kids in a weird, hard-to-define way that makes me uncomfortable and may make you uncomfortable as well.
Someone just linked to this in the eight thousandth discussion of static site generators or something like them for simple, basic websites and this just completely clarified my feelings about every single goddamn time I try to install and set up a static site generator.
Lately, I've found myself thinking a lot about an online interaction I had about twenty years ago, which really shaped my approach to online interactions in general.
I liked and mostly agreed with this article on "the enshittification" of TikTok, Twitter, Amazon shopping, and other web services.
I used to really like taking personality/sorting quizzes and sharing the results on LJ/DW (I've got a quizzes tag (all f-locked)) but I feel like personality quizzes have really gone downhill since their heyday on... (looks at the quiz site I shared my results from the most) ...Blogthings.com? I don't actually know much about that site, but this post I found when Googling the site name just now suggests that it was one woman's project and that all the quizzes were written by her... Which I guess would explain the consistently high quality of the quizzes!
So I've been using DeviantArt a lot recently for a personal project. This combined with my Snowflake Challenge musings (where I pondered what is now the best site for posting adult art in the wake of Twitter's struggles) inspired me to write up a long comparison of how DeviantArt and Tumblr compare as sites for posting fanart. n = 4546 words.
In 2012, for reasons that don't bear exploring at this juncture, I decided to make a list of all of the meta on reccing that I could find. I went through metafandom and I started going through metafandom and I ran out of steam. Every once in a while I'd pick it up again, and I'd, say, go pull more meta data for the links I'd pulled from metafandom. Sometimes I found that those links and entries that I read had since become locked or deleted; I chose to keep those links because I'd read the content there and I knew that I cared about it and maybe, someday, the entry would be accessible again, or, anyway, surely the data I did have meant something; I couldn't make myself delete anything, so there are some dead links in here.
A frontnav-style code inspired by a mix of vapourwave and general old Windows 78, Windows XP-era looks.
I have this much to say about the whole warnings debate: my feeling is that where one can take steps to be considerate to other people, particularly where that consideration helps people who have an issue in their lives which presents an impediment, those steps should be taken. The details from there are up to the individual but there are guidelines that exist which present a reasonable starting point.
- Uses Chrome
- Microsoft Excel (desktop)
- Selenium (a plugin that works with Chrome to run scripts) - instructions given on how to download and install
- Does not require membership to the community (but it helps with downloads of community restricted content)
- Will download comments - all threads and all pages
- It works off a free LiveJournal Account, just set your style to Newspaper Theme
- Embedded images are not downloaded but to capture them you can convert the downloaded html pages to PDFs using a batch HTML to PDF converter
Written for a prompt that I liked on the ffxvi_kink_meme. It really played with what I like about their dynamic.
He felt their presence more than he saw them, the warmth breath, the mournful moans, the shape of Zamazenta, the push of Zacian’s snout against his arm.
Handy-dandy “you wouldn’t X a Y” meme generator, for all your Xing a Y requirements.
14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture
Hello - I promised the Renegade Europe discord server to do a little breakdown/comparison of the text papers I use for my bindings, photos included. This is that post.
Please rec me some how-to books on sex. Please read my criteria carefully!
Time to get back to my roots and post some meta putting some minor detail of a video game under absurd scrutiny.
The biggest EDM tracks in the world, all in one place
Can you pick out for those London Underground references?
Music from the Yorgos Lanthimos film released on 11/23.
Only mainline Final Fantasy music (from 1-10) that was composed by Nobou Uemastu.
64 icons of owls dragged up from the hellish depths of my former career as an lj iconner. These ones are less good, but who knows what kind of pictures I had to work with in the days of yore when I iconned uphill, both ways?
These are free to use and modify. Credit is appreciated.
Free to download and modify. Credit appreciated.
Here's the second batch of 21 William Morris wallpaper icons.
Here's the last of my modern art icons from the artists associated with the Bauhaus. (I don't say I won't make any more modern art icons, but I haven't lined any up.)
The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) is the most famous artist associated with the Bauhaus, and is considered one of the originators of Western abstract art. Born in Moscow and raised in present-day Ukraine, he was already a law professor when he took up painting at 30. He moved to Germany to study art, returning to Russia in the years around WWI, then teaching at the Bauhaus from 1922-1933 when it was closed by the Nazis and he fled to France.
Icons made for 'basic-icontest' on LJ. Various subject matters: Mosaiculture Garden, Seahorses, Sci-Fi Architecture, Penguins, Hotdogs, Sunglasses and Autumn.
36 ICONS OF EDGE (FINAL FANTASY IV), all official art.
Icon post: 190 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Barret Wallace only. Screencaps from Capseroo.
Icon post: 115 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Reno and Rude only. Screencaps from Capseroo.
Icon post: 220 textless icons from Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Aerith Gainsborough only. This is Part 2. Screencaps from Capseroo.
A mish-mash of vintage 1990s stuff but basically all colored pink.
Once again I bring you a mish-mash of 90s/00s aesthetic icons.
Final Fantasy [1 - 20]
OMG HOW DID I GET THESE DONE SO QUICKLY, MY HEAD HURTS SO MUCH AFTER THIS. I'll crosspost them tomorrow because omg I want to go to bed. D:
Lately I've been checking out Misskey-based instances, specifically misskey.io and a fork of misskey called firefish.social. They're a microblog system but with additional features such as 4K character limit, 16 images per post, emoji reactions with even additional custom reactions per instance, a gallery feature that is unique, not just a media tab of all your media posts, built in custom color themes with the ability to make your own, and the choice of 3 layouts that are full screen with customizable widgets, a twitter-like layout, and a tweetdeck/mastodon-like layout with the multi-column view. It's one of the few services that doesn't just try to make twitter again but tries to do something its own and I very much appreciate that for it. I almost want to use it despite my aversion to microblogs.
I'm more grateful than ever for my commitment against the cloud. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. The death of forums and blogs and the centralising towards a single platform trades off control for convenience - and it's so collectively detrimental.
The prompt here focused on the Twitter explosion, so I guess I'll talk about platforms in a kind of rambling, disorganized sort of way.
Are you a member of a small, marginalized identity-based community of Tumblr bloggers, looking to advocate for yourselves, support each other, have meaningful discussions, build, and grow? Then Tumblr itself is standing in your way.
Knowing that Cait Corrain was a Reylo makes their actions make a lot more sense.
Not because of the ship they were interested. Not because of the fandom they were involved in. Rather, because knowing that they were active in fandom in a large, active ship with a lot of drama and a LOT of fic being posted, it really puts some aspects of the situations into context for me.
The past few days I've been working on pieces for Zines, right now I'm working on a 2nd piece for one that is spicy. The SFW is just about done. And I'm brainstorming for another one.
Over my roughly 23 years in fandom, I've witnessed a number of scam artists, grifters, and otherwise bad actors within fandom. I've had the good fortune, but also the wariness and caution, to not be taken in by these people. So today, for my second Fannish50, I'm going to talk about signs of scam artists and other kinds of grifters, gaslighters, and toxic people in fandom that have become apparent to me over the years and have helped me avoid them.
Most of us have gotten used to building tables for the LJ bio field, and have discovered that the DW one doesn't work the same way. So I messed around for a while and came up with some guidelines.
This is a test of lots of different mark up you should think about styling. It also uses a nonstandard icon size.
So it occurs to me that, regardless of how the current cycles of "oh wow so the OTW is pretty fucked up internally" shake out (which synonymous is v helpfully collecting for anyone who's lost track of the many threads of discussion) it might be beneficial for us all to work on our abilities to find & share fic via avenues other than Ao3 tags.
Fanfiction has improved many of my writing skills in ways that are directly transferable to original fiction. I wrote a bunch of fanfic in 2019-20 in particular, and I learned a lot from it that I can take with me into any future project no matter whose sandbox I’m playing in.
I didn't really have anything to say for day 9 or 10 but 11 is In your own space, recommend a fannish or creative resource and realized I should have posted my resource links for this challenge as opposed to day 7 (although, I'm proud of them, so I suppose they work for both)
Four heroes, each bearing a crystal, come to Coneria, and it goes about as well as you'd expect.
So morgandawn asked me to write up this guide as it may be helpful to people who:
- Create fan art that needs hosting before being able to post on ao3 or other places (images, videos, audio files etc)
- Need a place they can upload those media files that isn't youtube etc where take-downs are automated
- Is the cheapest trustworthy place I can find (like, for a lot of you this might be effectively free)
- Doesn't require training as a sysadmin to set it up
- Allows porn (backblaze just say nothing illegal, bunnyCDN specifically say they allow it as long as it's legal)
Inspired by a encyclopaedic page for phosphophyllite I saw once.
This is a (very) long Tumblr post with a clickbait title taken from a clickbait tweet, but it's beautifully written and skillfully argued. I read this essay over the course of several days, and every paragraph filled me with joy and power.
OK I've only been promising this post to various people (queenlua and necrophilia for sure, probably muladhara and others?) for literal actual years and I'm so sorry about my brain, but we're gonna DO THE THING.
The complete Nonclassical discography: classical, electronic & experimental music
In celebration of the 2018 vinyl reissue of Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint,
80s nostalgia, chip-like music with a modern taste. Growing as I find new sounds.
Complete, fully searchable information about The New English Hymnal, with audio recordings and page scans.