#web publishing software

[ingramjinkins]

 HEY! MAKE A GAME!

Here’s my new free 8-fold I was handing out at the SCAD Minicomic Expo! I’ll have more free copies with me at future shows.

I’ve been dabbling in game making lately using open source & free assets so I wanted to collect everything I’ve learned so far in one place. Coding has been really fun as a hobby since it marries skills I already have with an entirely new way of thinking.

This zine was put together with Electric Zine Maker which I highly recommend to everyone.

EDIT: I have been warned that OHRRPGCE is not good for those with photosensitivity, as it contains huge contrast and flashing. Sorry for the oversight, stay safe.

Transcription in read more

P1

Cover with “HEY! MAKE A GAME!” in big text. Ing’s cat Asher turns around and says “hm?” and then follows up at the bottom with “Isn’t that expensive tho?”. The credits at the bottom read “some thots by Ing”.

P2

A drawing of Ing holding up Asher and talking to him. They say “actually, buddy, there’s quite a few OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE game engines that are kinda easy to learn!” Asher replies with “so... free? I like free.”

P3

This page is about TWINE. It’s for PC, Mac, Linux and is written in HTML, CSS and Java. Some notable games made with it include Us Lovely Corpses and Egg Baby. Text games, choose your own adventure, and interactive fiction! IN A WEBPAGE!! Asher looks towards the Twine interface while saying “easy!” At the bottom is a note that reads “let me add that learning HTML/CSS is a really great skill to build especially with the growing return to web 1.0 in the face of horrifying social media practices just saying”

P4

This page is about OHRRPGCE. It’s for PC, Mac, Linux and is written in C. A notable game made with it is Franken by Splendidland. Free RPGMaker but more stripped down-- which is good! Was built for creators with no programming knowledge so a great starting place if you just wanna MAKE something. Has its own asset maker built in so you can make the whole thing in the thing. There is a little pixel sprite of Asher in a wizard outfit at the bottom.

P5

This page is about Ren’py. It’s for PC, Mac, Linux and is written in Python. Some notable games are Doki Doki Literature Club! and Butterfly Soup. Ever wanted to make a visual novel, dating sim, or get freaky w it and program a whole simulator? Here u go. Syntax is like writing a screenplay! Extremely accessible (mostly gets difficult when you add branching paths). At the bottom of the page is Asher in a visual novel layout with a text box below him. He’s wearing a suit and petals are floating around him while he blushes. The text box says “A whole can of tuna? For ME?”

P6

This page is about Godot. It’s for PC, Mac, Linux and is written in C. 2D & 3D game dev for basically everything including consoles. This is for WHOLE ENTIRE game development. Much more advanced than the other programs mentioned in this zine & assets must be made outside the program. At the bottom, Asher is playing minigolf and about to make a putt. A notable game is that my brother is making a golf game with it :)

P7

This page starts with a list of Asset Resources. A tiny Ing head at the top says “I have one doll hair” as they hold a dollar looking sadly. The list is as follows: Blender, 3D modeling. Inkscape, making vector images. Atom, simple coding software (recc’d for Ren’py). Unsplash, free images. Freesound, free audio. thepatternlibrary.com, free repeating patterns. itch.io, lots of free/PWYW asset packs are published here! 

The next list is for Paid Software I Like. A little Asher says “Meowby next paycheck...” The list is as follows: Aseprite, for spriting! 1-time payment, powerful but easy to use interface. RPGMaker series, Remember OFF?? Let’s goooo. Sometimes it’s for sale on Steam. Clip Studio, dump Adobe into the sea.

P8

This is the back cover and has the website ingramjinkins.com at the top. Asher has his paws on his face and looks joyous as he thinks about a panicked lizard. He says “Thx ING! Now I can make a game! Maybe one about catching pesky lizards!!” At the bottom there is text that reads “made w/ CLIP STUDIO and alienmelon’s ELECTRIC ZINE MAKER”.

#zine #8fold #8-fold #game dev #zines #electric zine maker #ok these look terrible on the TL lol please click thru

[probablyasocialecologist]

YouTube says it will intentionally cripple the playback of its videos in third-party apps that block its ads. A Monday post in YouTube's help forum notes netizens using applications that strip out adverts while streaming YouTube videos may encounter playback issues due to buffering or error messages indicating that the content is not available. "We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service," said a YouTube team member identified as Rob. "We also understand that some people prefer an entirely ad-free experience, which is why we offer YouTube Premium." This crackdown is coming at the API level, as these outside apps use this interface to access the Google-owned giant's videos. Last year, YouTube acknowledged it was running scripts to detect ad-blocking extensions in web browsers, which ended up interfering with Firefox page loads and prompted a privacy complaint to Ireland's Data Protection Commission. And several months before that, the internet video titan experimented with popup notifications warning YouTube web visitors that ad-blocking software is not allowed. A survey published last month by Ghostery, a maker of software that promotes privacy by blocking ads and tracking scripts, found that Google's efforts to crack down on ad blocking made about half of respondents (49 percent) more willing to use an ad blocker. According to the survey, the majority of Americans now use advert blockers, something recommended by the FBI when conducting internet searches.

Download NewPipe, it's what I use on Android

#youtube #internet #social media #ad blocking

[keyboardandquill]

On creating a wiki for your worldbuilding

Do you have a lot of lore to keep track of? Whether you're an author, a Game Master, or simply someone who really really likes worldbuilding, this post is for you.

Here's a quick overview of what I'll be talking about:

Platforms people use to create personal wikis

Formats and organization systems you may find useful when creating your own wiki

A brief look at the actual content you might put in your wiki (I'm planning a more in-depth post on that later with more images and demos)

And because this is gonna be a long'un, I'm putting a read-more here! I'll also make downloadable epub and PDF versions of this post available for free on my Ko-Fi at some point in the future.

(I'm also planning to reblog with a list of links later on, but I want this initial post shows up in search)

Also now that you're here, I'm going to say this isn't, like, super comprehensive or anything. I'm just talking about stuff I know a little about or have experience with. Please feel free to reblog with additions and/or corrections as needed!

What is a wiki?

According to Wikipedia, "a wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser."

In this case, you'll likely be the sole person making updates to your wiki. The web browser part is optional these days as well, as you'll soon see.

Platforms for creating wikis

Websites for creating worldbuilding wikis

WorldAnvil

This one is actually designed for people who want to create big worldbuilding wikis.

Pros: Worldbuilding prompts! Those are great. It's got a pretty comprehensive set of article types too.

Cons: Kind of expensive to upgrade for features like making your wiki private, and it does NOT work well with adblock turned on, so if you don't want to pay for a membership you'll get inundated with ads. I'm not a huge fan of the interface in general and a lot of it isn't intuitive, but I like what they're doing so I support them anyway.

---

Tiddlywiki/Tiddlyhost.com.

In addition to having a cat as its icon and also a silly name, each 'article' you create with this is called a 'tiddler' which makes me think of Chuck Tingle. I haven't used it much myself yet, but I did make an account and it seems pretty neat.

---

Miraheze

A community-hosted wiki platform that runs on MediaWiki (which is what Wikipedia runs off of).

Pros: It's not Fandom.com.

Cons: You have to request a wiki and can't just make it yourself, as far as I can tell. I haven't actually looked into this one as much.

---

Neocities

An option for if you want to go super oldschool and create a website using only basic html and hyperlinks (without the handy shortcuts of bbcode or Markdown). Monthly cost is $5 usd if you want to have more space and your own domain.

Pros: 100% control over your content.

Cons: Doesn't support PHP databases for wiki software, and can be fairly labour-intensive to update if you break a link or something.

---

Fandom.com

Unfortunately, this one is the top result you'll get when you look up how to make your own wiki. I'm only including it here to tell you to stay as far away from it as possible!!

Its staff are known to ban wiki creators from their own wikis and a bunch of other nonsense that I'm not getting into here.

Programs and apps/web apps for creating worldbuilding wikis

Obsidian.md

My personal favourite. I'm planning to make a whole post about how I use it in the near future as part of this article series.

It's a markdown-based application that you can get on just about any platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, etc) which is great. Obsidian is really easy to pick up and use and also has great themes and community plugins!

Best thing is, it's FREE and you only have to pay if you use their publishing service, which... I don't, so.

---

Notion

I've heard this one is pretty good too. Idk if it costs anything. It's another "second brain" style app (might be markdown also?) and I think it might do more than Obsidian, but I haven't checked it out much myself.

---

Microsoft Word/Google Docs etc.

...Or just about any word processor that lets you create internal hyperlinks. Word may work best due to the collapsible headings so it doesn't get too unwieldy, but *shrug* whatever floats your boat.

---

Excel/Google Sheets etc.

Or, again, any spreadsheet creator that lets you create internal hyperlinks.

I'd recommend having some basic spreadsheet knowledge before doing this. It could get complicated. Before I started using Obsidian, I was using Sheets to keep track of my glossary, notes about characters, and plot ideas.

Types of formatting & organization systems

There are as many organization systems as there are people who want to organize their stuff. Everybody needs something a little different! I find the ones that work best for me are systems that have a lot of customization options.

Here are a couple I know of.

Johnny Decimal

This system is absurdly simple in its concept and yet so versatile. From their website (it's just johnnydecimal dot com but I'll link it in a reblog later):

Take everything you need to organise and sort it in to, at most, ten large buckets.

Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different.

Put a label on each bucket.

Their website has a better explanation than I can give in this post, but I'll sum up the appeal of this system as quoted from their site: "There's only one place anything can ever be."

Usefully, part of this method is creating a directory for the rest of the system.

So if you're like me and tend to shove things wherever only to lose track of it later, this is a great system—especially when used in conjunction with the Zettelkasten Method (see below).

---

Zettelkasten Method

Originally devised as an extensive paper-based knowledge management system, Zettelkasten is meant to easily add new entries to a knowledge base while giving each one a unique ID for easy 'linking.'

The creator of this method said 'it is not important where you place the note, as long as you can link to it.'

As with the Johnny Decimal system, I can't explain it super succinctly (nor can the website, if I'm being honest), so I'll include a link in a future reblog for a video that gave me an excellent run-down of the basics.

Setting up your own system

An organization system is only useful if you can actually, y'know, use it.

It can be fun to set up a super-detailed organization system with predetermined categories for everything, but is it easy for you to use? How will you navigate it?

Making decisions

There will be a lot of decisions to make as you set up your system. The only set-in-stone rule I follow is... don't set anything in stone. It's okay if you decide something that doesn't work later on.

Figuring out your categories

My advice: go fairly broad. You can always sub-categorize. I'm going to go over my own wikis for Athenaeum and Rocket Boosters in detail in a later post, but here are the starting top-level categories I'd recommend for worldbuilders:

A meta category for notes about your database, templates, and any relevant research you've done.

Characters, including main characters, minor characters, and important figures

Worldbuilding

In the last category, which is the main reason for the existence of my wiki, I might have:

Culture

History

Locations

Organizations

Lore (if relevant)

Technology

Transportation

I'll go over the nuances of these 'main' subcategories in that future post I mentioned. In other words, the stuff that actually goes in those categories!

Determining the importance and relevance of worldbuilding elements

You'll need to figure out whether a topic is complex enough to deserve its own entry, or if it should be a sub-heading under another entry. It's okay if you decide on both! I have short subheadings under some entries that amount to "see [link to main entry on that topic]."

I've also decided to expand subheadings into their own topics, and I've removed topics as their own entry and shoved them under subheadings. I do this a lot, in fact! So it's okay if you don't know.

Templates

Will you be creating several of one type of entry?

Individual character profiles

Towns and cities

Factions

(to name a few)

It might be handy to figure out the basic types of information you'll need about each of those things and create a template for them.

A character template might have spaces for the basics, such as name, role, age, and so on.

Some characters will have a lot more information, and some might have even less than what your template dictates! And that's fine.

A word of warning about using system-creation as procrastination

Creating a wiki can be a daunting task. You might decide it's not for you, and that's okay. But you might also decide to go headlong into the process and work on every minute detail, and that is also okay, but.

But.

Beware of using your wiki as an excuse to procrastinate your actual writing/session preparation. Yes, use it to keep track of all the lore you've injected into your manuscript/campaign/whatever, just make sure it stays in its place as a companion to your main project rather than becoming your main project.

How formal should your entries be?

Honestly this one's entirely up to you. I have a mix. Some entries are written like Wikipedia entries with a thorough explanation of the topic with proper punctuation and formatting, while others are simply bullet-point lists of thoughts and ideas that I can return to at a later date.

What methods do you use to keep track of your lore and worldbuilding? Let me know in a reblog or comment!

And please make sure to check the notes. I'll be reblogging with links, and then reblogging that reblog to make sure they're, y'know, actually visible in the notes.

#wiki #worldbuilding #writing advice #writeblr #writeblr community #resource #worldbuilding wiki #obsidian #zettelkasten #resource by keyboardandquill

[blubberquark]

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?

#small web #blogging about blogging #link rot #bit rot #games studies

[xiaolumi-love]

so it's come to my attention that ao3 is actually proooobably more pro-ai than we originally thought. in maybe a sinister way. full disclosure, i'm not well-versed in how web pages work so i could be missing some information.

ao3 is about "inclusivity" and "legitimate" uses of the site and are using these quoted words to justify ai "works" on their site.

this is how you code to prevent selection of text on a web page.

the very same code is not "allowed" on ao3. the code does affect how the text is visible to screens and so this may or may not have safety and accessibility reasons. but given the other two points, welllllll that's not the point of this post.

so here's my Heated Complaint i'm submitting:

I want to prevent plagiarism of my work. Plain and simple. Usage of plagiarism software, otherwise known as AI, means I'm struggling to find places to share my work without feeling like it's just going to end up in some stupid regurgitation machine.

Since you've allowed AI works to be published here, it seems pretty clear what your stance on AI is. However I still want to try to get my original, organic works out there on this site, because it is the most common fanfiction site. But even when I take measures to try to prevent copy/pasting of my works on AO3, you side with the people who are stealing art.

You say you're being "inclusive" and only allowing "legitimate" uses of this site. What you as a corporation are failing to understand is that AI is by definition plagiarism software. Including it is stabbing actual creators in the back, because AI takes input from these creators without their consent and shits out their hard work. The authors are not the AI prompters. The authors are the hundreds or thousands or millions of writers who have had their works inserted into the software.

AI "fanworks" aren't fanworks. They're stolen labour. And by disallowing this code, by allowing publication of AI "fanworks", you are no longer open-source. You are functioning as a cog in the machine churning out profit for the AI plagiarizers.

i hope the whole of tumblr gets vocal because this is so not cool of ao3.

screenshots of the listed evidence under the keep reading. alt text available.

#ao3 #archive of our own #fanfic #fanfiction #ai #plagiarism #plagiarism software #alt text available

[soon-palestine]

Workers said Project Nimbus is the kind of lucrative contract that neglects ethical guardrails that outspoken members of Google’s workforce have demanded in recent years. “I am very worried that Google has no scruples if they’re going to work with the Israeli government,” said Joshua Marxen, a Google Cloud software engineer who helped to organize the protest. “Google has given us no reason to trust them.” The Tuesday protest represents continuing tension between Google’s workforce and its senior management over how the company’s technology is used. In recent years Google workers have objected to military contracts, challenging Google’s work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and its role in a defense program building artificial intelligence tools used to refine drone strikes. Workers have alleged that the company has cracked down on information-sharing, siloed controversial projects and enforced a workplace culture that increasingly punishes them for speaking out.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Tuesday protest and workers’ concerns over Project Nimbus. The Israeli Finance Ministry announced its contract with Google and Amazon in April 2021 as a project “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.” Google has largely refused to release details of the contract, the specific capabilities Israel will receive, or how they will be used. In July 2022, the Intercept reported that training documents for Israeli government personnel indicate Google is providing software that the company claims can recognize people, gauge emotional states from facial expressions and track objects in video footage. Google Cloud spokesperson Atle Erlingsson told Wired in September 2022 that the company proudly supports Israel’s government and said critics had misrepresented Project Nimbus. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads,” he told Wired. Erlingsson, however, acknowledged that the contract will provide Israel’s military access to Google technology. Former Google worker Ariel Koren, who has long been publicly critical of Project Nimbus, said “it adds insult to injury for Palestinian activists and Palestinians generally” that Google Cloud’s profitability milestone coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Nakba — which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians following creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

In March 2022, The Times reported allegations by Koren — at the time a product marketing manager at Google for Education — that Google had retaliated against her for criticizing the contract, issuing a directive that she move to São Paulo, Brazil, within 17 business days or lose her job. Google told The Times that it investigated the incident and found no evidence of retaliation. When Koren resigned from Google in August 2022 she published a memo explaining reasons for her departure, writing that “Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights.” Koren said Google’s apathy makes her and others believe more vigorous protest actions are justified. “This is a concrete disruption that is sending a clear message to Google: We won’t allow for business as usual, so long as you continue to profit off of a nefarious contract that expands Israeli apartheid.” Mohammad Khatami, a YouTube software engineer based in New York, participated in a small protest of Project Nimbus at a July Amazon Web Services conference in Manhattan. Khatami said major layoffs at Google announced in January pushed him to get more involved in the Alphabet Workers Union, which provides resources to Khatami and other union members in an anti-military working group — though the union has not taken a formal stance on Project Nimbus. “Greed and corporate interests were being put ahead of workers and I think the layoffs just illustrated that for me very clearly,” Khatami said.

#palestine #gaza #free palestine #nimbus #google

[spockandawe]

Hello! I've been thinking about binding some danmei novels in my native language, but I don't know where to start. I found your blog recently and find it very inspiring! I was wondering if maybe you could share with me what tools and materials would be good to get started with?

Sure!!!! So, I'm on mobile and don't have links at hand, but if you go back through my bookbinding tag, there are other replies I've got about the materials for making a book specifically. The renegade publishing blog also has resource documents that walk through the bookbinding process and include links to educational materials, etc. So for here, I'll focus on the danmei side of things!

So, a fun feature about these books is that they tend to run LONG. I've seen a number of people try to take up bookbinding in google docs, and honestly, it's doing things on hard mode. For many danmei, it's basically impossible. I think my EARLIEST earliest attempt at svsss began in gdocs, and that's not a super long novel, but gdocs was choking on it. A word processor on your desktop is going to be your best bet. Personally, i invested in a microsoft office license, because it was familiar and i could afford it. But the free parallel to that will be libre office, which does basically everything word can do, with just minor differences.

On the fancy end of bookbinding software, affinity, indesign, and microsoft publisher are also names you may hear tossed around. These can do fancier, more artistic layouts, but also come with a heavier price tag. And because i had webnovels on my radar from the start, i wanted something ROBUST. I wanted to be able to dump all of the husky and his white cat shizun into a single file and work from it. And i did eventually do that! Being able to typeset a single file rather than repeat each step across several is great, especially since i tend to tweak design choices as i go.

For danmei, you're also going to want a robust printer. I have a color laser that's been an absolute beast of a machine, but a black and white laser can get you a long ways, and monochrome designs can be very elegant. You don't want an HP brand printer, their toner subscription practices are downright predatory, but Brother and Canon are names I've seen recommended highly. You probably don't want an inkjet printer, because long books take a LOT of ink. The one exception would be if you can find an affordable ink tank printer.

And the last major thing i can think of is that if your main computer is a laptop, consider typesetting with an external mouse and keyboard! Danmei novels are split into lots of short chapters, frequently split across just as many web pages, with lots of footnotes to format, and laptops are convenient but not ergonomic. Doing too much on there is just asking for a repetitive strain injury. I've done it, but often paid for my sins in pain! And your laptop keyboard may start complaining too, I'm almost certain my first typeset of mdzs was the nail in the coffin for my last laptop's keyboard, haha

I hope that helps! Best of luck to you! Ive found binding cnovels to be EXTREMELY rewarding, even though my original reason was because these things would NEVER be licensed in english 😂 I'm delighted to see people experimenting with it for other translations in other languages, I really hope it goes well for you!!!!

#spock replies #bookbinding

[prokopetz]

Would you be willing to publish any of your html/css sources for one of your smaller games? It would be super useful to see what kind of semantic structure you use, since I'm mostly familiar with web-designy approaches

(With reference to this post here.)

Just grab any of the pay-what-you-want titles from the Penguin King Games itch.io page – they all include the HTML source files from which the PDF and EPUB versions were generated. Among the commercial titles, Cerebos: The Crystal City also includes the HTML source if you're willing to plunk down a few bucks, and includes some more sophisticated examples, like how to semantically mark up an attributed pull quote.

(Note, however, that they do not include the supplementary PDF- and EPUB-specific stylesheets. Those wouldn't necessarily be terribly useful to you anyway, since what they'd need to look like depends entirely on what specific software you're using to convert the HTML to PDF or EPUB.)

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #game design #publishing

[gothhabiba]

While it is true Latin-based orthographies predominate in writing African languages, those scripts that originated in Africa are a matter of special pride that Latin-based or Arabic-based scripts do not [carry].

The N’Ko script, for example, was devised by Solomana Kante in 1949. It is used for the Mande group of languages in West Africa, has spread beyond Guinea and Ivory Coast into the surrounding countries of Mali, Senegal, Liberia, Burkina Faso, and Sierra Leone (Tuchscherer 2007 and Doumbouya, p.c.). Many publications, including newspapers and books[,] have been published in N’Ko, and continue to [be published]. An expatriate in Philadelphia has driven the effort to get N’Ko into Unicode and, more recently, to get rendering engine support for N’Ko.

It is possible that other non-Latin scripts might also become more widely used, like N’Ko has done. The Bamum script in Cameroon, for example, is currently deemed an “endangered” script: there is only one user for whom it is the only means of writing, though the script appears in art and signs. Still, the script represents a powerful symbol of the Bamum cultural achievement – the creation of an original script[ –] though it is true few people actually can read it. Nevertheless, it is undergoing a revival effort (with support from Bamum Scripts and Archives Project), with teaching of the script continuing. It is hoped the script’s use may become more widespread. This may be the case for other non-Latin (/Arabic) scripts as well.

[...] Five “new” African scripts have appeared over the past 9 years. Unicode 3.0 had Ethiopic (with additional extensions in 4.1), 4.0 had Osmanya, 4.1 had Tifinagh, 5.0 had N’Ko and 5.1 included Vai. A quick survey finds Unicode fonts available for all of these, though Vai is still only included in a few fonts (James Kass’ Code2000 and one by Jason Glavy). However, font availability does not give the full picture of the situation for level of support for these scripts.

[...] Of all the five newly approved African scripts, only N’Ko is right-to-left, and this has been the source of problems. This is particularly unfortunate, given that “the production of published literature in N’Ko probably exceeds the published literature in all the other West African scripts combined” (Tuchscherer 2007). N’Ko has suffered because it is not currently supported in Vista’s Uniscribe rendering engine, and Windows is the predominant platform used by the N’Ko community. An alternative to Uniscribe, SIL’s Graphite rendering engine, has been used in the meantime. Unfortunately, there have been several difficulties in getting Graphite to handle right-to-left correctly, but most problems have finally been rectified. Now I am told that the latest version of OpenOffice using Graphite still has poor letter and accent alignment for N’Ko; a new version of Graphite in OpenOffice, currently being beta-tested, will hopefully solve the outstanding issues.

[...] The case of N’Ko is emblematic of some problems faced by minority groups, who don’t have the economic or business pull to get software support for their script. Still, I hope that in the near future N’Ko will finally be included in Uniscribe.

Shigeaki KODAMA, a researcher at Nagaoka University of Technology in Japan (working with the Language Observatory Project), surveyed 48 country code top-level domains, and discovered that webpages containing only African languages numbered only 2.3% of the total webpages in 2006, and in a smaller sampling in 2007, only 1.2%. (KODAMA forthcoming). While the African languages are scarce in webpages, the colonial languages, such as English and French, predominate: they make up about 70 – 77% of the webpages in Africa.

According to a paper by a RIFAL study on African webpages published in 20036, African languages are found on the Web more as topics of study than as the means of communication; English predominates – even in Francophone areas [–] as the language of communication; African language courses are rare on the Web (Fantognan 2005).

Though the World Summit on Information Society’s “Plan of Action” document, created in Geneva in 2003, repeated the need to develop local content, particularly in indigenous languages, it is clear that the development of local content on the Web in African languages is still in its infancy. The goal of preserving the world’s cultural and linguistic diversity on the Web and elsewhere has still a long way to go.

Deborah Anderson, "Report to JTC 1 Chair and JTC 1/SC 2 Chair Regarding Resolution 34 on African Languages," 2009. Unicode document L2/09-285.

#linguistics #sociolinguistics #unicode #Africa

[townofcrosshollow]

How to Keep Your Twine Project Safe

It is a tale as old as time. The app crashes, your cache is cleared, your laptop breaks, and hours or days or weeks of work is lost. It's a terrible experience, and you never think about what to do in that situation until it happens to you- and by that time, it's already too late. So here's your prompt to get ahead of things and keep your project protected before something goes wrong.

So here, I'll be going over some layers of security you can use...

1. NEVER use the web app

I know this one's gonna be controversial. I know, a lot of people use the web app! It exists for a reason! But if you do, you're leaving your work very vulnerable.

When you use a local installation of Twine, your files are being saved to local storage. That means that everything is saved on your hardware, and with the exception of a freak event, it's not going anywhere. Don't get me wrong, those freak events aren't rare enough to dismiss (we'll talk about that later), but it's not quite as bad as the web app.

Instead of saving your files locally, the web app saves your progress to your browser's cache- the same thing that saves your cookies and keeps you logged in on websites. If your cache is cleared for any reason, your games will be gone.

2. Write your documents in a separate program

Chances are, if you're using Twine, there's a lot of stuff you can do outside of Twine before moving it into the program itself. A common practice is to write prose in a separate program, and then move it all into Twine when you're finished and write the code in Twine. This is a great way to back up your work, because if Twine has an error, you'll still have all the source files to reconstruct what you had before.

I'd recommend trying to use a stable program to write in. That means something that saves locally and doesn't frequently crash. In other words, do not use Google Docs. Instead of Docs, try one of these:

Microsoft Word (expensive, subscription, but stable)

LibreOffice (free, stable)

Scrivener (one time purchase, stable)

3. Back EVERYTHING up

I can not stress this enough. Back up your damn work. Back it up in multiple places if possible.

"Oh, but I'm using Google Docs, it's already backed up!" NO. No it is not. To keep your work truly safe, you need multiple copies hosted on multiple pieces of hardware. If one of those is a Google server, great! But if it's just one, that means that one single failure in that hardware (or the software associated) will mean everything is lost.

You can back up your files from the Twine program by going under the Build tab and selecting Publish to File or Export as Twee. Saving that to your device is already better than having it saved by the Twine app, but you'll be even safer if you back that file up to an external hard drive (or just a cheap USB drive) and a cloud hosting service like Dropbox or Google Drive. To make it extra safe and minimize lost progress, make sure you replace these files regularly.

That seems like a lot of work though, right? Yeah. So here's my final piece of advice...

4. Use Git

Git is how I've been backing up my latest project, Signal Hill. It's intimidating at first, but there are simple and easy ways to use platforms like Github to keep your work safe and fix big errors. To teach you how, I've created a whole separate tutorial, which you can find here.

#twine tutorial #well... not a tutorial so much s just a reminder lol #but hopefully somebody will see this and back up their work before the twine web app crashes on them lol

[benk625-blog]

Confections Pulverizer

Commandant Effyl of Military intelligence began the briefing. Behind and above them was a large viewscreen displaying the galaxy's most popular video game, "Confections Pulverized." Game play involved manipulation of brightly colored geometric shapes so that three or more were aligned orthogonally. Success resulted in pleasant, on screen explosions and increased score. The audience quietly chuckled.

"The incongruity of this briefing is not lost on me." The Commandant began. "No doubt many of you are wondering why Military Intelligence would bother researching such a harmless frivolity. My own subordinates had a difficult time convincing me of the grave threat human malware presented.

“The game on display is relatively harmless. The danger is the underlying code within it. Almost all human programs include instructions to save and transmit user location data. In short, they have turned our electronic devices into little spies that note our every move.”

The viewscreen changed to display military personnel exercising in group calisthenics.

"The coordinates of several secret military bases became known to humans through fitness trackers. Hidden in the code of so-called "health software" is location tracking. Earth government has purchased the data generated by the applications, or apps. These apps are available to consumers free of charge. This data was analyzed and it was noted that users flagged as military service members had begun exercising in a routine manner in remote locations."

The next image was a spinning circle of question marks.

"Trivia games are being used to assess information ubiquity in user populations. Using algorithmic, artificial intelligence, the game learns the depth and breadth of each user's information and skill level. Military Intelligence was informed of this by an arms research group that noticed the trivia categories had gradually shifted from general knowledge questions towards categories that match their professional expertise."

Above the Commandant's head was a sound wave & a timer icon.

"This is an application titled 'Sound Worms.' It is a specific type of trivia game. Players are presented with an audio file of popular music. The task is to identify the composition in the least amount of time. Preliminary reports indicate the data mined from this app aids in the creation of propaganda."

New image is a nine digit number. Straight lines emanate from it to other numbers. Webs and clusters form as the video continues.

"Military Intelligence has been able to purchase data sets from the human malware companies. Displayed behind me are social networks. The deductions and probability extrapolations generated are truly staggering. We are still analyzing the data and will make a full report later”

Icons and symbols referring to romance and sexuality start to flicker onto the screen. Quickly the display becomes a scrolling screen of tiny thumbnail images.

“These are just a small sampling of the countless dating apps that humans have been flooding the personal electronic software market with. I say without exaggeration that they will fundamentally destabilize interstellar society. There are unpleasant and unspoken differences between public morality and private behavior. A staggering amount of politicians and bureaucrats have become susceptible to blackmail and corruption.”

Stifled gasps and nervous laughter from the audience

“Compounding this danger is that the private entities that publish this malware do not properly secure their data networks. Collectives that are not associated with governmental or commercial entities routinely release huge swaths of privileged user information on the galactinet. So far these disclosures have been small in scale and limited in damage. If anyone here has used these services, I implore you to stop at once and delete it from your devices.”

More than half the attendees start pulling out various objects and interacting with operating screens. Some hurriedly leave the lecture hall. Effyl was losing their audience.

“Oh, and one last thing.” The Commandant pulls out their own personal device. “These damn things are recording audio and video without our permission.”

#humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #humans are aliens #humans are confusing #humans are deathworlders #humans are silly #humans are space australians

[minglana]

Great news for Firefox for Android users: over 400 extensions are now available to use!

Today, Mozilla announced more than 450 new extensions (software that adds new features or functionality to the browser) to users on Firefox for Android at Mozilla’s AMO Android page. This milestone marks the launch of a new open extension ecosystem on mobile where developers are now free to create and publish extensions and users can easily access and install them on Firefox for Android.

“Extensions were first created as a way for people to customize their own internet experience, from artists designing themes to developers who wanted to make extensions to improve people’s web experience,” said Vicky Chin, Vice President of Engineering at Firefox. “We’re thrilled to bring this experience to Firefox for Android, where we’re the only major Android browser to support an open extension ecosystem. In the coming months, we plan to enable more extensions for people to choose from and customize their own mobile internet experience.” 

(December 14th, 2023)

#wahooooo i just installed twp so thats one reason to use tumblr web instead of the app #so i can translate what my mutuals are saying in the native langs😌👀 #ordinadors #z puya cosetas #firefox

[snarp]

I think it is probably Fucked Up that there are blog posts I wrote for stuff like "How To Use chgrp And chmod To Fix A Common Problem" or "How To SFTP Into The Webbed Site" over a decade ago - primarily for my own reference and that of like 2-3 people I knew personally - that people are still fucking sharing around on message boards and Discord, finding via Google, etc etc. A tutorial I wrote for a specific task in a now-abandoned piece of gamedev software has been translated into at least two languages.

Like, there are people out there learning tech skills on my old blog with the broken anime backgrounds, INSTEAD of in the documentation hosted by Google or MS or textbook publishers. And there are many abandoned blogs, often with anime backgrounds, through which people are learning things that are not made clear enough to them in more-official educational sources. Some of these posts must now be accessed via Wayback. That is Fucked Up. Tech education... is Fucked Up. This is my thesis.

#i need a grant #i also need someone to fix my roof and windows #i need apple google and ms to go under. now. immediately #better arthritis medication #antitrust regulation

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

#20yrsago Steven Levy on Trusted Computing https://web.archive.org/web/20031212101452/http://www.msnbc.com/news/998345.asp

#20yrsago London tube map, remixed https://memex.craphound.com/2003/12/11/london-tube-map-remixed/

#20yrsago Transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20040202211357/https://werbach.com/blog/2003/12/11.html#a1334

#15yrsago FCC commissioner: Warcraft is a “leading cause” of college dropouts https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/fcc-blames-world-of-warcraft-for-college-dropouts/

#15yrsago Carl Malamud, rogue archivist, in Wired https://www.wired.com/2008/12/online-rebel-publishes-millions-of-dollars-in-u-s-court-records-for-free/

#15yrsago Apple gets into the book-banning business https://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/apple-forfeits-ebooks-by-banning-a-comic-book/

#15yrsago MPAA to Obama: censor the Internet, kick people off the Internet, break other countries’ Internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/12/mpaa-obama

#15yrsago Mexico to fingerprint mobile-phone owners https://web.archive.org/web/20081218201523/https://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hbIC6ZYe2A2fSIe1q-1dnh4TphiwD94VK6K81

#15yrsago Last days of an NYC library https://www.drivenbyboredom.com/2008/12/11/the-donnell-library-center-a-eulogy-in-pictures/

#15yrsago UK culture secretary: “Screw the facts, I’m extending copyright anyway” https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/screw-the-evidence-says-burnham-lets-extend-copyright-term-anyway/

#10yrsago DHS stops NYT reporters at border, lies about it https://www.techdirt.com/2013/12/10/dhs-interrogates-ny-times-reporters-border-then-denies-having-any-records-about-them/

#10yrsago Little Brother stageplay now available for local performances https://littlebrotherlive.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/lets-get-little-brother-back-on-stage/

#10yrsago Potty with built-in tablet holder is “worst toy of 2013” https://web.archive.org/web/20151016182213/https://reasonsmysoniscrying.com/post/69503973203/this-was-just-named-the-worst-toy-of-2013-and-the

#10yrsago KC cop threatened to destroy home and kill pets unless he was allowed to conduct a warrantless search https://fox4kc.com/news/man-says-police-officer-threatened-to-kill-his-dogs/

#10yrsago Satanists offer “good taste” monument to complement Oklahoma Capitol’s Ten Commandments monument https://tulsaworld.com/news/government/satanists-seek-spot-on-oklahoma-statehouse-steps-next-to-ten/article_d7a11ac2-60dc-11e3-ac3b-0019bb30f31a.html

#10yrsago Why haunted houses have suits of armor https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2013/12/armor-gettin.html

#5yrsago Verizon writes down its Yahoo/AOL assets by $4.6 billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/verizon-writes-down-4-6-billion-of-value-of-aol-yahoo-business

#5yrsago Small Massachusetts town decides to spend $1.4m building its own fiber, rather than paying Comcast $500K for shitty broadband https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/comcast-rejected-by-small-town-residents-vote-for-municipal-fiber-instead/

#5yrsago Shitty Tumblr pornbot inception https://memex.craphound.com/2018/12/11/shitty-tumblr-pornbot-inception/

#5yrsago Surveillance libraries in common smartphone apps have amassed dossiers on the minute-to-minute movements of 200 million+ Americans https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html

#5yrsago Congressional Republicans say Equifax breach was “entirely preventable,” blames “aggressive growth strategy” but reject measures to prevent future breaches https://thehill.com/policy/technology/420582-house-panel-issues-scathing-report-on-entirely-preventable-equifax-data/

#5yrsago The EU says it wants Europeans to engage with it: now that 4 MILLION of them have opposed mass censorship through #Article13, will they listen? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/four-million-europeans-signatures-opposing-article-13-have-been-delivered-european

#1yrago Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/11/plato-would-ban-ad-blockers/

#pluralistic

[ebookporn]

Book Publishers Are Trying to Destroy Public E-Book Access in Order to Increase Profits

A recent ruling against the Internet Archive for copyright infringement threatens a treasured and critical public institution: our libraries.

by Stephan Prager

The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, is one of the most valuable websites currently on the Internet. Libraries worldwide use the platform to share access to their contents in e-book form, which users can access completely free of charge and regardless of their location or library membership. Its Text Archive offers users from around the world access to nearly 38 million electronic texts, including more than 3.6 million of which are copyrighted. The Archive works in collaboration with more than 1,400 libraries to offer free online access to tens of millions of texts, films, audio files, photos, and pieces of software. They also maintain the Wayback Machine, which catalogs 808 billion web pages. In the words of IA’s founder, Brewster Kahle, they seek to provide “universal access to all knowledge.” Based on my personal experience with the Archive, their service comes about as close to attaining this ideal as a single website could hope to.

The Internet Archive functions as the world’s largest digital library and has pioneered the method of “controlled digital lending,” by which it “circulates the exact number of copies of a specific title it owns, regardless of format, putting controls in place to prevent users from redistributing or copying the digitized version.”

I have used the Internet Archive’s text section to check out works of social and political theory not available at my local library—modern classics like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,and Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds. It allowed me to read Trevor Aaronson’s book, The Terror Factory, which inspired my recent Current Affairs article on the need for a modern Church Committee. During college, it saved me hundreds of dollars on textbooks that I would have otherwise needed to purchase from my school’s bookstore and allowed me to cite books with ease while pulling all-nighters to finish my term papers. 

READ MORE

#internet archive #open access #copyright law #fair use #libraries #authors #writers #librarians #book publishers #big 5

[raracool04]

A lot of us do want to use freeware and stuff but it’s always a major risk given how polluted the internet is with jerks who corrupt files/downloads and mess up our computers. Many of us don’t have the resources to mitigate every infection or loss :(

I think you're mixing up freeware and free and open source software. Freeware is monetarily free software, usually proprietary and closed source. Free and open source software (FOSS) is free (as in freedom from telemetry usually, but most of the time monetarily free too) is software that has published its code online for others to view, change, and make variations on. This causes it to be more secure since more eyes are on the code.

Always download from the original developers, which usually starts on GitHub. Here are a few links to the open source software I use every day.

OBS Studio - Good for recording and streaming footage, including screen recordings, includes plugin support, and people upload new plugins to their site constantly.

Ubuntu - I think I recommended Linux in the post you're coming from, and while switching from Windows or macOS is hard, one of the best introductions to Linux is Ubuntu or some Ubuntu based distribution, like Linux Mint.

Krita or GIMP - Part of what inspired me to make the initial post was the news about Clip Studio Paint fucking over the people who buy perpetual licenses. Krita and GIMP are FOSS and will always be free, I find that Krita is great for illustration whereas GIMP has a great background removal tool for manipulating photography.

Jellyfin - I initially recommended Plex as an alternative in the tags of the original post, I just realised that Plex is not actually open source. Jellyfin lets you store your own movies, TV shows, music, audiobooks and even playback live TV with a PC that can be as low power as a Raspberry Pi. This is to move away from streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max and Spotify that continually fuck over creators and consumers. There's even a demo of the Jellyfin UI on their website.

Firefox - This is one that probably doesn't need an introduction. The issue affecting web browsers right now is that all mainstream browsers, barring Firefox and Safari, run on Chromium, which means that Google has a massive say in how the internet is run, since developing websites for Chromium is the highest priority for a web developer. This problem has worsened with the looming Chromium update essentially disabling all adblock extensions, affecting all Chromium browsers. By using Firefox, not only do you retain adblock features, you also work against Chromium's steady march towards becoming a monopoly of the entire internet.

And finally, I want to address your claim that "many of us don't have the resources to mitigate every infection or loss". I am absolutely empathic to data loss thanks to malware, it almost happened to me a few days ago. The one thing I disagree with is the idea that unless you have a good computer, there is no way to prevent or fix data loss. If you choose to stay on Windows, be sure to frequently make system restore points in case your PC becomes unstable, and to avoid data loss, use virtual machines to test out software you don't trust before using it on your main PC. As general security advice on Windows, most antivirus is unnecessary. Windows Defender is quite good at catching malware and removing it, and installing third party antivirus more often than not just slows down your PC and tracks you.

I really hope this helps. There is a small amount of research to find good FOSS alternatives to your everyday software, and there is of course a learning curve to the more advanced software, but in general I would rate them as more secure to install than most closed source alternatives, and I believe it will benefit you and our general technology usage by a lot. If you want more open source alternatives to the software you use every day, I would recommend looking it up on alternativeto.net. I understand this was a long ass post but your concerns are frequent and valid and I wanted to just set the record straight. Ask again if you have any more questions.

#open source #foss #obs studio #linux #ubuntu #windows #krita #gimp #clip studio paint #jellyfin #netflix #hbo max #firefox #google chrome #chromium #privacy