Envoy of the Ayatan

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.

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.

The thing with setting boundaries, is that the only way they work is you give them clear markers with clear instructions about where the lines are. You also make it clear that there are caveats, you also make it up front if the boundary only applies to certain individuals. This way, everyone has clear instructions on where they are and are not permitted to go, what to expect, and open communication can be had by all.

But if you do not sign post your boundaries, are inconsistent with what you tell people, or spring a backlog convictions a person had never been told was a crime to commit; what you've created is not so much a 'boundary' as it is an invisible minefield that punishes anyone that even attempts to try to find out what the correct path is. And others will inevitably regard you with the fear and distrust such an environment creates.

A person cannot be responsible for something they don't know, that's why it's important to articulate comforts and discomforts as early as possible. Start lines of communication early to find out where you want it to go, allow yourself to be open to being communicated with.

I've been on the receiving end being blindsided by issues I had no idea I was doing, even things I had very specifically checked-in about to see if things were cool and was assured it was fine. But, things have changed and now it's not fine, and I get that, people change their perspective and realize they agreed to something they never wanted for one reason or another. But instead of giving me the grace to re-calibrate and create a new boundary, a new normal, something I'm more than happy to do, I'm instead supposed to be punished for a backlog of transgressions I never knew I committed. They're certainly allowed to 'do' that, I guess, but, I'm also allowed to just leave and never bother engaging with them, again.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.
--

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.

So I was recently made aware of this little thing
https://www.ocsocialnetwork.com/

It is a Mobile-Only service at this time, and while I tend to steer clear of services that are mobile-only, I have made an exception for this because of how unique it is in it's offering. The last time any service had anything like this, was a long forgotten OC resource service that I forgot the name of. But each OC account was it's own profile which gave you the ability to make blog posts as your OC. Toyhouse has the ability to post as OCs but lacks the social media front that allows you to run and manage a social media presence as the character which is sliiightly different.

So I've just made an account there and as one would expect of a mobile app, it is pretty restrictive in what it permits. Also, you cannot create an account with an email, you have to use one of those oauth account creation things and currently they only let you set up with a Google account. This is also something that I find to be a personal deterrent but my interest in the novelty won me over in this case, but I know for others it would be a deal-breaker so thus I wanted to make note of that.

The service itself is pretty simple, the TOS is pretty boiler plate (and has an arbitration clause FYI), but it's early in it's life so we'll see if it sinks or floats in time. For the moment, it's a fun character exercise to write a profile as though the character were explaining themselves. There's not too many features, you can post and share images on posts, use tags, block tags, block profiles, and it has some sort of 'daily wrapped' thing that gives you a summary of what you wrote and how you interacted. It's very AI summary data scraping but make of that what you will. Mostly, I'm just interested in the environment it offers and the writing exercise that provides.

I had mentioned this service and some of it's dealbreakers to others and in the course of conversation it dawned on me that this is exactly the kind of thing that would benefit from a federated social media service.

The biggest problem I've had with a lot of federated platforms is that either the platform, or their users, tout them as a 'replacement' for large centralized services, not understanding that there are benefits to centralization that federation cannot replace such as optics and reach. They function best when they are played to their strengths and those strengths are when they're used as a vector for a niche community with the option to let others outside of the community peer in if they want. A social media platform where it is expected that everyone signed in is playing in-character is exactly the kind of thing that would play with a federated service to its strengths.

It is an island unto itself, which is important especially if you want to make an environment that a specific kind of role play that everyone knows and partakes in. The use of the local feed would help keep this facade vs the pitfalls of making a character profile on a centralized service like tumblr. If other islands would like to watch the shenanigans they can opt in to do so without making an account on the service. Being on it's own island can also set the 'rules of engagement' from those outside the island, and individual accounts can choose to participate with that or not.

I certainly don't have the time or means to run such a service, but I'm putting the thought out there for someone else to see that might have the means to host such a thing, because it would be very fun.

Too many people are more willing to use esoteric tone tags than they are to spell out their stupid acronyms.
I've griped about Tone Tags before: https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/793839.html and there's a lot of overlap of frustration. Where people are using shortened or acronym versions of a thing and just assume everyone will know it and an key is never provided.

Obviously I use acronyms all the time in the form of things like PHP, HTML, I know these are acronyms, and I rarely define these, so like, that's not lost on me. In those cases, the acronym IS the word people know. (PHP: Personal Home Page, HTML: Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTML: Hypertext Markup Language) This gripe of mine applies to acronym usage where you can't easily find the meaning because it's fandom related or brings up too many hits on a search.

It's one thing on a platform with a tight character restriction, I get it. But on places that do not have that issue I'm getting so tired of trying to decipher people's code.

I get people talking all about accessibility and what not but never have I seen the topic of un-defined acronyms broached.

Just once! spell out the thing you're using an acronym for! So that it's clear about the other acronyms after the fact! It's getting to the point that I can list multiple things for a set of acronyms, and sometimes 'context clues' are not enough to discern which thing is which.

A guide on making 'filters' using CSS
https://solaria.neocities.org/guides/cssfilter
And a neat little CSS layout for a little card system using the same technique
https://osteophage.neocities.org/projects/templates/bibliodex
Pretty much just using the CSS hide/display features, means you can only display one item at a time and not be able to have different sorting options, but it's better than nothing on a static website.

A sparkle text generator
https://dagrand39.neocities.org/MainPages/MoreHTML/sparkleon/

I had been manually making an RSS feed but, for a reason I speculate being my means of upload, when I made changes to my feed and uploaded them, they never.. really updated in my feed reader. So I had been looking for something to automate that for me, like a blog. Problem is.. most blogs had way way more features than I needed, required another large database install and were just overkill for my desired purpose. You'd think that in all this time someone would have made some sort of flat file database blog system but apparently, they had not! All the other stripped down blogs (bear blog, status.cafe) required making an account on their platform, no self-hosting.

In my search it was also increasingly frustrating when given recommendations that didn't fit what I was looking for when I was very clear about what I needed. A standalone simple blog that generates an RSS feed and uses some form of flat file or single file database. Someone saw my plight and stepped up, fixing up another system to make it more secure and a little bit more clean which lead to:

TKR: A simple status system
https://projects.subcultureofone.org/tkr/
https://gitea.subcultureofone.org/greg/tkr

A stand-alone project that is similar to Status.Cafe in format, but self-hosted, using a SQLite database so as to be easy to drop in or move no matter what server I use. (I, admittedly, still am trying to test it)

https://tofutush.github.io/oc-webring/
An OC focused Web-Ring :o

Heeyyy so with the way things are going some of you that use Discord may be interested in Vencord
https://vencord.dev/

It adds all kinds of quality of life features to Discord, visual options (it can import themes from Better Discord), and other little goodies
https://vencord.dev/plugins
Personally, I'm fond of Better Folders, and being able to import my Last.FM strobbles as a status (just like what Trillian does Natively) It is also nice for blocking certain data collection so... yanno.. >_> may be useful...

Because it is a patch on top of the native discord install, you shouldn't run into the same problems with incompatibility faced with better discord.

It's worth noting that the plugins mention the ability to see hidden channels. I'd like to assure that it just lets you see that the channel exists at all, but no one can see the contents of the channels. (so if you've ever had someone get weird about hidden channels they shouldn't know about, this is probably why: they could see that they exist at all with Vencord)