lb_lee: A magazine on a table with the title Nubile Maidens and a pretty girl on it. (nubile)
Rogan: First: E. K. Weaver, a cartoonist whose work we've loved for over a decade, has a few copies of a very good trans erotic comic for sale at a very reasonable discount, JUST IN CASE YOU WERE INTERESTED! We already own a copy of Sweet Abilene and fully endorse it. (We only advertise for things we've already put money or labor into!)

Mori: Second, and speaking of: we joined a local Tesla protest and got to use our long-dormant Dog Child skills to draw a sign-sized Disappointed Kabosu meme. People took photos of it, so we will take that as success. If I cannot poop on a Cybertruck, at least I have other ways of shrivelpricking the phallic ego balloon it's attached to! If you end up wanting to join the weekly Saturday 12-2 protest in downtown Boston, let us know, maybe we can meet up! (We ran into a good number of folks we knew, yeehaw!)

Sneak/Rogan: And third... a lot of people these days do not know how to use an RSS reader, so consider this a public service announcement as to how to read and receive the parts of this blog you most care about!

First of all, if you want to learn what an RSS or feed reader is, check out Kiriska's informative Freedom From Algorithms: How to Use a Feed Reader! It's what got us using one, and it made our internet experience so much better.

You may have noticed, wandering our blog, the little "Syndicate" box with an orange RSS button and a light blue Atom button. Those are ways to generate a feed of our entries, to be sent and collated to the feed reader of your choice. But wait, it gets better: Dreamwidth creates not just global blog feeds, but for every specific tag we use. So, for instance, if you ONLY want our artwork, you can add the feed for the "lb makes" tag. (This is how we do our healthymultiplicity.com update announces! It's a Dreamwidth tag: "website stuff." All attempts to manually create an RSS for healthymultiplicity.com failed, and we do not know why.)

We figure the granular tag RSS will only be helpful for people who are interested in specific creative projects we do, like say, Infinity Smashed, or only our plural stuff (though that tag tree is a mess and always has been), but it might help fine-tune stuff for people. We do a lot of different weird things, and we know a lot of folks are only interested in some of it! Every attempt we've made to run multiple accounts has failed, but at least this is a way to keep other people from feeling inundated with irrelevant spam. ^_^

EDIT: this also means you can make custom RSS feeds for multiple tags you enjoy! For instance, if you're only here for Infinity Smashed and plural etymology posts, you can use the RSS URL: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/tag/plural:etymology,lb+makes:infinity+smashed?mode=or and if you want ONLY posts that Sneak made about plural stuff, you could use: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/tag/plural,us:sneak?mode=and! And you can stack many tags this way, though it's get ungainly fast.
lb_lee: animated Hack103 gravestone, displaying many stupid deaths. (yasd)
Hey, so, our doughty travel drawing tablet, a Wacom Intuos 4 from 2011, finally bit the dust. It did so as quietly and gently as possible; just one day it wouldn't turn on. (And we checked multiple cords, ports, and machines. Never got it to wake. RIP, Tabby.)

We are looking for a replacement travel tablet, and we figured before turning to Ebay, we'd see if anyone here has some old-as-dirt Intuos or something they want to sell for cheap. Old is a necessity because, uh. We need a tablet that will run on Windows XP. (Yes, I realize that's absurd, but look, BSOD still runs great, it's still my travel computer, I'd rather get my hands on a cheap old used tablet than throw out a perfectly good computer AND buy a new tablet on top of it.)

An Intuos 4 would be especially handy, since we still have our install disk from that so KNOW it will run on BSOD, but any old tablet that'll run on XP is welcome.

If nobody here has one, we'll just grab some old Intuos 4 off Ebay for $20.
lb_lee: a black and white animated gif of a pro wrestler flailing his arms above the words STILL THE BEST (VICTORY)
Okay, so there are people who don't know this, so here! Dreamwidth has as a beta feature a "New Create Entries Page" that makes this site way easier to use on mobile. Just go to https://www.dreamwidth.org/beta and turn on beta testing for the "New Create Entries Page" which should be at the very top. You can revert it if you hate it!

We use a secondhand smartphone that's over a decade old, and even IT is able to use the new interface to post (though it does admittedly require a workaround, on account of it being so old we can't update our browser or install barely anything).

You can learn more about this feature at https://dw-beta.dreamwidth.org/14656.html

Hope this makes your Dreamwidth experience better! :D
lb_lee: animated Hack103 gravestone, displaying many stupid deaths. (yasd)
Yesterday, after seven years of terrible service, welfare smartphone Snitchbrick has gone to the great electronics recycler in the back lot.

Goodbye, poor bastard. You did your best. Your headphone jack failed, your touchscreen could barely register, your camera was shit, you stopped ringing or vibrating, and your battery could barely hold on a day, but you taught me to write stories set post-2010 convincingly and your screen remained uncracked til the end. May you be reborn into components for better devices or safely returned into the merciful earth. Rest in pieces.

(Sorry [personal profile] hungryghosts, you will no longer be able to contact me the way you used to. Email or text message, I guess?)

lb_lee: animated Hack103 gravestone, displaying many stupid deaths. (yasd)
Rogan: With the help of my friend, I fixed my computer!

It turns out one of the preinstalled programs on Linux Mint, a system back-upper called Timeshift, went cancerous and started making back-up after back-up of its own back-ups until my Linux partition disk was 100% full. Whenever I deleted files to clear space (which was a challenge, since I had virtually no files of my own on the partition), it would immediately start making another snapshot until it was full again. This is apparently a longstanding problem. (To be clear, I didn't tell Timeshift to do this. I had no idea it even existed, never mind what it did. If it'd asked me, I would've only requested it make ONE back-up, and NOT make back-ups of itself.)

Since I make my own manual back-ups, I just uninstalled the program and deleted the files. PROBLEM SOLVED!

At least it wasn't my hard drive dying! That was what I was REALLY worried about! Though I am a bit alarmed that the only clue I had of my disk filling up (before it reached 100%) came from Privacy Badger, of all things. It proved the canary in the coal mine, letting me know that it had stopped working, and that this error could occur if my disk was getting full. I didn't get any other warnings until the disk was 100% full.

What a weird problem to exist on an OS for 5+ years.

lb_lee: M.D. making a shocked, confused face (serious thought)
 Mori: I was digging around in my '98 laptop for records reasons and... guys. Preinstalled on it is a whole slew of MIDI files of classical music, including Fur Elise, Clair de Lune, and In the Hall of the Mountain King. It's putrid. I can't stop listening to it. It is a thing of awe and horror, distilled into '90s computer game audio format.

When I started playing it, Bob dashed in like Pavlov's dog hearing a dinner bell.

We're just all grouped around Obsolete, listening with expressions of astonishment and pity as it does its damnedest to sing its little pre-Y2k heart out through its speakers. I might have to save these to a floppy disk and use them as phone alarms or something.

I am baffled as to why this antique still runs as well as it does.

EDIT: OH LORD IT HAS BACH'S BRANDENBURG CONCERTO
lb_lee: animated Hack103 gravestone, displaying many stupid deaths. (yasd)
 Mori: we have no dog in the social media wars so have mostly just watched Reddit and Twitter burn down with a detached, "watch that hurricane spin on the horizon, man am I glad we ain't closer," but we do appreciate the people who have moved to cohost.org because that's the only damn one of them that doesn't require an account to view AND allows RSS. (Meaning we can follow along with your sweet hamster pics.)

Bsky and tumblr both require accounts to view (though tumblr's real unpredictable on that count, sometimes it cuts you off after a few posts, sometimes it doesn't) and Threads... look, Instagram is the worst, I dread people linking me their stuff on Instagram because it's a coin flip whether I can see it or not, I would rather eat lard straight than go to Threads.

Some handy articles by Kiriska:
lb_lee: M.D. making a shocked, confused face (serious thought)
Linux: I can't play your Windows Media Player playlist.

Mori: Okay, how complicated is it? Do I have to redo the playlists? Find some new program to make it all work?

Linux: Nah, just pop the code into your text editor and replace all the \s with /s.

Mori: That's it?

Linux: That's it.

Mori: I AM NEVER LEAVING THIS OS

Linux! 8D

Jul. 19th, 2023 07:26 pm
lb_lee: a black and white animated gif of a pro wrestler flailing his arms above the words STILL THE BEST (VICTORY)
Mori: Also oh man I am loving Linux and am never going back to Windows-only!

Rogan is used to hoarding installers like he's prepping for doomsday, and we just... haven't needed any of them? Linux just CAME with a bunch of default software that was exactly what I needed! It could use our scanner right out of the box, which was a good thing since it's now "legacy software" and we can't get the drivers online anymore. (Which is BS, because our scanner is a trooper. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just old.) Installing stuff was SO EASY. I am flabbergasted. It runs so much faster!

Of course, I haven't dared tried and noodle with our tablet and Clip Studio Paint yet, but that's fine, I'm cool with keeping Windows as some vestigial OS to support the stuff that won't run any other way. I'll also have to fix up our playlists since they seem to be in a Windows-only format and I have to revamp them too.

But WOW this is such an improvement. I don't even care that I can never game again, our shoulder already insured that anyway!

...I just realized that I could play Hack again without an emulator, most likely! OH LORD THE RAPTURE IS HERE! I DONE BEEN SWEPT UP AND AWAY TO SLOW-TO-UPDATE HEAVEN
lb_lee: A hand wearing a leather fingerless glove, giving the finger to the camera. (ffffff)
Hey guys. So, since moving, we are having computer troubles: we can no longer upload files to Patreon, Itch.io, and Bigcartel. (Youtube also doesn't work much anymore, but who cares about Youtube.) I had more to upload this month, but sorry, patrons don't get to have them yet because my horrible workaround is horrible:

* scan images using desktop
* email them to my broken welfare smartphone (but the only email I can use with broken desktop has a strict 8 MB file limit, so I have to break the downloads up--no ebooks over that size, which axes basically all my large stuff, that's why y'all haven't gotten a test draft of Madgic 3!)
* download files to broken welfare smartphone (which has barely any storage)
* upload them to website (even though broken welfare smartphone's keyboard keeps breaking so I can't give you the CWs)

It's time consuming and horrible. I hate it.

This seems to be due to us using an old OS (maybe? we think?) and we are sick of the Windows escalator, so we are switching over to Linux. This will require learning a new system (Cinnamon Mint, if you're curious), reinstalling all our programs and hardware, and trying to get them to play nice with each other. We are basically trying to clear our plate so we can devote July to this sure-to-be-unpleasant process.

So right now, we are working on backing up all our files and preparing for a new install. Please stand by. I promise, once I can actually send and upload files larger than 8 MB, Patreon supporters will get some treats in reward for this nonsense. I'm sitting on stuff I WANT to give you and JUST CAN'T due to to tech problems at this time.

EDIT: oh sweet mother of entropy even viewing the stuff I've paid for on Patreon is now nigh-impossible. And when I save images to my hard drive to avoid this problem (have I mentioned how I hate some of Patreon's UI?), I can only save them in .webp, which my computer cannot open, and I can't convert them using online converters because that part of my computer is broken.

*pterodactyl shriek of outrage, shoves the whole mess at Bob and Sneak to sort out*
lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
God, what a pain. I had to use my broken welfare Smartphone for it, which is like making R2D2 do ballet. Nevertheless, if you want a paper copy of Possessions, you can now buy it for $5 plus $2 shipping to the US.

Clearly the problem is with me. I have tried turning off all my browser extensions, clearing my cache, updating my browser. None of it has made any difference. I cannot upload files or images to Bigcartel, itch.io, or Discord, and I still have no idea why. If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them, because it's a PAIN to upload the files somewhere so I can redownload them on a Linux boot or Snitchbrick, only to reupload them again. I'm especially stumped because this isn't a global problem, and I don't even know what words to use to search for my problem (and both Google and DuckDuckGo seem to have taken downturns in quality). I'm also having sporadic problems with Patreon and Youtube, though those seem to be a "wait a day, try again tomorrow" thing.

Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong? I have no idea what changed between late February and now to suddenly ruin my basic ability to sell stuff, but it's really cramping my style.
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
[personal profile] dreamwriteremmy asked for our procedure for PDF-izing comics, ebooks, and zines, so here is our step-by-step procedure for it using InDesign (the more reliable, traditional method, but Adobe has gone monthly subscription model) and also our friend Leaf's Racket PDF-izer (which is free and open-source but still in testing; you should help us test it)! This is using Windows and Linux; our InDesign methods has only been tested on Windows, but Leaf's program should work on all OSes. (Also, Leaf is our nickname for her. We are not mispelling her name.)

Before You Start )

Got your pages all set? Let's go! Leaf's method--shorter, easier, but still needs testing! )
InDesign CS2 Method )

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