Scribbles and Bits

"LB, you're not on social media, and you live like some weird austere godless monk. Do you even have fun on the Internet???"

Oh, don't worry, friends. We have fun on the Internet:

• Archive.org (for old music, old multi stuff, old website research, weird niche research... what DON'T I use Archive.org for? Seriously probably the website we spend the most time on)
• Archive of Our Own (for prose fiction and porn--most known for fanfic, but its tag system is so good that we sometimes trawl the original fic archive for stuff)
• the Anarchist Library (what it sounds like)
• Bandcamp (for new music--I have YET to figure out how the fuck iTunes works)
• LotusPrince's Let's Plays (this is the only Youtuber I really watch anymore, been watching him for over ten years, he is a softspoken, straightfaced completionist who tries to be positive about every game he plays, no matter how clunky or goofy, and he is still my favorite parasocial companion for when I am so brainblasted I really can't handle anything more complicated than "go to the right, fight boss.")

We use an RSS reader to stay on top of blogs and artist accounts scattered across the ether, but if it can't be RSSed, then we don't bother. Lotus Prince is the only exception; he's a self-limiting, Gatorade activity, something I only want when I'm badly depleted, and once I recharge, I'm off to the races again, digging around in 1998 soulbonding websites on Archive.org.

I only play one game now, hack103 (and we use our local offline copy. Our shoulder only allows it on occasion, but fortunately, Hack is from 1985 and pre-poopsocking, so it's a very easy game to put down for years at a time and pick up again.

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.

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

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.

 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:

• How to Build a Personal Website
• The Only Way to Beat the Algorithm is to Retrain Your Audience
• Freedom from Algorithms: How to Use a Feed Reader

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

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.