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Just in time for the new year, my commissions are open! From icons to character work, I’m down to draw!
art blog(derogatory)

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blake kathryn
Sade Olutola
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
we're not kids anymore.

izzy's playlists!

Janaina Medeiros
DEAR READER

Origami Around
taylor price

tannertan36
Acquired Stardust
Misplaced Lens Cap
AnasAbdin

@theartofmadeline
Stranger Things
Sweet Seals For You, Always
NASA

seen from Romania
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seen from India
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seen from Argentina
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@enigma-absolute
Commissions Open! Click to see Christi (in SPACE!)'s commission menu.
Just in time for the new year, my commissions are open! From icons to character work, I’m down to draw!
I had an interesting night last night
I’m so glad I have tumblr gold so I can view this post
Tumblr gold users rise up
you can only reblog if you have tumblr gold. dont even try if you dont.
Reblog if you have Tumblr gold
CHARACTER(S) ADDED!
Tumblr Gold Users
German Windows:
ok this looks ultra mega based, are you kidding me? can you imagine the bullshit i could get up to with this bad boy? fuck yes i want ten
Wait are iPhone bros coping because Apple has to be more universal? Lol.
Boo hoo i'll be able to add more physical storage to my phone and be able to change out batteries if they degrade as well as all these other optional features I won't have to touch
Continuing in the trend of political cartoons depicting milquetoast moderate positions seem so much cooler and more badass than they are
I love how they add totally absurd things no one is asking for to make the idea look crazy. And still, I must emphasize, failing to make this look like a bad idea.
Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0
If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.
I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it's really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most "Web3" articles has a big ol' chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:
"First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…"
No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You're rewriting history that's less than 20 years old!
Web 2.0 was:
blogs with comment sections
wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)
forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)
bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us
user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)
on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)
AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page
Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash
RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content
when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was "Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors" and summed that up as "User-generated content" and branded it "Web 2.0" around 2004-2005.
I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!
The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you'd set your own moderation policy and wield your own "banhammer". The free speech compromise was "don't like my moderation policy? Make your own website."
It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said "we'll host your videos for you". (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.
Social media wasn't web 2.0, it's what killed Web 2.0!
You might think I'm arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn't. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.
Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:
running your own server is a pain
running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video
signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1
once there's a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)
non-technical users didn't understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up
the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in
Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.
To make the web3 argument you have to explain why "a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash" is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:
the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.
for most web3 stuff "the" blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.
people who don't want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren't gonna run their own blockchain node
in practice, people don't interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.
in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums
if you want to make the dream of "buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!" work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn't need the blockchain!
What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:
cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting
portable data standards
antitrust enforcement with teeth
privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable
a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media
I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.
IT’S HALLOWEEN TIME TO GET SPOOKY
I T S T H E M I D D L E O F J U N E
I T I S H A L L O W E E N T I M E T O G E T S P O O K Y
ok who the fuck got this on my dash it’s still june
get spooky
how does this appear every june
T I M E T O G E T S P O O K Y
JUNE 1ST 2017 AND THIS IS THE FIRST THING I SEE.
WHY IS THIS ON MY DASH IN JUNE
LET’S GET SPOOKY
This will be on most people’s dash by midnight lmao
Happy June
req'd by @fur-tho
smeebling......
text: smeebles......
mutuals
Which is prev?
Unmarried girl
Apologist
Craftsman who works with a wheel
Archivist
Dying person
Educator
Girl
Jurist
Knife sharpener
Lawyer
Librarian
“AI art is okay if you’re just making shitposts”
Have you forgotten our roots
This really resonated with you guys huh
Every time OP dances, her parrot flies along with her. OP says she never trained it on purpose and her parrot just loves doing this naturally. Sometimes it’ll just hop right onto her face. (cr 月下郭城)
Help I love him so much
Coco biting on a toy lightsaber, looks like he’s shooting his laser beam
Was anyone gonna tell me there was a whole issue of this comic where Artoo singlehandedly storms an imperial star destroyer to rescue Threepio, takes out half the crew and then DOGFIGHTS DARTH VADER?!
The Empire continues to exist by the mercy of this droid.
The four penguins from Madagascar are, somehow, isekaied in the middle of the clone wars
Palpatine is dead within the hour
Please for the love of God, read the notes on this post
(Via @infinitelypurple)
HELLO???
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain
lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons
because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death
Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune
and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it
Also don’t think a
book is old because it’s in
the public domain
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Want audiobooks instead?
LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.
Public domain works in the US are:
Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and
Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and
Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.
(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)
There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)
There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.
Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."
Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.
browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change
https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30
Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:
And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.
And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.
This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book
Fun fact: if you, as an adult, tell miserable children that their youth is the best that life will ever be, and that it's all just downhill from there, there's a percentage of them who will hear this and think "well, I guess I better kill myself before that happens." And a certain percentage of those will proceed to do that and succeed.
Anyway what I'm saying is that any time you feel tempted to say that, you should instead consider shutting the fuck up. Just because you peaked at 16 doesn't mean anyone else did. Most peoples' lives get better than that.
if u like, reblog to remind folks that you will still love them even though they have visible mental illness