Showing posts with label site news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label site news. Show all posts

New location of Stablehand picture archive

For a long time I'd been wanting a nice and minimal but also relatively quality place to archive Stablehand pictures. deviantART was kinda okay, but its expectation you enter a bunch of metadata for every single one including "artist comments" and also had no way of changing the file to a different format after uploading was a drag. Tumblr was pretty all right, but hard to browse through well, and its photosets were very idiosyncratic (I'll still be posting updates there though). Also because of javascript weirdness and firebug glitches sometimes editing posts took forever.

archive.org seemed great at first because its purpose was to be an internet library and archive things for a long time—what better place to archive things, right? And to be fair, it was a great place to put fullsizes and won bonus points with me by providing a CCO licence tag. But it basically sucked for actually displaying any of the pictures in a remotely organised fashion, extremely surprising especially when its audio pages and game archive both got a recent revamp to look beautiful. So here comes the next step.

Recently I randomly found out about a new set of projects to create something called the federated internet when reading an article on opensource.com. Big shoutout to opensource.com! You helped me discover something I honestly think is going to be really awesome.

Anyway, the idea behind the federated internet is that there are going to be a number of projects available as alternatives to popular web apps, but they're going to be built on libre open source platforms, and there's going to be a strong standard of individual freedom and privacy. Federated web apps will be made of pods, different locations that each run the site independently but intercommunicate such that you can register on one pod and store data there and communicate with other pods without thinking about it (meaning it's vastly less easy to get any significant number of users' data at once, and maybe less traffic congestion), and if your pod threatens to go out for some reason, you can clone your stuff to a different one. diaspora* (aka libre Facebook :p), GNU social (aka libre twitter), and pump.io (aka distinctly different libre twitter), are the main examples that exist right now. But there are more things in progress! Though it's not a 'federated web' thing per se, libre.fm (a libre music site I use a lot) is based on the same "open platform you can build a clone/compatible site with" idea, and also, to finally finally get to the point of these two long paragraphs, there's mediagoblin.

What mediagoblin is supposed to be is a unified platform for uploading and displaying a whole bunch of types of media—instead of using a million different services for sound and pictures and video and 3d models and pdfs and... you get the picture, mediagoblin is supposed to give you ONE convenient media gallery. You can use it on a public site, or you can set up your own site running it and customise the heck out of it. I wish I could do the latter because that would be awesome (it would definitely be fun to make a FolderView skin to go with the new theme of this site), but I opted to do the former because I don't really have my own web space to do that with, haha. Eventually it will be federated, though it isn't right now (there are about two unlinked "pods" at the moment though).

Anyway the new Stablehand picture archive is at https://goblinrefuge.com/mediagoblin/u/sougonnatakumi/!

(Mediagoblin is fairly early and imperfect right now, as you might notice immediately from my page "description" where I've copied the gallery links onto the main page where they should be (:p), but I have serious confidence the platform will improve, as I know for a fact there are people working hard to improve it.)

As you might or might not know, this site is in the midst of a recode right now! Mainly I wanted to recode the template so that it wouldn't be so ridiculously horrifyingly hard to maintain, which is going pretty well (1440 lines of code vs 3114 lines in the original template, to give you a rough idea; 1039 vs 2403 with all custom CSS cut out). Also, I wanted to make a theme that emphasised my current Stablehand project, instead of my old Tyrian project that I heavily backburnered a little while after making the old theme.

Since this theme will be gone in like three days, I figure I might as well add a couple screenshots here for reference

The nice thing about this new template is that I'm not going to have to load an external stablehand.css for the pages specifically about Stablehand any more (both because I'm reworking things and because I'll have to do less reskinning anyway with the style already in line with it :p), so they should load a little faster. Accordingly, I'll be lessening the boundary between the Stablehand section and the main site a lot, dumping the guidebook pages in with regular posts for one (they'll be clearly marked though), and overall grouping the site by big topics (main characters, side characters, world). My goal is to make it easier to find stuff if you have no idea what you're looking for.

Nice thing number two is that I stumbled into AddToAny on a google search, which unlike the default Blogger share buttons, actually looks pretty useful. I've also figured out how to (mis)use the title link field I never use to add my own share link so you can reblog things from my tumblr if I've already posted them there.

Oh, and nice thing number three is that it resizes like crazy. I'm going to have to test it in other browsers but right now it zooms to the window size beautifully in Firefox with just a little bit of CSS.

A WIP of the new template. Many things still need work, the background being one.

Spoiler alert: this site will be renamed when the template goes through. I like that when you abbreviate it to SNN it looks like a weird news network.

Copyheart: Caring by no longer caring

Okay so, I'd been thinking about what to do about a minor conundrum I've been having. Namely, what to do about stuff on this site I'd created that either mixed hints of non-libre content or that I'm not proud of enough to release formally under the CC-BY-SA. For one thing I wasn't sure what to do about the text of the site; I didn't think anything I'd written apart from Stablehand posts was quite awesome enough to just shout "everything here is a quality resource!", which is what the CC-BY-SA had usually evoked in my mind.

And, well... long story short, the answer I guess is ♡ copyheart.

So what's that? It's a "nicer" variant on the idea of a copyright notice, which instead of reminding readers that the law restricts every use by default, reminds them that the author is fundamentally okay with the diffusion of their ideas. This is my version of it:

♡ 2014 TAKUMI. Copying is an act of love. Please copy, adapt, and share.

Some people might complain that this is the most hippy-dippy "copyright" notice they've ever seen (indeed, I've seen that), and you know what? I absolutely agree. It makes me feel like the biggest dork ever to put that in the footer. But at the same time it makes me feel way less like a hypocrite than writing the "truth" (the gritty truth) that by not taking any action to liberate my stuff, I choose to censor people by leaving all rights reserved. Which would suggest that I'm okay with that, and I'm not.

A really cool thing about copyheart is that it really neatly solves the problem I'd been having with fan art, which is that it seems intuitive to feel one can't liberate it, but on the other hand, I honestly didn't care what happened to it, and felt like there was something especially wrong with "retaining the right to censor" on things that weren't even "mine". Now, without trying to use the CC-BY-SA and open the can of worms of what happens when people have to use a libre licence on fan works, I can communicate my intentions that they be used and that I not act as a second barrier (after the original creator) to using things.

When you stop and think about it, it's really rather elegant for a handful of corny-sounding words without any legal fortifications built up behind them. (Which, by the way is why nothing I've already made CC-BY-SA is going un-CC-BY-SA any time soon, nor am I going to stop using it for my more substantial original things. It's like an extra safeguard for things you really, really want to stay libre.)

Accordingly, I may start bringing some of my fan things back onto Sangkara when I make them and when they're "good enough", particularly stuff for this project called "RESTART" (a spin-off to OFF) that I'm thinking about making.

And by the way, if for whatever reason you need to type copyheart, and you're using Linux like me, it's really easy to add it to your compose key! Find your .XCompose file in your home directory and put in the following line to type copyheart as "o3":

<Multi_key> <o> <3>   : "♡" U2661 # Copyheart

You'll need to have the XCompose file set up first but in my opinion it's the best way to type special characters (you can type practically anything) so it's worth it.

Moving my user scripts here

Well, if you haven't heard the bad news yet, userscripts.org apparently died because its owner went off to do space photography. So... pretty abruptly, my user script hub got pulled out from under me.

That means my user scripts will be temporarily relocating here, to Sangkara! I can't decide whether archive.org is a better idea or not so I'll just keep them here and update via Dropbox. At the very least I can really, really easily upload updates that way.

Stablehand: improved song posts

I've decided that with songs I'm going to start just posting the lyrics on Sangkara instead of my dA, with the song on archive.org embedded inside. It might mean I basically stop using the dA for pretty much everything other than silly dream drawings, but unfortunately, sometimes you've just gotta leave redundant things behind and move on to more convenient systems. And I feel doing things this way will overall be way more convenient and organised even than my tumblr, which is a slight mess with music WIPs and such all over the place.

So! Neutrality, Ssivyin's song, will be the first, to arrive shortly.

Over the weekend, I'm going to be trying to weed all the unnecessary garbage out of my blog template (I started with a premade one, so there are all kinds of weird things in it) and giving the elements better, more logical names (or even changing the elements themselves sometimes—why are my post headers h3 instead of h1?).

So, if the site layout breaks a few times or looks really weird, that's why. It should be fixed by about Monday, and look basically about the same as it does now. It may even load marginally faster with a bunch of the meaningless filler excised from it.

For a while my Creative Commons tags for Stablehand posts had just kind of disappeared and I was really confused, but today I finally realised that I'd left "Stablehand" in uppercase in the template while lowercasing the tag itself, and Blogger conditionals are apparently case-sensitive.

So... now they're finally back, after being gone for about the silliest reason.

Tyrian: Artifex truisms and new "Tyrian" page

Ok, I have a couple of things to tell you about today.

First, I don't want to give too much away since I plan for a lot of the story to be about surprise, but I'm thinking about calling the chapters of Tyrian—instead of "Chapter X:"—"Truism X:", and having a weird little Artifex truism as their title (e.g.: "guns create people!", except I'm most likely not going to use that one specifically since I didn't come up with it myself).

And then there would probably be an intro sequence with either an Artifex trying to explain the argument in a TEDTalks-like format or just a random anecdote happening at one of the Artifex places but still involving the weird idea in the chapter title.

My idea is that I'll get started on these "truisms" some time in the not-too-distant future before I try to do the actual story, probably at random times while I'm taking breaks from working on Stablehand/Tenkai. It may mean some or all need to be redrawn if my skills improve by the time I do the actual thing, but I've discovered that it tends to make me more willing to actually get something done if I just get SOMETHING done right now, no matter how utterly crappy it is. And oddly enough, half the time when I "just draw garbage" it actually comes out okay anyway, if not exactly wonderful.

Second, I'm currently working on separating all the Tyrian pages out into their own hub kind of like the Stablehand pages. I don't know when that will be done though.

All the Tyrian music is now under the CC-BY-SA, because I realised it made absolutely no sense for it not to be. I've updated the "legal story" and music pages with this information.

As with what happened with Stablehand, I can't prevent you from using the CC-BY-NC-SA instead if you made a remix (etc.) before today (January 11, 2014), but from now on, this is the licence. If the licence for Tyrian as a whole turns out to be something better later, I may switch to that, but remember, "better" to me means more open, not more restrictive. And I'm guessing it will be at least a year before that happens anyway. Maybe two if I'm slow. :p

Anyway, enjoy your now-actually-libre tracks, I guess!

I don't know if you noticed, but I did some work on the labels widget last night to make it more like the archive widget.

Now it's still fully as detailed, but vastly tidier.

I rewrote the Stablehand about page finally.

The thing was, even though I thought I had a pretty nice page describing what kind of story it was going to be, nobody seemed to care about that, and everybody instead kept asking me what kind of medium it would be told in. So, I rewrote that page to very concretely explain what kind of medium the story would be told in and what existing media it was most similar to, while still touching on details of what the story is about and what my goals are for it.

I feel like it's lacking something now, but I don't really want to add any more words to the page than it already has, and I'm done with rewriting it for like two weeks. So I think I'll just leave it.

To-do list

Just as a reminder, and as I said on my tumblr, what I'm doing now is re-exporting the rest of my Tyrian and Stablehand songs with timidity and audacity. (Yeah, I'll never get over the way the two of those programs combine in a sentence.)

When I'm done, I'm going to try redrawing Stolen Heart, Arkturuse, and/or the four main characters with anatomy that doesn't look weird, and then maybe make something like the circle pages I did for the hexarts. After that... well, I don't know.

Edit: you know, actually, there's something called a to-do list. Maybe I'd better make one of those.

  • Fix "On the Lift to Ruin" and upload
  • Fix "Hymn to Absurdity" and upload
  • Fix "Jianglongdui theme" and upload
  • Fix "Murasaki" (low priority because nowhere to upload)
  • Fix SH's theme, which will probably be very hard because as far as I can tell the guitar seems to be sounding bad because of a TiMidity bug and not anything easily within my control; not looking forward to this
  • Re-arrange Qamar's theme, which is to say, actually arrange Qamar's theme
  • Attempt to draw aethereal trio correctly
  • Attempt to draw main characters of Stablehand correctly
  • Wyvera?
  • Create awesome Hinotorian astrapia-pheasant
  • Pardeans?
  • Ensure college books are ordered (this just has to end up at the bottom of the list, doesn't it?)

Okay, with subsetting AND woff compression (and I think about one or two fonts taken out), the overall loading time went down to only 12.0 seconds, which is about a 48.4% reduction from what it was with the fonts completely uncompressed.

So now it just takes a while, which is far preferable to a long time, and vastly preferable to forever.

I'm not sure whether you'll find this noticeable or not, but today I compressed the CSS I was using to provide DejaVu fonts, using WOFF. The Stablehand pages were on average taking about 23.5 seconds to completely load before largely thanks to the size of that file, but now they only take about 18.8 seconds. So now they only load in forever minus 5 seconds, rather than taking forever.

I'm going to see if I can further reduce the filesize by manually subsetting the fonts.

Well, it looks like I was wrong about Internet Archive automatically generating mp3s.

But since tindeck allows me to upload oggs and my "mp3" player happens to be able to play them (and because I've gotten into this whole FLOSS thing a lot more recently) I'm probably not going to re-export them as mp3. Maybe this will convince a couple of people who somehow don't already have them to get ogg players? I don't know.

I was apparently also wrong about being able to broadcast Tyrian music on libre, but I'm going to keep uploading the rest of the tracks to the Internet Archive anyway just because it's nice to have them all in one place and with URLs that make sense for once.

(It's actually almost a relief because my now tindeck won't be entirely redundant. When there are Tyrian/Stablehand tracks that don't have associated album names yet, I can use the tindeck as the main download, and then when I have an album page on the Internet Archive I can use that as the main download instead.)

Anyway, I still have plans to broadcast my Stablehand music on libre.fm. Maybe, in time, I might switch the Tyrian music to the CC-BY-SA if enough people ask me permission to make libre remixes (like that's going to happen), but for now things will stay as they are.

On an unrelated note I find it hilarious that I'm using both TiMidity for synthesis and Audacity for post-production.

(Not to mention the fact I'm on a Unity desktop when I'm doing it. Both because nope, everything all jives, no contradictions or juxtapositions here, and that other thing.)

Stablehand/Tyrian music update: Ogg Vorbis?

Over the next two days, I'm going to go back and re-export all the Tyrian and Stablehand midis with TiMidity into Ogg Vorbis, so they can be uploaded to the Internet Archive and subsequently to libre.fm.

The awesome thing about this is that they'll be in highly stable storage and presumably easier to find via a search engine, and the Internet Archive system will automatically generate mp3s from the oggs so I don't have to do that again. They will probably also sound better since I think some of the Tyrian ones had previously gone through an mp3 export twice or more, and the TiMidity sequencer doesn't seem to do the terrible clipping VLC and Windows Media Player did (not to mention essentially playing the entire thing off key, which a couple of years ago I put up with because I thought Windows Media Player was the one singing off key).

There are still a couple problems I have yet to work out, like the (awful) way TiMidity is rendering cymbals, which may be challenging, but overall I think this will be an improvement. You can listen to the first three songs I got re-exported again here.

Post title

I don't get furious about many things, but I am absolutely furious at the loss of the ability to make titleless posts.

That was a FEATURE, not a bug, goddamnit.

I guess I can hack it back into the template, maybe.

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