9/9 - Blueberry Milk
Recaps
Two new sites, bios and refs, stories, a little raccoon out on a giant adventure, and I've started playing Cookie Clicker again. This one's gonna be so massive, I've had to split it into sections, so get cozy in the nearest armchair. It's time for a recap.
How the Feed Killed Creation
mariteaux
Let's start with a premise. We have a creator. She's a writer, maybe, or maybe a visual artist. Maybe dabbles in animation. She's got big ideas and the drive to see them to fruition. Might even be months into a grand project right now. Yet, she'll post her stuff online or in a Discord server, and no one gives a shit.
The internet's built on user-generated content, stuff ordinary people (people like you, perhaps!) create. And yet, with all these sites for it, where's the support? Let's talk about the feed and how it's killed independent content.
Jinkies
borb
Its been awhile.
AutoSite XL release, and a fun-sized retrospective
dotcomboom
Tonight I released the first "stable" version of AutoSite XL, 0.9. I started this project just before school started about two weeks ago. Something I had always wanted to do since I started working on AutoSite alllll the way back in August 2018 (ok, it was July 30th) was to make a desktop version of it. (AutoSite 98 almost counts. Almost.)
AutoSite XL isn't up on my site yet, which is something I'll get to soon. However, I do have all the code and the actual release on Github, and a pretty extensive (1800 something words) readme.md, which might as well contain a blog post of its own, so it'd be cool if you read it.
I originally considered writing a GUI AutoSite in a new language, maybe to practice Java, the literal bane of my existence (someone's oughta be the programmer for the robotics team now that the only one graduated), or perhaps taking on WPF and heck, C#.
Ultimately though, I decided to stick to what I knew best.
cheers, love! mon is here!
mon
After 6 months of being a Somnolian and almost two months working on my site, my slice of the Somnolescent website is live! Go check it out, will ya?
7/15 - The Bulb Worshippers Love Almost Everyone
Recaps
Can you believe it's been two-and-a-half months since the last recap? We don't rush a lot around here, but we do keep busy. Site overhauls, writing, drawing...and possibly a new member?
Cammy vs. the PhotoCam
mariteaux
I've long liked early digital cameras. There's a really specific era of 95-98 or so where digital cameras were, by some measures, atrocious, and by others, absolutely fantastic. Their bad CCDs, chunky design, and inconsistent featureset makes them fascinating and a topic of my obsession for a few months now. I would absolutely take pictures out and about with one, they're that appealing to me. Having drooled over a few of LGR's long enough, I decided I wanted an early digital camera of my own.
I am still looking. Here's my misadventure for your amusement.
Somnoville
mariteaux
I can remember the last time I had a proper Minecraft server with a group of friends. It was in 2012 or so, when a close friend of mine bought me the game and invited me onto his little public server. (Naturally, since we were spergy kids, I was a co-admin. Too many roles and plugins was just what ya did.) His friends were there, and sometimes, even other little kids would pop in to destroy everything because 1.2.5 was horribly broken and you could session steal like a motherfucker. Good times.
The bug for this game has never quite left me, and Caby and some of the other Somnolians having gotten their hands on it prompted me to set up a little server of our own. A lot's been done on it. Lemme show you around.
Gopher is not the Web
dotcomboom
Every now and then, I see new Gopher clients and sites popping up. And that's great—we're keeping this protocol alive for the next generation. However, I can't help but think some of the methods of doing so is restrictive, only getting the "Gopher is a list of links" part.
Back when NCSA Mosaic came out, it supported the Gopher protocol by generating an HTML equivalent to each menu. The idea of that makes sense; I mean, you already have a web browser that technically is capable of displaying the same content. This behavior has been replicated many times by the major web browsers and fellow gophermeisters over time when implementing Gopher support to client software.
The problem with that, however, is that you miss out on the potential that Gopher menus have to be not just a list of links. It's important to understand that Gopher is as much a file transfer protocol as, say, anonymous FTP is, and it would make an amount of sense to implement it similarly. There are two main features that I would like to see more often in modern Gopher clients that stem from this and I will talk about them now. Get the popcorn.
On Purpose
mariteaux
Less a rant and more musings about the pitfalls of storytelling without a goal for your characters, something I see a lot from amateur artists online.