one of the very few reoccurring nightmares i have is my poor baby linux computer getting infected with an old school virus that forces it to turn into a windows OS. dramatic changes to the user interface and all while i look on helplessly and try to shut the power off.

like it's not the 'oh shit somebody's controlling my computer' bit that gets me tweaked, like how you'd think.

it's the fuckin. forcewindow'ed??? into windows thing???

?????????????????

me @ my subconscious: jesus christ you are a nerd lol (also an amazing M$ hater)

THIS is why i wanted to pick up my to-reads list again so badly; i find the weirdest coolest rabbit-holes...

so i started reading "When Technocultures Collide" because i think it's the book that this post about blind phreakers came from, and I'm quite interested in the thematic and practical connections between computer hobbyists and disabled folks.

the book itself could be better written (it's academic-heavy enough for my tastes i'm skimming through large chunks), but i cracked up at this throw-away line with an unrelated guy bitching about zines going mainstream; seems like this is one of those evergreen pieces of wank.

Although cultural critics like Hal Niedzviecki (2004: 120) are quick to cry sell-out or, more urbanely, note the spread of the virus of conformity by a variety of means when zines go glossy (imitations and intimations—however paradoxical—of the mainstream), Infiltration went posthumously to self-published book form.

but it's in a chapter about another dude -Ninjalicious- who spent good chunks of a decade in a hospital (ayyyy i see you dude), and going urban-exploring in renovated wings, and eventually wrote a reasonably famous series of zines about the experience. apparently he's the godfather of urban exploring in general, wrote *the* manual for it, and even though he's since passed away, there's a cool as hell personal site still online in his honor??

love hearing about people on the margins like this.

> gets steam deck
> starts initial install to make sure it works, gets this immediately after:

i say this being a *complete* will-not-shut-up-about-linux-supremecy fangirl:

........ LMAO. there is no truer "welcome to linux-as-a-hardware" experience XD
(i had the same thing happen with me with the laptop)

... thankfully i know enough linux-fu that i figured that switching to desktop view in the menu > back over would fix it without even looking the bug up, and it did, but lol. lmao even.

( anyway! )

after about four days of black-magic-website land, the domain & new art blog/tegalog changeover is done \o/

go check this cool shit out (aka blog view with readmores!!)

AND THE ARCHIVE VIEW????? and both mobile friendly??? tumblr *wishes* it had that flexibility.

would y'all seethe with jealousy when i say that posting and FINDING my art is mind-numbingly easy now :D anyway both subdomains are back up, all the ao3 broken links are back up, email-domain-y buffoonery is back up, etc. i kind of meant to do a really pretty ~*announcement*~ post beautifully listing all the solutions i added (vs problems) and shamelessly bragging on the technical side of it but.... i am dog tired of being in the coding trenches lol (it will still probably happen over on tumblr / a later proper postmortem on here).

if there's still broken links or you need help re-following the rss feed let me know in the comments!!

i'm beginning to understand why a lot of JP artists on pixiv and earlier post in "logs" (single-post but multiple-image collections of artworks in a fandom), as it's what i'm starting to default to in the new website blog.

mostly since it's so easy to post multiple images under a readmore (for example if they're nsfw, so people at least have one warning "click" before they run face-first into dicks or whatever. even when i'm on the extreme side of 'audiences online are not entitled to warning tags', i still like to extend that courtesy as long as it's not being abused, taken for granted, or doesn't interfere with creation).

since my tegalog gallery only shows the first image in the thumbnail, you can also use it to have the prettiest artwork first, and then the other sketches underneath added as a bonus. if the viewer likes the art enough to click on the thumbnail (eg, if the fandom brings them joy), then they get cute bonus of sketches, and if not, well, hopefully the thumbnail is pretty enough it isn't offensive to the eyes. you get something out of it either way?

it also more naturally connects with (my) rhythm of drawing for a fandom ... a few truly standout images and then oodles of silly character sketches and shitposts.

i'm thinking it might even be a crafty way to link to my new website on social media.... i always treated individual posts on social media as ephemeral, i delete those after a time, but then these new links to the website logs are more permanent? i guess what i'm trying to find out is a way of training people to be more comfortable with personal sites. much to think about.

made a tremendous amount of progress with tegalog in the last 24 hours after i made a clean install on the new host! \o/

(tegalog is a JP microblogging software made out of cgi scripts. it's essentially the best of tumblr + dreamwidth smushed to be used for personal artist's blogs, and i'm migrating my old site blog previously on wordpress to this).

here's a screenshot of the (live) gallery view with artworks back from my 2008-2011 deviantART years.

120 posts have been re-posted in the migration as of this moment, which is roughly halfway through. some observations while i've been methodically posting:

* i remain shocked at how ... fast to pick up. it all is. it just works. the gallery view (seen above) makes it beyond simple to navigate chronologically or sort by tag/category. the blog view is just your basic blog view, and it has "readmore" functionality that is in all honesty easier to incorporate than dreamwidth's. i'm genuinely tempted to move my text dreamwidth posts to this platform because both image & text uploads are painless. if tumblr or dreamwidth goes down, it's an enormous relief to have a genuine backup that's self-sustaining.

* there is RSS feed functionality, which i'll make live once when everything's transferred (including the domain name). other perks are scheduling posts, setting multiple admin levels so a small doujin circle can all use the same site, doing every kind of html/css customization under the sun, embedding, NSFW flags to blur those images. i promise i'm not trying to be a shill but damn if it isn't the thing i've been looking for all my life.

* I've been able to re-word most public-facing JP text into english for easy accessibility. the (private) admin panel's a different story but honestly, the documentation's easier to navigate than some actual english documentation. i'm not a ~elite programmer~ by any means but it's been pretty easy to fiddle with the settings as long as you have google translate in the next tab. kudos to whoever wrote it.

i meant to draw more this weekend but it says a lot i'm this excited over something as mundane/boring as reposting old artwork.

can u tell i'm getting fed up with my "new""" "fancy""" work laptop lol

i've talked about how i'm moving my art logs off of wordpress to tegalog, a JP microblogging cgi program you can self-host and customize. i'll talk later about tegalog's advantages (even with the language barrier from EN), but the long and short of it is that it emulates tumblr's blog view and tumblr's archive view seamlessly, with an image focus. (versus 90% of western sites like Ghost or Publii which prioritize text).

this evening i was itching to get a live demo of the logs working. two hours later, got both the "blog" view and the "gallery/archive" view working!!

here's the blog view, nested within my default theme for kradeelav.com (I know some image links are broken and don't care; this is proof of concept):

note the easy-to-navigate "categories" (top) and "hashtags" (below in grey) link up top. i'm gonna have the hashtags be fandom related (see: fefates), and categories being related to whether it's a work in progress, resource post, or meme.

and here's the working gallery/archive view, no edits done to the theme yet:

you can see how easy this would be to clean up and search for posts even way back to years ago!

I was talking with (more like tempting lol) a dear friend over how useful this is already, and it's making me realize that I really need to write an EN "how to" for artists setting up tegalog for their personal sites.

next steps for me:

* set up categories/tags and confirm they work
* crosspost ~10 posts from both logs (make sure both NSFW posts and SFW posts are working)
* make sure RSS feed for the whole (merged, new) log works did already lol, that was easy
* backup everything
* copy whole site over to new host, and confirm no broken links
* then start the log migration (100+ posts to reupload lol)

[ this post is for people who already know what RSS feeds are, and are actively using them. ]

curiously, even in this state of the degraded web, you can find RSS feeds for basically every open platform (that doesn't have a log-in wall like twitter does now) - it just takes some digging sometimes. but how to find them ... is the question sometimes. i've written down some methods below when RSS feeds aren't immediately obvious, in case it helps some of you.

* view-source (any browser) - in every major browser, there's an option to view the source code of any web-page. Navigate to that page where you see a bunch of HTML of the page you wish to gank a feed from. Now CTRL+F ("find"), and search for "RSS". 95% of the time, the page will highlight a bunch of code. let's use my log.kradeelav.com page as an example; when I do the above, it highlights the below line:

Feed" href="https://log.kradeelav.com/feed" />

you want to copy + paste the bolded/underlined text above into your RSS reader. voila! it should populate now. note that sometimes if you can't find a feed by ctrl+f'ing "RSS" sometimes you can get it by searching "feed", but it's much less promising.

* openrss: great for generating rss feeds for bsky/fediverse. while bluesky and the fediverse technically has native RSS implementation, it doesn't show image attachments. i follow people for the art, so i need the images to pop up in the reader otherwise i'm not gonna click through. (note: openrss may have issue with baraag's images / hard kink images, i haven't tested that extensively.)

* rsshub: great for generating feeds to most social media (especially CN-language accounts) - just scroll the extensive list on the left. i use this one mainly for pixiv, cara, and weibo, though sometimes there's 10% of accounts it just plain refuses to generate stuff for randomly. (I have a feeling those are the accounts that have explicitly turned off a setting on their page to discourage bots).

the biggest two "holes" of mine are instagram and twitter; twitter front-ends like nitter (rip) used to work a year or so ago but those clones get shut down too quickly to really be reliable.

broke: security by obscurity
woke: security by 'my fingers memorized the keystrokes for $important_password but gun to my head if you asked me for what it is i genuinely forgor lolololol'

so i'm doing my research for the 'can you host a (kink) artist's personal site on a a rasbpi' idea. the "why is this necessary to self host?" is documented in this post.

this post is me sketching out the architecture(?) and the tools necessary for the plan, but if you really want the short details:

hardware: vitros raspberry pi zero w
SD card: this card, 64GB (?)
operating system: Raspberry Pi OS Lite
webserver: nginx
file manager: filezilla
security: UFW

( Read more... )

(crossposted from the art tumblr)

the tl;dr

IRON CROWN as a free comic is now off of wordpress and can be viewed by a neat, robust HTML/CSS/JS comic template called rarebit! effectively nothing has changed for the reader, beyond expecting a little more reliability of uptime over the years.

all comic pages and previously paywalled patreon posts can also be downloaded in this art dump for free, as mentioned in the new author's notes.

( Read more... )

> [sees my sadly unused raspi] 'yeah i should actually use my 2 raspis hanging around for some shit'
> 'wait..... can you host a site on a raspi' (googles) (yes, apparently)
> 'wait wait holy shit what if i just say fuck hosting my website elsewhere and host it on this fucker behind my desk'
> '.....and then have the fallover server when the power goes out being my android phone. since it'll always be charged. lol lmao even.'

incoming: world's most cursed hosting infrastructure by a baby mad ~~scientist~~ sysadmin :D

idly thinking about what i'd personally do if KOSA passes....

(I'm aware of the terrible knock on effects on the rest of the internet; this post is not about that and strictly what my moves under this handle would be.)

there's a part of me genuinely thinking of taking this as a sign to close out any social media that would require identity verification, and just... retreat.

I'll always draw; I'll always have kradeelav.com as a place to post. that won't change. but concretely deleting all social media, much like the hard hiatus break I did two years ago where I only posted on the logs.

honestly, there's a weird small part of me that would be.... happy? this "social media" phase of the internet was always my least favorite. 'gone is the age of the elves, here is the age of man' style. i feel constantly overwhelmed by the social internet as is; I can't say quietude would be distasteful. I'd miss the positive comments a little, but it wouldn't be devastating for me. Wondering if it'd feel more like my early deviantart days.

on the flip side, the private doujin circle I'm with has been talking a little about self hosting as a group for the last few months; pooling some resources together to bypass the ills of social media altogether as kink artists. I'd likely spend a lot more effort there and helping to build out some more solid infrastructure that allows artists to be truly independent as we can be. moves behind the scenes as it were, more like the genuine start of the internet before search engines were a thing.

yes, I think that's what my plan would be.

this tuesday is going so much less stressful than last tuesday and is basically me migrating iron crown to rarebit aka a (HTML/JS-only) comic template and muttering 'you fucking donkey' at wordpress every two minutes lol

oh yeah and babysitting work emails. occasionally.

(i am going to be so glad when all of my subdomains are finally off of wordpress let me tell ya.)

while we're on the topic of websites/hosting, greenhost looks decent from a NSFW art host; located in the netherlands, laws are more forgiving for visual arts. mentally slotting it as my backup in case if NFS.net craps out.

> wakes up
> reads about crowdstrike (shitty security vendor) pushing an update that took out half the US
> dismayingly reads the tl;dr by several sysadmins
> jaw dropping very slowly at how many garbage-ass practices led to this clusterfuck. (like seriously, basic shit like not having forced updates plus not slowly rolling out a major update)

seriously if i as a shallow-end-of-the-kiddie-pool-linux-hobbyist-beginner knew not to do two thirds of this shit. just... what. the fuck.

reason no 3255322 my ass ain't ever working in tech

link roundup, STEAM edition?

- there's a digital art museum online called Obelisk. technically it's a series of articles but the presentation of Art History (that can be organized by artists/themes/timelines/movements) is so well done it feels intuitively like walking through an art museum intellectually. there's enough images and history you can click around for hours. it is really hard to show an emotionally truthful snapshot of a ton of artists in a constrained environment, but it does it somehow?

- google also has something similar called google arts & culture that's just as much fun to click on; i'm on a random photo-journalist article about hong kong's neon lights. grudgingly giving google this one lol

- got completely suckered into reading this iranian gamedev/art director's medium articles after stumbling on some of his works on sketchfab ... he has some really well written articles like this intro to color theory post which is genuinely a college-level course posted for free, his reading list of 2023, and proceedurally generated chinese landscapes in blender that look like a spitting image of Okami's art direction. some of the posts can get really technical really quickly if you're not somewhat into 3D rendering, but his articles were surprisingly approachable.

- didn't think those silly uquizes could get close to an actual art form, but what color is your lightsaber is so deceptively well written that it feels like a really good twine/multiple choice adventure game. genuinely gave me chills in the "story" / sensory cocktail approach, and didn't feel fandom-y... if you like the more abstractly evocative KOTOR2 / star wars legends stuff, you'll like this (I got violet).

- interesting interview of Taaki, who's a type of old school hacker / cyberpunk-y figure that feels like an endangered species today. in addition to open source favorites, he has a few interesting paragraphs of talking about how he went more of your "college styled anarchist" to recognizing the nuances of bureaucracy/hierarchy in power especially after being in a warzone for a few years. fair warning it can get a little dude-bro-y at times but i thought it was fun.

- i've had 'a survival guide for Unix' in my bookmarks tabs forever; another old school hacker's guide on linux-y systems. kind of wish i had this in advance of getting my first linux as it's that perfect mix of simple for a true beginner but gets advanced quickly enough. so many guides have tons of level of theoretical cruft or assume way too much of a beginner but this mix was fun.

starting my twice-a-year SNS deep clean where i delete all reply / text posts (outside of tumblr/dreamwidth), and thinking a lot about the attack surface quote ... too seen, but also. i really do think this is one of the instinctive habits that've kept me from getting dogpiled (much much harder to dig up dirt etc).

anyway i'm counting this as part of my phased website/SNS revamp this year; doing it a little earlier so wrist can rest some more before embarking more fully on the doujin. sketching the plan out, next phases are ...

* phase one: test new website layout, test tegalog to replace current website logs, SNS spring cleaning. this is halfway done. LOVE the new layout and earnestly think the clarity and accessibility is miles better.
* phase two: sign up to + copy file structure of website to NFS (host). i actually don't think this is gonna be as big of an issue compared to last time as the most complex part of my site is the logs, and tegalog's "infrastructure" is not database-related, it's just one little .cgi file.
* phase 2.5 - reupload everything to NFS, and then switch RSS feed. this... is gonna take a few weeks. :D;; i'm also gonna redo the tags/nsfw flags so unfortunately it needs to be manual. can't be helped.
* phase three: redo dreamwidth, itch, & tumblr theme to match website

i'm also debating on rejoining pixiv; deleted my account there two years ago but it's the one social media site i can't just scrape NSFW art off of without an account >_< given a lot of the JP accounts following me recently ironically i think my art will be much more well received over there than the last ten years, but hm. hmmmm.

tl;dr putting down my thoughts on what I'd like to improve for this revamp of kradeelav.com!

as most of you know, kradeelav.com has been my "art home" for the last uhhh 8-ish years? I built the site when i was starting to feel the art censorship/harassment headwinds revving up, and it was honestly perfect timing for blithely riding through the social media implosion; I've been mostly unaffected unlike a lot of folks who had to scramble to build their own personal sites for the first time.

( while it's stayed pretty static in its current form for at least 5 years, I think it's time for a revamp! there's a few subtle problem areas i keep running into (elaborated below), and I'd like to take the chance to make the infrastructure even hardier. )

amusingly realizing i'm turning into my mom with the very particular trait of 'must have an active Project going at all times or else you're gonna neurotically chew at the carpet' :D;;;;

(I do not get how people can be Bored. you have the world's infinite knowledge at your fingertips man!!!)

anyway with NaZine mostly out of my hands and in the proofing stage, my wrist getting better but still needing breaks, i purged up my 800-odd reading list to 400 books and ""acquired" all of them a few weekends ago and i think im gonna attempt setting up pi hole this weekend. i was vaguely looking in the direction of setting up a joystick controller with my shitty dji tello drone via python (it got semi bricked b/c i didn't update it in ages and i fucking hate the app lol, so it's either wipe it and start over with python or toss it), but pi-hole feels actively and immediately useful.

wish me luck! it's my intention of writing up a lengthy post/post-mortem. if uh. i can find the raspi that i started the installation on...

krad

if stallman was freud

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I LIVE....

more rambling about the logistics of posting art

new art blog progress

#linuxsupremacy

website breakthrough! \o/

finding RSS feeds

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the tl;dr

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