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Hi! I always welcome new friends! :D
If you feel awkward adding out of the blue, then feel free to leave a comment here saying hi!
I've limited the width of most of these so as to not bork up my layout. For full size, right click & copy the link into a new tab, or go to the Tumblr post here.
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Recently I set out to make some covers for the fics I downloaded so they'd look nice in the ereader, which led me to realise the lack of transparent PNGs for SVSSS. So I decided to make my own. And I really did make them, as the 'automatically remove background' sites I tried either struggled with shaded b&w illustrations or would only let you save the result in poor quality unless you paid, or both. So I did it the old-fashioned but fun way, by hand. I've done all the character designs from the back of the 7seas books, & a bunch of illustrations from the 7seas & Russian books.
There are a too many to fit into a single Tumblr post, so I'm splitting them up. First up: 7seas vol 1 & 2 illustrations!
( congratulations! congratulations! congratulations! good things must be said three times! )
Bonus: Tiny horrified SQQ
I've limited the width of most of these so as to not bork up my layout. For full size, right click & copy the link into a new tab, or go to the Tumblr post here.
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Yet another batch of photos from the Turner Prize finalists exhibition, MIMA.
This time, it's Kira Freije - Unspeak the Chorus.
Return to a listening day
This isn't all of them. There were so many sculptures in this exhibit. I even managed to miss a few, if the brochure was any indication, probably because I must have looked past them amidst the atmospheric lighting & mirrored walls. And I still came out with a lot of photos. So I've settled for just a few of the ones I found most interesting.
That's the last of them, as the fourth finalist, Simeon Barclay, was nominated for The Ruin, a spoken word poetry piece. There's a video playing on a screen to give people something to look at, but it's not all that visually interesting (& as it's a bright screen in a dark room lit by red lights, the photos I did take look shit). There's some scaffolding surrounding it, but, well, it's scaffolding.
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Another batch of photos from the Turner Prize finalists exhibition, MIMA.
Next up, Tanoa Sasraku - Morale Patch
Big picture: Mascot
I did not do anything to toy with perspective. This is just what I saw when I stepped into the room. It's just that big & imposing. It's not super obvious from the pic, but it's got a pinstripe pattern, like a suit.
( morale patch )
I really liked the meaning behind this one. And had a good natter about the subject matter with the museum attendant & a little old lady who was viewing the exhibit at the same time as me, & we all agreed the world is in a bad state right now. Art brings people together!
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It's been a while since I updated this thing with actual blogging stuff rather than images from games I've played. I've been so busy on the projects-within-a-project I mentioned in this post, I was too focused on that to update.
So, update.
I finished the transparent PNGs I'd been working on. I did all the character designs from the back of the 7seas books, & most of the illustrations (basically if there was a clear enough outline of a character or characters without stuff in the way, I did it). I also did illustrations from the Russian translation, though not as many as I'd have liked, as there were some that were only available as a poorly-taken photo b someone using their phone where they couldn't even keep the whole image in shot. A bunch of the Russian chibi illustrations were already in transparent form, & a few others hat were in decent quality proved trickier to do than I'd like, but I did do one, of my boy Xiang Fei. There were also some promotional/merch illustrations that I found (I basically went browsing the wiki & snagged any official art that looked suitable). As for MDZS, I didn't do any illustrations from the books aside from the few I'd needed for the fanfic covers, because the art style wasn't suited for cutting out. I did find some promo/merch stuff to do though. MDZS is way better served with transparent images anyway, so I don't feel the need to force myself.
I was going to start posting them, but then I went to the Turner Prize exhibition & took loads of photos that I want to share. There are too many transparents to go in one Tumblr post (I believe the max is 30), so I'd need to pace them out (not too close together that it felt like flooding the tags, but not too far apart that I get sidetracked in between), & since the art photos will also need to be spread over multiple posts, I would probably get thrown off whatever schedule I set myself for posting them. Yeah, you can cue posts on Tumblr, but I'd still have to manually post them here on DW, with Tumblr used to host the images, & variations on formatting necessary for the different platforms, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So the transparents will hopefully start getting posted in a few days. In the meantime I've been organising the downloaded fics (both mine & others'), splicing together series into one fic (I tend to read them all together so why pretend otherwise), & tweaking metadata. This step has been more involved than expected (bit of a theme with this whole thing) as I've found myself doing plenty of editing to the works themselves. Not the actual stories, obviously, but downloaded epub versions of Ao3 fics display a little weirdly. You've got a random page with a the title in text & a bunch of tags, then you go to the next section & only then do you get the proper title & author & what the story is about. It's weird. Also I got sick of accidentally opening a tag when tapping to open the settings/navigation & it decided I'd tapped too close to a link. So I've been editing each fic in Sigil/Page Edit & stripping out the links. And in order to make this easier on myself, I've removed some entirely because they're not relevant to me (I'm not using them to search & filter, & I don't require warnings - I just want a quick rundown to remind me which fic it is that I'm considering reading, alongside the summary). I also moved the proper title & author, as well as the summary, to the top of the tags page (left the link to the original fic in place though), & moved any relevant pre-fic notes just below the tags, so it's all in the same section & in the right order, & then delete the original summary page. So, one section for the title, summary, tags, & notes, & then into the fic. I also went through the fics & added horizontal lines between any chapter notes & the chapter itself, & deleted a lot of chapter notes that are not useful ('sorry for the late update!' or 'i went back & edited a mistake in a previous chapter' are pointless when the fic has been completed for 5 years). In the case of my fics, I went & deleted a bunch of such no-longer-relevant notes from the actual posted fics themselves, because I can. Also, some notes the author seems to be arguing with dumbasses with zero literacy., & I'm not one of them, so it's just annoying. Also content warnings just feel condescending most of the time. Oh, really? Bad Stuff happens in a fanfic based on The Book Where Bad Stuff Happens? You don't say.
Another thing that happens with epub downloads of Ao3 fics is that it keeps all the original tags as metadata tags. I want to be able to organise & filter by tags, but Ao3 tags are not quite what I need as a system just for browsing epubs. These are all fics I know & like enough to have downloaded. I don't need to filter out tropes & genres I despise, I don't need warnings, & I don't want to deal with 50 tags that all basically mean the same thing (eg. an SVSSS System reveal, a MDZS Golden Core reveal, & secret identity reveal, are all basically the same trope with a different hat). Also one of my primary motivations in picking a fic to read is length (do I want something of epic length to get lost in? do I have not have the time to spare to risk getting lost in a story, so just want something short that scratches an itch? something in between?). And there's no way of seeing that at a glance in an ereader without opening each one & checking, so I needed a way to categorise by length.
So I've been working out my own little tagging system, very broad & simplified (too many tags for too specific things means I'll just forget most of them & the whole system will fall apart).
Next up is to find a good ereader app to read them on my phone. I usually just use Google Play Books to read my epubs, as it's already on there & works fine. But I want to keep fanfic separate, & would like something with a tagging system. I've seen Moon Reader recommended, so I'll give that a shot.
Progress so far:
- Make the last few covers/banners for my fics.
- Finish the transparent PNGs
- Post the transparent PNGs I've been working on.
- Make a fic rec post. I've been meaning to do that for a while, but this is a neat excuse. I can rec my faves while offering the covers to anyone else that wants to use them.
- Splice together series fics into a single fic & tweak any metadata for the epub files.
- Add the fics to an ereader app.
So the Turner Prize is being held in Middlesbrough this year, & since I was in the area, I figured I'd go have a look. I'm not much of an art connoisseur, I'll admit, but I like cool-looking stuff that says interesting things about the world, so that must count for something. I took so many photos while there, so I'm giving each of the artists their own post. Well, three out of the four, as one was an audio-visual spoken word poetry experience where you had to be there.
First up, Marguerite Humeau - Torches
( torches )
I liked this one. I have no idea what meaning there is behind it, but there's a lot of interesting shapes. I like interesting shapes.
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Playing the Myst remake after playing Horizon Forbidden West has me going 'Damn, I could get some sweet gear for this much brimshine!'
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Some lil guys hanging out on the beach in the Forbidden West
Bunny :(
(I didn't kill it - Verbena did!)
I've been busy lately, with a project that became multiple different things, that started from a small frustration.
I enjoy fanfiction. I like rereading my favourites. Not being a moron, I download fics to back them up. But when I reread, I tend to use the website (which is not my favourite way of reading & can be inconvenient if the site is down for maintenance, or I'm reading on my phone while travelling & enter a deadzone, or wanting to read on my phone while being conscious of battery like, but not being able to turn off wifi & data to save battery). Why? Because I can identify the fics I have saved. The thing is with epub readers is that they display your collection as a cover image, title, & author name.
Thing is, that works great for actual published books with identifiable titles & distinctive covers & author names you recognise. But fanfics rarely have covers so the app fills with a bunch of empty placeholder covers, the titles tend to be word salad lyrics from a song the author thinks is deep that have nothing to do with the fic, & the author names are random usernames that you tune out unless you really like a bunch of their works.
With fanfics, you need to be able to view summary & tags. I tried to find an epub reader on Android that was designed to show title & description rather than title & cover. I have a Windows device too, but that's less of a consideration. I browse Ao3 on desktop & that's how I read new fics (easier to leave comments), but when it comes to rereading my fave fics or reading novels, I prefer reading on my phone (or an actual physical book that I can carry with me) because it makes it more convenient to pick up & put down when I have time during my day. Since I don't have social media, reading is the primary reason I use my phone, actually.)
This was starting to get in the way of fic reading. So I decided I was going to make covers for all my bookmarked/downloaded (I only bother downloading fics I bookmarked).
This was a hell of an undertaking, as I had 81 fics bookmarked (& if I liked a series I only bookmarked to first fic in that series so there were actually a few more. That's not including fics that I've written & like rereading (this bitch wrote some bangers ngl). And most of the fics were based on book canons so had limited available images to use for covers, & I am not a graphic designer.
I decided to take the opportunity to ask myself if I really wanted to keep all of them. Which meant rereading a bunch.
My bookmarks are already somewhat curated. I'm not someone who bookmarks willy-nilly. My bookmarks are for complete (though with occasional exceptions) fics that I'll reread over & over. There are fics I quite liked that don't make the cut, because I know I won't want to read again. I just comment & kudos & move on. For WIPs, I use the subscribe feature & my browser bookmarks to track them. I also tend to clear out fics after losing interesting in the fandom they're for. Even if I think I'll still enjoy rereading them regardless, once some time has passed, I find I can't bring myself to care, so only a few end up surviving that.
I was still surprised by how many ended up getting culled. I realised there were fics that I assumed I'd want to reread but I just ended up scrolling past whenever I was looking for stuff to read, or had reread by found myself less likely to pick those. Reading through those, I found stories that I either had clearly lost interest in, however much I'd enjoyed them the first time, or fics where I really liked some bits but found others boring, & when rereading what I was actually doing was reading half the fic & scrolling through the meh bits.
I ended up getting down to 33 bookmarked/downloaded fics. I also figure that for series, I can splice epub files that are part of a series together, so 33 bookmarks meant 33 book covers.
Still, while it had been productive, it had kind of derailed the project to make my fanfic epub collection more convenient to reread. But then came the next step: creating the covers.
Yet again, there was some derailment. I didn't set out to be super elaborate. Find a suitable image, pick a cool font, play around with colours & effects. If I couldn't find an image, just make a little bit more effort with the font & background effects to make up for it.
First wrinkle: I hate Canva, & since it's treated as the only game in town, there's basically no competition. It's simultaneously too simple & too complicated. Too simple in the sense that it you want to create a social media banner or moodboard, & were either happy to pick whatever images were available or knew precisely what images you wanted to use & had them ready & to hand, it's great. If you don't want either of those formats & have only a vague sense of what you want, but know what you don't want, & want to experiment, it makes every step juuuuuust that little bit harder than it needs to be & really wants you to hand over money.
I mostly used Paint.NET, but it's not so good for text. Font Candy was perfect for adding cool text to images, but it's no longer on the Microsoft Store so if I want to use it I have to dig out my old half-dead computer hope it doesn't choose now to finally give up. Also, weirdly, Powerpoint. Yeah, you can use Powerpoint to make cool text & add it into images - who knew, right? It adds them as images, so you have to make any tweaks before copying & pasting it in, but it works.
The actual derailment came when I wanted to make images for SVSSS fics. The books have illustrations but they didn't work as covers, as I just wanted particular characters & wanted to be able to pick the background.
There are sites that will remove backgrounds, but they either struggle with detailed black & white images, or would only save in decent quality it you paid, or both. So I decided that if you want a job doing right, you have to do it yourself.
Cue me making a bunch of transparent PNGs from book illustrations by hand, using the magic wand select & eraser tools, & sometimes having to draw lines that had been covered up by a now-removed foreground detail. Which is fun when you can't draw (I dumped all my creative skill points into writing). I also did some MDZS ones. That fandom has a few PNGs at least, but I wanted a few specific things & omg wow was it hard to isolate things within that artist's illustrations (lots of detail & black on black on black shading & thin linework) but I had a vision & I wanted to see it through.
I got really into it & kept going beyond what I need to make covers before having to force myself to get back on track making covers that I was supposed to be doing. I plan to do some more & upload them as a service to the fandom once I'm done.
I made covers for all my bookmarks/downloaded fics, with a podfic album cover version of each one (not all of them have podfics, but I'll be ready if more of them get made), then moved on to my own fics. For my own, in addition to a book-type cover & an album cover for podfics, I made a small banner to go at the top of the posts on Tumblr & here. I'm mostly done now, with just my two most recently-written fics left to make covers for, with the rest now done & added to their posts (I only bothered adding book covers to final chapter post for each fic though).
Next steps in this cluster of projects within a project:
- Make the last few covers/banners for my fics.
- Finish the transparent PNGs
- Post the transparent PNGs I've been working on.
- Make a fic rec post. I've been meaning to do that for a while, but this is a neat excuse. I can rec my faves while offering the covers to anyone else that wants to use them.
- Splice together series fics into a single fic & tweak any erroneous metadata.
- Add the fics to an ereader app (I don't want to use the same one as for my books).
( we do not choose the times we let go )
Red Bow
Replayed this recently. I assumed I'd posted screenshots of my favourite lines, but I can't find the post, so it must have been on my previous tumblr blog that got terminated before I started this DW blog, so I never recreated the posts from it here. I replayed because I wanted to use the border image for something, & the previous screenshots that I still had saved were too low quality for my needs, taken on the PS Vita version, so I made new ones.
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I hated Travis Tate in HZD, but HFW caused me to do a complete 180. I know we're supposed to be frustrated in this scene, but I was absolutely cackling. Epic trolling, dude. Love it.
