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exeggcute · 11 months

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the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators; reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

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petermorwood · 7 months

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Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)

Long ago, @dduane and I had a Whirlpool combi microwave - micro, grill, fan oven - and It Was Great, big enough to use as a proper oven when what needed cooked in a proper oven was small enough that powering up the big proper oven in the cooker was a bit much.

Still with me...?

IIRC it was one of those Christmas presents where Mum, ever-practical, told us; "get yourselves something really useful but not too expensive (I did say practical!) and I'll go halves."

In 2016, after something like 15 years of pretty-well daily use for one thing and another, the old thing expired by stages, micro first, grill second, oven last - it made great bread up until the end - and went to recycling heaven.

*****

We couldn't find a one-for-one replacement (we needed a free-standing counter-top appliance, everyone was selling built-in), so until once was available (optimism) we bought an ordinary microwave.

NB, this and its successors were only used for ordinary microwave things like reheating, defrosting and dealing with freeze-cook stuff. They got nothing like the amount of use of the old combi, mostly because of being incapable of doing a lot of it. As things turned out, this didn't help much.

About eighteen months later, we had to buy another. If a microwave's enamel interior develops a crack (to this day I don't know how), moisture gets in, rust begins and the enamel pulls off the bare metal. That's when you get "sparking".

This demo is deliberate; believe me, when it's unexpected it's even worse.

youtube

A private welder show or lightning storm at the end of the kitchen counter when all you want is a hot cuppa is distinctly unsettling. Also, it's only going to get worse, and we could imagine - boy, could we - what "Much Worse" might look like.

To the recycle dump!

(NB, micros with stainless steel interiors don't seem to do this, probably because they're already tuned to deal with the bare metal.)

The replacement, another ordinary micro, Just Up And Died after eighteen months and, guess what, the quote for a check-up and replacements-if-required was as much as the price of a new one.

(Inkjet printers seem to operate on this principal too.)

To the recycle dump again!

We got a third new one (which BTW is still running just fine, because it's been downgraded to Extra, read on), totalled up what we'd spent on ordinary microwaves, said a few well-chosen words about planned obsolescence and the "Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Economic Inequality" and got ourselves a pre-pay credit card whose top-ups were dedicated to Get A Combi Again.

We didn't bother with GACA baseball caps.

That would have been silly.

I don't know if these cards exist in the USA; we treat them as the modern version of a piggy-bank...

...except that to get at the money you need two people acting in accord.

*****

And in 2021 we got one.

Okay, this next bit is going to read like an ad.

It isn't, because the appliance is discontinued. (Whirlpool FINALLY do something similar but not identical.) It's just enthusiastic users discovering there's even more to a gadget than expected.

*****

The New One even bigger than the old one, which had 28 litres capacity; the new one was 33 L (was .99 ft³, is now 1.16 ft³). In non-tech terms, wow, More Room To Cook In.

Reading the figures was no help (to me, anyway) in visualising what a maw the thing had, but opening the door did that and no mistake.

I said something to DD about "bite radius"...

...and she instantly responded with "anyway, we delivered the bomb".

We're a quotesy household. ;->

BTW, The New One does a very good job on seafood, too...

*****

Since we got this, almost exactly two years ago, we've used it from reheating tea to roasting meat to making chilli / goulash / stew / curry (you can run the oven / grill separately or add simultaneous zaps of microwave for much less cooking time) to baking bread.

One of the best things about it is that when the set cooking time is done, the appliance switches off automatically. No risk of busyness, absent-mindedness or out-in-the-garden-ness ending in clouds of smoke, ruined food and possibly even worse.

As for breadmaking, it has a dough-rise setting which is a Time Machine, reducing a two-hour "doubled in size" rise time to about 35-45 minutes...

It also has the most reliable Defrost Butter setting either of us have ever encountered, turning a rock-solid butter brick from the freezer into something spreadable while never - to date - doing the "never mind a butter-knife, give me a spoon or a paintbrush" thing.

*****

However...

There's also a "Chef Setting" where there are some simple recipes. Here's the pastry page.

Basically, you assemble and mix the ingredients, input the correct settings and the machine does all the timing, heating and cooking.

We'd never used this until yesterday, when DD said, "Let's try the sponge cake..."

Yes, this post was entitled "Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)..." and here we are...

We did all the measuring correctly and checked it by pouring the mixture into a baking container while on the scale, wondering betimes why the recipe says 900g, the ingredients total 925 and what actually poured into the container reads 906... Weird. Really weird.

Then we put the container into the oven, entered the correct code, and let things do what they were going to do.

A little later we discovered something else about the recipe besides a weight anomaly.

It didn't mention the required size of the container. Or or how much the mixture was likely to rise.

It rose...

Let's say more than we expected...

The fluted ceramic container used for baking this one makes it look like a Vesuvius cupcake; not quite a pyroclastic flow, but a lot of flow regardless.

Once it cooled we separated the sponge-cake from the escaped sponge in the same way as sculptors work with wood or marble - "Chip away everything that doesn't look like a cake" - and found that despite its misshapen looks, it tasted pretty good.

So today DD made another, this time using a larger container.

...and this time it stayed put until removed using the cunning base-and-lifting-straps of baking parchment.

It's not the loftiest or best-risen sponge cake either of us have ever seen (a smaller-diameter higher-sided container would probably deal with that) BUT if there's something needing sponge cake in a hurry - this went from cupboard ingredients to done and cooling in less than 55 minutes - that treatment seems to fit the bill.

We're now wondering what other secrets lurk in the simple recipe pages; falafel, quiche Lorraine, stuffed peppers, even Flammkuchen* from scratch.

(*Though I have my own views about Flammkuchen, mostly involving a plane flight...)

And we'll be paying a lot more attention to what size of dish we put them in. :->

#food and drink #kitchen appliances #combi microwaves #sponge cake #anecdotage #GNU Terry Pratchett #Youtube

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peytonsawyers · 10 months

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This quick tutorial will go over how to make gradients, from simple gradients to multicolor ones.

give this tutorial a like/reblog if it helped you out

end result & tutorial under the cut

if questions should arise, feel free to send a message!

Chapters:

how to make a basic gradient

adding colors with brushes

softening & adjustments

What you´ll need:

any version of photoshop (I use CS6, mine is in german because I bought it years ago in germany)

very basic photoshop knowledge

i. how to make a basic gradient

Open a new document in your desired size.

There are several ways to make gradients. I always use the new fill layer option, right next to the new layer or new group buttons on the right side.

Click on it and select the second option.

Adjust the angle however you wish, and then click on the gradient to bring up the next window

Select any colors you want by clicking on the little droppers highlighted above. I used #ff27f2 on the left and #d58dfa on the right. Once you´re done click OK until your new gradient is on your document.

ii. add colors with brushes

add a new layer & select a big brush with no hardness and low opacity.

select any color to paint with, I´ll be using #e50051 & #770dfa & plain white. Start painting on that new layer in slow strokes. You can add as many colors as you want. Mine now looks like this:

Now we merge our layers by selecting them, then righ click and selecting merge

iii. softening & adjustments

Go to filters -> blur > motion blur

Depending on the gradient you´ll have to select different variables, but for this one I used the numbers below:

Sometimes I add Gaussian Blur too to blend it even more, but didn´t do that for this gradient.

Now for the adjustments I only added a brightness and vibrance layer. This is the finished gradient:

#completeresources #dailyresources #photoshop tutorial #gradient tutorial #photoshop help #usernelly #userireland #ps asks #mine: tutorial #my tutorials #my resources

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20dollarlolita · 8 months

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Can you believe it? 20dollarlolita Pattern School Step 2!

Only took me a year and a half. For people who don't remember a year and a half ago, we've started a project about learning to sew from patterns. The eventual goal is to help people become proficient enough at reading patterns to be able to tell what's going on in a pattern with instructions in another language, taking a pattern that doesn't fit and resizing it so that it does, and taking a pattern that isn't technically lolita and make it work in lolita fashion.

Step 1 was to make a non-fitted item from a commercial pattern. There were two goals of step 1: first to ensure that everyone was familiar with notches, grainlines, and other pattern markings; second was to give people experience with selecting fabric and trims to help give a non-lolita pattern a more lolita feeling.

For step 2, we're modifying a commercial pajama pants pattern into bloomers. In this step, we're going to become familiar with how to prepare a commercial pattern for modification, to compare pattern size to body size and to use your tape measure to judge added fullness, and how to do some basic flat pattern manipulation to add in style ease. Bloomers are a great first manipulation/fitted project due to the loose fit and the fact that, in most lolita applications, the vast majority of it is under your skirt and therefore invisible.

For this specific sample, I'm going to use Gertie's Harlow Pajama Pants pattern for this. I'm doing this because I bought a commercial pattern from Green Store and then promptly lost it, and these pajama pants are a free download. If you are printing the tiled version on your home computer printer, you only need pages 41-52 and 58-71, which will save you about 40 pages of printing.

I highly recommed doing some research and having a good idea of how long the bloomers you want to make should be, as well as how they are decorated. This is my research board.

You can use any pajama pants pattern that has a casing (elastic or drawstring) at the top, and no zipper. In this case, pants with a looser fit are going to be easier to turn into bloomers. If you like wearing your pants at a certain point on your body, I'd check for pajama pants that are at that waistline. The pants that I'm using are designed to sit at your natural waist, which might be too high for some people.

Your first step is to assemble and fortify your pattern. If you're printing this on copy paper, it's going to be strong enough, provided you use enough tape when tiling your pattern. If you're using a tissue paper pattern, like the kind you'd buy at the craft store, it helps to fuse some inexpensive interfacing onto the back of the pattern. We're going to work with these patterns a lot, so it's important to make them a little bit stronger.

Now, you are going to need to go into your pattern instructions and find two important things. The first is your overall seam allowance. In most commercial patterns, this is 5/8 of an inch. Some other patterns might have different seam allowance.

The second is how big your elastic casing at the top will be. In this case, my seam allowance is 5/8" of an inch. Because my hem casing is .25"+1.25" (the amount you turn up plus them amount you turn up the second time), I know that my elastic casing will take up 1.5".

You're now going to mark on your pattern what the stitching line is. Your pattern has seam allowance included. This is very useful for when you cut out the pattern. However, if we take our pattern measurements with seam allowance, we won't have accurate numbers. So we have to clarify where the seam allowance is.

The first thing that I do (not pictured) is to write how much I'm removing along each line. In this case, I write 5/8" along the side and crotch seams, and "1+1/2" at the top where the casing is. Since we're going to drastically shorten these pants, it doesn't matter what the hem allowance is.

Then, I take my ruler, and I mark my stitching line. I do it in pencil, check that I'm correct, and then go back and re-draw it with a red marker. This helps me make sure that I'm following the correct lines.

Make sure you transfer your notches onto your new stitching line. You can see in the picture above how I'm using the ruler to measure where the notch is going to go.

The next step, walking the pattern, is a little tricky to explain. Here's a post that goes into it in great detail.

Basically, you're going to overlap the seam lines, to make sure they line up. The only problem with doing this is that both seam lines are curved. So, instead of lining it all up at once, you're going to go about an inch at a time, letting the pattern rotate so that it stays flat on the table. At any given point, you're only going to have an inch or so of the line overlapping, but that's all you need. If you run into notches that don't line up, cross one out and re-draw it so that it matches the other notch.

If this seems really complicated, you don't really need to do that on this project. It just is a good practice to have.

So you now should have a pattern with all the commercial markings, but where you've drawn the stitching line.

So now, you're going to put your two pieces together along the outseam. Since this is a pretty straight part of a pajama pant, it shouldn't be too difficult to get them to line up. Remember to overlap them on your stitching line, and not on the edge of the pattern.

We're putting them together so that you can measure them both at the same time. it saves us some math.

In bloomers, there are three major measurements to take into consideration. You need to know how big you want the leg to be, how big you want the booty to be, and how long you want the leg of the bloomer to be. In addition, you need to make sure that the waist of your pants will be big enough to fit your waist. In most pajama pants patterns, this isn't a problem, but checking it is good practice.

So, in this picture, you can see that I've measured the cuff of the pants. These two pieces together make up one pant leg, so I just need to measure the two pieces to know how big the pant leg will be.

I then take my tape measure and hold it around my leg at the same size that the pattern is at that point. I just use my eyes and judge if I think that'll be enough room to make my bloomers nice and poofy.

If your pattern doesn't tell you your hip line (mine didn't), it's usually at the point where the two notches on the crotch curve are. One of the reasons why we're doing this on a commercial pattern is that someone did the work for us and put those notches where they should be.

Now, remember, these two pieces are only half of the pant pattern. When we measure the hips of the pattern, we have to multiply this measurement by 2. Half the hip measurement x 2 is the full hip measurement.

Once again, hold this out next to your body and make sure that you like how much fullness you need. Remember that, in addition to having extra fullness because bloomers are poofy, you need room to be able to move and sit down. This measure between the size of my body and the size of the pattern looked pretty good to me. I could definitely have gone a little bit bigger.

The pant leg measurement is okay to be a little bit too long. You can always make it shorter. However, feel free to chop about 18" off the bottom of a full length pant leg. This just makes things a little easier.

Now, we're going to move the two pattern pieces until they're the size we like. If both the hip measurement and the leg measurement are too small, we're going to move both pattern pieces apart. To turn pajama pants into bloomers, this is likely to be the most common adjustment.

If the hip measurement is pretty okay, but the cuff measurement is too small, you're just going to move the bottom part of the pattern apart.

You'll notice that this is still enlarging the hip measurement a little bit. This is fine for bloomers since the style is for a lot of fullness in that area.

And if your cuff is the correct size, but your hip measure is too big, you can keep the cuff size the same and move the hip line apart until it's the size you want.

This technique of lining up the pattern pieces, and then moving them until they're the size you want, is the basics of flat patterning. As long as you follow the philosophy of keeping the measurements you like roughly the same, and moving the areas that you don't like until they measure what you need, you can easily resize a pattern without having to re-draw everything.

If you had to spread your pieces apart, tape some paper underneath the gap. This piece of paper should bridge the gap between the two pieces, turning them into one piece. Really quickly double-check that these pieces measure how you want. Then, mark a line in the middle of the paper bridge. Draw your notches onto the cut line. Cut the two pieces apart on that line. You've now made both pieces bigger. Tape another little piece of paper onto the cut edge of each piece, mark out your seam allowance, and cut that off.

Bonus points: swap the position of the pattern pieces, so that the crotch curve is one continuous line. Measure the length of that. Then, hold your tape measure along where the crotch curve of your pants will fit, and make sure that you have clearance there. I'm not going to photograph that, andi t's not super necessary with most pajama patterns.

Go ahead and cut your pieces out.Even though I'd shortened the pattern, mine were still too long to fit on a 2-yard cut of fabric. Since I knew that my pants were a little long, I just let the end hang off the edge of the fabric.

Here's the really magical part about this. Even though you've resized your pattern, you still have all your seam allowance, notches, grainlines, and your pattern instructions. Since you kept all your pattern markings consistent, you can now follow the instructions that came with your pattern. Go up until it tells you to hem the pants, and then try them on.

In my case, my pants were way too long to be bloomers. I knew that I wanted to do a casing with a heading, which does use s pretty big hem allowance, but even so, I'd need to shorten them.

Check out your bloomer research board to see how long you want them to be. I wanted some long ones that did the old-school bloomer peek, so I made them on the longer side. I also didn't want them to ride up into my butt when sitting in a wheelchair.

So, time to fold up the bottoms, add my elastic, and call the basic construction finished.

I looked up on my research board to try to find a good way to decorate these. One of the nice things about bloomers is that you can wear them with a wide variety of coords. This makes them one of those items where you can add some extra lace, and then use that lace in multiple coords. I feel like, since these bloomers are a good way of adding detail in multiple coords, it's a good excuse to add a little bit extra lace. You can see how much of a difference it makes in this picture. It really turns them from baggy shorts into real bloomers. I really recommend sometimes investing in a couple of big purchases of lace. If you have lots of lace on hand, you're more likely to include it in your projects, which can really help push a meh project into proper lolita fashion territory. I have a rule that I don't spend more than $1.50 a yard on lace unless it's really fantastic, and I manage to find things at that point on Aliexpress and sites like Cheeptrims.

Now go on and let them peek out of your favorite skirt. And remember, definitely don't press that skirt before putting this picture in your tutorial.

#20dollarlolita #dollar chan's pattern school #step 2 #lolita fashion #patternmaking #handmade lolita #lolita bloomers #sewing tutorial #hey guys look i actually made somethign #long post

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lalalian · 2 months

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LITERALLY every single DR I have

I have not completed the scripts for most of them 😭😭

KEYS: 💭 = Non-Media / Not from a book, movie, or show DR

Sorry if the grammar is bad, I’m too lazy to look over this post 😭😭

Magical Girl DR 💭

heavily inspired by Precure bcccc it’s cute. Who doesn’t want to fight enemies with frilly dresses?

Regular School DR 💭

School but like filled with drama, I have some things written out 😭😭 it’s super 2015 Wattpad-y so idk if I’m gonna talk abt it

Fantasy Minecraft YouTuber DR 💭

I KNOW WHAT YOURE THINKING… I DO NOTTTT LIKE ANY MINECRAFT YOUTUBER OTHER THAN LDSHADOWLADY AND SNIFFERFISH. I MEAN THAT LITERALLY. don’t misunderstand, please and thank you 🫶

Dreamscape Station DR 💭

I had a vision, but I’ve yet to work on this script enough for me to post a lot about it 😞 I did post about it tho on my TikTok account! Essentially it’s like the backrooms but cute, ethereal, not dangerous (kinda), and full of shifters from other realities. You take a train to different parts of ‘Dreamscape’ and explore! I made tickets for this DR too 😭😭

K-Pop Stan Life DR 💭

Self explanatory. I’m gonna be a fansite, buy as many albums as I could possibly buy, and trade cards with ppl online + provide lots of freebies!

J-Pop Idol DR (💭 kinda)

This was a requested script from someone on my request form (I’ve just realized I didn’t link my request form here on tumblr… it should be up before anyone’s read this). I ended actually using this script for my love live DR cuz my old love live scripts were the ugliest thing on the planet

Obsidian Bride DR

Obsidian Bride is a manhwa that’s literally Singles Inferno but in an isekai otome manhwa world + everyone’s based off a gem, your gem is chosen based on your life and personality!

MHA DR

I was influenced to shift here bc of Priicklleshifts on TikTok 😭😭😭. I don’t really like the actual anime that much, but it seems like a really fun place to shift to! The script for this DR is 100% complete (I haven’t added anything to it for months now)

Wind Breaker DR

Wind Breaker’s a bike racing manhwa that you can read for free on Webtoon. Idk who I’m gonna date, but I literally CANNOT date Jay bc he reminds me of my brother 😭😭

Made of Stardust DR

I’m so mad that nobody’s shifting here 😭 if you like fantasy romance books, stars, enemies to lovers, magical forests, angst, etherealism, I bet your ass would want to shift here. I plan to be Kalisa, and so far I don’t want to change the plot

Futuristic K-Pop DR 💭

Also self explanatory. I do have a filled version of this DR up if anyone wants to use it (It’s not in my current format tho cuz the script is old asf😭). I scripted in a contestant show where the contestants would come from different planets (Mars, Earth, and Kepler smth… I don’t remember the numbers)

Better CR DR 💭

The place I’ll probably be permashifting to

Hallows Ball DR 💭

Okay so I started this script like 2 years ago or smth and I was supposed to finish it before Halloween (it’s a masquerade ball DR but with a twist) and I just haven’t finished it yet 😭 let’s hope I finish it this year

How to Get my Husband on my Side DR

Another manhwa DR!

TGCF DR

I bought the first book to read bc I absolutely loved the anime 😭😭 I haven’t read more than like 30 pgs… I just really don’t like it when books are in third person 😭😭

Fantasy Kpop DR 💭

I completely forgot about this DR until I went through my TikTok account to see how ugly my themes were 😭😭 Basically this DR is set in a fantasy world, each of the kpop groups I scripted in are of different species (fae, vampires, elves, etc…) and I’ve gotta gather certain groups to help me find artifacts in every single kingdom so that magic doesn’t disappear (so corny omfggg…)

Hogwarts DR

I only wanted to shift here bc everyone else wanted to 😭😭

Old Kpop DR 💭

Not gonna shift here anymore, but the script is complete 😭😭 I remade it for my Kpop contestant DR

Kpop Contestant DR 💭

Self explanatory, there’s filled and non filled versions on my linktree

My Own Kpop Group DR 💭

This script happens in the same reality as my Kpop contestant one, this is this group I’ll be in once my contestant group disbands. My own Kpop group is time and mythology themed!

Laurier Academy DR 💭

An actual idol school DR, you learn how to be a Kpop idol + a bunch of other stuff. I made a whole school website for this DR and there’s a four versions of this script:

Filled Co-Ed

Empty Co-Ed

Filled Girls Only

Empty Girls Only

(Co-ed is all genders in one school)

Elite School DR 💭

Idk why anyone uses this script bc not only is it ugly but the formatting is 😨😨 this was my first script that I posted to TikTok, and it has all the characters from my other DRs as students. Idk why, but I made everyone has an animal form. Mines a cat (kinda boring but I wanna be able to sneak around 😭)

Dragon Rider Academy (Aethergarde Academy DR) 💭

There’s also a filled version of this script in my linktree, don’t recommend it tho cuz it’s also poorly formatted and ugly. I think this was the second script I posted on my TikTok account

Shifting Library DR (Realmwalker Library) 💭

It’s a shifting library but better! All the books here are written by shifters. There’s different sections for world building, storytimes, quizzes, fanfics (of other ppls DRs), tips & methods, nsfw storytimes (adults only plz), philosophy related to shifting, and discussions about shifting (idk why I didn’t just merge discussions with philosophy..). Don’t be surprised if some or most of the shifters here aren’t human! I scripted that all non malevont beings that shift can come here; this does also mean that the books are automatically translated into the language you understand best. Oh and the authors aren’t always going to be human.

Love and Deepspace DR

My script for this one is pretty much complete, but I really want to know more about MC’s evol before shifting here 😭

Mental Health DR

I won’t talk about this DR at all on TikTok or on here (sorry) bc it’s super personal and I don’t want to seem like a damn baby 😭😭. I’m actually kind of scared of men irl, plus I didn’t have the best high school experience in my DR. My goal with this DR is to practice talking to people and get over my fear of men. This DR is my first ever DR; my original intent with shifting is to help get over my fear of men + people in general, especially taller people

Waiting Room

My waiting room is essentially an isekai manhwa mansion 😭😭 I scripted that there’s a serving cart with one of those 3 tiered afternoon snack things + milk tea, the milk tea has special properties that calm me down immediately when I drink it. My goal is to use the smell of the tea to know that I’ve shifted, and to drink the tea so I don’t fuck myself over and shift back to my OR 😭😭

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netherworldpost · 1 year

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Good morning and thank you for joining the Saturday Morning Randomly Selected Date to Disclose Progress for Netherworld Post Office

or the SMRSDDPNPO for clarity

ONE: The above image is from Peyroux Dispatch #011. The first order of business is to announce the plans to create a web version of the Dispatch archives is underway and going nicely.

It will of course be free to access, and the PDF will remain free as well. This is not a limited time offer, there are no plans to alter availability.

(This is image is from Peyroux Dispatch issue #006)

TWO: The plans to re-launch the Dispatch in a new format, under a new name, in keeping with the rebranding of Evil Supply Co. -> Netherworld Post Office is going great.

The new version has a tentative name, I'm not prepared to release it at this time.

It is tentatively going to be in color and will probably be zine-sized rather than newspaper due to production necessity.

THREE: I have located a continuously data-stream update system that runs 24/7/365 with (for the purposes of my use) infinite variables.

Do you play an RPG?

Have you ever thought "I wish my character could be a corrupt rogue in charge of a bank that lent money to my fellow players with interest rates that continuously but slightly changed so I could enrich myself at their expense?"

(...am I the only one obsessed with taking characters and adding super mundane things to them...)

"I am creating an orc clan in my game. I need the number of orcs to change, subtly, over the course of the hour we play. And I want the numbers to again subtly change when we re-convene in two weeks for the next game -- in a pattern that is reasonable to belief, but unpredictable.""

Good news!

I'm building a system that will allow you to do this!

I'm working on a "MAKE MATH HAPPEN" spell that will make said data table work.

I legitimately don't know if anyone will use it but I'm hoping people who play RPGs say "holy crap that can help me do..."

The site will be free to use and neat and I'm hoping people will find use with it.

I had the idea many years ago when I hacked a client's phone to ring whenever someone bought or sold goats using public data streams.

Goats were chosen because they are cute, it had nothing to do with the client.

Randomly in meetings the client's phone would just start wildly beeping when a certain threshold of goat sales were made and then turn off when a different threshold of goat-data was achieved.

It showed me the power + hilarity of math-data-chaos.

I ran the experiment for about a week before dismantling it.

It was an amazing week.

They never paid their invoices to me on time and this was my way of dealing with the frustration of having to argue about contractually obligated late fees.

This is devolving into, like, five stories at once so I'm going to adjourn this morning's SMRSDDPNPO presentation

(laugh)

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delgado-master · 2 years

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Non-exploitative mobile apps

These are all apps that I like enough to play often. None of these apps have currency that can be bought with money, and none have loot boxes/gatcha mechanics. These are all available on iPhone (unfortunately I’m locked in at this point), and I’ll mark which are available on Android with an asterisk. I’ll also mention if they’re available on Steam. These are also listed in no particular order, and any iap or advertisements are listed. None of this is paid sponsorship.

Free Apps

Baker Business 3*: You get to run a little bakery, making all sorts of breads and pastries. You can buy one time iap that expands the gameplay, and watch advertisements if you choose to speed cooking up (which is entirely unnecessary)

MinuteFrontier*: An RPG made by a Japanese game developer that makes a ton of similar RPGs (this is just my favorite of the bunch). You travel through various areas fighting monsters. Combat’s easy and can be done with one hand

Amazing Loot Grind*: This is literally what I do to get the dopamine of opening loot boxes without spending real money. Theoretically you could watch ads to get benefits, but that hasn’t worked since I got the app. This app may eventually be too outdated to play, but it’s fun.

Auction Wars: Storage King*: Basically you bid on storage containers, and gain money from the contents. Really simple game play. I bought it like 10 years ago and it’s still fun.

The Sink Gods* (steam): Entirely free point and click adventure.

Fluxx*: Great card game where the rules constantly change, iap is an expansion and a zombie version. I have multiple physical versions of this.

Evolution* (linux, mac & windows $2): barely a game, but you get to mess around with machine learning

Paid Games

(Cannot find the price -_-) The Randominion: Roguelike game that’s very luck based. You will lose. A lot. But I’ve played it so much I have the fifth high score on Game Center.

$5 - $6 Dealer’s Life 2* (steam): You run a pawn shop, buying low and selling high. Simple enough.

$5 Tsuro*: A really amazing board game that I have the physical to, you make paths and try to stay on the board the longest. The mobile version has 3 alternate game modes (including a single player mode)

$1 Loopical*: Puzzle game where you make a bunch of loops, also has a sequel (Loopical Pro*, $2)

$7 Citizens of Rome* (Steam $10): This is a life simulator game set in the Roman Republic. The iPhone game is mod-supported, which frankly amazes me (the android game is currently not due to file management issues). It is also completely screen reader/voice over compatible.

Bonus: because I entirely forgot to add these two games to the list

Seedship* (Mac, windows): a free game where you are controlling an ai that is trying to find a suitable home for its human cargo. The ship is falling apart.

$10 Beyond the Chiron Gate (Mac, windows, Linux (browser)): a game where an exploration crew explores the galaxy to try to keep the gate to the rest of the galaxy open.

#I have a lot more games I could’ve added but the list is getting long #so if you want game recs you can send in an ask and I’ll respond (tell me if you have android)#I have so many games on my phone and the only ones I keep are ones with minimal exploitation #i left premium currency games out because you can easily overspend (ask how I know$#but for asks I may include games that have premium currency that isn’t in short supply

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lulu2992 · 3 months

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Is there anyway you could send the files of the game?

To be honest, I’m uncomfortable with doing this for two reasons.

The first one is that the game is huge and that sending all the files would be difficult. When I bought Far Cry 5 several years ago on PC, I think it was around 70 GB, and they’ve since added more downloadable content so the whole game must be even bigger now!

The second reason is that sharing what is essentially a full, dematerialized version of a game is basically piracy, and I don’t want to do that. However, I remember seeing modders in the Ubisoft Star Program, so they don’t seem to have a problem with modding. Even if you don’t necessarily want to make or install mods, it’s totally possible to use modding tools to simply see what’s in the files. If you want more information on the tools, there are online tutorials, and I know the modding community has a Discord.

There are Far Cry 5 sound files on @voices-of-hope-county, and you can find many links to other audio compilations or useful files (such as transcripts of all in-game dialog) in the pinned post. Sometimes, there are Ubisoft+ free trials, so if you don’t already own Far Cry 5, you can download the full game (and many others) for free and keep all the files even when the trial is over. From time to time, the game also becomes temporarily free, so that’s another way you can get all the files (legally) and keep them forever!

So, I’m sorry, but I won’t send hundreds of thousands of game files... But as I said, there are tools (one of them is even mentioned on the Wiki) to help you easily extract them yourself. If I managed to do that despite having zero experience in modding or coding and not knowing anything about game files in general, I believe everyone can :)

#maybe there are people who would be okay with doing that but I’m not #sorry it just feels wrong to me #I hope you understand #far cry 5 #FCBConverter works really well and is easy to use in my opinion #I also used other programs (for the same results) but this one is good #I learned literally everything as I went along #it was intimidating at first but I loved it!#and all the questions I had had already been asked (and answered) on forums so that was cool too #thank you modders for all the tools and tutorials #as I’ve said before you’re the real MVPs

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adelle-ein · 1 year

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CSP 2.0 features test and rant

I bought my copy of CSP in 2022 due to a variety of Wacom-caused convoluted circumstances, meaning I get the "upgrade" to version 2.0 for free. So, because I enjoy talking about (and shittalking) digital art programs....my thoughts on the "upgrade." To summarize, this update is basically the same as various pre-2022 CSP updates, adding a handful of useful and some godly-sounding features. It doesn't change anything fundamental about the program, really, although allegedly background saves are faster and more reliable now (massive dick move to lock that behind a paywall!) On this PC, I really only get lag on background saves with huge files or if I haven't saved at all for hours, so I haven't really tested that aspect. Other features are: a new brush setting that allows for allegedly more realistic color mixing, a few new 3d model options, an AI auto-shading program, and ~*~align tools ~*~ which really should have been implemented like...five years ago minimum but hey. But, hey, are these features actually as ~life changing~ as Celsys makes them sound? Traditionally no but let's find out

Upon installation I was immediately greeted by said align tools. They were just...there.

Fantastic UI decision I love it. Anyway I couldn't get this stupid window to be part of a sidebar, or treated as a tool, or anything except for a floating window. God knows why it has to be its own "palette" instead of being just a regular tool like liquify etc, but I ended up getting rid of it. figure I'll put it back whenever I need it. It seems to work fine, though in usual CSP fashion it is excessively complicated if reasonably easy to figure out.

And now the new brush color mixing setting (new brushes on the right/bottom). This was the only feature I was personally really excited for. It's something of an improvement and feels a little closer to Krita's infinitely superior painting engines. There are replacements for nearly all of the "thick paint" default brushes, some pastels, and a few assorted others. The "wet wash" brush still lags horrifically at every size even on blank canvases, just fyi.

The updated brushes have the "ver 2.0" tag. And I'm not sure if this was added in a recent update or my own faulty memory, but you can add multiple default brushes from the "add defaults" window now, thank god. I remember having to reopen the damn thing and add them one by one.

I painted this Celica entirely using the new defaults (plus design pencil for the lineart and a custom watercolor for the background, but the painting is all the defaults.) It's definitely a step up, again it feels more like Krita which is my favorite program for painting. Is it worth the upgrade price, though? For me personally, not really.

The head model seems to work well enough, it has settings to let you adjust the features and seems nicer than the various user-made options on the asset store. That being said, using and manipulating the 3d assets is as obtuse and frustrating as ever, and I personally think they make my art look incredibly stiff and robotic, so idk if I'll be using this much.

Just to illustrate how little I use the models, apparently I didn't even have them installed. I had to redownload the entire default asset set to get my hands on them so I could test out the "hand pose" thing. Basically, CSP claims that you can take a picture of your hand and have the model instantly recreate that hand pose. It doesn't look like you can just...use an existing picture. Because that would be too useful. Get posing and upload yourself to the CSP AI instead.

No pictures, because I couldn't get a shot on my shitty webcam without my face in it, but it was unimpressive. The poses were...vaguely similar to the pictures, I guess, but not exactly the pinnacle of accuracy.

This was a straight-fingered peace sign, for example. It's in the general realm of correct, but...not what I was aiming for.

I never use the text tool, for the record - I don't really do comics, and also I hate it. Even with the update, it is still not...good. Better than Krita's, maybe? At least by a bit. But still quite awful. And that's bizarre to me, because this is what was originally *manga studio*, used and promoted primarily by manga and comic artists. But its text tools suck, as well as its general graphic design capabilities.

Trying out the new fog settings...it just looks like a gradient, honestly. I'm not sure why this would ever be helpful. School-live vibes from my little experiment here (i've never watched school-live lol)

Multilayer liquify actually works decently. There's a jolt of lag when you start it and at the end when your changes register, but the actual action of moving your cursor is fairly smooth, unexpectedly. I did it with a huge stack of layers and was pleasantly surprised by the results. That being said, liquify in CSP is really finicky, and even that little bit of lag might prevent it from being a consistently usable tool in my workflow. Not sure yet.

As for the AI shading assist....

I tried a bunch of old .csp drawings and the only one I could even get it to run on was the Eunie above. And it still looked like absolute shit no matter how I messed with the settings. I could have tried to do every layer individually but I just didn't have the patience for a feature I frankly don't want, AND that's not what it was advertised for so I don't see that as a valid test anyway. I just couldn't get this one working, it looks hideous, and I have no desire to have something be shaded for me automatically. Flatting, lineart cleanup, sure! Not the lighting and creativity and stuff that's actually fun! Hard pass.

There's also a fish-eye ruler. I don't see this ever being useful for me because I honestly don't like fish-eye perspective much. Meh.

So...yeah. That's all. That's the upgrade. It's not an impressive upgrade by any means, and clearly just a handful of assorted desirable features Celsys deliberately left out of the last year or so of updates in order to try and bill them as "2.0" now. No significant improvement to the base program, just assorted bells and whistles. And of course, even if you pony up for the flat upgrade fee, you do not get access to any new features going forward. Even if they finally drop a decent selection of filters or make the text tool workable, we plebians will have to pay if we want the goods. And get any features we don't continually pay for revoked.

Wait, how does that work? Yeah, Celsys has been incredibly bad at explaining their bizarre new plans. People have no idea what's going on -- they think CSP is sub-only now, that their copies of 1.0 will be revoked, that everyone's getting 2.0 for free, that they can pay for individual updates they want...nope. TLDR: You can pay a flat price to get version 2.0 now, either as a base program or an upgrade to 1.0. Users who bought 1.0 recently (roughly mid-2022 to 2023, I believe), like me, get that upgrade for free. Alternately, you can pay a yearly or monthly fee to get not only 2.0 but any other continuous upgrades Celsys rolls out between 2.0 and 3.0 (if, say, they add better filtering options or an automatic flatting tool, you must pay for the subscription to get them.) If you at any time end that subscription, ALL updates are revoked and you return to 2.0. 3.0 will be available eventually under the same system. Mmmm microtransaction art program (except worse, you can't even keep your microtransactions and this program ALREADY HAD microtransactions through premium assets to begin with! aaaaaaa why does ibispaint have a bad reputation and not this?)

Also, bear in mind that if you upgrade your 1.0 license to 2.0, you lose your 1.0 license immediately and permanently. 1.0 licenses are for two computers and 2.0 licenses are for one. Reddit confirms that you will be forced to uninstall from one computer if you upgrade the license. So if you have CSP installed on two computers, absolutely do not upgrade, you're essentially throwing away one copy of the program to add a small handful of mediocre features to your other copy. This might be one of the most disgusting parts of the whole deal, actually, because BOY they do not make this clear up front and their little stans are defending it tooth and nail.

So, what's the pricing plan for all this? Um...honestly, I'm not sure. I'm navigating the website right now trying to figure it out and I am totally, utterly lost. The plan is distributed across several pages, and I suspect Celsys is relying heavily on machine translation, so things are...slightly incoherent. I believe it's only $10/year for the PRO (not EX, which is $30) upgrade pass, which isn't unreasonable on the surface, but the "revoke features if you don't keep paying" bit sure is. Not to mention how many user-made assets will be inaccessible to those without the same versions as the creators, or how people's 2.1+ files may break if that person stops paying for their subscription...like, they don't deserve even $1 for pulling this shit and I'm really disappointed by the huge number of users I see not only buying into but defending this awful shit.

Celsys is clearly trying to be the next Adobe, gently easing their users into being forced to go fully subscription-only. We'll see how that works out for them, but I think they are drastically overestimating the loyalty of their userbase, the lack of alternatives, and their rate of use in the professional industry (unlike Adobe, nobody is mandating CSP in graphic design college courses....) They're slowly boiling the frog as we speak -- we'll see how long the userbase can stand it. Personally, I would suggest just waiting for 3.0 - nothing in this upgrade is exceptional, and I wouldn't assume anything else the devs put out for the next couple years is.

TLDR: mediocre update is mediocre, fuck celsys

#csp #txt #lace reviews

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