Welcome to the vortex! It's filled with many random and fandom things. (Disclaimer: While mostly tame, mature content may show up at times and will be tagged accordingly. Enjoy!)
PSA the “si” in shared YouTube links stand for Seal Indicator. This means there is a nefarious seal tracking your information and will give YouTube your data in exchange for fish. Please remove the part after “?si=” before you click on it or share the link with others because it is a tracking token!
hi guys! discord is doing a survey on how people would like ai to be integrated into discord. take it and say fuck no to every question. when you get to “in general, how do you feel about discord inegrating ai features?”, respond that you would actively get everyone you know off of discord and wouldn’t pay for nitro or other shop items if they added ai features.
watch out for the trap! there’s ONE QUESTION where the last option *isn’t* the max ‘no AI’ option, read each part carefully to be sure
Cara is the only art platform I have found that not only prohibits AI art from being uploaded on the site, but also offers their users to Glaze their art (which protects them from ai mimicry). They are also working on implementing Nightshade, which actively poisons ai training.
I have used Cara for a couple of months now, and I hope more people check it out. It’s really nice. 💚
We need these kinds of places for artists, and it’s also FREE (despite the staff paying out of their own pockets to keep it running).
reblogging this as I was just complaining about the rampant AI usage on pinterest yesterday lol
Even if you’re not an artist, I highly recommend signing up just to lurk because it’s been such a lovely wholesome experience free of the noise and brainrot that comes with the ads and reels on instagram. As a writer I think it has a niche for connecting authors with cover designers and illustrators. I’m documenting my experience in this thread if anyone wants to follow along!
The more you look into a lot of famous tumblr Kickstarter scams with your thirty-something brain the more it’s like. Man these weren’t even scams they were just incredibly poorly managed creative projects that fizzled out. This is a thing that literally happens all the time it’s just people outside the immediate team/investors aren’t usually paying attention to it. And also everyone involved is like 19 so they don’t know how a complex, multi-year creative project works.
There’s a weird grey area between “intentionally scamming people” and “brimming with unwarranted optimism about your ability to make an AAA game in one year with two of your friends who have never even made a twine game before.”
I still think the most devastating enshittification I’ve ever seen has been picrew. One of the few dress-up game websites left that’s not flash-based and it’s become DRENCHED in ads. You can’t open the home screen without being blasted by at least three or four ads. You can’t open two picrews in a row without watching a video ad first. When you have a picrew open the ads cover up the different options and sometimes even stack on each other so you have to hit like 2 or 3 different x buttons to get it to go away, only for more to appear seconds later. Evil world
It got worse - they added a subscription service
WHAT
For once I can be the one to promote alternate sites, my time to shine has finally come
Now I will say I do use an adblocker so I can’t say how many ads all these places have, but- Here’s some other places you can go to dress up little characters on your screen!
meiker.io - A free dress-up/character creator tool/platform filled with a TON of neat little games. There ARE ads on this site unfortunately but imo they aren’t overwhelming (and from what I understand them running ads helps keep the site free, so). I’ve been using this site off and on for years already bc most games are fullbody instead of headshots, which I find more helpful w oc creation, and I can say in my experience it all runs extremely smoothly :) of everything here this site is the most similar to picrew
DollDivine - One of the classic dress-up game websites. Not only is it still up but it is actively being updated with new games, and the owner has been working to try and transfer the old flash games into a program called Ruffle so that they can still be played. Most of the games that I played when I was younger are already back up and working again thanks to this. DollDivine is also the host site for the games featured on Rinmaru Games back in the day so if you were like me and lived and breathed that site for most of your pre-teen years, you will be delighted to know that many of those games were saved here! :D
Azalea’s Dolls - Another classic one that is still running and still being added to! If you like Disney/fairytale-esque dress-up games you will love this website, they have some BEAUTIFUL games. They have also been transferring many of their old games into Ruffle, so a good chunk of those will be working again too.
PastelKatto Games - A site owned/managed by one of my personal favourite developers back in the day. While the creator has moved on from publishing their own games they still update the site with other games every so often, and the catalog of games they created over the course of the last decade or so is absolutely worth your time. The range of options they would give to players for characters included a wide range of skin tones, vitiligo, missing limbs + prosthetics, scars/burn marks, and more. Plus their art is also just really, really pretty.
VeggieStudio - If you like anime-esque games then this is the site for you. Their catalog may be quite small, but all the games on this site are beautifully drawn. You may recognize their style if you played any Rinmaru games, as they did the art for a few of those back in the day.
Most of these sites mainly feature games that center around female/feminine characters, but there ARE games where you can make guys/masculine characters as well. But just a heads up in advance. None of them are hardwired for pfp creation either, so if you’re looking for that you might not find a lot here. But otherwise, def check these sites out! The flash purge hit dress-up game communities HARD but people have been working to keep things running in some form or another ever since the news dropped. It’s been rough, but all has not been lost and a lot of the old games I used to play are now playable again! :D
btw while people continue to fight the system don’t forget about Undue Medical Debt (formerly RIP Medical Debt), a charity that buys and forgives medical debt. on average a donation of $10 will forgive $1,000 of medical debt.
I’m fairly confident that this is now the one original post I’ve made that has gotten the most notes, and I honestly couldn’t be happier. the more attention we give this, the higher the chances that someone will see this and donate. medical debt is both one of the most crushing things a person can deal with and one of the stupidest things humanity has invented. and if you live in the US, I have no doubt that you’ve had to deal with medical debt in your life, either for yourself or a loved one. even a small donation can do so much good, and now is the time of year when we are encouraged to think of others.
EVERYONE BE CAREFUL. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN PHISHING SITE (first link)
(the link is purple bc i clicked on it to get the link w/o special characters to report to various phising page report places).
the page leads to what appears to be the normal archive page, w/ the popup about the privacy policy & everything, with the url https://xn–iao3-lw4b.ws/media DO NOT LOG IN. THEY ARE HERE TO STEAL YOUR LOGIN CREDENTIALS. LOOK AT URLS BEFORE ENTERING ANY PERSONAL INFO.
Wait, do people know about the Before I Play wiki?
I have used this for….. at this point easily over 6 years. It’s a wiki where there will be low-spoiler/non-spoiler hints about just stuff you would want to know before playing a game.
It’s always stuff like…. “Vitality in this game is useless, put your points in everything else first” or “Don’t leave the second hub town until you buy X item, it’ll become unobtainable.”
Lemme pick an example almost everyone will know. From the Animal Crossing New Horizons page, the first tip is:
Nearly everything on the island is movable later, including all buildings and even cliffs and rivers. The main things that are fixed are the stuff on the border of the island (river mouths, beaches, rocks/peninsulae, the dock and the airport) and the resident services plaza, so picking your island layout should be based around that primarily.
That’s stellar advice, tbh, given what you’ll know about the game 30 hours in instead of 30 minutes.
Not every game is covered obviously and not every piece of advice is good, it’s all subjective, BUT….. I look up almost every game I play for the first time, just to keep stuff in mind. The SMT4 page had top tier advice imo.
Things you can watch/do instead of YouTube, For those who may have trouble finding things to do.
1. Internet Archive. Has plenty of videos to watch, plenty of games you can play that are emulated right on the website. You can also find entire collections of roms. For emulators, check out Emulation General Wiki to find the best emulator for the system you want to emulate.
2. r/piracy has a wiki full of safe places to read comics and manga, to watch anime and cartoons, and to watch movies.
3. Virtualbox, you can set up a Windows XP virtual box and get old PC games from Internet Archive. You can also check out CD Game World if you need a no-cd patch.
4. Saltybet. A Livestream of MUGEN with thousands of characters fighting against each other, sometimes things get hilarious. Runs 24/7.
5. The Cutting Room Floor, spend hours reading up on cut content from your favorite games.
6. Lost Media Wiki, read up on lost movie, books, animation, video games, etc.
7. Neocities, learn coding and make your own website!
8. WebDSR, explore shortband radio
9. Radio Garden, listen to radio stations from around the world
10. Every Noise At Once, explore the widest archive of music genres, with samples and Spotify playlists
11. My Retro TV, pick and era and watch popular television from that time period
writing tip: searching “[place of origin]ish names” will get you a lot of stuff and nonsense made up by baby bloggers.
searching “[place] census [year]” will get you lists of real names of real people who lived in that place.
I feel like I’m constantly shilling for them but BehindTheName.com, the only baby name site that doesn’t feel like it’s run by mommy bloggers, includes census-based graphs for dozens of countries/regions (though not all of them go back very far yet)
And you can expand them to see rank, number of babies, and percentage of babies and add a second name to compare. (in 1973 four percent of babies were named Jennifer! 1 in 25!!!)
Also this. Cursed.
@homoqueerjewhobbit what name did you search for your example, and what’s going on with Moldova?
Those are the graphs for Samuel. They only have 1 year’s data for Moldova right now, so that’s why it’s a straight line. Similarly, they only have 2 years for Mexico right now. The US goes back to 1880. I’m not sure how much of that is publicly available/translated records and how much of it is that it’s like 1 or 2 guys maintaining a website of 27000 names and a finite amount of time to format and upload.
You can’t advertise BehindTheName for writers without mentioning the advanced search! You can search names based on cultural origin and usage, gender (including unisex), meaning, and even things like meter and number of syllables, or famous namesakes (you can also see a list of famous namesakes on every name’s page, along with meaning, history, related names, alternate spellings in different languages, the above popularity graphs, and more).
I wouldn’t even call BehindTheName a baby name site. They have a surname sister site and a random name generator with tons of variables to set that is very clearly intended to be used for fictional characters (iirc it can even generate a cause of death? I haven’t looked at it in many years so it might have changed but these things predate generative AI so unless it’s been forcefully enshittified it shouldn’t be slop). Like, you can use it for baby names, but the website isn’t explicitly intended for that purpose. This website caters to us.
-NeedyMeds - a nonprofit that helps pay for prescriptions. Thank you to @allitdoesispause for the suggestion! They also suggested checking the manufacturers website for a paitent assistance program, which can give you a coupon for free or cheaper meds.
-Ask for a discount card - thank you to @cccshutdown for the reminder!
-Walmart - They have a $4 generic list! Thank you to @tristese !
- Nurx - is a Planned Parenthood alternative. You can get birth control and other medication here. Thanks to @tomhenks!
- Costco Pharmacy - which offers discounts and you don’t need a membership to access. Thank you @alarmed-father!
- Walgreens RX Savings Finder - This let’s you compare prices and applies discount codes from sites like GoodRx to find the most affordable option. Thank you to @maledictionwolf !
- CVS - which automatically applies discounts if you don’t have insurance. Thank you, @imtrying-ok !
- MDsave - which provides lower costs for self-pay procedures. Thank you to @mustacchiofurioso who also recommended the next entry.
Stay safe, everyone. Things are about to get much, much worse in the US.
EDIT: if you’re worried about doctor/therapy appointments, see if there’s a sliding scale clinic near you (and ask your therapist if they offer sliding scale prices)
discord has been pushing its new uk online safety act changes early for some users. this screenshot belongs to a 32 year old who used discords built in face scanner to verify their age. the scanner said they were 11 years old, and instantly suspended the account, with no option to try again or appeal, and the suspension will automatically end in 2027, when they’re “old enough” to use discord.
DO NOT SCAN YOUR FACE TO VERIFY YOUR AGE
if you really want to verify your age, use a different option available. don’t trust the face scan.
A website with tips on how to avoid the face ID system for Bluesky and other platforms.
if you’re in the throes of cosmic despair i cannot recommend museums enough. art or science or history it doesn’t matter. oh we’re all connected, all of us and everything, throughout all time and space, and no one, no one, no one is alone? awesome. that’s what i thought i just wanted to make sure.
If you are in th USA and on SNAP and can’t afford museum prices, check out Museums For All, which offers free or reduced admission to a LOT of museums, zoos, etc. to families on SNAP.
PLEASE use this service. People using it helps make sure funding for it remains available!
It reduced our cost getting into our local INCREDIBLE art museum from $30 to $1. We still had to pay for the special traveling exhibit, but the reduced price meant we COULD see the traveling exhibit!!!
And spread this link as often as you can. Email it to friends on SNAP right now. It is so important that lower income people get to see things like animals and art, too. It should not be limited to the rich. Thanks to this program, in many places, it isn’t.
The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist,” DuckDuckGo said in a post on X. “While it won’t catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.
Left: AI filter is off Right: AI filter is on
Another tip for DDG - if you want to permanently get rid of DDG’s AI features (which you can turn off in settings, but only temporarily) - for now you can just use noai.duckduckgo.com as your search engine. Works as advertised in the name.
ALT
