terresdebrume:

antarctica-starts-here:

Note: This article is aimed at people all across the spectrum of levels of experience with computers.  You might see a lot of stuff you already know; then again, you might learn one or two things that hadn’t showed up on your radar yet.  Be patient.

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, one of his plot points of the story was something called the Memory Hole. They were slots all over the building in which Winston Smith worked, into which documents which the Party considered seditious or merely inconvenient were deposited for incineration.  Anything that the Ministry of Truth decided had to go because it posed a threat to the party line was destroyed.  This meant that if anyone wanted to go back and double check to see what history might have been, the only thing they could get hold of were “officially sanctioned” documents written to reflect the revised Party policy.  Human memory’s funny: If you don’t have any static representation of something to refer back to periodically, eventually you come to think that whatever people have been telling you is the real deal, regardless of what you just lived through.  No mind tricks are necessary, just repetition.

The Net’s a lot like that.  There are literally piles and piles of information everywhere you look, but most of it resides on systems that aren’t yours.  This blog is running on somebody else’s server, and it wouldn’t take much to wipe it off the face of the Net.  All it would take is a DMCA takedown notice with no evidence (historically speaking, this is usually the case).  This has happened in the past a number of times, including to an archive maintained by Project Gutenberg and documents explicitly placed into the public domain so somebody could try to make a buck off of them.  This is a common enough thing that the IETF has made a standard HTTP error code to reflect it, Error 451 – Unavailable for legal reasons.

So, how would you make local copies of information that you think might be pulled down because somebody thought it was inconvenient?  For example, climatological data archives?

The fastest and easiest way is to use your web browser.  Just about every web browser today can save web pages as PDF files which you can open with software like Acrobat Reader (remember that?) or your web browser (most modern browsers can display PDF files natively).  For Firefox, Iceweasel and Internet Explorer, hit control-p and select “Print to file.“  The same goes for Google Chrome and Chromium.  You can then copy these PDF files to offline storage to archive them, if you so choose.

Because I’m predominently a Firefox user, my go-to utility for saving anything is an add-on called Scrapbook; it’s one of the first five add-ons I install, in point of fact.  Whenever I come to an interesting web page that I want to keep a copy of (which comes in handy when I’m working on something but I’m on an airplane flight that doesn’t have wi-fi) I reflexively right-click someplace inside the page and select Save Page, and then pick a folder to drop the page into.  I’ve lost count of the number of web pages I’ve saved this way, easily a couple of thousand.  There seem to be two similar extensions for Chrome called PageArchiver and SingleFile.  I’ve tried the former (incidentally, it depends on the add-on SingleFile Core) and I’ve yet to get it to work. I haven’t tried the latter add-on yet.  For saving video footage (like much of the mirrored street and news footage scattered all over my website) I use Video Download Helper.  When I come to a page that has a video I want to save (like Youtube) I click on the icon in the bottom-right corner, select the highest resolution video (width by height), and pick a directory to save it to.  There is a similar add-on for Chrome called Video Downloader Professional, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I don’t know if there are similar plug-ins for Internet Explorer or Safari.  I’ve not used either of them.

If you’re not concerned that they’ll go away anytime soon, or be asked to remove certain archived entries (see also HTTP Error 451) there are some online archives that you can ask to mirror single web pages and make them available for posterity.  The first is archive.fo – drop in a URL or use their handy bookmarklet (which I’ve used often to good effect) and they’ll make a complete snapshot of the web page at the URL.  If the page in question already exists it’ll tell you so along with how old the copy is; you have the option to replace it with a newer snapshot.  You can also search their archive for a page and capture the shortened URL of their copy of the page to return to it later.  The Internet Archive also has a page to which you can submit a URL (look for “Save Page Now” on the page) and one of their bots will make a snapshot of it when they reach it in their input queue.  Of course, you can also use one of the above personal methods to make local copies of those snapshots.

If you’re feeling adventurous you can copy the content into a page on a public site, such as somebody’s public (or private) Etherpad instance.  If you’ve never used it, Etherpad is basically an online, collaborative text editor not too different from Google Docs.  Everything you’d expect of a WYSIWYG text edit is there, although multiple people can edit the same document at the same time, and there is a chat function (which you can toggle on and off) so the editors can talk through a side channel.  The downside of this is that anybody who finds the page can change its for whatever reason, and that means that the contents of the document can be altered without your knowing it (though you can also roll the page back to an earlier point in time of its history).  If you’re going to go the Etherpad route, make sure it’s your own or run by somebody you trust and is behind a password.  You could also copy-and-paste the contents of the page into a site like Pastebin, where you can’t edit the page once you save it, but on the other hand a page can also mysteriously vanish if someone demands it of the people running it.

So, there you have it.  If you feel that you need to save news articles, video footage, or press releases from the Memory Hole, here are the resources you can use to do it.

Never forget the way things used to be, so things to come will not seem normal.

@caloub

mulattafury:

people ask me a lot about drawing poc, more specifically “how” to do it. my kneejerk reaction is to get frustrated by it, because the answer is “just like you’d draw anything else.” it’s like the main excuse artists and writers use to not include poc in their art and in their worlds – they “don’t know how,” implying that we somehow operate by a separate set of rules, that while white characters don’t require a special set of considerations to be varied and textured and interesting, non-white characters are just an elusive series of step-by-step instructions that most creators just can’t be assed to learn or to include

i still feel that way

but

i guess i can understand that most instructive media focuses specifically on white aesthetics, proportions, skintones, and features, so there really is a need for more instructive material that is more inclusive

i can dig it

that said, there is a lot that i don’t know and am not good at and i don’t really feel comfortable trying to instruct other artists, but i’m fine with taking you through my thought processes a little

SO here’s some stuff about skintones. it’s not perfect, and there will never be a better teacher than the world around you for showing you what things look like and how to express them

first off, if you’ve ever seen me stream you know i don’t usually block in my shading with hard lines like this. i like to paint and sample colors as i go, but i’m trying to communicate my ideas about color a little better

but i’ve always used the same basic process for coloring skintones, any skintones, forever and always:

this is going to change up a little bit with directional lighting, colored lighting, environmental lighting, shit like that, but this is your basic procedure. the biggest mistake i think artists make is using skintone+black for shadows and skintone + white for highlights, and that results in pretty dull looking skintones

in the former image, i only varied the value of the main skin color, but in the latter i also varied the hue and saturation. doing so gives you more of an opportunity to add warmth and depth to your colors, as well as bring in environmental colors if you need to

you want to sample around the palette, use reds and purples and oranges, don’t just stay within the range of your base tone!

this applies for all colors, not just skin, but especially skin! you want skin to look alive, not plastic and dull

these same rules apply for most skintones

though it’s always going to be incredibly helpful to just look at references of the skintone you’re trying to draw, for little details like (for example), very dark skin, because there is a more extreme light/dark variation, will often look much more reflective than very light skin under the same lighting conditions

like so

because of this, you’ll want to work on using light more than shadow to describe form on dark skin

again, this is true of all colors, but especially skin, because you don’t want skin to look flat and lifeless!

the same rules can apply to fantasy skin tones. start with a base tone, then use warm, saturated colors to add light and shadow. sampling around the palette becomes really important for fantasy skintones if you are trying to make them look realistic/believable

this is especially true if, for whatever reason, you wanted to make a character with grey skin that looks alive and believable

OKAY THAT’S THE END OF OUR SHOW

pt90:

creepbites:

Start off with a crappy scanned/phone taken picture like so

Mess around with the SAI Filters, I usually go color deepen all the way to the left then mess with brightness and contrast until I find a good balance I like, then to top it off with a copied layer on multiply to make the lines darker

Click what I boxed off and the magic has already happened
you now are left with a clean lineart layer that you can color underneath to your liking : 0 Hell you can even color your lines however you want as well for a colored lineart

ok i wasn’t going to reblog this first but honestly this is such a life/time saver. you can get a neat lineart in minutes instead of using a hour (or more) on ‘copying’ the lineart digitally. share this as much as you can. especially since it’s on sai which is what most aspiring artists on this site use…

sexandtheastrology:

:

the power of birthdays stars & numbers the complete personology reference guide

if any of you are interested in the book but cant get it id recommend this website: http://www.thesecretlanguageofrelationships.com/lookup/

also on the left hand side if you click on birthdays it gives you a whole damn READ on your bday 🙂