Oh how I missed reading paper books!! I always have issues reading off backlit LCDs because of a shitty cocktail of my sensory issues causing backlights to sometimes bug my eyes and my maybe-astigmatism making text on backlit screens to look shitty from any distance (doubly so if it's high contrast). Plus there's really nothing beating the feeling of flipping through a paper book, and it gives you a real physical indicator of how far through things you are. Also, I'm a fucking weirdo, and I like sniffing books because sometimes library books in particular smell interesting (and in the case of books I get from Little Free Libraries/street libraries, it's tipped me off to a fine-looking book actually being musty and moldy and in need of being imprisoned in a plastic bag in the freezer for a bit)

We are in the middle of a wild-ass cold snap, it keeps getting to nearly -40°C at night. My bedroom window is awful and leaky and last night me and my mom had to put old pillows in the window to help keep the cold out. There was frost on the inside of the window. It's actually warming up a bit now, though. I'm scared my plants might freeze?

No idea what the fuck happened but I've just managed to like, not post anything at all for months apparently. Figured I'd write something simple to try and get back into the swing of things.

I made a Social Site Feature of the "Month" about piclog some time ago (what do you mean that was literally the second-last proper post i made??), basically it's like a semi-social image sharing website that hyper-compresses images, resizing them down to have a max width and/or height of 400 pixels, and also applying the literal highest level of JPEG compression to them. For an example, here's a side-by-side comparison of what a picture looks like both before I do any of my own editing as well as before it gets actually uploaded, and what it looks like after piclog has crunched it down:



It's weirdly fun to use, both as a viewer of stuff other people post (it's a really odd array of things because the lack of a way to directly comment on someone's uploads kinda turns it into a stream of consciousness type thing that goes largely unhindered by onlookers encouraging one type of thing or the other), but also as an uploader because the constraints make for something fun and interesting to consider everywhere along the way from taking the picture (if you're actually taking one with piclog in mind, which I only do on occasion, and others don't do at all because they upload things like memes) through to editing it and uploading it.

Levels of JPEG compression this high obviously muddle the details quite a bit, but it tends to get yet worse in certain circumstances. Consider this comparison of a photo I took much earlier on (literally my first ever piclog upload, actually):


Yeah, so as you can see, the details get super muddled when you're dealing with more muted colours, with the leaves of the plant here kind of fading into the wall, and most of the colour variation being focused on the orange bot that it's in, and the other pink-ish plant that's in front of it.

There's also this one from after I'd started figuring things out more, which is just downright unfortunate (and the before picture was actually edited to add saturation in this case but it wasn't enough!!):


This image just turned totally fucking grey!!!

I haven't actually looked up the JPEG format's specs so I don't super know the actual ins and outs of how it works (I'm actually having more fun trying to figure it out like it's a puzzle), but it's pretty clear to me that extremely high levels of compression will just obliterate all less saturated colours and I've often seen what appears to be these more muted colours just being squashed down to grey in other people's uploads. The actual amount of colours also seems maybe kind of limited too? But that one I'm less sure of.

So basically, I've developed a few different tactics to work with and around the limitations I've found so far with JPEG compression levels this high. One of the ones I started opting for initially was editing photos with muted colours to have higher levels of saturation. This alone can be kind of hit or miss, here's some examples of pictures I took when I was doing this and only this (no before/after comparisons now in part because I'm lazy, but also because I feel like it ruins it if I just post the originals of everything I've ever uploaded to piclog lol):


This one's pretty okay, I think. It's got some issues but it's nothing that makes the photo totally unreadable in the end.


This one I think I oversaturated too much, because the details here once again become super muddled just like what happens with very muted colours. In this case though at least the parsley is very distinct from everything around it.

So saturation is definitely not enough on its own, and I need to be careful with not going too overkill with it too because then it's the same problem of muddled details. But it's very helpful! I think that first picture would've been even less readable had I not opted to saturate it before upload. Another tactic I ended up developing was various ways of playing with the lighting, like intensifying the shadows a bit to help make details more distinct, or to do the same with intensifying just the highlights, or sometimes a combo of both. This is what I do on most images now. That set of images I used at the very beginning was an example of the combo of increasing saturation and playing with the shadow/highlights levels. Just to illustrate what that looks like, here's what the photo I actually uploaded to piclog, after having made edits to it, looks like:


This is almost even a better image in this form than the original, because it's a decent bit more readable even without the heavy compression. But there's also some weird details here I wouldn't like to keep if it were an image I was going to upload without the heavy compression, like his fur colour on his body is almost weirdly off? It looks like a totally different array of colours from those on his head, which it's not if you were to see him in person. But it makes his tabby stripes probably way more readable in the final piclog image than they would be otherwise.

One last tactic for images not taken with piclog in mind that I've come up with is to essentially do the above, but only to an isolated section of the image that's supposed to be the focus, and to sometimes even do the inverse to everything else (desaturating and flattening the differences in light and shadow) if the situation calls for it.



Here I just isolated the hibiscus flower, saturated it to hell, and then desaturated everything else. I don't recall if I did any light and shadows adjustment?


Outside of those editing-based solutions, if I were taking a photo specifically for piclog and had total control over the environment/scene, I'd try my best to minimize unnecessary detail and make sure the contrast between whatever object I'm taking a picture of and the background is relatively significant. I unfortunately don't really have good examples of actually doing this because I don't really have that kind of control in these situations, but I do have this photo where I was somewhat trying to apply that:



It's frankly a less "fancy" photo than the others I featured here, I mean I literally just took it because "lmao the letters are rubbed off this soda bottle so now it reads weird", but I'm hoping it should get the point across. I intentionally found a spot in my room I could take a picture of it while keeping it distinct enough from the background, and I think I did an okay job on that front.

Also worth a note: illustrations with minimal shading (or cell shading if so) and distinct lines renders well. I didn't know how else to fit that in here because I don't really upload stuff like that to piclog, except for a Neko Astume screenshot once.


So, uh, I don't know how to end this post, but there you have the list of things I've discovered thus far to make my resultant piclog uploads just look a tiny bit nicer. If ever I find something else substantial enough maybe I'll make another post, maybe I'll go over the same stuff in a more nicely formatted manner also. I dunno.

i am TOO tired to write anything for this week. so much for "i gotta write more dreamwidth posts" lmao

Welcome to another entry of SSFOTW! Since I talked about Status Cafe last week, this week I'll be talking about its sister site, piclog! If you haven't read the Status Cafe post, I'd definitely suggest it.

piclog is rather similar to Status Cafe with the main point of distinction being that it's focused on the sharing of images, rather than text-based status updates. Similar to how Status Cafe focuses on very short text as status updates, piclog focuses on JPEG images that are very small — both in maximum dimensions being limited to 400×400 pixels, and using the highest possible level of JPEG compression keeping filesizes low (the majority of the ones I've uploaded thus far are under 5 KB!). piclog's software is also written by m15o, the same person who wrote Status Cafe, which would explain some of the similarities.


visitor.jpg
The high level of compression can sometimes make certain images somewhat illegible, so piclog definitely doesn't work as a more typical image hosting website à la Imgur or catbox.moe, but it can make for a more gimmicky and, in my opinion, very fun way of sharing images. In my experience you'll definitely want to edit your images before uploading most times, as JPEG compression levels this high seem to respond best to bright colours, with more defined shadows sometimes helping a lot as well.


tetras.jpg
Just like Status Cafe, piclog also has the ability to add custom CSS to user pages through a <style> tag placed inside the user bio, with the site's default style being extremely basic. It also has a widget you can embed on your website displaying your most recent piclog upload, and is supposed to have RSS feeds for users which unfortunately appears to be broken at the moment. Just like Status Cafe the homepage shows the latest few posts from all users, and there similarly is no ability to comment on other people's images.


sleepychu.jpg
All in all, while I'm a very big fan of piclog, it's definitely not a site for everyone. The compression can muddle images a lot as was previously mentioned, and it almost requires that you take the things compression does to images into account even while you're taking photos (if that's what you're uploading anyways — there's definitely some people who just upload memes, game screenshots, or other content that doesn't involve photos) and sometimes the entire point of some images can in fact be the detail that would be destroyed in the process of uploading them here. If you're not super bothered by this though, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try, because working around these limitations can be really fun! A friend of mine said that the compression's destruction of detail can almost make images feel "mysterious", and I agree, with this actually causing me to upload some types of pictures I'd never bother to upload to somewhere with more high fidelity image quality.

Links

• piclog.blue
• My piclog.blue profile
• piclog source code

Hi, and welcome to the first SSFOTW mini post! These posts will be separate from the main series in that they're not really showcasing a particular social network site you can sign up to now, but will instead be talking about closely adjacent topics. I couldn't get the actual, normal post done in time this week (that's my own fault. You see, I was VERY BUSY playing Katamari Damacy and Cubivore) so I thought I'd talk about two social sites that I used to use and loved! I'd love to see new sites sprout up that are inspired by either of these ones, or even just similar to them unintentionally.

Hatena Haiku

Here's one I used to use all the time when I was younger. Some people might recognize Hatena as the company that runs/used to run Flipnote Hatena, Miiverse, and SplatNet on Nintendo's behalf, and some others might recognize them just as a fairly large Japanese internet services company and the place where you often see a bunch of Japanese blogs be hosted. Whatever your association with Hatena is, it seems comparatively few are familiar with its now-defunct service Hatena Haiku.

Hatena Haiku was a microblogging service that existed for varying amounts of time, depending on which language version you're thinking of. I don't know the exact date either language version started, like I just couldn't really find any information on it at all, but the English version shut down January of 2015, and the Japanese version March of 2019.

I personally found it to be pretty unique when compared to any other microblogging sites I've personally used before or since, having features others didn't, and a much slower and tight-knit-feeling community (I am of course basing this on my experiences of English Hatena Haiku, but it seems the Japanese version also had the same slow speed at the very least). It's worth a mention though that the last time I used Hatena Haiku was, obviously, a damn long time ago, with when I last used it probably being a year or so before the English shutdown even happened (the few times I browsed the Japanese version longingly before it shut down don't apply, since I never interacted with anyone and those stints were always very brief), so it's likely I may misremember some details of how it worked.

Every new root haiku would show up on the Hatena Haiku front page, so you could get a glimpse at everything that was going on at a given time. You could also see a list of the most active users at the moment (seen on the left of the above screenshot, the red column), and a list of the most active keywords at the moment as well (on the right, the green column).

Speaking of keywords, those were another feature of Hatena Haiku's that I thought was fairly unique. You're doubtlessly familiar with the hashtags system that Twitter and a bunch of other social media sites have, and keywords acted somewhat similarly, with some key differences that set them apart. Unlike hashtags, you could only set one per haiku, and only on root haikus, though I believe replies would show up as being part of the keyword matching that of the haiku they were replying to. I recall keywords also allowed spaces and didn't have any real charlimit, so some people would use them almost like titles on the English site on occasion.

Additionally, instead of the more traditional favourites or likes system you might be used to from most quick-moving social media sites, Hatena Haiku had the same unique system shared across all of Hatena services, still used to this day, called stars (Flipnote Hatena people will know what I'm talking about!!). They might not sound too different from favourites on name alone, but they were in fact fairly different. You could award multiple stars to one post, with users having an infinite amount of gold stars in particular you could hand out, so you could spam a post you really liked with 200 gold stars if you were determined enough. There also were colour stars, limited in quantity, which you could only either receive from other users or (unfortunately) purchase yourself. There's green, red, blue, and purple, ordered roughly from lowest rarity/price to highest.

I also vaguely remember it having the miscellaneous feature of an oekaki system too, something I always wanted to try myself, but most of the times I used Hatena Haiku were when I was using my DSi browser where it didn't work, so I got very few times to try it if any at all. Huge bummer for sure.


A picture of the Japanese Hatena Haiku homepage as of Feb. 19, 2012, fetched from archive.org.
Click thumbnail to view fullsize
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Legacy

Hatena Haiku... doesn't really have a legacy, at least not an English language one. I'm not aware of any sites that sprung up any time after its shutdown that try to occupy the same niche and maybe improve upon it, and I certainly don't get anyone going "oh, yeah, I remember that!" when I bring it up anywhere. I suspect that things might be a bit different at least in terms of the 'remembering Hatena Haiku even existed' department in Japanese-language communities, and I considered poking around a bit on my own to find out, but I don't have enough confidence in my Japanese skills yet to do that. If ever I encounter a Hatena Haiku inspired site that somewhat mimics its function though, you bet I'll be making a SSFOTW post about it. I will be on that shit, like white on rice.

OMGPOP

OMGPOP was a really fun one, and a great example of some of the old internet things I sorely miss. It was a service where people could play very high-polish Flash minigames with each other in their browsers. I don't have a whole lot to say about this one as I remember it even less than I do Hatena Haiku (my memory is really bad, especially this long ago), and it was also a very straightforward service so there's not a whole lot that can be said.

The main games I remember the most fondly were Balloono — a versus Bomberman style game with monkeys wielding water balloons — and Draw My Thing — kinda like Pictionary, or the much more recent skribbl.io. There was also this match 3 game called Swapples that I believe was very popular and that I somewhat remember, but wasn't something I was nearly as fond of. These three games were only a small fraction of what OMGPOP had to offer, though. I believe there was upwards of 40 at various different points in time.

The site had a variety of different social features built in as well, incorporating a chat function into most (if not all) games. I think I remember there also being a friends system?

OMGPOP was not long for this world though, as in March of 2012 it was purchased by mobile gaming giant Zynga, who later shut OMGPOP down the following year in September as they began to have financial issues. Nice, eh? Purchase a whole company + social site and then run out of money not long after, so you just destroy the damn thing. Pure evil.

I don't have any screenshots of OMGPOP's homepage on hand, and I can't take a screenshot of an archive.org snapshot either due to the site's reliance on Flash + the reliance on the actual existence of the server itself — you know, the one that's been gone for almost a decade now :( — so instead here's this video made by YouTuber videogamedunkey involving Draw My Thing gameplay. I love this video, I go back to it lots.

Legacy

I've seen so many people who remember OMGPOP when I mention it, getting angry about Zynga's purchase and bulldozing along with me when I do. There's also a website called MOBCPOP (previously "OMGMOBC") which attempts to somewhat recreate the experience of OMGPOP, having some of its games like Swapples, Balloono or Dinglepop, but it only has a fraction of the games OMGPOP has as it seems the actual Flash files for most of the other games have become lost. OMGPOP the company also released a mobile game called "Draw Something", based off their game "Draw My Thing" you could play on the website, and that remains as the one and only thing Zynga kept when they decided to grind OMGPOP into dust. I, frankly, do not think this counts much though, as it doesn't really feel that similar to the offerings of the OMGPOP website itself, as it's an async multiplayer game instead of the realtime multiplayer game Draw My Thing was.

I'm not personally aware of any modern services that create this social minigame sort of experience, where there's multiple games on offer and you can play with anyone, either friends or people you know. But for sure there's actually many things that come close to it. Playing Jackbox with your friends feels very reminiscent of what playing OMGPOP games would feel like, and there's also things like Discord Activities or iMessage games that somewhat fill this niche. If you want to get your Draw My Thing fill in particular, there's also the aforementioned skribbl.io which is pretty much that. Still, there's nothing I know of with quite the same feel that OMGPOP had, and I'm still holding out hope that one day something similar will pop up.

Welcome to SSFOTW #2! Today's post is about Weasyl, an art gallery website with a similar function and look to FurAffinity, or older iterations of deviantArt but with a modern bent to it, for those who are finding more standard social media like Instagram just don't cut it for art. It's also open source, so if you're tech-savvy, you could theoretically host Weasyl on your own server if your heart so desired, perhaps with your own changes too.

Summary

Weasyl allows for more types of submissions than just static visual art, also having a section for multimedia work (audio, video, and a legacy Flash content option), literary work, a character database, and a journal feature that's separate from the literary works section. Journals are their own category as they're intended less for artistic work, and more for artists to use as a personal blog, or for announcing the opening of commissions, or other things in a similar vein.

Weasyl does not have any broad limits on the type of content you're allowed to submit, though the bulk of the art on the site at the moment skews towards furry art. Both SFW and NSFW art is allowed, with there being separate age ratings for NSFW content that is not sexually explicit (i.e. something with artistic nudity), and for NSFW content that is (i.e. pornographic art), though sexually explicit photography in particular is disallowed for legal reasons. When browsing the site while logged in, there's also a switch you can toggle to hide or show NSFW content, with NSFW content being hidden by default if you're logged out.

To be able to post on Weasyl, you must either have someone else vouch for you to have your account verified, or send an email to support once you've filled out some profile information to do the same. It only took me two days for my account to be verified by sending out an email to the support address.

Click on thumbnails to view fullsized screenshots.

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Profiles and galleries

User profiles on Weasyl are pretty good, and user galleries in particular are incredibly solid.

The user profile itself is only the bare minimum of customizable, with basic user info including a bio, a banner you can upload to display at the top of your page, and some sections with a set few things you can choose from to display (such as items from your gallery).

User galleries by default lump all types of submissions from a user together, with the exception of character database entries and journals. This is so one can organize their gallery themself in whichever way they please, as Weasyl lets you create folders for your gallery, and this includes the ability to create nested folders for more granular organization.


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Creating submissions

Creating submissions on Weasyl is amazingly streamlined. You pick an option from the types of submissions listed off in the summary, and then are brought to a very straightforward page for filling out information about your art. Title, category, tags, description, and of course the actual piece of art itself (plus you can upload a thumbnail if you want). Weasyl does not allow for multiple files to be attached to one submission as some sites like pixiv or deviantArt do.


[586 KiB; fullpage screenshot]


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Marketplace

Weasyl has a marketplace for artists who want to advertise that they're doing commissions. You can search by price, commission type, and the sort of content the artist allows. By default all prices are shown in the artist's set currency, but you can also change the display currency to one of: USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CAD, MXN, AUD, NZD, CNY, CHF.


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Conclusion

Weasyl is pretty great in my opinion, and a more than worthy alternative to deviantArt, the one I can foresee myself primarily using. It's easy to wrap your head around and feels intuitive to use even when you're still figuring it out.

Here's some more subjective, personal points I'd like to add on:

• Weasyl's verification system requiring sending an email to support if you don't already know someone who uses it could perhaps be seen as a bit user-unfriendly for some people nowadays. Not many people use email in their personal lives anymore for anything other than accepting verification emails and other things in the same vein, so although sending an email like this is generally easy, it might still be seen as a tiny bit intimidating to some people who don't regularly make use of email in this way. I did not personally find it to be a problem though.
• If you're reading this post not too super long after it's been posted, I might be willing to vouch for you once you've filled out your profile with some information if you post a link to your profile in the comments. If it's been a year or more since the creation of this post though, don't hold your breath!


• One thing I personally really liked about deviantArt that I've still been missing a good alternative for is its groups feature, and Weasyl doesn't have one either unfortunately. This is a more minor gripe of course, but I just liked the way dA groups could help facilitate more tight-knit artist subcommunities based on certain topics.


• Though it's likely most people will be submitting to Weasyl from a desktop or laptop computer anyways, it does have a very good mobile version of the website that looks and feels almost identical to the desktop site!


• I personally find that Weasyl's artist galleries are just about the best of any website in this vein I've tried. The folder organization in particular is great, especially since I used to primarily use deviantArt as a kid, which allowed folder organization, but locked the ability to have nested folders behind their paid membership tier — a thing that always frustrated me because I was too poor to pay for it on the regular, and the lack of nested folders felt like it barely helped at all with actual gallery organization (sometimes, it made it more of a mess). There is one issue though with how Weasyl handles folders, wherein one submission cannot appear in multiple folders at once, but there's currently an issue open on the Github for this, which I would suggest commenting on if you have a Github account and would like to see this changed too.
• I do, however, find the character database section a bit lacking. It's definitely a unique feature as far as the standard art gallery site goes (deviantArt, FurAffinity, pixiv – all of them don't have a comparable feature), but I think being able to organize characters into folders is something that seems like it could be important for artists who, as an example, maintain multiple worldbuilding projects. Or even if someone doesn't really have distinct worlds like that, but would like to separate completely original characters from fan characters (like, say, Sonic the Hedgehog OCs or something)


• The lack of an ability to attach multiple files to one submission is kind of frustrating, albeit pretty minor. Regardless, it'd be nice for people who want to submit multiple versions of a piece with slight variation (i.e. if someone couldn't choose between multiple colour palettes) or if they would like to include additional in-progress shots without having to clog things up with multiple submissions. It'd be helpful for the character database too, to have multiple reference sheets, or be able to keep older refsheets/etc as part of the entry for reference while adding newer ones higher in the post. It could additionally be used for creating comics. As with the issue of multiple folders per submission, there's an open issue for this on the Github.

Links

• Weasyl website
• Weasyl source code repository @ Github
• My Weasyl profile