I've never used this feature before, but at least it works unlike InkBlot's scheduling feature.

I've been busy with my Space Lover Hotel project lately, hence the lack of uploads. Plus I'm replacing my graphics card for something more stable. And that's if it finally cures the problem of having to reseat my hardware every 1-3 months.

If you happen to be an InkBlot user and was unfortunate to have heard of a fake subreddit posing as InkBlot, let me remind you that the platform doesn't (and will never) have a subreddit.

That means that the subreddit you were advertised is unofficial, but that's not the whole story. It's an unofficial subreddit designed to be hostile towards InkBlot users. You might have encountered at least one grifter trying to convince you that it's an amazing subreddit """for the community""", but that's primarily meant to drop your guard so that you're subjected to unwarranted mistreatment once you're there.

Most people regarding this issue would say that it's best to not pay the subreddit or its grifters any mind, but it becomes difficult to do this when I actually encountered one of them before realizing they were grifting.

There are two important things to keep in mind about this:

--1: Avoid targeted harassment. It may seem tempting for those who got heated when they encountered these grifters, but it does nobody any good, as it's a shitty Twitter tactic that really should have been phased out after 2020 ended.

--2: Address all the dead giveaways that they happen to be grifters spreading misinformation about their fake subreddit. This involves common phrases they'll use, or a paraphrased equivalent.

Now that the two important points are out of the way, let's head on to the dead giveaways:

--1: The most obvious to note is that InkBlot doesn't have an actual subreddit. If you spot anyone telling you there is such a thing, there's a 50% chance they're a fake sub grifter. The other 50% could be an innocent person who got suckered in before actually joining the subreddit and receiving the mistreatment.

--2: This one's in case you responded by saying it's a fake subreddit. Their responses are usually elaborate, describing the fake subreddit like it's meant to be "for the community", or a "backup", or the like. It's the complete opposite of those things, and raises that 50% chance to a 400% that it's a grifter.

--3: They use the same talking points on other InkBlot users on Twitter. This is simply because you wrote the name "InkBlot" in your tweet and they used the search box to land on it. This is a common tactic by edgy teens where they type in words related to a sensitive topic so they can look for emotionally vulnerable people to harass online. It's the same way other trolls would do in order to harass somebody subscribed to a particular fetish. So it's hilarious to see grifters doing the same thing. It's one of the reasons I became more careful with the words I'm using over time, because of weirdos landing on my posts everywhere from simply typing in "sensitive topic" words in a search box. (it's why some artists misspell "Patreon" on purpose)

--4:They were found to fabricate completely weird reasons to get into one of InkBlot's socials that have nothing to do with what the platform is about. You've seen this tactic multiple times with crypto bros where they spam irrelevant advertisements. Fake sub grifters would make up reasons like: recruiting translators, financial business irrelevant to art, being a weirdly worded affiliate (yeah, it's hard to explain this one, but if it reads like a Nigerian prince email, it's a red flag).

--5: If you're a Reddit user, you get permabanned by them if you ever wasted your time on these grifters. Even though I'm not a Reddit user (and nobody should be on Reddit anyway 'cause it's a spam site), I find this part hilarious because it demonstrates immediately their bitterness when they realize nobody believes them. So they take the extra mile and make Reddit unusable for you (which would have no effect if you were never a Redditor in the first place).

At first I thought there was gonna be only three dead giveaways, but after hearing about their malicious behavior of retaliating in any way when they get called out, there are worse things to look out for when encountering these grifters.

Hopefully you find this informative, and you won't fall for these bull shitters.

Just seeing how a long image would look in this blog post, as I've noticed that images seem to be compressed into the WebP format in lossy mode, whether it's in a blog post or additional pictures posted in the description box of an art submission:

Update: Alright, so as usual, the pictures would get downscaled to fit a 764px width. However, this was a PNG with a palette, and it remained in PNG format (but in RGBA color instead of a palette, thereby a bigger file) upon conversion. I guess it would only convert to a lossy WebP if it was both A) either a high color PNG or a JPEG, and B) the image is wider than 764px.

I'm experiencing some problems with the site's UI since they've updated the web app to v1.9.0.

This means my artposting is gonna be slower, but for now, enjoy this screenshot of something I'm writing in Python:

At first I didn't think it was that much of a big deal that Twitter's changed. But that was until I started seeing the domino effect where every artist I've been following is deciding to move to another platform, some of which have tweeted "Newgrounds", or "DeviantArt", or "Tumblr" or a long list of other social links they may have in case their Twitter followers suddenly disappear.

I appreciate that some of them have secondary avenues, which means that more people can follow them. But others seem to give the impression of stopping cold turkey, effectively narrowing their audience, with fewer ways of reaching them.

As you may understand, not everyone likes to sign up to other platforms because of a few people migrating to them. It would be like buying a game console for that one exclusive game, and not touch the system again. I've experienced this at least twice. First time was in 2016 with alternative social medias, of which have eventually shut down either due to not being able to afford the extra load, or because they turned out to be just a platform for horrific misfits. The second time, of course, is today with people bringing up Mastodon (which by description sounds like Discord if every server was a Twitter site domain. I had no luck with this one unfortunately, as it appears to be reliant on sleepy humans.).

Fortunately for me, I've been around here way longer than my first time registering to Twitter. As far as moving my newer stuff here, I honestly don't feel like my stuff is portal worthy most of the time. I've always been reluctant to post much here because it's mostly either pixel art or it's WIP.

Last time I've touched this site, I received notifications from some deranged FNF fanboy replying to old reviews from when I was an anti-porn 14yo. Like come on man, that's not me anymore. lol

I don't get why a tiny problem like that makes computers batshit unusable.

The Difficulty Curve of MSL and the Player Base that Contradicts it

____I've been playing this gacha game since early December 2016. I've taken my several month breaks whenever I either finish the game's single player content, or was frustrated with one of the capture events (or when a large hurricane knocked down my electricity forcing me to wait four months to be back online).

The game's units are broken down in five levels of rarity, all of which can be ascended to 6-stars (unlike Dokkan Battle where most of the units can upgrade their rarity only once):

1-star: Common unit with single target active: Slimes, Mimics and Sparklers.

2-stars: Common unit with either ST, AoE or healing active.

3-stars (84% summon rate): Rare/S. Rare unit that can be summoned from the Special Shop.

4-stars (15% summon rate): Legendary unit either exclusive to story stages or can be summoned from the Special Shop.

5-stars (1% summon rate): Heroic unit that can be summoned from the Special Shop.

____Regardless of further expansion, the game's difficulty curve allows for nat2 units to still be able to beat the original campaign and their limit would be half of the first continental expansion most of the time. Nat3s can get past a good portion of the second expansion, while nat4s are the minimum to finish the whole campaign. When nat5s are a necessity is during the mid to high portions of the dragon dungeons, as well as pvp and guild battles.

____Despite the game's easy difficulty curve, the units below the nat5 (sometimes nat4) rarity are regarded as a waste of resources by the player base. This is exclusively based on multiplayer modes like pvp and mostly guilds. Typically the complaint is "this unit is useless for end-game" or "this unit is strong in early-game but it's quickly fodder in mid-game". The "end-game" argument is where the bias normally comes from and is a poor justification to dismiss certain units when there's no concrete "end-game" to begin with.

____What's "end-game"? In this context, it's pvp and guilds. It refers to the last thing the player would be doing after passing all the relevant single player modes and starts participating in multiplayer modes that reset weekly. "End-game" can be another way of saying that the player has beaten the main game. So the "end-game" goal can be other things like completing the whole album of units, grinding in preparation for future content, or just taking a break until new content gets released. You can do whatever the fuck in the "end-game" state.

Let's go back to the player base's histrionic judgment regarding a unit's strength. Because from there comes a lot of fallacious arguments and some minor misconceptions about the game's content:

Appeal to Authority:

____This one's the originator of a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation about the game spread by a large number of scrubs who've recently read beginner guides and calculations from the game's sub-reddit. When you ask them why they came to a particular conclusion, they answer with "because a veteran player says so".

____The "veteran player" who's assumed to have infallible authority is either A) a youtube channel with a big following, B) a player with a high profile level, C) a player who's been around since the early days of the game, or D) a player who ran through the game in a very short time.

____The problem with all four options is that none of them directly correlate to how much the player knows about the game. It doesn't matter how many subs, profile levels, months or how fast the player was at clearing content. All that matters is how far in the game the player has gotten, how that experience is exercised, and the research that was done. And even then, "because mom says so" is still not a justification.

Some players have genuinely datamined the game and shared the info around in the game's subreddit.

Ad Populum:

Similar to the appeal to authority, except it's under the basis of a popular practice. When you ask them why they came to a particular conclusion, they answer with "because a friend told me", or "because everyone does it".

____A certain practice is said to be popular, but it doesn't explain why it's a popular practice. This lead to common myths like the Pugilist gem set being based on hits, Predator being a direct multiplier to damage (when it's a flat increase to the elemental damage multiplier), and that Golems B7 and B9 are "too hard". When a certain practice is demonstrably good, it spreads, not the other way around.

False Dichotomy:

____This is done to primarily butcher what "usability" means. Most of the time, it's not a question of "is it usable?" but more so "how usable is it?". When there exists 500+ units of distinct purposes and strength, simplifying it to black and white is not a good form of judgment. This type of judgment can also be considered a bad generalization.

____Another instance of a false dichotomy is when it's used as an excuse to dismiss probabilistic math just because of Critical Hit Rate not being 100%. They simplify it to being either 100% or none when it statistically doesn't work that way.

Circular Reasoning:

____This one's very annoying because once the question is made, the answer leads to nowhere. They answer with "X is Y because X is Y". Or "this monster's stronger because it just is". Answering a certain question with circular reasoning is like saying nothing at all.

Equivocation:

____This happens when a particular word (or formula) completely changes meaning mid topic. An example of this is when a passive skill formula is considered to be a "multiplier", only for it to be used as an "additional increase" when applied. Originally, it was going to multiply damage, but half way it was changed to an additional increase onto a base of 1, which is way different from multiplying.

This was an awful argument to come across because the guy making the "CS is a 5x multiplier" argument was being serious about it while demonstrating that it's a 6x multiplier based on the logic of it being an additional increase of 5.

Argument from Ignorance:

____This is the absolute worst of all the arguments I was thrown at. Most of the time, this is used to dismiss the concept of probability (a thing that's essential to understanding the game's RNG). Other times it's to dismiss the stats of two units as an excuse to downplay a high grade unit, just because the low grade has slightly better proc rates in its passive skills despite the stats being abysmal.

____Just because the person doesn't understand or doesn't care about it, doesn't mean that the thing in question shouldn't matter or doesn't exist when it's in the game.

Nat5s are undoubtedly the strongest rarity along with a few nat4s, but the game's main difficulty curve makes them a bit overkill, to where there's no problem in using nat3s.

(Originally this was going to be much longer, but I rambled too much on the game's development over time and the good and bad decisions they made along the way.)

____My disappointment in Minds (a self-proclaimed "free speech alternative" to social media) began on February 2017 when I wrote my first Minds blog expressing said displeasure. 90% of the time, the site has been promoting:

--Shit ideologies

--Shit politics (one-sided politics that disregards Horseshoe Theory)

--Identity politics

--Conspiratorial crap regarding all sorts of medicine.

--Alternative Media/New Media

____All of that was promoted in the form of "boosted content" (which the site later admitted that it's another form of ads the moment they introduced premium accounts that DISABLES boosted content from appearing). It was the breeding grounds for uncritical crackpots who'd actively pick fights over shit they fabricated. How long said crackpots existed is far besides the point.

____Its "BOOST" feature was meant to give a user's post "more reach" based on an assigned number of points for a number of views. Unfortunately, this game-like feature was used by people who treat viewcount like it's a form of credibility, and would block any user who decides to down vote their quackery (which is why their ratings never look negative).

____On April 2017, I saw some of the users in my subscriptions list get TERMINATED just 'cause some cunt was highly offended by some drawings. Apparently it's only "free speech" if it fits their agenda. Then I find out there were witch hunt groups made specifically to take down people they disagree with, causing me to go paranoid for several weeks.

____On May 2017, I made the quiet decision to never use Minds again. Thus, I started my GIF animation project which is a goodbye message to that platform. Since its userbase consisted of mostly ideologues and suspended Twitter/Facebook accounts, gaining ANY amount of followers there seemed like a terrible idea (especially 240+ followers).

____Originally, I used Minds to stay away from Twitter politics, and used Vidme to stay away from YouTube's crazy policy changes. I tried out Gab.ai (during mid 2016), but found there wasn't a point to it. Then there's Voat.co which is supposed to be an "alternative" to Reddit, but just like Reddit, there wasn't much of a reason for me to use it.

____But considering this politically histrionic climate, with YouTube restricting videos from core features, and Vidme taking down channels slowly; I'm not going to bother finding "alternatives to X" when the pandemic has already infected EVERY platform in existance.

____Originally, the title was going to be just "The DeviantArt Mentality", but then I figured people might think of... ... ... something else that's unrelated to what this is about.

I once tweeted something for artists who take great offense over the most inoffensive and harmless criticism: https://twitter.com/Eltro93/status/859673974304776192

It was something like this:

"Here's a thing about opinions and criticism. When you produce work and someone points out a few flaws or gives an opinion on what needs to be improved, they're not insulting you or trying to make you feel like shit. They're giving you a chance to improve.

Don't look at it as a failure, but as an opportunity to do better. And you will do better if you allow it. But if you choose to just cover your ears and label your critics as bad people trying to bring you down, you're not helping yourself and instead damaging your image.

Being unable to take criticism means you don't want to get better. And if you decide to cut communications, then no one should be buying your stuff to begin with."

____Unfortunately, I forgot to specify that it was constructive criticism, not to be lumped in with destructive criticism (which in my opinion, isn't criticism unlike the former). However, there's a story behind why I made that tweet. In early May, me and my friends were talking in a Discord group about some art tweets by one specific individual (let's call him "Kim"). We talked about what we liked, what we didn't like, where the artist needs to improve, etc. Then the artist tweeted an unfinished landscape of a bridge that's supposed to take place in an abandoned ancient level. It turns out the bridge looked more like it belonged in an early level, because of the coloring of the grass and the objects on the bridge being nowhere to be found in the ancient level. Everyone in the Discord group made similar comments. I tweeted at Kim that it looked more like it's from the Dragon Valley stage than Pangu Lagoon. Afterwords, he got rid of the objects that seemed out of place for an ancient level.

____But then, one of my friends (let's call him "Ren") shared an art tweet of a sketch for an OC who was easily mistaken to be an already existing canon character. Ren said that he immediately thought that the character was Lilac, because it looked just like her except for the lack of hearing aids. But the sketch is supposed to be an OC named Scarlet, and that she's more red colored than Lilac. Out of all the Lilac recolors we posted in the server, we were shocked that an artist like Kim would take that rout. I asked another guy (let's call him "Fry") to color the Scarlet sketch by using Lilac's palette just to see how similar she looks in design. She had the same hairdo, as well as the same top. What's supposed to be the dangling side of her scarf could easily be confused with the long twintails one would see from Lilac. Scarlet with Lilac's palette made her look indistinguishable, except for not having hearing aids.

____As soon as I tweeted Kim that his Scarlet looked too much like Lilac because of the hair and clothes, he blocked me (which lead me to even making that tweet about opinions and criticism). Afterwords, he made four tweets throwing a tantrum about the people who've made similar comments that I made, as if they were personal attacks to him. He also states that he has a problem with people who don't like recolors, admitting that his OC is in fact a Lilac recolor. Thus, he can't take criticism. And I was being polite to the guy.

____Then, weeks later, he throws another Twitter tantrum lecturing his audience about what "inspiration" is, only to demonstrate that he doesn't know what that word means. Inspiration is influence. It's when a person is given the motivation to do certain things. In practice, when a person says they "took inspiration", it usually means they saw or tried something they really liked and decided to use it on their own stuff (almost like borrowing elements from somewhere). Of course, it tends to get tangled with "plagiarism" sometimes, but a distinction can still be made. What's Kim's version of "inspiration"? That it's synonymous to "support". That, because you're making fan art or a fan game, you're somehow supporting the original authors, despite not giving them any cash for it or them not being interested in seeing your fan made content.

____What happened to this artist is what I would dub the "DeviantArt mentality". I call it that, because it's the kind of shitty behavior I often see in DeviantArt when posting recolor OCs in the Discord server. That, and the fact that a majority of the fandom are from DA. It's also the kind of mentality that artists get when they gain a huge following. It turns them into massive dicks.

____Now, onto what can be seen as a prequel to what happened above. It started off in late 2014 when I was obsessed with an indie game known as Freedom Planet. Because of it's heavy inspiration from Sonic games, I was initially hesitant to join any of its fandoms until a year later when the new forum was opened. Before the Discord app was a big thing, there used to be that crappy IRC chat that was barely used in the forum site. There was also a lot of fan fiction crap for only a year, until the fan fic writers lost motivation and left the forums, realizing not enough people bothered to read, and their demands for detailed criticism were just impractical (looking at you, Ultra). Then, there were headcanons being wrongfully passed on as official canon, never mind that their shit never happened in the game, and the fan fic writers made it up (plenty of fan fic written misinformation was discovered and debunked the moment Freedom Planet 2 was announced).

____During those years of this fandom (infested with DA users), there was one particular fan fic writer (let's call him "Zorn") who was writing a fan comic for the first game. I liked the idea of a comic adaptation as long as it didn't copy mistakes from the old Archie comics where lazily edgy characters were shoehorned in. Unfortunately, in the comic issues after the events of FP, of course he implanted a dark-suited edgelord OC. But then there was one comic issue drawn by an artist (let's call him "Shaggy") that caused the fan comic to get shat all over by someone who we'll call "Moo". It was probably the harshest criticism that Zorn received, it made him cancel the comic series abruptly, and resorted to writing the fan fic text-only. It torn his skin so much, he publicly announced that he quit the forums, just because Moo didn't like his fan fic. But then again, Moo makes rather ridiculous demands in general, and his fan fics were kinda shit to begin with (also a guy who blacklisted me because I don't like his fan fiction or his story philosophies being always grimdark).

____Speaking of the artist Shaggy, he was another story, and it heavily involved Ren. At first, Shaggy kinda liked the guy, until Ren decided to play Shaggy's Neera fan game. Apparently, Shaggy didn't like what he had to say about the game (if Ren said anything), thus he blacklisted him for the rest of his life. Since then, Shaggy's been perpetually taking the piss at Ren for any drawing he's done. At the time of Ren's depression, Shaggy went out of his way to make fun of his depression, called him "the biggest attention whore", as well as telling Ren to go kill himself in the official forums of all websites (pretty much the shittiest thing I don't condone). Unsurprisingly, that got Shaggy banned for a couple months. It doesn't help that his fanboys copy his shitty behavior (or even notice it outside of DeviantArt), which is no wonder Kim also blocks people for simply not liking Shaggy. Not only did Shaggy have a beef with Ren, he also had a beef with other artists because of nsfw art (never mind that this makes him a hypocrite, since he also does nsfw art). Overall, he gained a shitty reputation in the fandom, and he seems to be doing better when he's quiet and not lurking as much as he used to (because if he says anything, it's usually to start shit).

____Now, fast forwarding back to early May of this year, in the art channel of the Discord server, one guy was posting some casual MSpaint drawings. Of course, someone opened his mouth and said he wasn't a fan of the MSpaint art. Instead of the uploader shrugging it off, he took great offense to it, escalated the situation, and said he wont post anymore, even if people were not trying to tell him to stop showcasing.

____You might say that I'm only bringing up four artists and therefore it's not a good sample size. However, the fandom itself is around 500+ people, and each artist (especially Kim and Shaggy) has a large following of 300+ parrots. Much like when Shaggy made that KYS joke drawing (two actually, one that's titled "DO IT" with the old character handing over a revolver, and the other titled "JUST" with the new character pointing the revolver on her own head), nearly everyone of his fans took his drawings seriously to the point of rigging a character redesign poll on DeviantArt, as if they were pressured to do that or else they'd piss off their favorite artist.

____Of course, that's just a different kind of DeviantArt mentality where fanatics treat their artists like they're flawless, thus are incapable of disagreeing with their "idols".

____Other than that, you pretty much have hypersensitive artists who think it's okay to either commit internet suicide or be unreasonably defensive and blacklist people over the most inoffensive, petty tripe (basically, the DeviantArt mentality). I wouldn't mind the logic that it's important to separate the art from the artist, just like we should separate the franchise from the fandom. The art might be good, but the artist might be a shitty person. Or the franchise is amazing, but its fandom is cringy as fuck. But when the artist acts shitty because his art looks shitty, that's when the separation becomes difficult for me.

____An artist who lashes out at his own audience over something harmless and polite isn't the kind of artist I would support. And maybe not supporting them would at least discourage that childish behavior. Because without support, they'd go back to being nobodies and maybe rethink their attitudes (or not). Then again, doing so would be considered Orwellian or Draconian to some.

DISCLAIMER

____The names Ren, Kim, Fry, Shaggy, Moo, Zorn, and Ultra are only nicknames I gave to avoid using their real names and their actual pseudonyms. As much as I take the piss out of DeviantArt, I have nothing against people using the service, especially when some good artists can be found there.

____A color space is a combination of parameters (typically three) that represent color. Change the value of a certain parameter, and the color would change accordingly. There's a series of color spaces for different purposes:

--RYB Traditional Color Space (well, as I was taught at a young age anyway): It's a combination of Red, Yellow and Blue. Something I played with in early elementary school during art class.

--RGB Additive Color Space: Similar to RYB, but with green instead of yellow. It's a combination of Red, Green and Blue that's used for TV screens and computer monitors. Combining all three primaries at the brightest intensity produces white.

--CMYK Subtractive Color Space: Technically RGB's polar opposite. It's a combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK that's used for printing. Since combining the first three primaries produces a dark (and ugly) brown instead of black, a fourth primary was included for a better representation of black, and for the sake saving some CMY ink.

____There's plenty of other color spaces to go around, but then there's the HSV color space and its close cousin HSL. They were designed primarily to be more intuitive and are commonly used for image editing and digital art. Unfortunately, since they're rearrangements of the RGB color space, their cylinder coordinates are filled with redundant colors at the top and bottom of said cylinder.

To begin, the Hue coordinate is one thing that both HSV and HSL have in common. It acts like a color wheel that uses degrees.

0° = Red

60° = Yellow

120° = Green

180° = Cyan

240° = Blue

300° = Magenta

____The Saturation coordinate in HSV and HSL determines how clean the color appears. However, the way saturation works in HSV is not the same as in HSL. It's true that 100% saturation in HSV is the same as in HSL, but it's a different story when it's at any level below 100%. The lower the saturation in HSV, the closer it gets to white. But in HSL, the lower the saturation, the closer it gets to gray.

____The Value coordinate in HSV determines how intense the color is. Seems simple enough, the lower the value the closer it gets to black. It's different with the Lightness coordinate in HSL though. While colors come closer to black when turning down the Value or Lightness in HSV and HSL, 100% Value in HSV is 50% Lightness in HSL. 100% Lightness is considered white, which is 100% Value and 0% Saturation in HSV. So, greater lightness is closer to white, while lower lightness is closer to black.

(The full version of this blog can be read here: https://www.minds.com/blog/view/706401383749787664 )