2 of 2) Opening Photocraft and loading some old PSD files made me feel like I was back on MacOS, like it was the old days, when I felt like I needed the "Industry standards" to be a real designer. I can't see me using it in work, as I'm now so used to #GIMP and #Inkscape. But considering that these models have been trained on opensource, it really does feel like a 'two fingers in the air punk rock' "back at you" kind of thing.
1 of 2) )So I downloaded the appimage of Photocraft to try. The AI reversed engineered Photoshop. I'm very anti-AI, and a big reason why I abandoned Adobe - when they forced training their models on their customers work - and had used the software since 1998. But, I had already begun a move into opensource anyway, and this was my final cue to go.
Aretha Franklin will always and forever be the greatest ever singer in human history. Period. Full stop. Point Final. Punkt Schluss. Punto e Punto. Punto y Final.
This is one of my "Elaborate Doodles" drawn with a ballpoint pen between 2003 and 2005, adding little bits to it at a time, without any plan. The only goal to fill every part of the paper. These "doodles" somewhat document moments in my life, thoughts and feeling, in a symbolic sense, and I can see now looking back that it was actually all a form of #therapy and reflecting my organised choas #audhd brain. I'll be posting more of these.
I've always drawn these weird doodles since I was at school. I can see now #ADHD is a part of it, where to keep my mind occupied I would half mindlessly doodle in my school books as a way to try and stay half focused in class. But I kept doing it, and 30 years later I still am. All these drawings, I have never really shown before, but I'm going to here. This is the earliest doodle I have, from September 2001, when the video of planes hitting the towers was on constant rotation.
One of the first things to do when setting up a new Fedicerse instance is Import block lists publicly curated by admins. It is a must for a pleasant experience. I have my own list that has followed me around different instances, based on Oliphant.Social lists, and grown from following the #fediblock tag. But I do hope to see Mastodon and other projects implement some kind of community shared lists that servers can subscribe to and automatically sync with one another.
#introduction Hi I'm Shye Strange; weirdo spooky boy, who likes to doodle the odd worlds and creatures that exist in my head. I've been around on the Fedi since 2023, self-hosting different instances as a single user, and now back on Mastodon. I'm going to be posting random weird art, cartoon memes, and elaborate doodles - alongside grumbling about AI and the horrendous state of the world right now.
I just built my first desktop app in Rust and Typscript. Sure it is very basic, just following a tutorial, but I still had a real sense of satisfaction when the window actually loaded. I come from decades old experience with HTML/CSS/JS, and have wanted to learn new languages for the last few years, but my life and the world has been too shit to put the time and focus in.
I had planned to build a new personal website with React and Typscript for while, learning those, but I have also been curious about developing desktop apps since shifting to Linux and opensource a few years ago.
Typscript has been recommended to me a few times, as something worthwhile to learn, and now that I know it can be used for the UI in Rust projects (using Tauri), it makes some sense to learn a few different things together that mix well. So, I'm going to be setting some time aside to learn both Rust and Typscript properly, for a couple of different projects, and learn anything else that I need to around those.
#dev #coding #rust #typscript
Nicky Crane, was a British Neo-Nazi and far right extremist. In the early 1980's, he had been a big part of the infiltration of Nazism into the skinhead and oi music scene, which had previously been an anti-fascist movement.
He co-founded the white power 'Blood & Honour' movement in 1987, with Ian Stuart - who I knew from around when I was a kid, and his crew used to abuse my best (black) friend and I when we were 9 / 10 years old ( but more on that another time.)
In the early 90's, when Nicky Crane was dying from Aids. He came out as gay, and it turned out that the whole time, he had been living a double life as an amateur gay porn actor.
Neo-Nazisms has unfortunately been a part of my life since I was a young child, and I know these people well. (it all comes from psychological insecurities).
To understand how it came to be, I always suggest people watch the movie 'This Is England', written and directed by Shane Meadows, who based that movie on his own personal experiences. Who's real life experiences were based upon the exact same real life people that I knew as well as a kid growing up.
#racism #fascism #racist #fascist #homophobia #homophobic #neonazi #skinhead #gay
I was once rushed into hospital, severely ill and should have already been dead. I was initially treated by a black nurse, on a table in a small storage room off a corridor, surrounded by junk, because there were no beds available. The light bulb was gone, and so the door had to be wide open, whilst she stuck drips into my arms, people just walking passed.
After a few hours, I was moved to a bed, where the two main people who saved my life and looked after me, was a Japanese man, and an Indian man.
When I came out of the danger zone, those two men had a little celebration with me, stood at the end of my bed, genuinely happy and relieved.
I remember noting at the time, that if they had an attitude of only people of their own "race" being worthy of medical attention, or that diversity was not allowed, then I would be dead.
This was emthasised by the fact that the white doctor took three days to get around to seeing me, looked through some paperwork, and told me that I should have died and was lucky to be alive, before moving on and was never seen again.
At one point, I could hear the black nurse receiving the most disgusting racist abuse by a patient she was trying to help. Then the nurse came to me, and actually apologised to me, for me having to hear it, bringing me headphones to block sound.
I refused them though, and said it wasn't right for me to block out something that she couldn't. I briefly touched her hand, looked up at her with a smile, and thanked her for helping to save my life.
#diversity #inclusion #racism #lifeexperiences #randomhospitalstory
I'm thinking of learning React/NextJS/Typescript. Is this a good idea?
I know HTML and CSS like the back of my hand, and half know Javascript (and PHP). I've been building websites on and off for 25 years.
A year ago I started putting thought and research into creating my own CMS for the flexibility (and having a hobby project).
I started learning Laravel, mostly because 10 years ago I had wanted to learn it, though I never got around to it. Plus I figured I would be able to pick it up quite easily, already having an understanding of how PHP works.
But over this last year, I've not been able to engage with learning it, wondering if there is any point learning something (getting on a bit now) that still leads to a clunky PHP app that needs constant maintainence.
I figure instead, I could use NextJs for the frontend, and a headless flexible open source data management / cms for the backend.
I would think it would take me at least a year of learning and practice to become adequate enough. So, I'm trying to decide if this is where I should put my energy - or if there is something else I should be putting focus on, if I'm going to start properly learning something new to me.
#webdev #webdesign #webapps #react #nextjs #typescript #javascript
Whilst many here in England fly their flags, proud to be British, I couldn't be any more ashamed. Whilst "White British" for me has only ever been a checkbox on a form, for others it is their entire identity.
How boring, plain and empty does someone have to be for that to be the extent of who they are? To be so fearful of anyone even slightly beyond the basic, that it makes them hate with such passion? Creates such a desperate need within themselves to protect that, by pulling those people below themselves and trampling all over them.
I know these people well. They've bullied me at school. Bullied me in the workplace, and bullied me in the streets.
Yet for me, compared to others, I might first appear to be a "White British", just like them, but with a weirdness that doesn't pigeonhole easily, which always put me on the brunt.
I stand by trans. I stand by immigrants. I stand by homosexuals. I stand by neurodivergents. I stand by the creatives, and everyone who's existence offends them.
There are more of us together than there are of them. The fight has only just begun.
#uk #rights #ukpol #trans #immigrants #lbgtq #flags
As an autistic person, I can often rely on alt text to understand memes. The thing is, memes expect its context to be automatically understood. Yet it is context that I can struggle with if it isn't presented. Therefore, sometimes memes can just look like nonsense to me at first.
It isn't until reading the description for blind people that the context is explained. So, I would argue strongly that alt text for accessibility goes beyond just those that can't physically see.
#autism #actuallyautistic #alttext
Here is a preview design for a (business) card promoting the Fediverse (made in Inkscape).
I plagiarized the idea from @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social who has created card templates people can print and give out at protests.
Instead, i'm doing fully designed cards for more generic use. Lending my graphic design skills to the community. I will put these out as print ready files under a (non-commercial) Creative Commons license - so anyone can get a stack cheaply printed themselves to give out places or leave in coffee shops etc.
If there is interest, I will do a bunch of different designs, different languages, and a US size (I'm designing to EU standards). Plus maybe some stickers and posters too?
This particular design is my trademark 'busy with movement' style. I've based the design on the colours and shapes from the official Fediverse logo.
#fediverse #fedi #fedicard #fedihelp #graphicdesign #graphics #inkscape #fedipromo #creativecommons
I'm going to start posting a journal of my ongoing project work. Different creative projects from art and design to music production and web development. I'm sort of starting again, so I will begin with my own brand and website, which acts as an umbrella for everything else. It is called Dead Robots, which will showcase various creative work, but will also be wrapped in story which integrates with other projects.
Just over a decade and a half ago, I created a character called Evil Death Robot. It 's back story is that it was built to be an assassin AI robot, but rolled off the assembly line with a conscience. It had empathy that it had to try and hide from it's evil masters. But, It was still considered defected, and ended up being locked in a store room.
When I created this character, it was before I knew that I am autistic, but in retrospect, I can see that is what I'm basing it on. It's that notion of being outcast for having feelings and not actually being inside what everyone on the outside expects you to be. A notion that also goes far beyond just autism, when being outcast for who you are.
This artwork was created in 2008, when I was in an experimental phase of using photography in the artwork to create the base texture of elements. I did stop doing it like that though.
#art #mastoart #digitalart #autism #robot #outcast #comicart
I would like to give a big HUG :lightblueheartx: to everyone that is out at a #protest for #nokings
This is so important, not just for America, but for the rest of the world also - as where the USA leans next moving forward, will tip the scale of the whole world's fate.
So, thank you :cute_pink_heartx:
We are all in this together, even if we can't all be there with you. But for those of you that are there - GOOD LUCK! and BE SAFE! :heartplanet:
I decided to swap my Mastodon Instance on my server with a #Sharkey install (#Misskey fork). I've used the same domain, but I've still lost posts, follows, likes, etc in the migration. But yeah, just in case, this is not some weird clone thing or anything - which I totally get is what a weird clone thing would probably say... 🤔
#introduction I'm Shye, a humanoid like alien spider who fell to earth a few apocalypses ago. When I'm not hanging out in the dark corners of old buildings, I like to draw, make, write, design, score and code. I'm fascinated by consciousness and the magical gift of abstract thought. An ability to create original concepts and intangible ideas, turning them into something that exists and which can be experienced by others. Here, I post about my creative projects, with random thoughts in between.
