i hate that every time i look for color studies and tips to improve my art and make it more dynamic and interesting all that comes up are rudimentary explanations of the color wheel that explain it to me like im in 1st grade and just now discovering my primary colors
blog dedicated to categorizing and saving various posts i find helpful. main blog @venomgender ;
newly rbed posts almost definitely won't be tagged, but (in theory) they'll all be tagged within the month
tag explanations below cut:
#piracy - self explanatory. has both piracy tutorials and masterposts of pirated media
#digital privacy - posts dedicated to resources on digital privacy; has things ranging from browser extensions to google product alternatives
#cooking - cooking resources. both general how-tos and actual recipes
#trans - trans resources. more dedicated to transmasc than transfem posts just because im transmasc, but has several generalized posts as well
#art resources - self explanatory. has both tutorials and things like resource packs and stuff
#writing resources - self explanatory
#learning - learning resources, typically dedicated to masterposts about learning a specific "thing" (language, sewing basics, etc)
#media rec - media recommendations
#sewing - sewing resources. has both tutorials and sewing patterns
#tech - technology resources. stuff like removing windows 10 bloatware, switching to linux, improving pc performance
#video game resources - resources centered around making video games
#coding - coding resources. from basic language how-tos to how to make your own websites
#save - any other helpful post i see that doesnt easily fit into the above categories. typically has things that help with "adulting" but i dont like that word so im not making a tag for it.
#megathread - any post containing large amounts of links for different things. contains a variety of categories. mildly depreciated in terms of how often i actually tag things this...
#tutorial - posts that teach you things. normally will also be tagged with a more specific category. also mildly depreciated...
additionally anything tagged 'kinda' means it only sort of falls into the tagged category. i tag these things to in theory go through later and see if theres enough similar items to have them been grouped into a new one
Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?
Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.
Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.
Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?
Hey, so I’ve talked to you guys about navigating debt collection and I’ve talk to you guys about how to get hospitals to forgive 100% of your medical debt, now I want to talk to you about dental care.
Dental care is something sorely lacking in the US because of the disparity and access. So here’s a few things I think you should know :

Regular cleanings and exams are a lot cheaper than you think. They are one of the most significant things you can do for your oral health to prevent you from developing tens of thousands of dollars worth of work later on. I see a very expensive private dentist that I have seen since I was like 12. His cleanings and exams are $165 without insurance. That for me is doable twice a year. And again he’s expensive. There are many dentist offices, who specifically work with low income patients who will do it for less than 100. 
This is the most significant thing you can do for your teeth twice a year. You have to find the money. Doing this will save you tens of thousands of dollars and potentially heartbreak and heartache regarding your teeth. 
2. Dental schools, dental schools dental schools. If you are in a situation where you do not have insurance and you need thousands of dollars of work done. I want you to find your nearest, and most reputable, school and go get the work you need done.
Dental schools can do pretty much all of the services that regular dentist do and are done under the supervision of dental professionals or done by those professionals themselves to teach their students.
The major con of dental tools is that they take a long time to get back to you. I personally would never have any sort of dental surgery personally unless I absolutely needed it. But they’re great places to get cavities and even root canals if you need them. Especially if you need dental implants. 
Sliding scales. Many dentist offices around the country specifically work with uninsured patients and will offer sliding scales based on your income. Particularly dentist offices that are attached to federal health centers. So look for those. 
The average filling is $150-$250. Not cheap but I promise you you’re gonna want to dig deep and find the money because a $250 filling can save you $2000 of dental work. And, if you go to a dental school, you can probably get them done for $95-$100. 
Let me tell you about my panda mini-washer
As an apartment dweller, this is a game changer. My current apartment doesn’t have a laundry facility and the closest Laundromat about a 30 min bus ride which is just not practical. The mini-washer is a life saver
The panda mini washer hooks up to the sink, is incredibly lightweight (about 28 pounds, so light even I can lift it) and easy to use.
It has a surprisingly large capacity. The basket from the first picture represents about one and a half loads. The jeans took up a whole load while the rest filled the bin only half way.
Here’s the inside. The left is the washer the right is the spin dryer. Yes, it even drys.
Basically you shove your cloths into the washer, fill it up with water and let it go. I use my shower head to fill it up so it goes faster, the sink hook up took about five minutes to fill the whole tub, with the shower head is is down to a minute an a half. I do it in three wash cycles, a five minute rinse with baking soda, a five minute wash with soap and a three minute rinse with water. You have to drain and refill between each cycle so it’s a little more labor intensive than a traditional washer.
That’s the spin dryer. It’s about half the capacity of the washer so one wash takes about two loads to dry. The spinner is much more effective than I was expecting. A three minute spin gets my cloths about 90% dry. I hang them up to air dry for that last 10%.
The machine cost me about 150$. When you factor in two dollars for the bus, five for the machines (per week), the mini-washer pays for its self after only about six months worth of laundry.
I’m not great at expressing emotion, but I’m hoping you can tell how excited I am. Let me just say that the panda mini-washer is great and I highly recommend it to anyone currently using a Laundromat.
Hey I saw your tags on a prev post, can you tell me how you pirate content safely? (you can publish privately) thanks!
ok im going to start out that im not the 'end all be all' of piracy im like. constantly improving my craft (lol) but i'll explain everything i do to make sure i dont get caught while extensively downloading media
before that though if you just want to stream media and not torrent it you can just go to r/piracy's megathread and click the links through there
i WAS going to put this all under a read more but i was trying to link additional resources and this post has most of their explanation under a read more and since they deactivated their account you can't access it anymore. so on the off chance i deactivate i want to keep this post accessible, sorry its so long lol
some of this tutorial is only truly accessible if you have a computer that can stay on 24/7, which i know is not viable for everyone, so i went ahead and highlighted the things you need a computer thats always on for in blue
(honestly, you probably do all the things you need an always on computer for with a raspberry pi but i dont know jack shit about those (yet) so you'd have to look elsewhere on how to do that) i do all of my piracy on a windows desktop computer
i personally don't trust any vpn sponsored by youtubers to not sell you data to companies for profit, so i use ProtonVPN since i use their mail service and their servers are based in Norway i believe which has EXTREMELY strict privacy laws. they have a free version of it but it doesn't allow you to torrent.
NEVER USE A FREE VPN FOR TORRENTING EITHER! they are like. the least secure vpns in the world . a vpn is expensive but basically all of them are for plans that last well over a year so its a worthwhile investment
i personally use qbittorrent and it works great. DO NOT USE UTORRENT. while their are some versions that don't have a cryptominer attached to it, basically all of the versions do at this point so its better to just steer clear
once you have your torrenting client downloaded, you will want to set it up to only be able to connect to the internet through you're vpn. the images below show you how to do it in qbittorrent
(image descriptions available in the alt text)
once you've done the steps in the image, click "apply" and then "ok" in the bottom right of the settings tab
the next part is only necessary if you are going to seed torrents (which i recommend you do if you can)
if you ARE going to seed torrents, you are going to need to enable port forwarding in your vpn and connect your torrenting client to the port specifed. the following images will show you how to do that with ProtonVPN and qBittorrent
(image descriptions available in the alt text)
once you've done the steps in the image, click "apply" and then "ok" in the bottom right of the settings tab. you will want to make sure that connection status button, located two buttons to the left of your displayed download speed is a GREEN electrical cord plug. if it is red then you cannot download or seed. if it is yellow then you can download, but you cannot seed. it will take a couple of minutes for the specified port to update and the connection status to turn green.
you do this using Radarr (for movies), Lidarr (for music), Sonarr (for TV shows), and Prowlarr (as your indexer to manage what torrent hosting clients you want these applications to use). when you download these applications and install them, you are going to want to
you first want to download all of these applications using the links above. you can choose which applications to download based on the things you're going to be downloading, however for any of these applications to work you are going to NEED to download Prowlarr. for simplicity sake i will walk you through setting up all of these from the beginning of my list to the end, except im starting with prowlarr first because that's what you need to set up the rest.
however, when installing ANY of these applications, you are going to have to choose whether to install it as a system tray application or a windows service. I'm going to copy and paste from the Prowlarr wiki what the difference means, though it applies to all of the applications
A Windows Service runs even when the user is not logged in, but special care must be taken since Windows Services cannot access network drives (X:\ mapped drives or \\server\share UNC paths) without special configuration steps.
Additionally the Windows Service runs under the 'Local Service' account, by default this account does not have permissions to access your user's home directory unless permissions have been assigned manually. This is particularly relevant when using download clients that are configured to download to your home directory.
It's therefore advisable to install Prowlarr as a system tray application if the user can remain logged in. The option to do so is provided during the installer.
now that you've installed the programs you want, its time to set up prowlarr. i am once again going to show you how to set it up using pictures
(image descriptions available in the alt text)
that is how you add what torrent indexers (the websites that host torrents) you want to use to prowlarr. I only used TorrentGalaxy as an example, I don't actually use that site. I recommend being VERY careful and selective with what websites you use if they are a public tracker, as any of their torrents can host viruses. do your research before adding them. for convenience, however, I will list all of the public trackers I use so you can add them to Prowlarr if you like:
1337x
IBit
Internet Archive
Nyaa.si
Rarbg
Shana Project
SubsPlease
Torlock
YTS
you can also add private trackers, which is basically the same setup except you will have to input your username and password and/or an api key to allow prowlarr to access your account. I will explain private trackers later.
i will now show you how to connect prowlarr with the other applications you downloaded, once again with images
you want to do this with every application you're using.
that's the basics for setting up Prowlarr. you can further customize it with the help of the Prowlarr wiki if you'd like, but this is all I'll be covering in this tutorial.
setting up the other applications pretty intuitive if after setting up prowlarr, however if you do need help this is the video i watched to set up the rest. you only need to watch how to set up one of these applications to know how to set up the rest, and you can ignore literally everything this person is saying besides how to set up sonarr radarr and lidarr. seriously, don't listen to the rest of what this person has to say it will only confuse you. i have the video hyperlinked to where you need to start to learn how to set up these applications (the one she walks you through in depth is sonarr)
you can only download so many megabytes a second, and when you have a million torrents downloading at once it makes every single torrent download at a snails pace because of that. so, what you're going to want to do is set it to download only a certain number of torrents at a time, and queue the rest to download once one torrent finishes.
this setup is pretty self explanatory, so I won't use images and just explain it.
go back to the settings of your torrenting client, and click on the "BitTorrent" tab (this might be a tab specific to qbittorrent, if you are using a different client look for a tab that is called something similar) (you can alternatively just google how to set torrents to queue for your specific client)
click the checkbox next to the option "torrent queuing"
customize how many active downloads and uploads you want. I personally recommend having no more than 6 torrents downloading at a time so that way they can all download relatively fast. i have my seed (upload) limit set to 60 because I'm in private trackers (which i will explain more about later), but if you don't want to seed for whatever reason you can set that to 0 and it SHOULD (don't quote me on this) automatically stop your torrent once its finished downloading. this could also potentially throttle your download speed because torrents don't like it when you're not uploading them while downloading them, don't quote me on that either having downloads set to 0 is not something im familiar with at all
you can optionally also set your download and upload limits in the "speed" category of settings, though i recommend keeping them both at infinity
this part is really easy and ALSO technically optional but it makes your life so much more convenient so i really recommend doing it. we're going to set up Plex Media Server so it can auto sort through your libraries and organize everything.
download plex and create an account
launch the server and go to the settings page, indicated by the wrench icon in the top right
scroll all the way down the settings directory until you get to the 'Manage" subheading and click on "Libraries"
assign your media libraries to the folders on your hard drive. for this you are going to want to keep movies, tv, and music all in separate folders, and you are going to want to keep your tv shows within your tv folder separate as well.
click 'scan library files' and watch plex update your library in real time
there will be times where plex isn't able to grab the metadata for a piece of media you have, but i can tell you how to (hopefully) prevent that from happening:
in the settings menu, go to the "network" tab under the "settings" subheading
uncheck the box next to "Enable server support for IPv6"
thats it! it should be able to get the metadata for all your media now
this is honestly some Advanced levels of torrenting, and you shouldn't join them if you don't have a device that can be on and seeding 24/7
private trackers are torrent trackers that you can only use if you have a registered account with. they generally have a higher quality selection of torrents with faster download speeds due to a higher seeders to leecher ratio. each tracker has their own rules you need to follow, but they all have similar baselines
maintain your download-to-upload ratio (this will be specified in the trackers FRQ)
after you finish downloading something, you then need to seed it for a certain amount of time (normally a week) or else it will be considered a 'hit n run' and you will face the appropriate consequences
some things are free leach, which means you can download them without it contributing negatively to your ratio. if you seed and upload free leaches they will count to your ratio positively, however
most private trackers are invite-only, but some do occasionally have open signups which you can track on r/opensignups
when joining any private tracker, i recommend only downloading things that are free leach until you have built a good buffer between your upload to download ratio.
this is barely a drop in the water explanation of private trackers, but it's a part of torrenting that i feel like most people don't know about and/or don't know how to get started with, so i felt like it was worth mentioning. r/piracy has a more in-depth explanation (and a better "how to get started" guide on their megathread
linked below are some useful resources for torrenting and pirating in general that i have saved.
my favorite public torrent tracker
r/piracy megathread
r/roms megathread for video game console downloading (direct downloads mostly, not torrents)
r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH megathread
r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH beginners guide to piracy
nintendo switch roms (direct downloads)
nintendo switch emmulator
ns emmulator setup guide
sideload apps on an apple device
hacked spotify ipa (ios app) that you can use above link to sideload
a less convient way to sideload apps onto apple if altstore doesnt work for you
Starting 2023 by checking in on which emulators are currently #1 🏆
I reviewed Emulation Wiki's updates and updated my Top Emulators guide with the latest and greatest emulators.
My guide goes into more detail and gives different recommendations for different audiences. This graphic is simplified for social media and not intended to be the end-all and be-all.
okay so if you need more veggies/fruit, protein or fibre (bc most people do NOT eat enough) in your diet but you struggle to do so, hear me out:
look up recipes (especially snack recipes) that are child/toddler/baby-friendly
i can guarantee there is a woman with a cooking blog out there who has found away to pack a bunch of vegetables into a surprisingly delicious little snack for her kids. this process has never failed me when i feel like i am not eating enough fruits and veggies. my entire flat is eating spinach muffins at the moment, which doesn’t sounding particularly appealing to most people and yet somehow. they’re delicious.
Hey, you are not an embarrassment for not knowing how to do certain household chores/basic self-care. They do not come naturally to us. A lot of it takes practice! Maybe you had a neglectful guardian. Maybe you had one that was very coddling and never thought to teach you. Maybe you haven't lived in a place where these things were available to you or needed. Doesn't matter. It's okay to not know and far more common than you might realise.
That said, this website provides very simple instructions on how to do everyday tasks such as making your bed, using a washing machine, cooking different foods, washing dishes, taking a shower, etc. All you have to do is use the search bar to find the task you're struggling with, and it'll come up with what you need + other related how-to's:)
If you're having trouble navigating it, let me provide you with some examples:
How to clean dishes by hand
How to make your bed (with visual demonstrations of each step!)
How to fold clothes (with visual demonstrations of each step!)
How to take a shower & dry yourself off (also provides ways to shave beards, armpits, legs and genitals)
How to shave legs, armpits, beards, pubic areas, etc. (a more in-depth guide)
How to mop the floor
How to sweep the floor
How to swallow pills
How to make small talk
How to make eye contact in different situations (or how to avoid it while still looking natural)
It's also perfectly okay if these don't help or aren't appealing to you. Unfortunately, nothing helps everyone.
i want to make a neocities so bad but i dont know where to start :(( any advice? i love ur website!!
hiii! thank you im so happy you visited and liked it <3 so like 2 months ago i was in the same spot as you - no idea how to code, but the idea of a personal website thrilled me so much!
i basically spent a few weeks browsing sites on neocities, noting down what delighted me, what i would personally like to have on my own website, etc.
after that i searched furiously for coding tutorials and making a personal website (around this time i was also making a portfolio website, so i had a couple of links saved). here are some
pages github
w3schools! free html and css and lots of other language tutorials
https://sadgrl.online — a TON of resources 🌟
neocities learn page (HTML, CSS, JS, and lots more! + a cute interactive cat tutorial) 🍰
codetheweb - tutorials
codeacademy — free coding tutorials
freecodecamp — all free coding tutorials
a bunch of resources
i started with neocities' learn page, which has a really quick intro to HTML and CSS. after that, i bookmarked a ton of posts on sadgrl.online's website, because she's super big on neocities and has sooo many helpful beginner tutorials.
after that i basically got an HTML boilerplate from eggramen and just started going from there! you can just directly upload your website files to neocities (make sure your folders are constructed the same way!) once you have an account.
basically tldr: grab a boilerplate HTML template from anywhere, make a neocities account, and start fiddling with it right away! google everything you don't know or don't understand. good luck 💖⚙️
Character creation and development:
Character creation questionnaire
Character foils
Core values
Core values 2
Creating a character from scratch
How eating an orange reveals character
Fears, weaknesses, and pet peeves
Flaws
Flaws and Vices (list)
Inventory
Nicknames
Outline for a distinct character
Personal effects
7 Key Traits of Enduring Characters
What does your character know?
Your character as a paradox
Your character’s closet
Dealing with large character casts
Types of Character:
Creating a likable villain
Strong Female Characters
Supporting characters
Throwaway characters
Mary Sue / Gary Stu
Loner Characters
Character Arc:
Building a character arc
Series Characters
Steps of change
Swoons and wounds
Character dialogue:
How your character asks for help
Character-specific dialogue
Cursing
Speech patterns
What we say vs. what we mean
Who has control
Relationships:
Power imbalances
Pacing your romance
How to avoid unintentional romantic subtext
On the page:
Creating a strong first impression
An exaggerated first impression
Characterization through appearance
Description
Showing emotion
Staging
Thank God I have (insert character here)
Torturing your Character (and reader)
blog created as an archive of posts i would want to save for various reasons
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