Posted by huck (etc.) on Apr 14, 2025
while i'm getting over the learning curve of using Linux, there's a few things i've been up to lately:
SECOND LIFE
SCRIMBLO WORLD is coming to Abnormality!
Scrimblo World is a creative partnership of Second Life stores that primarily makes cartoony and fun avatars and avatar mods, but also deals in a lot of other products. my store, Can I Get The Real Stuff?, is a part of Scrimblo World, alongside AMOEBAZONE, Glubby's Gubbins, Right Side Down, SEVENTH STAKE, and [SKINSTEALER_SYNDROME].
meanwhile, Abnormality is a shopping event that caters to fantasy, furry, and other alternative / unconventional styles. the theme for this quarter is "The Garden". this will be our collective's first ever shopping event, from May 7-28!
for the duration of the event, our collective may sell things "exclusive" to the event, meaning that Abnormality's in-world location will be the only place you can get them; once the event is over we'll get around to listing our Abnormality-exclusive items "eventually".
i have some ideas for how to decorate our group's stall. we'll see!
CREATIVE THINGS
my friends over at I HATE ART have a loose parody containment fiction series called Stupid Objects. the other day i wrote SOC-043, or "DEZEL REPICKER". it's not much but it was fun to write.
INTERESTING INFORMATION
instead of using my actual website with a blog on it i'm going to use this post as a blog for useful things that have been relevant to my life lately. oh god i just realized i have to reinstall nodejs
if you're not a very "techy" person, you might not know that there are a handful of command line tools out there that accomplish tasks you might be using shady websites for. for example:
- yt-dlp is a command line tool to download youtube videos (in various video and/or audio formats). if you've ever gone to a "youtube downloader" website, it was probably powered by a similar utility!
- gallery-dl is a mass image downloader that supports many sites, especially gallery and social media sites. i find it useful for archival.
- ffmpeg is probably one of the most iconic command line utilities out there. it offers a lot of useful audio and video related functions, but the most useful one i've found lately is its ability to convert audio/video from one format to another. for example: "ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.mp3" can turn an mp4 file into an mp3.
- let's not forget imagemagick; this one can be kind of hard to wrap your head around, but it's hard to overstate how much this tool has driven image editing in software for decades. i've used it for bulk editing before! (i've heard graphicsmagick is similar, but i have not used it.)
perhaps in the future i can make little tutorials on how to use these.
also, at the request of a friend, i archived a post by @ technofeudalism on tumblr as a github gist, it's basically a big list of links to interesting web media and stories.
WHAT ELSE I'VE BEEN UP TO
funny enough, this is a damn inconvenient time for me. my computer failed for reasons outside of my control, so i am on a backup laptop. and due to unrelated coincidental circumstances, this laptop has a completely different operating system from my previous one (going from Windows 10 to Debian 12).
as of last night my drawing tablet stopped working because debugging anything graphics-related on Linux is a nightmare and i spent 9 hours trying and failing to fix it! which means i probably will only have a semi-functional drawing tablet for the time being.
i don't know if i can fix the drawing tablet and to be honest it would really suck if i could not! this thing is expensive when it's not 50% off! at the very least it registers input, so i can pretend it's like, an oversized wacom or something.
even more annoying, i haven't listened to music in a week because all 3000 of the songs i had on my previous laptop are missing. it's rough out here for people who need music to do anything.
- clancy 🍥