Gracious Anthracite @anthracite@dragon.style

@Phorm

possibly also getting oral from yet another genie while getting insanely high :)

@Xinjinmeng

to be quite honest, something like "um, would you be interested in drawing the same thing, but even fatter?" feels pretty much par for the course in this fandom.

@001zlnv @Phorm

this is what peak van dude performance looks like

Cat Valente’s “Space Opera” is the saddest damn thing I have ever read that claims to be a comedy. It’s pretty good but it sure does have a lot of huge downers amidst all the goofy descriptions of aliens having Space Eurovisions instead of galactic wars.

I made it to the Ballard market in time for some painfully spicy cheese, which will help me survive another dreary Seattle winter week. There was a little jazz combo playing for tips. They sang a lyric about Basin Street and all I can think of now is that these guys are about as far from Basin Street as it is possible to BE without leaving the continental US, which resulted in a melancholy little wave of missing NOLA.

@Phorm

"this snake is so goddamn lazy she can't even be bothered to turn people in to her genie servants, she lets one of her servants do that for her"

I really need to get dressed so I can go out to Ballard to hit the farmer's market and get some really really spicy cheese.

But it is raining.

Ah well. "Starland is full of many harsh tasks."

@Phorm

Who gets to be the little homunculous under the p4 score?

@Leucrotta @troodon

yeah, you start by getting some portion of your existing fans to pay. Even if this just means you get a cup of coffee on them, it's a start. Ultimately you reach the point where all of your fans who have some spare cash they're willing to throw your way are doing so, and you need to think about *shudder* advertising, I'm kind of at that point right now and putting it off because I feel like I am not quite at the critical mass of having enough Parallax *to* advertise.

@pandora_parrot @troodon

yep. There was some noise a while back about a community-governed fork a while back, I can't remember its name sadly. Haven't heard anything about it.

Nobody is holding a gun to my head making me update dragon.style to the latest version; if Garg' adds a feature that I don't like, I am quite free to turn it off here (assuming I can find the time to add in a switch, or convince a programmer type to do so for me). I am also free to just never update dragon.style and never get *any* of the new features he's playing with, for good or ill; eventually there may come a time when this means I can no longer talk with anyone on an updated instance because the underlying protocols have shifted. But I ain't gotta do it if I don't wanna.

If you make a change to the code, you can submit it to the main Mastodon project, and if Garg' approves it then it becomes part of the next release of the main branch. If he doesn't approve of it then other people are quite free to grab that change and apply it to their own instances.

As a minor example: Garg has, so far, been pretty firm in wanting the toot length limit to be 500. But here I am 877 characters into a response on an instance that has 7777 characters, and there's absolutely nothing he can do about it.

The main thing Garg' currently has is that he's the guy who put in the work to build it up from scratch; it's a big huge project that takes a LOT of time to get to the point where even a trivial change is possible. He is also the guy sitting on the Official Mastodon Patreon and thus kind of now has "figure out ways to improve Mastodon" as his full-time job.

But if I decided I wanted to start hacking on Mastodon and taking it in a new direction, I could do it. I could even set up my own Patreon and end up having that be my full-time job if enough people liked what I was doing, there could be a slow shift to my version, and eventually I'd kind of be the leader of Mastodon. I would never do that but *someone* could if they were willing and able to put in the work, and the community of admins and users liked her results more than Garg's.

IIRC, the classic text on the whole idea of open-source projects like Mastodon is [The Cathedral And The Bazaar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar) by Eric S Raymond; I think that should give you a basic overview of how this sort of project can grow, change, stall, and split.

REALISTICALLY I have been saying for at least a half a year that m.s really needs to just shut off new accounts for the good of the system, and I hope that this will happen eventually. Garg' needed to set it up to serve as a seed, and it did that job well. Now it serves both as a default noob place, and as a testing ground for his new features as they evolve. That last is also probably a feature the community as a whole needs, tbh, software is complicated and some bugs aren't gonna show up until you have multiple thousands of users hammering on new code...

@troodon @Leucrotta

Patreon was founded by an extrovert and has been largely guided by extroverts, and so much of their advice on How To Make Money Via Patreon has to be heavily filtered for things that are actually possible to do if you are an introvert like myself.

That said it's also quite possible to make money via Patreon if you are an introvert. You might not have your income grow as fast as someone who is the sort of person who is built to be happy with using every possible glitch in the human emotional system to make themselves feel like the Very Special Friend of every single one of their patrons. But if you keep making stuff and having a quiet little "hey if you like the shit I make and have some money to spare then check out [my Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash)" note next to it then it'll grow. Look at my campaign, look at the campaign of other artists, I'm sure half the artists you follow have one going, steal the ideas that sound sensible, don't overpromise a ton of work to your supporters that you can't do.

Dunno much about GoFundMe.

@Andy_P

Oh turns out I just bought it and had it in the to-read on the Kindle. It is pretty fun so far!

Have you read Valente’s “In The Night Garden”? Very nicely done Arabian Nights-style nesting tales.

@Leucrotta

Sounds interesting. Very much in the same territory as a lot of early Hellboy. The quiet "these are not white euromutts" thing sounds good to me, I'd want to do some research to have a bit more ethnicity in their dialogue/some details myself, but I'm a white French/Italian lady and my opinions kinda don't really count much here I think.

And I got no clue what the WWII nerds will think. I don't think "grunts-eye view of magical WWII" is a thing I'd pick up if it wasn't by someone I already knew, Hellboy's kind of given me all I need of that.

Do you have a mental list of Occult Bullshit for them to deal with?

I got in a nice groove the past couple days and just posted four new page layouts to Patreon. Feels nice to push the story forwards in a chunk like this. Now to start the lengthy process of finishing the drawings... https://www.patreon.com/posts/23215322

@troodon

I think it's gonna be a good while until he's not the lead developer, but yeah. masto.social really needs to close registration for good. So some people will bounce off of not having one obvious place to go? Sure, whatever. We need to avoid having a few giant unmoderatable instances.

@Andy_P

Always a good feeling!

I am generally finding that the parts of Spyro 3 where you control someone besides the titular dragon to be more entertaining than they were in the original. Part of this may be because I've mellowed out with age, part of it may be because I just completely binged on being Spyro through 1 and 2 over the past couple weeks... and part of it may be because Toys for Bob put a *lot* of love into sculpting and animating the other characters.

I suppose I will see how much the last one is worth when I unlock the First Monkey Shooter friend.

@dzuk

I think Arkane is mostly French?

@Snapai

It might be because I’m a few versions behind. I should try to update soon, I think it was summer last time I did that?