Humbird0's Blog

Exvious Sprite Masterpieces

2026-04-30T02:01:01Z

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I fell down a delightful rabbit-hole recently!

Octopath Traveller is a beautiful game. Now imagine if every character and monster in every SquareEnix game was redrawn like that.

That… happened!!

I recently tried searching for Octopath Traveller sprite-sheets. But something peculiar caught my eye.

Is that... Primrose??How she normally looks.

Is that… a high-resolution version of Octopath Traveller!? What am I looking at?? Fan-art?

No, it was official art! I had just discovered Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. A discontinued mobile game that was stuffed full of sprite art masterpieces!!

In this screenshot alone, each of those folders contains one hundred different boss enemies!

Apparently that game had high-resolution sprites of characters and monsters from almost every SquareEnix game ever made. Even the 3D games! Nearly all drawn with just as much skill and care as the original games, but at double the size. That is four times as much detail!

I know how much effort that takes. A large sprite usually takes me at least 5 hours to create. Usually longer. And they made… thousands…. of these! All for one game.

The artists who worked on this are in a league of their own!

Spriter’s Resource

Barbariccia from FF4 Redrawn sprite

… and also animated them!

WereRat from FF6 Redrawn sprite

Siren from FF8 Redrawn in classic style!

AtmaWeapon from FF6 Fucking insanity!

On principle, I stay far far away from mobile ~~games~~ casinos. But as a sprite-artist, I will be studying this body of artwork for years!

Social Media Has Awful Design

2026-03-25T02:01:01Z

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Ironically, despite the internet being around for a fair amount of time now, social media websites aren’t actually very good website designs. In fact they’re intentionally bad at certain things. But what’s the alternative?

Separation VS Mixing

Imagine that you’re following an artist and you have a way to see just the art they made recently. Wouldn’t that be handy?

What if you could see retweeted or recommended art in a separate list? So you can tell if this artist drew it or somebody else? Even better, make it a gallery!

And their opinions. What if you only care about some people’s opinions and not others? Maybe you could follow that separately? … in a list… not mixed in with all of the art? Woah!!

I just described an older design that pre-dates social media. Multiple websites today actually still work this way. But they’re not apps. They’re websites… on the internet… that you visit. Like some kind of caveman who is somehow having a better experience than everybody else.

For example, FurAffinity separates an artist’s page into 3 sections:

Their art
Their favorites
Their journal

This makes it easy to ignore things you don’t care about, because it’s actually organized! If you only want to see art, then that is ALL you will ever see. What a concept!
This also reduces drama because opinions are contained in their journal, so people only see it when they intentionally look at it, instead of comments being randomly shoved into everybody’s face all the time.

Social media mixes all of these things together into a confused mess, forcing random opinions in your face, whether you’re interested or not. Doing this tempts strangers into reacting to opinions not directed at them, which encourages drama.
Mixing these things together is also less useful for the viewer, because it’s harder to find things they want, and nearly impossible to ignore stuff they don’t care about.

Infinite Scrolling

A gallery lets you instantly see everything that’s new without needing to scroll past each individual post one… at… a… time. There’s no guesswork. You know where the new posts end.

A scrolling feed makes checking for new things a slow manual process. It wastes your time by turning the act of checking for new stuff into a slow manual laborious process instead of an instant result.

One of the best things about an “inbox” gallery approach is that after you look at everything that’s new for the day, that inbox becomes empty! Because you are done. Freedom!!

Afterwards you can find more stuff using the search bar, or you can decide you are done and leave. This design lets you choose!

An algorithm is like a search happening automatically… at random. When something happens automatically, it subdues choice. This auto-search will keep your list scrolling forever, so you feel trapped trying in vain to reach an end that never comes.

Endless scrolling isn’t necessarily the same as infinite content.

Discord has unlimited scrolling with limited content. It ends at the most recent message.
Image booru sites limit their scrolling by separating it into pages, but with near-infinite content.

Pages are nice because the bottom of each one is like a checkpoint where you can choose to stop if you’ve had enough. And you can see how many total pages there are so you’re not guessing when it will finally end.

Check Websites Using RSS Feeds

It’s also possible to follow entire websites instead of people. It’s called an RSS feed. If ign.com posts an article you can see it show up in a simple list. YouTube and Mastodon also have RSS feeds, so you can follow YouTube channels and see what people post on Mastodon this way. This means you can instantly see whether or not there’s anything new. If the list is empty then you don’t have to waste your time manually visiting the site itself to check. You can even combine these lists and check multiple sites all at once.

“Being done” is useful, because you’re free to move on to doing other things.

Looking at RSS feeds

How to Use RSS Feeds

My Point

When you make your next website, don’t just blindly copy familiar designs. Think about them. There may be more useful ways to do things.

Internet Before Social Media

2026-03-23T02:01:01Z

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One day I happened to be watching a YouTube video about where “dark mode” came from in operating systems, and something he said was kind of a wake-up call for me.

Apparently there are now grown adults who don’t know what forums are.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I forget how much time has passed. This is a useful reminder for me. I guess it’s time to explain how the internet worked 15 years ago.

The irony is that it never actually went away. What changed was smart phones being invented in 2007. Everybody immediately loved them, but their itty bitty teensy weensy teeny tiny 3 inch touch screens made old websites impractical to use.

Some websites completely redesigned themselves to accommodate these popular new gadgets. But many did not. So people migrated to more convenient new things like Discord and brand new websites like MySpace and FaceBook that were all designed for phones from the start.

Old New

And so the old web was forgotten. Still there. Still used by some. But everybody and their dog had an iPhone now. And as the decades passed. A new generation grew up never knowing everything else. Never discovering the old wonders still waiting just beyond the tiny screen.

How Did People Find Out About Things?

Just use a search engine to look up a website about that subject, or revisit your favorite website about it. Search engines were the lifeblood of the internet before social media. Everything started there.

That’s the entire reason why Google became popular at all is because people used to actually look for websites.

Everybody had a daily routine. A set of favorite websites they would check each day. But it was different for each person, because everybody’s interests are different. I actually still do this today. Back in 2010 we didn’t just jump on Twitter and doom-scroll until the sun set. Instead we checked each of our favorite websites in case anything new was posted, such as a reply to something you wrote the day before, or a new article. And after you finished looking at the day’s handful of new things… you left. It usually didn’t even take that long. You could get through all of your morning websites in about an hour or two, and then go on with your day, or jump on a search engine to look for more stuff. We were constantly finding new websites because we were actively looking for them. And we were looking because every website always ran out of stuff to look at. You could actually finish exploring a website back then. There was no such thing as infinite scrolling.

Popular websites tended to be ones that updated often. If a website rarely updated it tended to get forgotten because there was no longer any reason to revisit it. Gamespot and IGN were pretty useful for game news, and their websites still exist today even though everybody just watches them on YouTube instead. The most popular sites were things like Gaia Online and Neopets, because they were equal parts website and game. A total hybrid. You played them in your browser. Each page was a different “place” in the game. You would play Flash mini-games in your browser, collect items, trade them with your friends, or sell them for game currency, or use that currency to buy accessories and outfits for your avatar, or to customize each of your neopets. You could also just hang out with friends in online games instead of websites. There was no one single universal home. Everybody picked their own homes online.

By the way, all of those links still work… it’s almost like the rest of the internet still exists or something.

RSS Feeds

If you were really clever, you would use RSS feeds and iGoogle to see when your favorite websites updated without having to visit them one by one. Instead you saw a list of that website’s recent posts, right next to another website’s list. You could even combine these together into a single list of what’s new on your personal internet. This was much faster and very convenient. Your list would tell you when a website had something new and THEN you could choose to visit it.

We “followed” entire websites the same way that you might “follow” a person on social media. You subscribed to a website and then your RSS list would you tell you when there was something new to see. RSS is still works today but most people forgot about it when Google killed Google Reader and iGoogle, so they no longer had an obvious way to see their feeds inside the browser. You could use an RSS Feed Reader program instead. Tons of these programs exist, but most people didn’t bother to look for them.

The Google Graveyard

Instant Messengers

Instead of Discord we had instant messengers. AOL, MSN, and ICQ were the most popular ones. These were separate computer programs that you ran outside of your browser. Usually you would tell it to automatically start up when you turned on your computer and it would just run all the time in the background. When one of your friends wanted to talk, they would send a message and you would instantly see it.

Sure, the old flip-phones could do text messaging, but it was kind of crappy. You had to type out sentences on a number pad so people usually abbreviated phrases to save themselves the trouble (chat speak LOL), and the screen was microscopic. The computer was just better at everything.

Our real-life friends and family members would all be on instant messengers as well. Facebook didn’t exist. People just talked to each other using computer programs. You could send text, pictures, and any other file you wanted, like a one-on-one Discord. But it was common to be having multiple conversations at the same time, with each person in a separate window. Some instant messenger programs combined AOL MSN and ICQ together so it didn’t even matter which program your friends used. You could just talk to each other no matter what. But that’s all it did. It didn’t have “Discord servers”. It was just you and your friends.

By the way, the Trillian website still exists… it’s almost like it still works or something.

Forums

Instead of Discord servers we had forums. Websites that were dedicated to talking about your favorite things. Each forum had a main overall subject but like on Discord servers people didn’t only talk about one thing. You would visit the forum regularly to see if anybody posted something new, and replies would show up in your email so you would know right away. Before phone notifications we all got notifications over email. Technically you can still do that. Nothing is preventing it. The forum server software was free, so anybody could create a new one overnight. There were thousands of forums. In fact most of them still exist today but most people forget to visit anymore. They fell out of fashion because the old ones look bad on phones. They weren’t designed for tiny screens. Discord works well on phones so most people just switched to that instead.

Most of These Still Exist!

Some websites closed over the years, but most of the old internet didn’t actually go away. It’s just sitting there being ignored. If you look around, some forums are still active. Some old games still have people in them hanging out together. Websites like Newgrounds and GameSpot still exist with tons of stuff to show anybody who remembers to visit. And most search engines will still take you to these places if you bother to look.

RSS Feeds still work today even without iGoogle. Just use a browser extension like Feedbro, or a feed reader program.

Instant Messenger programs still exist such as Trillian and Pidgin. DemonSaw is one that I currently use a lot. It’s kind of like an Instant Messenger with encryption and file sharing.

Let’s do This Again Sometime

I should probably revisit this topic again in another 15 years, when the next generation has grown up and wonders what things were like now.

Why 15 years? Because a five year old today is barely aware of the world around them. In 15 years they will be an adult, wondering what that whole “social media” fad was about, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth in the long-ago ancient year of 2025.

Secrets Reward Curiosity

2025-06-04T02:01:01Z

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In The Secret Life Of Machines, Tim Hunkin liked to decorate his hand-made contraptions with fun details. Circuit boards would have little plastic people glued to them to make it look like a little city. Anybody curious enough to peek inside would get a delightful little surprise.

Jason Scott is a digital archivist who likes to give his files silly names. He sometimes mentions how some old shareware programs will display a fun message if you run them more than 10 years in the future.

Watch the full video here

The VLC video player’s icon wears a little Santa hat during December.

This type of fun whimsey rewards curiosity.

What if you put some ascii art in your website’s HTML? Or background details that animate when you click on them? A hidden picture or extra level in your game? Some funny filenames or extra bonus files for people who look inside a folder? Or add an Easter egg to your program?

Spy Fox

Easter Eggs are a very fitting way to describe this. You hide things so that curious people are rewarded for looking. People who would click on things just to see what they do. This encourages them to explore even more. You turn curiosity and learning into a game.

Curiosity leads to discovery and knowledge. But it takes patience. You can help sustain a person’s patience by rewarding their experimentation and curiosity along the way.

On the old Macintosh I would sometimes find fun hidden goodies when I looked at a program or game with ResEdit. Extra unused sound files and pictures. Flash animations can be decompiled, so maybe I should hide extra goodies in my games? Every writer has a pile of half-written stories. Every artist has unfinished sketches lying around. These are still entertaining. They can be secret goodies.

So far I have hidden secret images or stories inside of 3 projects. You can see them if open their SWF file in a Flash decompiler.

Royal Pets Princess Rivals Amazon Offering 2

Sharing Is Not Piracy

2025-09-01T02:01:01Z

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Giving or Taking. It Can’t Be Both.

Piracy is TAKING things away, not giving.
That’s obvious, right?
Burglary: Removal of property.
If I share and give you something, that’s the opposite of taking.

The very first time I ever saw the word “piracy” associated with sharing was the Napster controversy, and I just assumed it was obvious to everybody how transparently greedy that interpretation was. People were GIVING each other files. Not taking them away.

If you share an idea and I share an idea. We both end up with TWO ideas.
If you share a file and I share a file. We both end up with TWO files.

Obviously the word “pirate” was being misused here. This is the exact opposite: Sharing. Even better… duplication!

Downloading is duplication. If we could duplicate all the food in the world, nobody would starve. What if we could duplicate all human knowledge!? Education for everybody!

Can you imagine how horrible that would be?

Basic Ethics

I feel like people have forgotten the basics. Or maybe they somehow never grew up with them? You know, stuff like Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and The Berenstain Bears. Or pretty much anything else on PBS.

It’s good to share.
Good people share with each other.
Only greedy people don’t share.

Everybody is unique and different. No two people are alike. Don’t generalize.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Maybe kids no longer grow up with these things? I know this seems like corny kiddie stuff, but that’s the whole point. Kindness and sharing are the most basic ethics we learn as kids. The bare minimum. These concepts should be obvious. Are these ideas really being forgotten? Yes… yes they are.

Who are THESE bozos?

OMG! That bird is violating a copyright!
“Um… he is??”
There’s only one book!
“And…?”
There are 3 people.
“They’re sharing it.”
They’re stealing! They should buy licenses for 3 books!!
“One is clearly enough.”

The March of Time

Lately I have come to realize that these “eternal” values from my childhood are really just the fading echoes of the hippie era. The ideas of compassion and community were the lingering aftershocks of US culture rejecting the puritanical 1950’s and the warmongering Vietnam era. Just a moment in time. And now the pendulum swings again.

Labels and Politics make no sense to me. Life isn’t a Saturday morning cartoon where the entire human race is neatly divided into “Good guys” VS “Bad guys” The concept of cramming every possible opinion about every possible thing into just 2 boxes seems ridiculous. This is obvious right? My distaste for politics isn’t because I don’t care. I still vote. But I can’t really wrap my head around the concept of only “2 parties”. Human beings just don’t work this way. Everybody is a unique individual, different from everybody else.

You can’t solve all the world’s problems by just killing all the bad people. Most problems do not come from a cartoonish villain. There are exceptions… but they are exceptions because they are not normal.

"Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent."

It’s Just Me I Guess

Media often mentions Boomers and Millennials.
But I’m somewhere in between. A “Gen-Y” kid I think?
I didn’t grow up with Spongebob and Gameboy Advance. Those were my college years.
I’m not a hippie or baby boomer either. My parents were.
My grandmother worked at a library.
Maybe that’s why I grew up with these “love and sharing” values.
But I always just took it all for granted. I assumed that these were eternal human values that everybody understood since the beginning of time.
Mothers read books with their kids.
Your parents give you food and clothes.
Raising kids is an act of sharing.
It is literally 100% percent of the process.

The idea that sharing is somehow controversial seems bizarre to me. Wasn’t that just part of the “You Wouldn’t Download a Car” bullshit that everybody laughed at? And we laughed HARD… It was such an obvious lie! And everybody knew it!
Sharing is “stealing” now? What is this… opposite day?
Are there too many good people in the world or something?
Too much kindness?

When I support artists on Patreon, I could not care less about “exclusive access.” I am THANKING them for adding awesome things to the world. Making the world better. I support them so they can continue adding themselves to the world. The second the internet existed we began living in a post-scarcity media society. I am not buying or owning “property” when the whole world receives it, so I don’t think of it as a purchase.

By definition a purchase is a transfer of property. Ownership of a single thing. But digital things are not singular. They’re something better. They are infinite! Which means they do an infinite amount of good and create an infinite amount of happiness because they affect an unlimited number of people.

We are halfway to achieving post-scarcity culture and don't even realize it

I remember 2005 when the XBox 360 first introduced the concept of digital games. It was convenient. But everyone still knew that buying stuff meant owning it. If I buy a lightbulb. I could use it or break it. I could paint it. I could give it away. Nobody gives a shit what I do with MY lightbulb. You can do whatever you want with the stuff you own. It’s your property. That’s normal.

If I have something temporarily. There’s a different word for that: renting!
If I purchase it, I own it permanently.

Hey, remember when we all “bought licenses” at the video store? No of course not, because that would be complete bullshit.

If you think about it. Buying only makes sense for physical objects that cannot be duplicated. But when a digital file exists on the internet, the whole world has it. Because every single part of how the internet works duplicates information. It is infinite. You can’t own something that is infinite.

Browsers Download Things in Order to Display Them

I live with my mother and sister.
My mother is too old to earn a living, she’s almost 80, but we didn’t ship her off to some lousy nursing home. It seemed obvious that it would not make sense for each of us to try to rent separate apartments, owning 3 refrigerators, 3 stoves, 3 toilets. Instead we just share ONE house. It’s way less expensive. It’s not fancy but there’s enough room for us. Last night we even shared dinner. Sharing is not a crime. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s also the only humane way to care for people when they get old.

How I Learned To Make Websites

2026-10-08T02:01:01Z

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Amazing Tools From a Bygone Era

I often tell people it’s easy to make a website. Why do I believe that?

Because I grew up in a time when web browsers like Netscape Communicator came with GRAPHICAL website editors that worked without you having to know any code. They worked like word processors. They were called WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get)

I take it for granted that easy tools like these exist. But they’re old, so why would anybody want to use ancient software from 25 years ago? … because they STILL WORK.

New features were gradually added to HTML, but the original features did not go away. You can still build a website “the old way” and with very few exceptions it will still work perfectly. Granted these methods are now “the wrong way” because… tables or something. But more importantly these methods are easy. It’s a good way to start.

I built my first website in Adobe Pagemill in the year 2000. Look how easy this is!

And Microsoft made a great one called Frontpage. All of these are visual editors. All drag-and-drop. All easy to use. And if you had any curiosity at all, you would naturally peek behind the curtain at the text that it’s writing.

If a GeoCities website did something cool, you could just right-click their page and “View Source” to see how they did it. Then just copy-and-paste it into your own page. That’s not stealing. It’s learning. Nobody owns HTML code. The web was designed like this on purpose.

… or you can just look up the main HTML tags. You only really need about 5 of them most of the time. ˂IMG˃, ˂A HREF˃, ˂DIV˃, ˂SPAN˃, ˂BR˃

https://wvrocker.tripod.com/codes.html
https://wvrocker.tripod.com/tables.html

The Old Approach

But fine. Big deal if you can make an ugly GeoCities page. Everything is just centered and stacked on top of each other. How do you make it, you know… good?

Tables! ˂TABLE˃, ˂TR˃, ˂TD˃
Back then that was the only way to put things next to each other in any controlled way.
https://wvrocker.tripod.com/tables.html

So here’s how the “good looking” websites were made back then. First you draw a mock-up of your page in Photoshop… yes really. Then export a picture of your design as a JPEG and set that as your website’s background so you can trace over it in a graphical website editor! Then you use tables to position things down to the exact pixel. Photoshop even has tools for slicing up pictures for this exact purpose, just so you can put all the pieces inside a table to surround your content.

Tables are very convenient, but also very rigid. Normally you would have to create a new layout for every single page. But you can re-use parts of a page using ˂IFRAME˃ tags which let you keep your navigation buttons on-screen, and only change part of the page when you click on links. Basically you can display a page inside of another page.
https://www.siteground.com/kb/what-is-iframe/

That was how I built a website back in 2004. It doesn’t even use CSS. Hell it barely even uses pictures. It’s mostly just one giant background picture with areas you can click. Behind the scenes it’s a table and a couple of invisible iFrames. When I click the buttons, the pages get loaded inside those areas. No JavaScript. It was 100% HTML.

Learning New Things

So if this is so easy, why is nobody using these anymore?
Because of 2 reasons:

It’s hard to change old websites.
Smartphones.

It’s hard to change old websites.

It’s easy to make a website this way. But it’s hard to change the way it looks afterwards, because you would have to modify every… single… page! One by one. You could use Dreamweaver templates to rewrite all the pages for you, but then you would have to pay Adobe forever. You can avoid all of this by using a CSS Style Sheet, which is a separate file that describes how all the pages should look. And because it’s a separate file, you can just change that one file to completely transform how the rest of your website looks.

Smartphones

Smartphones also threw a monkey-wrench into things. In the early 2000’s you could safely assume everybody had a computer monitor with at least a 800x600 resolution that was at least a foot wide (and 20 pounds). But smartphones are 2 inch screens with completely random resolutions. Even if you can fit all the pixels, everything will look too tiny to read or tap on with our giant clumsy sausage fingers. So you end up needing to stack things when they don’t fit side-by-side. Tables can’t really do that.

To be honest I dragged my feet for a few years before learning CSS. I didn’t even try to learn it until about 2011. At first I threw together my original Project Website in a single weekend back in 2010 using Adobe Dreamweaver and pure HTML. But the website was so simple that I later re-created it using CSS as an experiment, just to see if I could. I also tried out a bunch of other techniques in the process. These experiments became my crash course in modern HTML and CSS. This is when I learned almost everything I know about websites, by remaking the same little website over and over with different techniques. I already knew how this website was supposed to look and act, so it was just a matter of learning how to accomplish the same thing using different techniques.

I also learned that storing downloads on external sites like Dropbox and 4shared was inherently unreliable. It turns out that sites like that always delete your stuff some time later, completely at random, when you’re not looking. And after a couple years the hosting-site itself will vanish too. It always happens. So everything on your website should just be ON your website. That way it only goes away when you tell it to.

But that has drawbacks too. My Pokemon hentai game was in full-swing and all the downloads were stressing my free domain, so I switched to a paid host for $10 bucks a month and looked for ways to make a more efficient website. I heard about this new thing called “Single-page JavaScript websites” so I thought I’d try it. It seemed to make sense. In theory if everything is rendered and cached on the visitor’s computer, then most of the website will still be on their computer when they visit it later. The only thing they will have to re-download are the parts that change, like a single JSON file and a tiny thumbnail picture.

And I had already learned JavaScript… completely by accident! It turned out that Flash’s ActionScript language was basically just JavaScript in a trench coat. I had already created my custom RPG Maker by this point, so I was pretty damn good at it.

I briefly tried using React.js but it seemed like extreme overkill, so instead I wrote my own “model-view controller” from scratch. Originally as a single long JS file. Then I discovered require.js. This thing is glorious! Modular programming baby! That concept itself also revolutionized the way I programmed my Flash games going forward.

https://requirejs.org/

I didn’t download a bunch of “helper” JavaScript libraries. I mostly just used jQuery to tame Internet Explorer’s quirks and require.js to organize stuff, and then wrote the rest myself. Everything worked so well that I never felt any need to add “helper” code.

Avoiding Modern Mistakes

As a side-effect I mostly ignored the React.js craze, CoffeeScript, SASS, and the avalanche of other JavaScript helper libraries and build tools that were released over the years. I simply didn’t need them. That turned out to be a very good thing. Most “professional” websites struggle to even display a simple picture if JavaScript is turned off.

Meanwhile my old JavaScript website could display an entire fully usable thumbnail gallery if JavaScript is off. After learning about The Wayback Machine, I became obsessed with semantic HTML, machine-readable metadata, and digital preservation, so I modified my JavaScript website to work perfectly even on the Internet Wayback Machine. Go ahead and try it. Even the old search engine still works!

Let me repeat that. My search engine works… inside the Wayback Machine!

Eventually I realized that my JavaScript website had long since given up the efficiency of a single JSON file in exchange for preservability. It also took over 2 seconds to load even over a blazing fast internet connection. Meanwhile a normal “static” website could do all of these things better. And since each of my projects already had its own HTML page for their “readme” descriptions, it was almost a static website already, so why did I need the JavaScript? I also wanted to write my website using Markdown to make its content more future-proof. So in 2023 I completely remade my website using a static site generator called HUGO.

So I’m back to using templates. But this time I’m not relying on Dreamweaver and Adobe. I’m using a program called HUGO, which is free, open-source, and multi-platform. I can just write my pages as simple Markdown text files, and HUGO converts them into web pages for me. But since I already know all about HTML and CSS I wrote my own templates for HUGO to make my pages exactly the way I want them. But you could just use a pre-existing HUGO theme instead.

Your Turn

So when I tell people that making websites is easy, that’s because I remember using simple visual editors, making simple websites with tables, signing up for cheap hosting (Which only costs about $3 a month), and using FTP to drag-and-drop files onto the internet. I watched HTML grow from something simple to something with a bunch of optional complexity, so I already know which parts are optional. But I forget that other people don’t.

These days it’s kind of hard for people to figure out what matters next to the mountain of advertisements for JavaScript frameworks and “helper” tools.
Spoiler alert: ALL of them are optional. Most of them make things more complicated. And they do that on purpose so they can sell you their “solutions” so that you will depend on them. Most of them should be avoided. The truth is that HTML itself is already simple. Just focus on HTML and CSS. Then experiment with other things later.

https://webguide.neocities.org/css/

Restoring the Choice of Activities

2024-10-20T02:01:01Z

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Separate appliances give you a choice to make. Doing everything on one device takes that choice away. But you can divide things on purpose to get it back.

A few years ago I used one computer for everything. Art, internet, gaming, and YouTube.

But there was a problem. This eventually devolved into just YouTube and Gaming all day every day. I wasn’t getting anything done.

Then I realized something. Computers can do anything! … and that’s kind of the problem. It didn’t used to be this way. In the 1990’s you had to choose different objects for different activities. This gave you a choice. A choice we don’t tend to have now. Even the old computers were more like internet appliances, because they sucked at everything else. And you tended to see the computer itself because it wasn’t hidden under a desk. It was in front of you. Just another object in the room.

… and so you naturally traveled to different parts of a room to do different things. But most importantly, you chose your activity before you did it. Because you had to. This choice meant that you weren’t just falling into the same habit over and over.

But when one computer does everything, you habitually sit in the same place so you end up doing the same thing. Because in your mind it feels like one activity.

But I’m not lazy while I’m at work. I do different things in different places. Because habits are tied to places.

So if a computer can do anything, what if I intentionally choose a different computer for each activity? Divide my hobbies apart between different objects and put those objects in different places?

It just so happened I already had a ton of computers lying around. Partly because I’m a sucker for gadgets. But they also just sort of… accumulated over the years. Some were hand-me-downs from friends and family, some were impulse buys, some were old computers I used long ago.

So that’s what I did. Behold my glorious mess! No really. There’s a method to all this madness. It doesn’t even use all that much electricity, aside from the monitors. But I only turn on the screens I’m currently using.

For browsing internet stuff, I use a windows tablet hooked to an external monitor. It’s a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 from 2016, so it’s powerful enough to browse the web comfortably. And because it’s a portable device it uses very little power.

For making projects, I use a relatively powerful PC. Needless to say this uses the most electricity out of everything.

For watching YouTube I use a little low-power Intel NUC. It does nothing else. And this computer runs on just 8 watts of power so I can run it 24/7 for the cost of like, a couple bucks a month.

And what about games? I mostly use my Nintendo Switch and a Steam Deck. Again, portable devices that use relatively little power. They all use the same screen as my YouTube computer, so I keep all my bad habits in one place.

… unless I want to play Fallout 4. I refuse to play Bethesda games without mods. But I need a mod manager for that. Which means I need Windows and a half-decent PC.

But I don’t want to accidentally get into the habit of gaming on my project computer, so instead I stream the game from that computer to the “gaming” screen across the room and then play the game there. I know this seems stupid, but there’s a reason. It keeps my gaming habits tied to the “gaming screen”. So I’m never tempted to play games when I sit down at my project computer.

Sending: https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine
Receiving: https://moonlight-stream.org/

And this setup actually works! I’ve been doing things this way for years now. But the secret ingredient is not having multiple computers… it’s having multiple chairs. My habits get associated with the physical position and location of my body. Sitting down at the gaming place puts me in a gaming state of mind. Sitting at the project place puts me in a different state of mind.

Writing Future-Proof Sites

2025-12-16T02:01:01Z

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Project website in 2011 Project website in 2013 Project website in 2023

The Problem

Websites change over time, but their old content stays the same. So how do your store that part separately in a future-proof way? It’s not pure text. There are pictures and formatting too. How do you store that in a form that all future versions of your website can read? What format should you use? The lowest common denominator is plain text. But HTML itself has pretty good compatibility going back more than 20 years, but not every feature survived. Remember when you could play MIDI files as background music? Or play Flash animations?

Previous Attempts

Last year in 2023 I redesigned my website. It was a tedious process because I had to double-click the old HTML files, select all the plain text displayed in the browser, copy it, and then paste the text into a shiny new markdown editor. And then re-apply the formatting and re-import the pictures.

It’s not the first time. 14 years ago in 2013, I also redesigned my website. I had just created a custom editor using Flash to generate JSON for my JavaScript single-page-app website. But that website wasn’t all JSON. Each project also had a readme file. A simple HTML file with minimal markup. So I double-clicked each of the older HTML files, selected part of the text, copied… and then pasted it into that project’s HTML readme file. This seemed to make sense. HTML is basically just XML right? Surely I could just use an XML program to read the data in the future.

It turns out that HTML is not proper XML. Maybe XHTML was going to be, but that didn’t really take off. To put things in perspective:

In 1997 HTML was the format of the future.
In 2005 XML was the format of the future.
In 2014 JSON was the format of the future.
In 2016 Markdown was the format of the future.

A Possible Solution

But I have noticed a pattern here. I always end up copying the plain unformatted text being displayed from the browser and then pasting that into whatever new thing I want to use. I never wanted to copy the old HTML directly. Why? Because plain text just works with everything no matter what. Which means I always had to manually re-apply the formatting and re-import the pictures afterwards.

So why couldn’t I just use the HTML I already had? One problem was that my old website was inconsistent. In spite of my efforts to use minimal HTML, it was still all hand-written and so the same things would get formatted in slightly different ways on different pages. A computer program would struggle to recognize them all, and I would struggle to remember all the places I wrote something.

I also had new ideas when I redesigned my website in 2023, about what kind of information I wanted to store, and how I wanted to present it. I often recommend artists. How should I store a “recommendation?” It’s not as simple as a bold tag. It’s a very niche and specific concept, so there is no single dedicated HTML tag for this. And being an abstract concept, it can also be presented in multiple ways. All equally valid. Should it be a semantic FIGURE tag with a fig-caption? But what if I want to include a link with it?

I also learned more about semantic HTML, schema microformats, and new CSS features that make new layout methods possible. What I needed was a more generic way to represent things, and a separate way to handle their presentation. It’s always a good idea to separate content from presentation, so that you can change how things look without having to modify ALL the content. That’s why CSS was invented in the first place, but it’s not enough by itself. And even though HTML lets you add tags with arbitrary names, I still need to include things like normal HTML links inside of them. The real problem is that any time you compose multiple tags together, they can end up in any order and create inconsistency. This makes it nearly impossible to detect that “set” of tags to convert things later on. But what if I could represent something using a single tag instead?

So that’s what I did. Here in 2023 / 2024 I am storing my website’s source as Markdown, and using HUGO to convert it into HTML. BUT… I represent abstract things like artist recommendations using single “XML” tags because I found a way to make Hugo interpret these as short-codes so that it replaces them with whatever set of tags I want when it generates the HTML files. And if I lose that option in the future, any other markdown editor will harmlessly pass-through the original “XML tags” I wrote directly into the HTML, where something else could potentially detect and convert them… in theory.

This has two advantages. HUGO will always write this HTML exactly the same way every time so the order of tags will always be exactly the same, and my markdown files store the content in a form that is even simpler than HTML without needing to combine tags together.

Hugo isn’t limited to generating HTML either. It can write any kind of text file. So in another 10 years when I (very likely) redesign my website again, I assume I can probably just use HUGO to convert the markdown into the next “format of the future”… assuming computers can still run x86 windows programs, but even that is not guaranteed. I suppose there’s always emulation.

Part of my inspiration came from reading about how Cory Doctorow handles his blog. He is a very prolific blogger who has used XML for over 20 years and uses various python scripts to convert his articles for his website and social media posts. That probably works, but I don’t envy having to edit XML markup by hand.

How It’s Going So Far

So I recently moved my blog to a new website. I mostly re-designed the new website from the ground up. Did all my “future proof” articles transfer seamlessly?

Well mostly yes!

… Most of the exceptions were self-inflicted changes, where I chose to handle a few things differently. I guess that’s to be expected. I’m always going to keep improving so change is inevitable.

By using other people’s ready-made software in Linux instead of making my own in Windows, I no longer had the luxury of generating metadata from a nice graphical editor. I went with Obsidian because it seems to provide a few conveniences such as keeping track of previously used tags. The tag-handling is primitive compared to my custom editor, but hopefully good enough to be useful.

Another change is that I decided to convert my XML codes into markdown outside of Hugo, using find-and-replace, and that led me to storing the front-matter in both the “content” and “index” markdown files. The idea is that I will mainly write and edit the “content” file in Obsidian and then convert it into an “index” file for Hugo to read. I only do this conversion as-needed, which saves Hugo a TON of work and makes generating the website much faster.

I also changed my mind about which markdown codes I want to use for loud text and ^quiet text. This is another thing that could be handled with find-and-replace, but unlike the shortcodes this change only needs to happen a one time. Besides intend to type the new markdown manually in any new articles so I ended up going back and revising all of the old articles by hand. Fortunately this is a very simple change and I don’t have a lot of articles… yet. In the future a change like this could theoretically be handled with a drag-and-drop script. Recursively search a folder to find all files named content.md and then replace the double-underlines with carat symbols. That is definitely something a Linux bash script can do.

Why I Admire Furry Fandom

2025-02-28T02:01:01Z

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I’ve always admired the furry fandom. They are the laid-back hippie artists of the digital age, and their DIY spirit is downright inspiring.

When large art websites like DeviantArt and SheezyArt started rejecting adult art, the furries simply built their own sites. Decades later, FurAffinity is still thriving. And even when FurAffinity changed some rules and rejected some of its own members, those furries simply built another site, and decades later InkBunny is still thriving. Both doing their own thing and coexisting just fine. Many artists are on both. Just different houses with different rules. Where do you feel like hanging out today? There are even more furry art sites out there… just in case. And they are ALL extremely well-made.

When the rest of the world seems to be hopelessly drowning in toxic politics, the furries still seem to abide by their unwritten rule of “You do you!” Every artist is different. Every gallery is shameless. Nobody is surprised by this, and nobody expects it to be otherwise. Because that’s how it has always been (for at least 30 years). Don’t like an artist’s work? Just skip the “watch” button and silently move on. It’s that simple. Art has keywords. The websites have filters. Viewers suggest keywords to fill the gaps. And their search engines actually work! They had all this figured out decades ago. It just feels like the rest of the world forgot.

Social Media Meanwhile on FurAffinity

When the rest of the world seems hopelessly hooked on exploitive social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, relentlessly harvesting people’s private details and artwork to sell for profit, the furry websites are still just art sites made by artists, for artists, run by artists, with barely a cookie in sight… all still going as if social media just never even happened. And while everyone laments the loss of the “old web”, the furry community just… never stopped.

I consider myself a casual furry at best. I barely draw furry art but I can easily enjoy it because it never looked strange to me. It simply looks like a cartoon. What’s strange about an artist drawing something? I had a childhood where literally every cartoon had a talking animal in it. Scooby Doo talked. Micky Mouse talked. Duck Tales talked. Bugs Bunny talked. The Smurfs talked. Sonic talked. I think the only exception I can remember was Transformers, and that was because the alien transforming robots were talking! We didn’t call these “furries” back then, we just called them “cartoons.” Even the old classics were Looney Toons and Disney. Cartoons had always been this way. I feel like I didn’t start seeing cartoons without talking animals until anime arrived. And even then the Pokemon and Digimon were still talking.

But also consider this: When your average cartoon is about mutant turtles traveling between dimensions to fight an evil talking brain while transforming robots steal cubes of energy to teleport to their cybernetic home planet on a precarious beam of light, while the ghostbusters time-travel to save Christmas… you don’t even notice if an animal starts talking in the middle of all that delightful chaos. How can I hate the furries? They celebrate all the things that made my childhood fun! We’re weird because the 1990’s were weird… and the 1980’s, and the 70’s, and the 60’s, and the 50’s, and the 40’s.

And then as I entered my teenage years I discovered a fandom that was exploring all the same naughty new ideas that I was, right along with me! Thousands of artists shamelessly combining all their favorite things, all doing it differently, never once being embarrassed about any of it.

I’m a child of the 90’s. Calling it all “furry” after the fact seems like a weird retcon, propagated by Big Newspaper to sell more EWW! … or something like that. Some people can freak out and be miserable if they want to, but I’m just gonna continue enjoying life… and making my own websites.

How I Use Social Media

2026-10-17T02:01:01Z

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The Twitter Years

I don’t think I use social media the way most people do. Even when I first signed up for Twitter way back in 2013, I created my account for a very specific purpose, to post progress updates about my projects. But why Twitter? Because I could post the messages using my phone, even if I was at work. My Pokemon Hentai game project had a dedicated forum thread, but I had a bad habit of going silent for months at a time and not telling anybody how the project was going. Part of this was because I didn’t have much free time back then, so I wanted to post a quick message using my Phone right before work. But forums don’t really work well on phones. Forum software was designed in the early 2000’s for desktop computers.

My plan (partly) worked. For over a decade, every single post on that Twitter account was a project update. No exceptions. I later added other accounts for general Twitter stuff like following artists or whatever. But I ended up never using my phone to write those messages. Why? Because of pictures. I could not stand the idea of posting anything without an eye-catching picture to go with it, even a lazy stock photo is better than nothing. Text looks boring. People don’t read about text. They read about pictures. My own eyes want to glaze over if all I see are a bunch of text posts scrolling by. Even if other people are not like me, I still want to make my posts look interesting. I have standards dammit! But good pictures need Photoshop, and Photoshop needs a desktop computer.

Anyway I stopped using Twitter… eventually. But not for the reasons you expect. This was years before Nazi’s and Musk. Twitter simply became impractical. Sure, I figured out how to read my feeds and display them on my website. I even displayed them with a custom widget. But I wanted MORE! I wanted every project on my website to have its own updates, somehow plucked out of the master list of tweets. I even prefixed every single Twitter post with the project’s name and a colon so that I could manually search for them… and I actually pulled that off! … temporarily.

At one point Twitter stopped letting me request my feed as a JSON file. They wanted everyone to use THEIR official widget™ which only contained the data as pre-formatted HTML. No problem I’ll just load their widget invisibly, jQuery that bitch to extract the data I care about, throw it away and turn the data back into JSON so I can keep displaying my own posts the way I want, even the ones with adult content. And I actually pulled it off! … partly. It turned out there was another problem. Twitter was only giving me the last 50 posts. But I had projects going back for years! I wanted TOTAL ACCESS to my own data, and Twitter wasn’t giving it to me… so I took it. I downloaded my Twitter archive, wrote a program to convert it’s ugly JSON into much simpler JSON, and uploaded that directly to my website. Then I wrote a program that would let me write new messages and upload this JSON file AND post to my Twitter account at the same time. Post on your own site and syndicate elsewhere. I had accidentally discovered the IndieWeb concept of POSSE.

The Many Mastodons

A few years later I dropped Twitter completely, out of a sense of solidarity. Baraag seemed like a good alternative. They didn’t judge you for your art. And for some year026-10-17T02:01:01-04:00s that worked well. But Baraag eventually started struggling under its own weight. So many people were using it that they couldn’t afford the bandwidth and they occasionally had to switch off federation with other instances. Not federating kind of defeats the purpose of Mastodon. But Baragg’s own staff recommended another instance called Aethy.

It turns out that Aethy suits me better. They require everyone to label their posts. I was already doing that. My website was already doing that. I have very strong opinions about this. I believe porn needs to be well labeled so people can actually find stuff they like… or at least filter it. This also makes a lot of sense on a federated system.

But now I have 2 mastodon accounts. So what do I do with the Baraag account? I don’t want to delete it because I still follow some of the artists on there. But if Baraag has to defederate to save bandwidth again I’ll miss out. I also want to share awesome lewd art from other artists. But nobody on there ever bothers to hide anything with Content Warnings so most other mastodon instances tend to block posts from Baraag, so I can’t really share posts from there… but I can share lewd posts to there. Clearly nobody on Baraag minds, so that’s what that account is for. Recommending art and artists.

Meanwhile my Aethy account is only used to share my project updates, exactly like my old Twitter account. I even updated my posting program to send messages to both my website and my Aethy account.

And I have a 3rd account now. For conversations on Aethy. I mean who wants to follow an artist only to see a bunch of ugly boring non-porn posts… ew! So that’s all tucked away somewhere else.

My setup actually gives people 4 channels:

Work-in-progress Updates about projects I’m currently working on. (headpat.cafe)
Finished Projects. (#By_Humbird0 hash tag on Headpat)
Lewd art by other artists. (Baraag)
Chat with me. (Aethy)

Part of the reason why I do this is because I wish other artists did this. A lot of times I just want an easy way to see only their art. Mastodon provides a “media” tab which usually works for this, but if they’re having conversations or talking about their favorite meals on the same account then a lot of unrelated stuff will show up there. One way to prevent this is to have separate accounts for separate things.

Mastodon media tab with unrelated pictures

My projects account shows a lot of WIP stuff, but my website can provide a convenient gallery. And if you want to share my stuff on Mastodon, then the #by_humbird0 hashtag will give you a way to see the finished stuff.

a gallery on my website

I have even started recommending awesome artists who aren’t even on Mastodon. My website already does this, but when I post someone’s art on Mastodon the important thing is presenting it without making it look like I drew it… so I hung it up in a freakin’ museum with their name in big giant letters. This seems fitting. Museums present other people’s art all the time. Nobody assumes a museum drew their own paintings. Oh and most importantly, I LINK TO THEIR ART. The whole point of recommending artists is to give people an easy way to find more awesome art. You can’t expect them to go looking for it. Some artwork may not be easy to find or people might not know where to look.

Created by: Liesday

See more of their art

artist recommendation on Mastodon

Akira Toryama And Chrono Trigger

2024-03-11T02:01:01Z

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I’m going to write about two things here. This is more opinion than fact. I write what the heart remembers, because my first experience with Chrono Trigger was a massively soul-shaping moment for me. And like so many things, Akira Toriyama played a part in that.

Akira Toriyama

But before I write twelve chapters gushing about how I adore every single pixel in Chrono Trigger, let me talk about Akira Toriyama. In the USA, Dragon Ball Z is almost like the “Star Wars” of the anime world. It feels like it invented the shonen action genre overnight, regardless of whether that’s technically true. Because one day we were a bunch of kids watching cheap garbage like The Smurfs, and the next day we saw motherfuckin’ Dragon Ball Z! It’s hard to describe just how massively badass anime was when it arrived here. It was an apocalyptic moment in American cartoons, utterly humiliating everything that came before. Even Disney felt like baby-stuff. Cute Widdle Bambi wasn’t going to go super-saijyan and blast someone’s head off. There was no going back! And like so many foundational things, Akira Toriyama was a part of it.

It wasn't even a contest...It was a goddamn massacre!

Long before Chrono Trigger came out, JRPG’s had to be invented first. There was Dungeons & Dragons. But turning exploration, adventure, and storytelling into a video game genre was largely defined by Dragon Quest. It didn’t technically invent RPG’s but it defined so much about the genre that it might as well have. And like so many foundational things, Akira Toriyama was a part of it.

I think my favorite thing about Toriyama is his utterly unique art style. You will never mistake his art for any other artist. I’m proud to say that I’m jealous of him. He inspires me to explore and develop a unique art style of my own. To find an expression unlike anybody else. But one has to wonder, where did Akira Toryama’s art style come from? What inspired him?? To answer this I think we need to look at the things he watched and read while growing up. In the earliest days of the 1960’s and 70’s, anime and manga were full of cute characters overflowing with fun personalities.

And when that style faded in the shadow of the golden era of robot space-operas and gory erotic horror, a few artists like Rumiko Takahashi and Akira Toriyama continued carrying the torch of charming wide-eyed personalities forward many decades into the future long after most of the world forgot about the cute anime of ancient times. And so in a way, the old styles became their own. But there is still no mistaking Toriyama’s art. It has a personal touch all his own. An epic blend of personality and cool.

Chrono Trigger

The day I rented Chrono Trigger was life-changing. Decades later I can still vividly remember lying on the carpet of my grandmother’s living room with my Super Nintendo hooked up to my little white 12 inch TV set on the floor in front of me. The battle music was the coolest song I had ever heard. I was completely enthralled with the story. And all those glorious special attacks… oh my god I think I spent hours searching for battles just so I could keep replaying those attack animations over and over. I think I even made up some stupid lyrics to sing along with the battle music just for the Delta Force attack, which was the first triple-technique you learn in the game. The game had a way of one-upping itself with every new move you learned, escalating into cooler and cooler effects. And the first triple-attack took things to another level. At least it felt that way. It’s hard to describe how a few flickering triangles and flashing sprites could be so deeply moving for a kid in 1995, but part of it was because it looked 3D. And in 1995, 3D graphics were the most amazing thing you could possibly witness on a TV screen. It’s a 2D console. You are not expecting this. So when you see the first triple-attack in the game and it suddenly starts going 3D on you, your jaw hits the floor! … and it’ll be days before you pick it up again.

OMG it's three-deeee!!Accurate self-portrait

But even at the beginning of the game I was amazed by the very first battle in the forest, because it took place on the same screen, and I had never seen an RPG do that before! This felt like the next stage of evolution for the entire genre! It was such an obvious improvement that I was certain that every RPG that came out in the future would handle battles this way, and never look back. Of course I was naive. I was 12 years old. But the point is that Chrono Trigger felt like an improvement out-doing every game I had ever experienced before that day in every single possible way.

I know I am biased. I know that games with better graphics have come out in future decades. More great stories. More genres. More exploration. Goddamn open-world games! And of course that whole… 3D thing. So in my heart, Chrono Trigger mostly represents a pinnacle of 16-bit games. Over the past 30 years I have replayed this game so many times that it’s honestly hard to really experience it anymore. Every strategy and movement has been committed to muscle memory. My eyes glaze over because I barely have to think about the game. I’m on auto-pilot. So instead I study it. Every pixel. Every story beat. Every clever design choice. The game is just 16-bit perfection to me. Yes I am absolutely biased, and I don’t even care.

Even subtle things like the way that every cutscene has dialog written for exactly half of the main characters in your party at any given moment, so that no matter who you choose, it feels like they’re always part of the story.

There is a lot to love, and barely any flaws I can bring myself to notice. But if I had to pick my absolute favorite thing about Chrono Trigger it’s the sprite art. I don’t know of any other RPG on the Super Nintendo that uses these proportions for characters. It’s almost 3-heads tall, but the torso is smaller to make room for longer limbs to make the poses clearer, the ladies sexier, and to give the large heads more expressive eyes.

The anti-aliasing is superb, packing so much subtle detail into the smallest possible space. Every pose and animation shows off the personalities of the main characters. And I bet you’ll never guess which animation has the most frames… Walking! Not the fancy attacks or the mind-blowing story moments. The goddamn walk-cycles! Why? Because this is an RPG and that’s what the player is going to be seeing for 95% of the entire game. That is a stroke of genius! But it goes even deeper. The characters don’t even walk the same way. They’re all different. You can actually see their unique personalities. Robo is a wood-stove on feet. Marle walks like a delicate princess. Ayla is brimming with strength and swings her fists. And Magus moves with a menacing strut because he is a magical badass… when he’s not freakin’ flying!

This Has Affected Me

Decades later to this very day I am still studying those walk-cycles. Marle taught me how feet move so I could make Princess Sally walk. Ayla demonstrated the way hands recede three dimensionally so I could make Bunnie Rabbot look strong and make Little Red Riding Hood prance around. And I am an absolute glutton for anti-aliasing. You’ll rarely see any picture from me where I didn’t spend hours pouring over every edge of every pixel to get all the shapes juuuuust right. And somehow I love every minute of it. You can thank Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger for making me fall in love with this process. It doesn’t feel tedious to me because I’m too busy being impressed by the art I’m making while pushing the detail of every pixel to its absolute limit. Even though I’ve been experimenting with larger pixel-art recently, sprites still feel like a bigger accomplishment to me, because they are more densely detailed. Achieving more with less. Their small size forces them to make every pixel count. So the sheer feeling of accomplishment out-weighs the “unnecessary” challenge.

Me placing every pixel by hand like a lunatic

The Perils Of Exclusivity

2024-09-05T02:01:01Z

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Paywall by David Revoy

Sankaku Complex is a booru website. But it’s a funny place. They charge you to access other people’s art. They don’t own the art. But exclusivity doesn’t care about ownership. That’s what’s funny about all this. People simply flock to whatever provides the most convenient or cheapest access to something. Exclusivity can just as easily work against the original artist as it can work for them. The moment you put your work behind a paywall, another competing paywall can compete against you.

Nevermind the absurdity of trying to sell a JPEG on the internet, or the fact that other free booru websites already exist. Sankaku Complex is absurd for many reasons.

The moment a picture is seen, it’s usually downloaded, and the moment it’s downloaded it can be uploaded somewhere else, so there is no such thing as exclusive art. The only truly exclusive art is lost media. A forgotten file on a hard drive that nobody ever saw. Art like that can never outlive the artist because nobody else is able to preserve it.

Online “exclusivity” is artificial. Copying data is a basic feature built into every CPU ever made. It takes considerable effort and complexity to “disable” a built-in feature. You either add complexity to make something viewable while blocking access to the file that your computer has already downloaded (so-called “streaming” media), or you sabotage your own software by choosing to add an external dependency so that it unexpectedly breaks in the future when that external piece inevitably vanishes. All of these have to be added on purpose. It takes extra effort to remove built-in features. It takes effort to make things worse than the default.

And it’s hilarious to watch. Browsing Sankaku Complex is a pretty lousy experience. Banner ads everywhere, blurred or hidden thumbnails, pop-ups demanding that you sign up… all trying to “compete” against free booru websites that simply show you the pictures. Usually the same pictures. They wasted all this effort just to make everybody else look better. Tirelessly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Paywalls are absurd, and they make people do absurd things.

Should I Have A Blog?

2026-10-17T02:01:01Z

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Maybe I Shouldn’t

My website is mainly intended to be an archive of all the stuff I create, all in one convenient place. Having an opinion is not exactly an accomplishment. But whenever I visit other people’s websites I do enjoy reading through their blogs, so why not add one?

But I think it should be in its own section, separate from my art and games.

After all it would be pretty annoying to search for boobs and see random non-boobs polluting the results like annoying advertisements. There’s no shortage of opinions on the internet.

Then again, maybe the website’s search engine should always search everything. Otherwise it would just seem unreliable. The whole point of searching is that you don’t know where to find something, so hiding things based on where they are would be confusing.

I aside from that, I also feel like it’s a courtesy for me to separate my opinions from my art. Sure art can have meaning, but my own pictures aren’t usually about that. They’re just shameless fun. My opinions don’t really factor into my art, so my opinions don’t belong in my art gallery. Besides, that stuff can make things uncomfortable for an audience. I myself prefer to enjoy a painting without worrying what Picaso thinks of the economy or whether he’s secretly donating his profits to Hitler.

And since there’s no money involved here, you don’t need to worry about that second thing. Merely looking at a picture does not “support” an artist or anything they’re part of. Only paying them does that. You don’t have to agree with me if you just want to look at some boobs I drew.

Maybe I Should

It turns out that I enjoy seeing an artist’s opinions and viewpoints. It shows there’s an actual person behind the pixels. It humanizes them.

If an artist did nothing except draw pictures and never express themselves, that gives the impression that what they draw is all they think about, which would be pretty weird. But if you’re the audience it’s very hard to avoid that assumption if you never see any other side of the person.

Sprite Art is Changing

2026-09-23T02:01:01Z

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What is Sprite Art?

It goes by multiple names, but it is low-resolution hand-drawn 2D computer/game graphics.

Very tiny art needs to be hand-drawn because resizing a picture turns into a blurry mess at those sizes. The deliberate hand-crafted nature of pixel-art makes it an artform.

What is Happening

Time is changing Pixel Art. Its definition is changing, because the context is fading. And some day soon (2026 apparently) nearly all context will be lost on most people. It’ll just be that one quirky art style collectively called “Retro.” Like Minecraft except in 2D. Arbitrarily simple for the sake of being simple. Not everyone grew up with the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit generations. Honestly it’s still hard for me to believe that some adults were born after the PlayStation 2 came out.

For me, sprite art represents hand-crafted graphics where every single pixel is hand-placed to create the absolute best art possible against the limits of the hardware, and the different levels of fidelity represent how powerful each console was. I realize this point of view is artistically limiting, but I can’t help it. My childhood was drowning in the concept of 8-bit VS 16-bit and the pursuit of better and better graphics toward the theoretical maximum fidelity of “realism”.

A History Lesson

This is not pixel-artBut for more and more people, pixel-art literally just means anything with visible pixels. I’ve seen people just resize pictures in Photoshop and call it “retro.”

It’s not their fault. The differences between one console generation and the next are not automatically obvious unless you happened to grow up during those years, or spend time studying video game history.

(1982) Atari 2600 (1985) Early NES (1990) Late NES (1995) Late Super Nintendo (1995) Sega CD (1994) DOS (1996) PC-98 (2000) PlayStation Mark Ferrari

Fading History

For people my age we “studied” game history by reading about the latest games in Nintendo Power every month. For people like me it’s not “history,” they’re just fond memories that we remember so effortlessly that we assume everyone else knows it too.

But over time, that becomes less and less true, and it’s starting to feel surreal. The entire world seems to be “forgetting” things that were obvious my entire life.

(written in 2023)
But this knowledge will eventually fade. The techniques will fade. And the many countless forms it took will become nothing more than curious art styles compared side-by-side with all other art, except that it’s “low resolution” and “blocky” for some reason.

An actual thing that somebody said to me

There's nothing simple about making light refract through glass with only 16 colorsThe irony is that historically sprite art was not about simplifying. It was about the exact opposite. Achieving the most with the least. You fought against the simplicity imposed on you by the hardware, to create the absolute best art you possibly could.

For my part, I enjoy the challenge of making every pixel count, and often impose artificial limitations on myself just so I can overcome them.

The Name Keeps Changing

UPDATE

It is now 2026, and the definition has shifted even further than I predicted.

I shouldn’t be mad. It’s not intentional. It isn’t anybody’s fault that fully-grown adults in 2026 are people who were born when the iPhone came out. I was born in the 80’s. I couldn’t tell you what the 1970’s were like. Why would adults in 2026 know what a “pixel” is?

Apparently some people are unaware that there was ever a low-resolution version of 2D. Therefore anything that isn’t polygon-based is pixel-based, and therefore “pixel-art.” (Never mind that polygons get turned into pixels too) To me this seems baffling because I grew up drowning in all the details and breakthroughs during the emergence of computer graphics. But it’s also interesting how the terminology has drifted over time.

Year	Concept	It Was Called
2026	3D 2D Low-res 2D	Graphics Pixel-art 8-bit / Retro
2020	3D 2D Low-res 2D	Graphics 2D Graphics Pixel-art
2015	3D 2D Low-res 2D	Graphics 2D Graphics Sprite Art
2000	3D 2D Low-res 2D	3D Graphics Graphics Graphics
1995	3D 2D Low-res 2D	3D Graphics Obsolete CRAP! Obsolete CRAP!
1994	3D 2D Low-res 2D	CGI Graphics Graphics

Contact Page and Optional JavaScript

2025-02-28T02:01:01Z

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I made a dedicated landing-page with links to all the places you can find me. I’ve seen other people making these. It’s a good idea.

It’s a good idea. Just put all your social media links in one place and link to it. It’s a shorter link and it’s a lot easier than updating a dozen links in a dozen places every time you lose an account for some random reason.

Just wait ’til people discover they can put OTHER things on their landing pages! Like all their art and creations. Almost like… a website.

My website already had a “contact” section, but making it a separate page makes it accessible when you have JavaScript turned off. That’s right. My website also works without JavaScript.

When JavaScript is OFF, the website will display a seemingly normal thumbnail gallery of everything, and you can still download all the files. When JavaScript is ON, the website has all the fancy features and project pages.

I know that seems pointless. JavaScript runs on literally everything. It’s almost as common as Flash was… it never hurts to play it safe.

Laugh if you want. But remember when BASIC seemed like the universal compatible language that ran on absolutely everything? Every standard feels like it’ll last forever… until it doesn’t.

I don’t hate JavaScript. I just don’t like relying on it.

The Internet Archive

2026-04-13T02:01:01Z

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I’ve been obsessed with Archive.org lately. A HUGE online library that’s collecting pictures, books, magazines, software. Backing it up online, making it available to everybody. Very cool. I’ve collected a bunch of interesting things over the years to upload.

You can see and freely download everything I’ve put up there so far.
https://archive.org/details/@humbird0

Anybody want a Sexyfur WinAMP skin?

They’re looking for old software, source code, and all the random interesting things people did with them.

They also create torrent downloads for everything. The whole point is to make it so nothing can be lost.

Oh hey! I just realized I still have an old backup of the now-dead SuperMegaTopia website from back in 2004. Apparently I had downloaded the entire website at one point. That used to be a thing you could do.

Download Supermegatopia

The Death of Flash

2023-10-27T02:01:01Z

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Fun fact, I actually care a LOT about digital preservation. That’s why I emulate all my roms, er… That’s why all my Flash games are self-contained and have EXE versions that’ll run on everything from the original version of Win XP to the latest version of Windows 10.

https://twitter.com/metasynthie/status/1081227148558548993

“Some works didn’t make it to the public domain this week. When necessary to prevent culture from being lost forever, we have an ethical duty to violate short-sighted copyright law and preserve works in a viable format. This is a higher duty than preserving an income stream.”
~ Metasynthie

This is still relevant. Practically all digital storage only lasts about 10 years at best. Discs rot. SD cards fade. Hard drives gum-up and rot. Tape storage fades. Even discs made with non-organic compounds don’t last as long as advertised. Even the internet itself changes often.

Windows has always had stand-alone flash players, but I have also been testing stand-alone Flash Players for Linux and Mac OS X which can run my games. They’re all very easy to use, but sometimes hard to find online, so I might add them to my website as a download in case browsers stop running Flash.

I can also use stand-alone Flash players to convert games into EXE’s and native apps for Linux and Mac, but it’s better to leave them as Flash files and include Flash players for the sake of future compatibility. It’s kind of an “Emulator + Rom” approach to preservation.

Also, it’s a pain to get OSX running in VMware. I only managed to get the “Marklar Tiger” version of OSX working (google it.) But networking doesn’t work, so I used ISO’s to bring files in, and a mapped HD to transfer files out.

I just spent the day testing and prepping my games for the FlashPoint archive. It’s a Flash game preservation project headed by BlueMaxima. His team’s been scrambling to download and archive every Flash game he can find on the internet before Browsers drop Flash next year.

The FlashPoint game browser and full archive can be downloaded here.
And people can submit and test games on his Discord channel.

FlashPoint is not JUST a game browser, it creates a virtual server so that ANY Flash game will run from your computer, even ones that try to check which website they’re on.