evolvingessence:

Stop over-apologizing at work.

copperbadge:

memprime:

loreweaver-universe:

damaramegido:

loreweaver-universe:

loreweaver-universe:

In case you’re not aware, Tumblr has recently announced that on the seventeenth of December they’ll start purging all porn and porn-adjacent content on Tumblr.  Why does that matter to LWU, you ask?  Well, they’re using their bots to identify it, and we’ve all seen how well THAT works.  One of my Wander posts even got flagged as sensitive for no apparent reason.  What I want to do is reassure you all that I’ve taken steps to back up all of the content on LWU to my hard drive using a tool I was recommended a couple weeks ago.  I’m going to continue to do so on a regular basis just in case, so there’s very little chance that my stuff will be lost.

I’m using this one!  It condensed my entire blog as of November 20th into one 4.36 gigabyte folder.

Any notes on how to use it? I can’t figure it out.

Okay, so here’s how to do this.

First off, go here and make sure you have Python installed.  For Windows it should be the very bottom link, the x86 MSI Installer.  You don’t have to do anything but install it.

Second, go here, and click “Clone or Download” (the green button on the right).  Select “Download ZIP”.

Make sure you have WinRAR or 7zip or something installed that lets you extract zip files.

Next, make a folder on your desktop.  I named mine “Tumblr Backup”, and in the following instructions I’m going to assume that’s what you’ve named yours as well; replace “Tumblr Backup” with whatever you name yours if it isn’t.

Drop the zip file you downloaded into Tumblr Backup.  Go in and extract it; this should create a folder called “tumblr-utils-master“.

Open your Command Prompt.  If you don’t know how to find that, click your start menu button and type “CMD”, which should give you this:

That should open this:

That frog over there is blotting out my profile name on my computer.  Whatever your profile name is when you sign in (e.g. “Max” or “Snugglebuns” or “froglord69”) is going to be in that spot on the address path.  If it instead says something about Windows and System 32, that’s okay, what I’m gonna tell you to do will go to the right place either way.

Next, input this command–keeping in mind that the parts in bold should be changed based on your profile name and what you named the folder on your desktop:

CD C:Usersfroglord69DesktopTumblr Backuptumblr-utils-master

There!  Now you’re in the right folder!  Next, enter this command, replacing the bolded bit with your own blog name:

tumblr_backup.py yourblogname

You should see this:

Then just…let it run!  It took less than five minutes for my computer, though it will vary by processor and connection.  Once it’s done, you’ll have something like this:

That “index” opens in an internet browser.  It’s basically a webpage stored directly on your computer.  Some pics of mine:

So…not pretty, but it’ll save the content of your posts.  Hope this helps!

@copperbadge in case you want to back up your Tumblr?

Yep, tried this and it seems to be working well – I would have more concrete results but in the middle of it this morning my internet tanked and I had to restart, so it’s running while I’m at work. It’s returning errors where shit has vanished (for example, images taken from external links) but that’s to be expected. 

Also of note, some unzipping programs put a folder inside a folder when they unzip, so you may have to move tumblr-utils-master up a folder level before it will work.

I did actually also try to back up using Tumblr’s in-house program, but it took eight hours to process and another five to download, after which I was presented with a .zip file that would not unzip, claiming it was empty despite being 4+GB in size. 

casthegrumpy:

some context for yahoo’s excellent product management that not a lot of people know about:

remember yahoo instant messenger? i’m guessing basically everyone stopped using that after like the early 2000s. but until about two years ago, almost all of the world’s oil trading was conducted through yahoo instant messenger. every day hundreds of millions of barrels, billions of dollars in equity, was traded by a bunch of dudes through yahoo instant messenger. traders and brokers loved that they could be speaking with tons of people at once, and their compliance officers loved that there was a transcript of conversations and deals left behind for auditing and regulatory purposes.

but yahoo decided, perhaps reasonably on the surface, that they did not want to support this service anymore. they wanted to migrate the messaging platform onto something a bit more integrated and 21st century. except their new service was not compatible with any kind of conversation-recording capability, so traders would not be allowed to use it anymore for compliance purposes.

chaos. billion dollar companies all around the world were scrambling. how would they conduct their business? i know this sounds silly, but traders talk to hundreds of people a day, brokers are showing them markets all day long. phones are inefficient and not all are set to record. they explained to yahoo what the compliance issue was. they offered to pay – these companies can afford any kind of subscription necessary. they assured yahoo that a massive pillar of the world’s economy, as fucking insane as it sounds, is actually conducted through their service. just let us use it. (here’s a reuters article about it, and here’s a financial times article on it)

yahoo didn’t change its plans.

now everyone uses something else to trade the world’s oil.

liberalsarecool:

Please spread the word that enrollment for health care ends Dec 15. #obamacare

prokopetz:

Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.

In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.

Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.

Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:

1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.

2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:

Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.

Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.

Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.

As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.