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Literally just print paper. Glue it on cardboard and a cardboard stand. Its the simplest diy project. You need scissors and glue, primary school supplies. This is very cheap, very easy arts and crafts. Its not just primary school supplies, but its primary school arts and crafts level skill required. Its quick, its quicker than earning the cash to spend on a standee. Consider paper. Paper has it for you.

Paper is also biodegradable.

FAQ:

Q: I dont have a printer at home!

A: An office store or library has it.

Q: But will they let me print copyrighted shit?

A: If the printers are self serve, they dont know. Unless its something absolutely socially unacceptable, nobody is going to glance over your shoulder and then rush over to stop you. Even if the printers are not self serve, I’ve never dealt with a business who cares.

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Legal disclaimer: Satire/Parody. This post is a joke. Do not break the law, especially because you read some dumb blog online.

You should pirate Undertale. Its a decade old, and still sells a ton of merch, meaning its creator is not at financial risk. It got DRM-free releases, meaning pirating it is fairly trivial. But its not entirely non-trivial, you will learn a lot about piracy by pirating Undertale. Its also a small game in terms of file size: if you make a misfire, you won’t lose too much in terms of download time. Just watch out for viruses! It’s a good game, too. It’s a popular game, its an influential game, its one of the Games You Should Play TM. But if you don’t want to play it, the game starts quickly, you can easily boot it up to check you did it correctly and transfer your new skills to pirating something you want to play.

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Splendidland is artist Samanthuel Louise Gillson. She is most famous for her “don’t talk to me or my son ever again” meme post, and character design for a few enemies on Deltarune Chapter 2. Her website is www.splendid.land .

Anyway her games are megaman sprite game, FRANKEN, and Formless Star. All these games are free, and none of them are long. This is a review of those three games.

Megaman (Megaman Sprite Comic Player Character)

Megaman Sprite Game

https://megamanspritecomic.tumblr.com/post/65735240451/megaman-sprite-game-released-on-october-31st

what

Hero (FRANKEN Player Character)

FRANKEN

https://splendidland.itch.io/franken

Short, fun RPG that reminds me of old GBC RPGs I used to play. A great throwback to relive retro gaming, in the space of 2 hours instead of 20 hours. The store page estimated 30 mins – 1 hour, but I am very slow at games.

I think its cute enough, and has things to offer outside of nostalgia. Its got a nice vibe and great character designs, and a fun story. This story also riffs on RPG tropes, and its not very surprising to anybody familiar with the past decade of meta RPGs, not that predictability is bad. It would have been electric if it was released ten years earlier, but its not bad now.

One detail I really like is the dissonance between the field sprites and character portraits. Although the game only has one artist, it gives the impression of a game with multiple artists and multiple visions for the same character, which feels very true.

Another detail that I like is that Cid Pollendina is here.

Anemo (Formless Star Player Character)

Formless Star

https://splendidland.itch.io/formless-star

Speaking of GBC RPGs, just by coincidence, I had played Dragon Quest Monsters 2 last year. One thing that DQM2 does is have randomly generated “worlds”, as part of its Pokemon-like multiplayer mechanics. It’s a mechanic I was thinking of when I was playing Formless Star.

Its a little exploration game about finding weird creatures. It scratches the itch of finding weird guys, and I think if that sounds good to you then you should give it a go.

There’s no point not going for 100%. You can end the game early, but the 100% ending doesn’t take long to achieve and the additional scenes for completion are the best in the game.

I had trouble finding the last creature, a UFO who’s gimmick is that only one spawns per map. The in-game hint wasn’t very helpful for this one, which is unusual, as the in-game hints are otherwise very helpful. There was probably also an element of bad luck in my experience. Oh well.

final score

Three out of 3
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WebP Bad

WebP feels like DRM. It’s interrupting the long standing trinity of GIF, PNG, and JPEG for web images. Its not supported by many legacy programs – well-supported by programs released in the last few years, but if you have an older or abandoned image tool you like using, it’ll give you problems. It feels like it appeared overnight, and nothing supports it.

WebP is developed by Google. It is free, open source, Google don’t directly profit off it, and WebP can be implemented by anyone. Either way, it feels a step in Google taking control of what formats and technologies we use to view the web. In particular, the way WebP has been pushed to the exclusion of the competing and better (for static images) JPEGXL image format has many concerned.

Google have used Chrome, a proprietary freeware web browser based on Google’s open-source Chromium browser, to implement several controversial hostile anti-features. Google develops the browser, Google develops the image formats, and Google bad. Its a bit silly*, but I do see where the apprehension comes from. Even if so much is open-source, for now, what stops Google for enshittifying the web from the core of its file format foundations in the future? I don’t personally see the future shaking out this way, but I can empathise with the concern.

*Not the part about Google being bad. Google bad.

Unfortunately, WebP is good for animated images. It’s so good. Lets look at the competition, to argue why its time for a change:

What about…

GIF?

I love GIF! But even as I love them, I need to concede that GIF is an old, dusty image format with restrictions that seem arcane by today’s standards. 256 colours is a tiny amount. When GIF was competing with JPEG 1, it produced images that were comparatively sharp and clear. But the world has moved on, and GIF is no longer competing with image formats from the 1980s.

The only advantage GIF has had for decades is the fact its widely supported and animated – some newer web apps no longer know what to do with static GIFs. This inertia of being widely supported and animated has kept GIF around long after its been pushed to its limits. Animated GIFs were designed around short, low resolution looping images – using them to display short clips of TV shows is them at their absolute limit.

The kind of image the animated GIF file format was build around – a small cartoon with a few colours.

Web users wanted a format to display short animated clips from videos, TV and movies. And GIF was the closest fit. These push the format to its limits, with large file sizes and obvious compression artefacts.

APNG?

The compression isn’t very good. Despite what the rest of this article has me sounding like, I’m not some file format expert. All I know, with the tools i’ve used, is that these files come out huge. I don’t like that.

APNG was only recently embraced by the PNG Development Group. Although it has been supported on the web a long time, this lack of official support has left its status in the lurch from 2007 to 2023. Its a format in a really weird place, and history will tell if official support has come just in time to be superseded by WebP.

MPEG-4

Here’s where we hit a compatibility snag, with the way the web is organised by those designing platforms. This is just video. And its good, its fine. A silent video is a good, compressed way of delivering short clips – and I have done so on this website before. For a self-hosted website, using short silent video is a good way to show short animated clips.

But its all in the usage, and the people who run platforms – they might not want to support video. They want “video” and “image” file formats to be two separate spheres to support. Its useful for platform content management for video and images to be kept separate, and for this separation to be designated by file format. Since platforms are a primary way users interact with the web, mass-adoption of a video format in place of an image format is not possible.

You can’t natively upload video clips – but platforms did convert your GIFs to very compressed videos, leading to the ugliest compression known to man.

I loooove the colour banding of gifs combined with the blurry DCT artifacting of MP4. Lossy compression on top of lossy compression. This is so ugly, that the ugliness is an artform in itself. This is deep fried. This is gore, compression gore of the image format I love.

Aversion to short form video is changing for different reasons. The success of short-form video platforms has created a gold rush mania around being the next Tiktok. If you though reaction GIFs were annoying they’re making reaction images with sound now and its worse. But this isn’t an old man yells at cloud rant. This is…

A lukewarm defence of WebP.

  • Animated images in a file format with no arcane restrictions handed down to us from the 1980s. Displays animations Good.
  • When .PNG came to prominence it was also widely unsupported, so with more support WebP will come. Don’t worry. It’s fine.
  • justice for jpegxl justice for jpegxl justice for jpegxl

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Hard drives are physical media.

There’s a specific tech illiteracy that’s been deliberately engineered, where people don’t know the difference between files stored on their computer and data accessed over the internet. This is an important distinction, because drm-free files stored on your computer are physical media to the same degree an optical disc is.

A movie in your hard drive is not significantly different from an optical disc, in terms of data encoded. These are different storage mediums for the same data.

The files on your hard drive cannot be revoked, unless you let the DRM in! Don’t let the DRM in! Hard drives: they’re physical media.

Its kind of brilliant, right? Businesses control your access to movies through the cloud and always-on DRM. They convince you that your hard drive is an ephemeral item, one you can’t control. Finally, they convince you to buy their expensive premium product to remedy the problem they’ve created. You aren’t sticking it to the man by “returning to discs”, you’re falling for their marketing campaign!

And what can you do about it? I mean, you can pirate

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We’ve reached an era of the internet where there’s a lot of reflection on old web reviwers. Channel Awesome and their ilk. I spend a week watching a shit ton of them. I was doing a no Youtube challenge and ended up watching CA shit on Archive.org, obeying the letter but not the spirit of the challenge.

These reviewers certainly have their shortcomings. Sometimes, the takes are bad. They often use slurs, which were wrong to use at the time. The angry review format is far more about righteous anger than empathy, meeting a work halfway, and understanding why media is how it is. You could call EA games fucking idiots and it feels good they deserve it, but it could be more constructive to direct rigorous anger to bigger issues than individual game devs. Granting empathy and meeting a work of media halfway can improve even the angry review. I think the more thoughtful video essay is a natural evolution, but this evolutionary shift also occurred over a decade ago – feminist media critique was in its heyday by the late 00s – but it took a little extra time to Pivot To Video. The first article I read about Super Mario 1-1 teaching you how to play it was written by feminist media critic.

Other people can handle the follies better than I can. I want to take a different critical lens: Things in old media reviews that I like.

I liked the swearing. A lot of old reviewers used swearing and slurs, the slurs fucking suck but the swearing ruled. It just wouldn’t be funny if reviewers called a game from 1989 a poo load of seggs, they need to call it a shitload of fuck. Word choice matters, and swearing is a good choice. The algorithm superstition that causes cOnTeNt CrEaToRs to hold their tongue is embarrassing. Note that I said algorithm superstition, these cowards of content creators don’t even act based on things that can be proven, if they even think the algorithm wants something they nod and obey. Its so embarrassing. Its embarrassing that I need to defend bad words on line as a concept, what is wrong on-line.

Nothing pisses my ears off like a swearing bleep, they’re always just grating and awful.

I liked how they’d use copyrighted music. It is a profound misunderstanding of fair use that any music is fair game if used as an aesthetic component of a review, even if the review has nothing to do with song choices. It’s an excellent one. I loved to learn about reviewers music choices, it said a lot about them and their interests. Just letting a song play for the fucking vibes. As with everyone else, reviewers were richer for breaking copyright law, and should continue to break copyright law whenever possible.

I liked the lack of pussy footing, and ways they treated their audience like adults. No “this is just an opinion guys” “its okawy is u think differently” padding: subjectivity was understood to be known to already be implied. These statements are added to reviews by media critics who are cowards. Or as algospeak, a form of speech to pad out cOnTeNt in order to earn algorithm points. Reviewers who make statements like these are embarrassing, and I prefer the certainty of older reviewers who didn’t bother with that trash.

I also like how older reviewers would just be mean to their viewers in some regards. Rack ’em (13 year olds sending weak flames supposedly on your behalf) instead of a weak “Pwease don’t harass anyone”. Call your comment box full of idiots, if they’re being fucking idiots. If some flamer comes at you like “thats just your opinion man”, fucking duh subjectivity was implied, get rude.

Channel Awesome itself was flawed and deserved to die, but its even slight human curation was amazing. Imagine an entire blog site telling you where the decent reviews were, instead of a machine learning algorithm slinging you slop essays. A lot of the bad reputation of video essays is due to algorithm slinging, dogshit essays with catchy titles make everyone roll their eyes at that bullshit. I do lurk forum threads which recommend videos – and that is absolutely the only way to do it.

I spoke of angry reviewers not granting empathy, so let me grant that empathy to the 10s. Most video media still believed it had to adhere to a schedule, and usually a weekly one. This encouraged the production of what can only be described as filler, to fit a schedule they convinced themselves they needed. Low effort, formulaic reviews. This would delay or outright prevent the production of more thoughtful media. I also need to point out that people working for Channel Awesome were working for Channel Awesome, which was shit.

Little Mermaid 2 (Obscurus Lupa Presents)

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It’s a review thats tedious nitpicking, and knows its insincere and adhering to formula. The end section is pretty much dedicated to showing that fact off. I don’t think its a very good review, it comes off as annoying and nitpicky, even if it knows itself as such the self-awareness doesn’t make it good. What I like about it is the skits, the parodies of reviewers taking soft drink sponsorships. It seems prescient in the current day.

Trespasser: Jurassic Park’s Biggest Failure? – A History | Monotonal Lizard

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Ok so this is the video that made me write this article. I had these thoughts since the No Youtube challenge mentioned up top. This video contains a section talking about angry bloggers, who predate angry video reviews. Everything I’ve said here has nothing to do with the critics mentioned in this video – It’s a non-sequitur. But you need to shout out your inspirations. And this video made me want to say things.

Maybe one day i’ll write my “Old Man Murray’s popular take on the death of Adventure Games was always really bad, but it also aged like milk” post, but actually I think that sums it up.

Credit:

  • Doodie.com for art used as a divider.
  • Visit phelous.com for more Obscurus Lupa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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how many of these blobos can you name? (this is engagement bait btw. i hope it works 😉 )

Book Review: A history of webcomics by T Campbell, 2006.

This book is free to rent on the Internet Archive right now! Don’t download this out-of-print book from Anna’s Archive, that would be illegal.

A contemporary review of the book can be found on Fleen (original blog) (IA), and it makes an interesting companion piece to this blog. This review is largely negative, focuses on mistakes, and is clearly written by an reviewer as familiar with the topic as Campbell is. I think these mistakes are important, but this review won’t focus on these.

I am not Fleen. I was reading webcomics in 2006, but am not intimately familiar with the topics this book tackles. We are now almost 20 years removed from this History of Webcomics. And there’s been a couple of changes in that time. The book opens with calling 1993-2005 a Golden age. If one were telling the history of webcomics today, would this era be more a footnote? Maybe the value in this book will be to prove this is a time worth remembering. I don’t know.

Let’s get reading!

The b00k spends 2 pages explaining the history of nerdc0re, and ends it with this legendary comic page in complete earnest. Its worth remembering the times before irony poisoning. Forget irony poisoning! Forget it! And enjoy a classic! Here it is!

Does anyone here speak L337?

The book spends A LOT of time on Scott McCloud, of course. This is your invitation to re-read Choose Your Own Carl. It spends a lot of time on Dilbert, on Sluggy Freelance, on User Friendly and a drama involving hotlinking User Friendly comic strips. It keeps returning to this Nerdcore idea, which feels so dated, but I… I don’t think its an inaccurate description of this millennial zeitgeist, even if we’d use ruder words for it today.

It feels like its taken a while to get to the Gamer comics, the comics we’d most associate with this era today. PVP and Penny Arcade are most talked about, with a large section dedicate to the flame wars Kurtz of PVP would get into. Infamous webcomic CAD only gets a passing mention, in the same sentence as several other comics such as Real Life, which are both comics whose reputations have diverged significantly.

Characters from the websites Keenspot and Modern tales face off.

TWO PWNED L0Z3R5!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The comic discussed platforms and businesses for several pages. Maybe interesting, but these are the same concerns all netizens are still facing. If you’re familiar with the encroach of capitalism on the web, you know the shape of this discussion.

When webcomics try to form collectives and unions, its worth pointing out there’s a turbulent history there. People will learn from experience, I suppose. The turbulence is platforms vs users, humans vs capital, and the natural interpersonal conflicts we all navigate. These don’t go away easily with time and change.

oh shit campbells on about the N3RDC0R3 again

There’s a section in here about Furry comics. I genuinely think some furries might find these pages interesting, even as they mostly litigate what are ongoing flame wars. “Is furry porn ethical” is touched upon, but it presents the phase “Furverts“. There’s some jargon for you. Never say I don’t do anything for my furry readers.

From the Furry section the book transitions into a brief discussion of adult webcomics. Furries and adult media were already heavily associated lol. Although the book doesn’t mention any adult comic by name except the paysite Slipshine. Lol there’s a short mention of Paypal dicking over adult comic makers. Paypal hasn’t changed, but you need to be pretty new around these parts not to know Paypal has always sucked.

The Ice Queen. Joe Zabel often uses 3D figures created in poser to startling effect
CHAPTER SEVEN: MONEY MATTERS AND THE MODERN WEBCOMIC There is no webcomics industry. There is no large commercial exchange of webcomics. There are [only] a handful of people making anything more than extra spending money from their webcomics. —Scott Kurtz, 2005°” I do webcomics as a hobby—I don’t do it to gain fame or popularity or earn money, and it feels like too many artists are doing webcomics for the wrong reasons. All I say is, I believe webcomics should be done for enjoyment and not for money or fame. —Space Coyote of Saturnalia, 2005°"* Rare is the artist who cares nothing for success, i.e., survival! But [that] ideal is alive in the hearts of many artists who may hope for success, but won't alter their work to obtain it. —Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics?” Four of my favorite online cartoonists are Patrick Farley, Cayetano Garza, David Gaddis and Mark Martin; and I can tell you with certainty (‘cause I know these guys) that if their sites could support them financially, they'd be posting 5 times as often! And so would |, for that matter. —Scott McCloud in J Can’t Stop Thinking?”
Above: Ctri+Alt+Del sold out of its first printing before the first customer received his first book.

Space Coyote, AKA Nina Matsumoto, has absolutely turned her art hobby into a career. I’m familiar with her work. I wonder how she feels about these statements now. It doesn’t matter what this one random person thinks, I suppose. But its interesting.

The talk of monetization is also extremely obsolete. There’s talk of marketable plushies and print editions: yes. But there’s a lot of wondering if “donation drives” will ever work out. Can a comic be crowdfunded? is a question the book seems in doubt about, when we know the answer in current year is a resounding Yes.

It briefly mentions the feeling of being nickel-and-dimed, which is something I do feel. With so many patreons around, all with ever increasing price floors, supporting your fave artist feels more expensive then ever. I get that we’re in a cost of living crisis. We all are. The readers, too. Not that I don’t have a list of ppl im supporting – but this individualist pricing structure has its limitations. Support government funding for the arts, now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There’s also a lot of words on advertising, a venture in which the price floor has lowered considerably over the years. A modest page can’t get a nice chunk of pocket change with advertising alone any more – and the adverting nowadays raises massive privacy issues. Download ublock origin, now!!!!!!!!!

Not that webcomics remained breeders-only. Manga traditions had loosened up American preconceptions here, too; manga had genres specifically for gays and lesbians, and even its mainstream showed widespread acceptance. More than one well-known manga (Ranma , Futaba-Kun Change, Sailor Moon) featured a boy who spontaneously changes genders. ‘“Transgendering” found its way into webcomics like E/ Goonish Shive, where the gender-switching was similarly arbitrary, and Venus Envy, which dealt with real transsexuality.’’”> Merely gay characters were relatively populous. Gay authors were usually positive or matter-of-fact about being gay, so Justine Shaw’s brutal honesty startled the field—but soon attracted it. Naturally, gays, like women, found certain genres friendlier than others. True gay-bashing was extremely rare, but most nerdcore and gamer strips either featured jokes about heterosexual men doubting themselves or avoided the subject altogether. They were under no obligation, of course, so long as other genres were there to pick up the slack. In certain matters of faith, though, almost no one seemed willing to step up. EI Goonish Shive, above, explores identity with magical, temporary gender-swaps, while Venus Envy, right, tells a more down-to-earth story of a transsexual.

Nothing to add here, I just thought some readers might want to read about ‘transgendering’…

There’s more to read, about race in webcomics and class in webcomics. Remember to not download this book from Anna’s Archive if you want to read all about it.

Although the book mentions bigotries in webcomics, I think remembering that webcomics always tackled progressive issues is something worth remembering and celebrating.

Exhibit of webcomics alternate futures past. including world domination, micropayments, and artificial intelligence.

hm

The future.

Did this book from 2006 predict the future?

Shifting hierarchy: This book predicts new comics will replace old mainstays. A very safe prediction, and one that is absolutely and obviously true.

Decentralization and DIY: I think the book unfortunately got this one wrong. But the future it predicts seems more rosy that the reality we got. Webcomics are almost exclusively on platforms now, as are most netizens. That’s not to say decentralization and DIY have completely fallen by the wayside, and are usually where the most interesting webcomics, if not the most successful, exist right now.

Short-form as a vanguard, long-form in development: Short comics continue to be shared and spread most on social media, as short form content is just more shareable. One-offs are just as likely to do numbers as shortform strips from a bigger comic.

Techno-art: Stagnation tbh, as art becomes #content for #platforms. Nothing wrong with PNGs, ain’t broke. Although I think new web technologies are increasing potential out there.

Generation One. Cartoonists who had grown up with the Web joined the field and began to change its aesthetic from the inside out: Yes, true.

Organic ties to readers: ok…

Demographic expansion: Other web media took some of webcomics attention. The audience for webcomics is no doubt larger, but that same audience has more web multimedia taking their attention. This is a good thing

The elite reader. For good and for ill, webcomics’ own creators and their biggest
fans exerted a disproportionate share of influence on their surrounding culture. Criticism
was difficult and fan-service was easy. I’m not sure what the prediction here is, but uhhh,,,, true?????????

An industry in embryo: There’s more money in webcomics today compared to 2005. True I guess.

The book also proposes six broad scenarios for comics future. The sixth one is the web vanishing completely. Could still happen. Of all of them, “the expanding long tail” scenario is the most pressing and accurate. It predicts a move to platforms, who aggregate the efforts of artists into large platforms for themselves. It also proposes a scenario where webcomics remain populist and serve the lowest common denominator: an anxiety still expressed.

WHATS THE REVIEW, POINDEXTER???????????

pic goes hard, who drew it.

This pic that goes hard was on page 108 of the PDF. I’m lost in the credits.

from the bookcore

this is da nerdcore

its got L337

like a elite

comics

bcomics

the internet

moar liek teh splinternet

anyway heres this classic by beanytuesday

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I love government funding for the arts!

Its ok when an artist who receives government funding creates something ugly, niche, or bad. I’m just glad when money is spent on bad art, instead of the military.

However, its far more often that an artist makes something that rules.

I think we need more government funding for the arts. They can never spend enough on art! No arts budget is too big, its impossible to do.

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The Intertidal Zone is a short comedy edutainment comic made by Stephen Hillenburg in 1989, and is considered a precursor to the Spongebob Squarepants television show. The story focuses on larger than life show anchor Rocky the Shrimp and his cohost Bob the Sponge, as they interview the inhabitants of the eponymous intertidal zone and discover their unique traits.

This comic was considered lost media, until it was scanned and uploaded to the internet archive by MasterDonut on 24/04/2024. Cheers, mate. This is a cleanup of MasterDonut’s scans, and I am pleased to present them here today.

Dropbox download | Read online here

NEW! Grab the torrent here.

I can’t seed this torrent 24/7. If I ever stop seeding it forever i’ll remove the link from the page, but as long as the link is here, I will get back to seeding it eventually. Also: Help me seed it! I could really use a hand, thanks.

GIF – Before – After

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Hello, RSS Feed fans. This article is for people who’ve chosen to use RSS feeds, and picked an RSS feed reader. Those choices are outside the scope of this article. What this article is about is filling your empty feed reader, deciding what to put in there and how to surf the web in search of feeds.

However, I can’t just tell you what exactly to pop in there. I will give you a few direct recommendations in the end, but you need to find things you enjoy and add them in yourself. These are some guidelines to help you select things to add.

How do I know if a website has an RSS feed?

The common feed icon depicts the tip of an antennae, with two or three radio waves rippling out of it. The RSS Logo is typically orange, although it comes in other colours. If you see this icon, it should represent an RSS Feed.

Not all websites will have an obvious link to their RSS feed. but it will still exist.

If a social media platform debut’d in the 00s, there’s a good chance it supports RSS. There’s a bit of an RSS support gap in mainstream social media platforms which started in the 10s. But RSS is still common enough that if in doubt, you should always check and see.

It depends on the culture in which the website was developed, as well. Websites from the computer geek side of the web, open-source and GNU nerds (affectionate), have RSS support a lot. VC-funded web startups that want to be the new Facebook, the people who want to build a web silo, are less likely to build RSS support into their website. A fediverse site like Mastodon supports RSS feeds, a fediverse site like Bluesky or Threads doesn’t.

[see: Footnote 1]

My web browser automatically detects RSS feeds, and adds an icon to the address bar if it detects one. If yours browser doesn’t, there are browser extensions. Haven’t got a specific one to recommend, just look around.

Some RSS feed providers will automatically detect a feed if you put a URL in. You can also use a service like getrssfeed.com can detect RSS feeds on a website.

Search engines can help you find RSS feeds for platforms the manual way. Type Platform + RSS Feed into a search engine, and it’ll let you know if feeds exist.

About Large Platforms and Social Media

Although it might seem like an easy way to fill your feeds, just duplicating your existing social media feeds is unadvisable. Give yourself new things to look at, or you’re going to get burned out seeing nothing but repetitive notifications.

There’s probably a large social media platform full of very talented and interesting users, but you don’t really want to use it for whatever reason. And if the platform supports RSS feeds, well, there you go. As a personal example, I don’t go on Deviantart much any more. Even less, since I moved the few people I followed into my RSS feed. “But Deviantart doesn’t have RSS after the Eclipse update” says the person who didn’t search and see the first result for Deviantart + RSS Feed.

So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. Think if this person who’s posts you already like, and is using a platform you don’t. A Tumblr user you like also uses Mastodon. Now, you don’t use Mastodon in this hypothetical, but you want to see that poster’s sweet Mastodon posts. Mastodon is a website that supports RSS feeds. Add their feed to your reader, follow the posts, all without needing a Mastodon account.

Sometimes, its ok to just duplicate your existing social media feeds, if the feeds are algorithm-driven and unreliable. People question Youtube’s reliability, I think its superstitious but you can add Youtube channels to your feed reader so you KNOW you’re not missing anything.

About Small web, independent web, niche social media.

One of the good things about RSS is how you don’t need to limit yourself to notable platforms. There’s a large web out there, and RSS feeds can help you keep up with it all. I know its the harder work, but you’d be surprised at how easily they accumulate in your feed once you start. This is about exercising your web surfing skills. Be curious, and bias towards subscribing to a webmaster rather than not subscribing.

Web native media like blogs, webcomics, and podcasts very often have RSS feeds. There’s even a website just for webcomic feeds, called Piperka.

You can use RSS feeds to automate forum lurking, although even forums software from the heyday of RSS have patchy support. The best forum software RSS support I’ve found is for Discourse, which one of the newer forum softwares on the block. New as in its ten years old, but u get it. For example, PHPBB has been around twice as long and has RSS support that sucks out of the box. Webmasters can choose to extend the RSS feed support of forums with plugins, but you know, they don’t lol. Feel free to ask ur local forum webmaster to install the RSS plugin if u want. Still, if a forum is slow-moving enough, it having just the one feed might be enough to lurk it.

RSS where there isn’t usually RSS.

Kill the newsletter

Some webmasters opt for an email newsletter instead of an RSS feed. But you can subscribe to that newsletter as an RSS feed, using kill-the-newsletter.

I think experiencing newsletters as an RSS feed makes a huge psychological difference. The contents of an email newsletter feel like an Object, like A Spam, to me. Reading them as a feed just feels more natural and enjoyable. Even if you hate email newsletters, give it a go. Throw a donation to the developer if you love it too.

I do experience cosmetic formatting issues with Kill the Newsletter, but these don’t impact the readability.

Websites I follow this way are mostly normie stuff, local businesses and government institutions, and news websites.

Alternative front ends

Many major websites may have alternative front ends available. A front end is the user interface side of a website, the way a website is presented to visitors. The back end is the machine side of a website, the underlying data a website processes. An alternative front end is a way to view the back end data, in a way that’s designed by somebody who’s not the website’s owner. It’s the same contents but a different interface.[see: footnote 2] And sometimes these different interfaces support RSS feed, where the official front end does not.

So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. A Youtube user you like also uses Tiktok. Now, you don’t use Tiktok in this hypothetical, and Tiktok doesn’t support RSS feeds. But Tiktok has an alternative front end called Proxytok, that does support RSS feeds. Now, you can see all the videos just with your RSS feed.

I’ve also seen Tiktok described as unusable due to its algorithmically-generated feed being bothersome for potential users. If you do enjoy Tiktok videos and want to exclusively build your own feed, with no algorithm nonsense, you can do it with ProxyTok and RSS feeds.

My most-used alternative front end is Nitter. It’s a Twitter front end. I quit Twitter, for the normal reasons. But I can still follow all the same users on Twitter, without using Twitter. I get the back end stuff I like (microblogs from good posters), without the frontend stuff I hate. It also means Twitter can’t show me ads, or track my activity to sell to advertisers. I don’t financially contribute to Twitter’s ecosystem any more, which is great. It’s like i’m stealing Twitter, which I love doing.

There is a list of alternative front ends here. You want to click on the Main Instance or Public Instances links. The others are for advanced users, you don’t need to self-host or worry about onion links. Keep things simple unless you really, really want to make them complicated.

Not all alternative front ends support RSS feeds, though. You’ll have to research them (try using them) to find out.

Keep at it

I stopped using RSS feeds when everyone else did, when Google Reader shut down. When I first got back into RSS feeds, it wasn’t much to look at. I followed a few things. Feeds weren’t fast. This may be desirable for some people, but in the Google Reader days, I was checking my RSS feeds daily. I wanted that pace back, and was frustrated when it wasn’t. I was bored, I wanted to give up again. But now, I have the pace I want.

It must be so hard for people just starting out. It was probably hard for me starting in the Google Reader days, but I don’t remember. I went back and re-subscribed to feeds I remember having, I had a starting point. I don’t know how hard it would be for somebody with no starting point. But treat it like a project, and keep at it. You didn’t onboard to social media you like in a day, let the onboarding of RSS feeds take a while.

Here are some things I subscribe to, that a general audience might like.

  • Blenderartists.org Forums: Finished Projects. Website | Feed
    • Blender Artists is a forum for people who use the 3D software Blender. So its just a feed of indie CGI art, which is neat! A lot of artists here also have personal sites and portfolios, so it can be a good jumping off point for web surfing if this is your jam.
  • albumoftheday Website | Feed
    • It’s an album! Every day! Gonna unsub to this one, because it links to Spotify and I don’t use Spotify. u can have it instead
  • Overclocked Remix Website | Feed
    • Vidoe game music remixes.
  • The News
    • Whatever news you like here.
  • FediVideo Website | Feed
    • Curated list of variety video recommendations hosted on the fediverse platform Peertube.
  • me its me
    • blatant self promotion

These aren’t really for a general audience so much, are they. Ask me about the even more niche stuff in the comment’s if you like, ask me shit like “do you subscribe to any anime sites”. Except don’t ask that one because i’m answering it now with Jojo News Website | Feed.

Footnotes

Footnote 1. This image was taken from “RSS Autodiscovery” by Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin of the RSS Advisory Board
– https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20081106104156/http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Cheers!

Footnote 2. The explanation of alternative front-ends is stolen from:
“You Probably Want to Know About “Alternative Front-ends” by Justin Hanagan.
– https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20230522232310/https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
I just paraphrased this info to suit my post. Visit the original articles for more details and a more complete explanation, it’s a good article.