✏️ A drawing with direct eye contact, vulgar language, and a longcat
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Johann Sebastian Staedtler 🇨🇦
@jsstaedtler@mastodon.art
mastodon 4.7.3A raccoon living in the Greater Toronto Area. I'm a hobby artist who just wants to draw cute women *and* find people who want to see them. Tooting/boosting a lot of 18+ stuff, but always behind a content warning (mine are tagged #lewd).
I usually only boost media with alt text, to promote accessibility.
◾ Ottawa Senators fan who doesn't know what to believe anymore
◾ Draws in IbisPaint on an Android phone
◾ Older than the Internet
◾ Oxford comma
◾ Artwork is licensed CC BY 4.0
2136 Followers
345 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 28, 2022
I will keep pointing out that decentralization is not the cure for shittified social networks, it's actually the owners and operators being *normal people with no profit motive*. The Fediverse is useful to us because it's a co-op, not a business.
Therapy/MH (neutral!)
Oh neat, this photo was taken with a Nikon D5 camera.
...in MFing OUTER SPACE, HOLY %$£#
Can anyone confirm that the company name "ULINE" is pronounced "you-line?"
It's super petty but I make a point of mispronouncing the name of organizations I despise, and I've always used "oo-leen."
I kinda like the Google News app on Android, partly because it provides all available sources for each event. Plus, it lets me fine-tune the topics it covers—and what sources or topics I *don't* want it to provide.
...Well, up to a certain point, anyway. Like, I can block stories about Taylor Swift or figure skating or the province of Alberta.
What I can't block: Murders. Shootings. Car crashes. Law enforcement.
Sigh.
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@wallmask3@mastodon.art 😳
How many more characters can we get you to draw in just a shirt...
Once again I am messing around with the Mastodon API :A_BlobCat_Code: I intend to export my bookmarks, most importantly grabbing the full content and media of each bookmarked toot—because toots can expire or be deleted.
I'm only doing this for myself, so it doesn't have to be pretty! However, authenticated API calls have to be done through an app registration. I guess the hot new Masto client "jsstaedtler_mucking_about_with_curl" will show up in the server logs soon enough
Ah, here's what I've been looking for: a visual of where Integrity is along their planned path. They're still in Earth orbit, but a few hours from now they'll do a burn to leave orbit and head moonward.
For a diagram that's more to scale, this page demonstrates some crazy upcoming gravitational tricks: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5610/
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I installed SyncThing in Desktop Mode, and paired the screenshots directory¹ to my Windows fileserver PC. Worked like a charm.
Sadly, it only works like a charm *in Desktop Mode*. The Linux applications there obviously don't run while in regular old Steam Deck gaming mode.
¹ Traditionally this is a truly arcane filepath full of very long ID numbers, but recent Steam versions let you select a custom path for screenshot storage, which is a godsend.
2/n
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@Shaibonbon@indulgent.art Absolutely! And he'll also rip your hand off
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I'm not fundamentally opposed to web crawlers, I would actually love it if my work is more discoverable. But this is such an obnoxious situation that I'm forced to accomodate or protect against.
I'm starting to think I need to test for mutually exclusive tags, and if two or more are selected, the resulting page will have no links at all except one to go back. That will deny the bots any more links to dive into.
But maybe there are better options? I'd wager this is not a novel issue...
🧵7/7
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How many permutations of tags are there? A butttonne, and the bot will diligently check out ALL OF THEM. Thousands and thousands of page loads! And even though all of them have 0 images to display, there will still be a tag list to choose from, and it will always visually update to indicate which tags are currently selected. So the page can't just be saved in a static HTML file, and the bot isn't going to load anything from it's own cache.
🧵6/?
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But you can't stop anyone from entering a URL with any combination of tag names. You must decide what page they will see when they do so, and in my case, it's a gallery page with 0 images.
Now: enter the web crawler bot. It finds my site. It grabs all of the links on the front page, then starts loading each one. Then it grabs all of the links on *those* pages, and starts loading all of *them*. Presumably it will stop once all links have been viewed.
🧵4/?
OH THANK FUCK
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@wallmask3@mastodon.art MARCILLE ❤️❤️❤️
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@MichaelKlamerus you sold BABY? you sold her like the commodity? oh! oh! jail for michael! jail for michael for One Thousand Years!!!!
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@wallmask3@mastodon.art Holy fgrbhdsgfrb this is stunning :BlobCat_HeartEyes: Thank you for such a beautiful gift
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This method of selecting tags allows for invalid combos, like "?tag=2026%2C2025". That selects images that were drawn both in 2026 *and* 2025... which obviously can't exist! The resulting page will tell you that 0 images were found.
A human would generally make sense of the available options, and *not* select two different years simultaneously. I could even code the page so that if one year is already selected, you can't select another one.
🧵3/?
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So it loads my gallery page, and sees the list of tags: maybe 50 different links, all of which load the gallery page with a new filter applied. So it loads one, like "?tag=2026".
On the resulting page, there are still 50-odd tag links available. So it loads another one, and the URL now includes "?tag=2026%2C2025". Which is nonsense, but the page still loads.
Well, there are 0 images to show on that page, but still more tags to open! So next the bot opens "?tag=2026%2C2025%2C2024"...
🧵5/?
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@doombloomart I and others I know have experienced that pressure: you get an idea for a fun comic series, but you can't actually publish anything until you've fully fledged out the characters and story, nailed down a consistent art style and layout, set yourself up at the most popular host sites, built up a buffer, etc. etc.
I know I ought to just draw the 4 or 5 comic strips I have in my mind and then choose where to go from there, but yeah 🤷♀️
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@Shaibonbon@indulgent.art :BlobCat_Yipee:
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@NullTheFool@mastodon.gamedev.place How do you make such banal subjects SO CUTE good lord you have superpowers
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@mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza Yeah, the bookmarks export is merely a list of the URL to each bookmarked toot. I could programatically load each URL and capture the content, though I could hit snags if any toots (or their instance) aren't fully public.
I figure I'll just authenticate once into mastodon.art, then I can get the full data of each bookmark directly via a single server.
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@hylianwest@mastodon.art Hmmmmmm probably yeah, maybe if a client keeps tacking new tags to the end of a URL, at a speed too fast to reasonably be human, I can drop their requests
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@pentup@mastodon.art That's a fantastic idea actually! That's a pretty simple change for me to make, and it will create a dead end for the crawlers once they've strung too many tags together. Thank you!
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@jeff@higgy.social Happily, I'm able to use a .htaccess file in my root directory to configure Apache to redirect specific user agents. The frustration I have is that I'll discover a new one churning through my site, so I'll block them, but then a few days later *another* new one will come along to do the exact same thing 😮💨
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@hypha@cafe.mycelium.locahlo.st Aw thank you :BlobCat_Heart:
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net The server is managed with cPanel which provides a surprising amount of options, including IP blocking; and .htaccess files give me some good control over Apache. So I can certainly handle *known* bad actors.
It does look like I need to pick a threshold of behaviour that will result in a 404 or some other dead end. I can imagine a human legitimately filtering on 2-3 tags, but more than that (as well as invalid combos) could be denied.
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@redstrate@mastoart.social Ah, this sounds promising! I don't want to make my site invisible on the greater Web by blocking all bot crawlers, but I'd be fine with them only loading URLs with no queries/parameters (anything after a ?). I'll look into that meta tag, though I acknowledge the other reply here that bots can happily ignore that.
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net Ah, you're absolutely right: if the query includes tags that don't even exist, I can tell it to jog off. That's a pretty easy task.
Sadly, the bots are following actual links on legit gallery pages. Every tag is a link with a valid query, and the query just grows longer as you click through them. That's where I figure I need to set a limit.
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net I'm sharing a paid host with a friend. Thanks to relatively low combined popularity, we can get away with a cheap plan, but I really don't want random bots to ruin that
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@requiem@masto.hackers.town I'll point you toward @vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net who has done Mac restorations, though I don't know if that goes back to Apple II
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@snuggle_slime@catgirl.works lol that's okay, sadly it's not a very straightforward task. Right now tags are just string values tacked on to every gallery image, and there's no way to differentiate which ones are years and which aren't... so I can't test whether two different years are being selected simultaneously.
I've long been meaning to create tag "categories", much like how the booru sites do it, and that would make this task a lot easier.
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@jonathan@charade.social That was my stop but I was slippin and missed it
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@halcy@icosahedron.website I've done stuff with other application APIs before, where you can simply generate an auth token in your user settings (with the regular graphical UI), then plug that right into the API calls. Definitely simpler that way :BlobCat_SmilignOpenMouth:
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@halcy@icosahedron.website Oh cool, I didn't know that was there! Makes it easier, thanks!
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@cb@boop.bleepbop.space I also use the .htaccess method to "block" specific agents, so they simply get thousands of 0 byte responses. Whenever it's a known LLM/AI scraper, I'm happy with that solution (and IP blocking ones that don't present a unique user agent).
I've heard of Iocane and similar tools but never looked into them, and I guess now is the time!
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@csolisr Woah I didn't know about this, thank you!
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@me I love Mastodon's mute function because it hides individuals from my home feed, but still lets them see me and even reply to me. If they don't use reliable keywords or content warnings that I can filter on, at least I can still save myself without having to go nuclear on them with a block
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@CarbonCatalyst@mastodon.social I'm on a shared webhost, so not much access to the backend outside of Apache
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@eldersea@expressional.social Funny enough, I've known about SyncThing for aaaaaaages (many people extol it's virtues), but it had never fit my use cases until now. I often need to move files to/from Android or FTP. Finally I have a need to move files between desktop OSes on the same LAN