thar be dergs

girin scry bc i suddenly felt inspired

Was taking a look at the World Map this afternoon and finally figured out how to extract the Luminax textures from it. Combined the right-facing idle and roar strips for the above, and the left-facing ditto for the below (Luminax is not symmetrically coloured, so there's left- and right-facing strips for every animation).

Haven't attempted the walking animations, since as well as right- and left-facing there's also facing-front and -back directions - so four different pose strips, and there'd need to be 4 different gifs made. Blargh.

isn’t rot such a beautiful thing? - Submitted by youllstealannuduh

I grew up on the mid-2000s internet, and it was pretty common to just log in to a site like deviantart or neopets or youtube or whatever and see the layout completely reworked with no warning whatsoever. and you had absolutely no say or feedback about this shit, you just had to put up with it. and people would rage but then a month later no one would care.

six months later, everything gets rearranged and converted to a new system with no warning again. The site crashes or a function stops functioning, the team apologise, take the site down for a few hours and it comes back weird looking but functional again. and it happened so many times. If you use the wayback machine on some sites they would change their layout year-to-year. People would always complain but the staff weren't going to listen, feedback threads were rare.

So with the new layout we got plenty of fore-warning, asking for ideas, implementation of user's ideas, a feed back thread, and lots of communication. I think that's great. Nowadays its pretty rare for a site to completely rework it's layout, so even small changes like changing the colour of a button incites rage. *old man voice* you kids don't know how lucky you are! *shakes cane.*

There's a part of me which is frustrated that only now are people coming out of the woodwork to claim it's an act of tyranny and it looks horrendous, when they didn't really involve themselves in the discussion beforehand. But I also sympathise that we all have limited time and our priorities aren't always about paying attention to the future plans of the dragon jpeg website.

there are so many comments lamenting the style changes and how they miss the aesthetics of the old internet but it's like... babygirl this site launched in 2013, if this was the "old internet" you would not be informed of upcoming site changes and you certainly wouldn't have a say in them.

web 1.0 and early 2.0 looked the way they did because there was basically One Guy experimenting. there was zero precedent on web design, no tools to make the site look better, and even if you could make a site look good on your device there was no consistency on how it would look from browser to browser and no guarantee that other people would have the bandwidth to view it.

not to mention, user feedback wasn't really a thing. you might interface with other people on a site once forums and chats were implemented, but rarely with the ~*~webmaster~*~

people are yearning for aesthetics that are only possible when the developer has complete creative freedom and an extremely limited toolset. a hypothetical old internet FR would have the devs changing up the UI however they damn well pleased and as often as they wanted, because what the fuck are you going to do about it? they might leave the website to collect dust if they got busy, and there'd be a looming threat of shutting it down if server costs got too expensive. they could get bored of this whole dragons thing and go nah we're a football game now.