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Welcome to Computer Fairies, where the ✨​sparkles✨​ are lively fairy dust, not lifeless AI slop.

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Don't blindly believe everything you read online, tempting as that is. Do your homework first. This video series will help you do it well: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8d

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Remember to pop your filter bubble every so often. If you think you're not in one, you're trapped in one and in for a rude awakening.

With the rising cost of PC hardware, and modern PC software's inability to cope with fewer hardware resources, the top software picks of 2027 are shaping up to be:

* WordPerfect and WordStar
* Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro
* dBase III
* Harvard Graphics
* CorelDraw
* Paint Shop Pro
* Ability Office and Lotus SmartSuite
* RetroZilla
* Oregon Trail
* Doom
* Sim City
* SkiFree

:V

*gently grabs the cheeks of all programmers to stare deeply into their eyes*

All I want is a dry tech manual. A boring, well indexed manual that defines every function. Not a chatbot. Not a training. Not a million "articles" that I have to search through. Not a "community forum".

My rice cooker came with one. I want one for every piece of software I have to interact with.

Go get yourself a technical writer if necessary.

I. Want. An. Instructional. Manual.

start your own website, even if it's barebones. support your favorite artists on DRM-free platforms like bandcamp or itchio. grab an install of winamp, built a music collection. raid a friend's soulseek & learn to safely torrent. put media foundational to you on a USB drive and forever hold it close

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it may be years before it happens, but you've had to jump ship many times before, and you've still got a long life ahead of ya. there will always be a new startup that springs from the ashes of a dead service, but it's no guarantee that it'll contain the featureset or content you fell in love with

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if you're following me, or we're mutuals, we're probably around the same age bracket, which means i can confidently tell you:

you are going to outlive many of the services you use. it's never too late to start building that offline media library, or find a tool that can be ran outside of a browser!

"A Repose at Tintagel Castle" 🏰
Art by Elisabeth Alba
4x6 inches, ink, watercolor, and acryla gouache

With new gaming hardware getting more expensive by the day, it's finally time to start making games again for the hardware everyone already owns. That's right, the sun rises once more for the Nintendo DS

re: climate change, wealth inequality, dark thought 

If you're worried about being an anti-billionaire target, then the solution is obvious: Don't become a billionaire, and if you are, do everything in your extreme power to quit being a billionaire.

Give your billions of dollars to everyone not even a millionaire, and try to die penniless.

That second part is impossible, because even millionaires can have so much money they literally can't spend it all and die penniless if they tried.

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climate change, wealth inequality, dark thought 

Following a thread about beating the heat in a climate-changed summer, and I'm sitting here thinking if there's any better way to moderate everyone's body temperature than to significantly reduce billionaires' body temperatures specifically.

There was some discussion at work about gender neutral language. I told them I always go by this (old) guide.

Writers: here are ten free and easy ways to add a dash of visual interest to your blog posts without resorting to AI imagery (which signals to readers that your blog post is probably also AI and there’s no need to bother reading it):

1) A thoughtful photo you’ve taken yourself — a nice sunrise you saw, a cool angle spotted on vacation, your pet curled up on the couch, flowers. Play with your phone photo app’s filter settings to nail the tone. It doesn’t need to be particularly related to the post, it’s related to you as a person.

2) An image from Wikimedia Commons that’s somehow related to the subject matter — there are unfathomably many, you can search by keyword. Remember to credit. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mai

3) A screenshot of a scene you made in a sandbox game such as Minecraft or Animal Crossing

4) A scene you made with toys such as Lego (you can also use free Lego design software such as Bricklink Studio) bricklink.com/v3/studio/main.p

5) Play with the effects in whatever image editor you have access to, using your own photos or free-to-use images, to create something a bit abstract and avant-garde

6) Even if you can’t draw or paint very well, you can probably make some pretty cool abstract or collage imagery with whatever art supplies you have around. Dampen some paper and randomly dip watercolor paint onto it and see what happens

7) Those stickers you stashed and never used? Yeah you can make something with them. If they’re individually cut, you don’t even need to peel them, you’ll still find the One True Way to use them one day, I’m sure

8) Shelfies. None will dare question your competence after they see you have a real paper copy of Subject Matter Tome Volumes 1 through 6

9) You can get a lot of mileage out of compositing pre-made video game assets into an image. A good place to start is Kenney’s free and generously licensed 2D assets: kenney.nl/assets/category:2D and the Tiled editor which is specifically meant for assembling images out of video game asset tile sheets mapeditor.org

10) the most ridiculously amateurish thing you can scribble on a post-it note or in MS Paint is preferable to AI imagery because it clearly signals a real human cares about the post.

#writing #writingcommunity #collage #blog

Gaming PC builder blog and channel run by a glaceon, called the Cutest Coolant.

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!