Category: Commentary

As you know, I always like doing holiday themed captions. So, last chance if you want to send in something for Christmas.

Someone contacted me last night to point out that images aren’t visible when you’re looking at a Tag page anymore. And the same applied to Category pages, I see. As they suspected, this was not intentional. It was the result of a change made to the WordPress theme I’m using. I did a quick-n-dirty fix by rolling back the theme, but I guess sooner or later I’ll have to look into how to override things like that properly. I’m still out of my element messing with WordPress internals.

TL;DR It’s fixed for now.

Your mission: Determine whether this woman is naked legally or illegally.

If you’re game, let me know what you think (and why) in the comments.

I added a “Random Post” link to the menu bar. This is based on a suggestion someone sent while my forms were broken. (The attachments are sadly lost for good, but I’ve been able to recover the text in most cases) Anyway, they also asked if I could do something like Tumblr’s “Archives” thumbnail view. That sounds like it might be a little harder, but I’ll look into it. One good thing about WordPress is there are all kinds of plug-ins you can get to add different features.

Edit: First attempt didn’t work that great. Try the Random link up there again and see if it works better now.

Oh man, dealing with this has been annoying. And it’s not over yet. But I think I have the forms working again.

So if anyone submitted something in the last month or so and has neither seen it posted nor got a reply from me, I guess you can go ahead and try sending it again. Definitely still hang onto those pictures though, because I’m not totally confident in my system yet. To spare you the gory details, got the old setup working again, but I still want to try something else and see if it’s a little more confidence-inspiring.

Direct email submissions mostly work, but there does remain a risk of getting it bounced,  zip files in particular are apparently unwelcome on the mailing service. (But  you should at least get a message back if your email doesn’t go through.). I will  have an alternate (hopefully more reliable) email address also available soon.

OK, so it looks like the problem is not with the form itself, rather the submissions are getting caught as spam before I receive them. Unfortunately this is not on my end, or even my ISP, but at a third-party service I’m using. This leaves a few possible solutions. I’m trying to get my site’s IP address taken off the spam list, but who knows how that will go. I don’t want to rely on that. I could also ditch that 3rd party and use something else. But probably the best thing is if I can set it up so submissions don’t have to go trough email at all. And it looks like that should be possible, but I’m still too busy with the holiday (visiting family and stuff) to really dig into setting it up.

Oh, and to top it off, direct email might not be working as well as I thought. Someone just reported that attempting to send me a zip file bounced. Arrgh. Obviously I have alot to sort out. But I’ve got some ideas what to do now,  I just don’t have the time to do it at the moment. Probably this weekend.

I’ve just been talking with Tales of Nudity , who also had their Tumblr terminated, and surprisingly they actually got it back! Now when mine got terminated they did actually give me a reason, however harshly I feel they handled it, so I doubt if I could get it restored. But if anyone else got theirs shut down with no warning or explanation, like Tales apparently did, contacting support might just be worth a shot.

My damn contact and submission forms are broken again, and really hate to say it, but they probably have been for some time. I had noticed a slump in submissions, but I naively assumed that’s all it was. I still get a few through Tumblr or by e-mail so it took me longer than it should have to notice I was getting zero through this site. I only caught on when someone told me through another channel that they sent something I didn’t receive.

So the bottom line is, if you sent me anything recently at all, like the last month, and you’ve neither seen it posted nor got a reply from me, it’s almost certainly because the gremlins ate it. You are more than welcome to send it again, but you’ll have to either send it by email (address on the submit page) or hold off until I get things straightened out. At this point, I still don’t know exactly what’s going on, so it’s not likely to be a super quick fix I’m afraid.

I’m very sorry about all this. It’s the downside of managing your own site I guess.

This submission is kind of neat to think about.

At first I was gonna say, it looks more like she just got out of the shower. But maybe that’s the point. What if she’s permanently naked and just got out of the shower? Yeah that could definitely be pretty awkward. All kinds of misunderstands in the cards there.

She’s probably a little self conscious meeting her roommates wet with a towel on her head, and they’d pick up on that but not know there reason. So they’re thinking “geez lady you’ve been out here for 10 minutes, put you’re clothes on already”. But of course they’re not gonna actually say that to their new roommate. And she in turn would notice they’re uncomfortable, but probably assumes they realize she’s permanude and just aren’t used to it…

I can easily imaging that going on for an hour or two before anyone’s brave enough to directly say what they see as obvious and clear it up.

This is a recreation of a little tutorial I posted back on tumblr. The purpose is to give people a way to do nice looking captions without using tools that cost money. The problem in particular is that none of free tools seem able easily make text with outlined letters, which greatly improves the look and readability. I’ll be using Paint.NET in this tutorial, but any image editor with layers could do the same.

Step 1. Open your image and select a light color or white as the foreground color. In the layers window, click the Add New Layer button so the text you’re about to add will be separate from the background.

Step 2. Select the Text tool, click where you want the text and type your message. You can still move the text around, or change the color or font at this point, so do that now until it looks how you want it. (I recommend a simple sans serif font.) Then click Finish. Repeat this step now for any additional text blocks.

Step 3. In the Layers window, click the Duplicate Layer button. You now have three layers. Select the middle one and choose Adjustments->Brightness / Contrast from the top menu. Set it for minimum brightness and maximum contrast. (Note: For pure white text, you need set both to minimum instead, this may be a quirk of Paint.NET specifically.) You may not see anything yet because it’s still covered by the top layer, but the text on the middle layer should now be black. Now choose Effects->Blurs->Gaussian Blur. A radius 2 or 3 is usually good, but it depends on the size of your text. This smears the black text into a “shadow” behind the light text on the top layer.

Step 4. The shadow is still kind of faint, so just click the Duplicate Layer button again to double it up and make it more visible. And then do it again if it’s still too faint. And there we go! It’s not exactly an outline, but it’s significantly more readable and looks a bit nicer too.

Step 5. Save your image as jpeg. Since the text will become a permanent part of the picture, you might want to save it with a new name and keep the original.

Lastly I want to be clear that I’m not insisting captions be done this way. As long as they’re readable and don’t look horrific, it’s fine. And of course you are still welcome to send me pictures and separate text and let me do it. I use Paint Shop Pro 9 (an old but good commercial program) in case anyone is interested.

Here’s another way you can do it in GIMP, this is probably better because it makes true outlines instead of a shadow. Thanks to Megamegatron99 for finding it.