maybe i am better at js than i thought i was-

i never shoulda learned to code

i shoulda been a farmer

i still need to learn how to do custom board structures properly. i have resources but not the patience. it's a very hard knock life for me.

one of the most frustrating things about being a designer but also a goth is trying to strike the balance between what's going to appeal to me vs what's going to appeal to everyone else. like i know that body horror is generally unappealing and....horror to most people but a lot of the time i'm looking a piece of art on pintrest and artstation like



and it's like some grotesque melting face or something LMAO

just a few random tips in the hopes that, by repeating them, the concepts will finally stick in my mind. i've learned and re-learned this information at least three times by now.

when animating CSS properties, make sure that you've explicitly declared the base state.

for example, if i'm animating a box shadow that appears on hover and the base state is effectively `box-shadow: initial`, i still ought to declare the box shadow property as though it were invisible:

.animate {
 box-shadow: 0 0 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);
 transition: box-shadow 0.4s;
}

.animate:hover {
 box-shadow: 0 8px 16px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25);
}
the same goes for transform animations, which are especially janky on text with no base state. use `translate3d(x, y, z)` instead of `translateX` or `translateY` which triggers hardware acceleration -> smoother animation.

.animate {
 transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0);
 transition: transform 0.2s;
}

.animate:hover {
 transform: translate3d(0, -1em, 0);
}
avoid animating margins and top/bottom/left/right - prefer transform where possible.

sometimes `backface-visibility: hidden` helps - it depends on the animation.

selectively use `will-change: transform` for heavy transform animations, as a last resort.

anyway, we'll see if i remember next time i have to animate something. 🫠

i'm still so noob with animations and how/when they use GPU and what it means for performance. even recently, learning how to use the performance tab of chrome dev tools was a wild ride for me. i found this article pretty helpful as an intro for some of the tips you've mentioned (though it's from 2016, not sure if a lot has changed since then). sharing in case it helps anyone else! www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/12/gpu-animation-doing-it-right/

knowing i should start looking into baby javascript (especially after playing with fizzyelf's scripts) but apparently i'm allergic to doing anything outside of css and html

My confession: I freaking hate coding, I barely ink by with my limited understanding of it. And yet I chose to do one of the most complicated things. for myself and made a whole jcink webpage guidebook. Couldn't figure shit out and it took me three weeks, didn't understand shit about how keys worked or anything. Now I'm sitting here asking myself why the hell I have to make so many webpages?





Seriously though, who the hell decided RP forums needed to be so complicated coding wise now a days? Point them out so I can strangle them please and thank you.

honestly i agree with you. i think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people started selling skins, and skins came with all this extra stuff such as board mods, extra templates, etc and it became the standard. also we got older and our skills improved so the standards got higher.

people who cannot code do not understand just how much work this stuff is. they think they do, but they do not. like even the smallest thing can take hours to do and they'd never know unless they've done it themselves, but they demand it because it's become the standard. frankly i kinda miss just the sidebars + header life of v4 proboards (it would certainly be faster to skin LMAO)

Imo, it's the fault of crow-brained "ooh, shiny!" human nature as compounded by the difficulty and aversion all of us have to honest discussion, resulting in our entire RP culture shifting away from communication and thoughtful interaction and instead towards instant gratification and the illusion of prestige. This is a hell of our own making, by everyone, and not just one single scapegoat we can blame before changing nothing and going back to perpetuating it all over again.

On the one hand, there are a significant amount of members who will genuinely click away from a forum because its header isn't as fancy as that other one's, so they're gonna go spend their freetime there, nevermind they've never actually read a single IC post on either - but it's also the fault of us staffers, for making members have to go to that much work just to feel out our communities to begin with.

We cannot fault people for making snap decisions on aesthetics when aesthetics are all we give them: we've spent the last 10+ years distilling every forum down to the bare minimums needed to read some rules, post an app, and start threading, with the most personable engagement you can get being "how silly are they with their images/profile answers/member intro, should they even choose to do any of that". I used to roll my eyes at people who join a Discord five minutes into scoping out a new place; now I realize that's literally the only way to see if you'll even like the people on it.

And instead of solving that problem, we just embed discord widgets, adding more demands for how a forum is supposed to look and function.

It is an ouroboros of a relationship where we're like this because it works, but also because changing to a more meaningful system requires substantially more effort. I know I squawk about this all the time, but some things I believe can help:

• Engage in OoC communications on-forum again; I had an idea a million years back to do a themed "Monthly Music Discussion" thread, but I've never actually tried it for my own fears of non-participation and also I lost my list
• Normalize sharing and discussing the more substantive aspects of our RP, such as where we land on the "write to escape the world" vs. "write to understand the world" and "bend the character to tell an interesting narrative" vs. "story is the character and exploring those boundaries is what I find interesting" axes
• Consider and develop other meaningful questions to make the above easier
• Substantive discussion on who a forum is for, but also who it is not for, thus respecting the time and effort of prospective members to find something that actually aligns with them and cutting down on that perpetual restart-burnout cycle we got going on now
• Encourage and enable people to try things that are new or outside their comfort zones, with the most obvious being to do it ourselves
• Part of the above and real specific to me, but I always encourage everyone to do character art, especially if it's bad; IMO, the best way to move away from an aesthetics-heavy culture is to tear down prestige and refocus on fun

thank you!! this is such a good link - it actually explains why transform3d works. i didn't realize that it creates a new compositing layer 🤔 i'll have to be mindful of that info.

Im never ok tm so I end up starting new skin projects so I can feel motivated to the ones I started earlier later....Oops I have just worsened my procrastination.

Honestly....I get really burned out tm for some reason the more I work on skins especially the nitty gritty components I gotta remodel and all. Kinda hate it cuz there is one I absolutely need to finish and I am like....Help.