Ellri

Using artwork for characters/Art stealing. (Civil discussion please)

@Valor... If you want a good image editor that neither requires you to pay ludicrous amounts of money or to be a pirate, we suggest looking at Gimp. It doesn't have the shallowest learning curve, but its at least as powerful as photoshop.

Small addendenum to the above post of ours: When we do edit images, we try to make sure that the end result is as far from the original as possible, so that its not one of those "Look, that pesky author watermark is gone!" thingies. To give an example of what we mean, we'll link two images:
http://master-dust.deviantart.com/art/Mari-Nguyen-Kaydana-504515681
http://katherion.deviantart.com/art/Uniformed-Sith-510511895

First is the original, second is the reworked version. And of course permission was acquired before the latter was uploaded publically, as anyone editing images should do. We fully expect, and hope, that someone else finds a use for the creation we made there. Nothing would be better than to see others use it well.

The Relics

as Sep mentioned, @LiverisGood, you are very much welcome back.

We're back from our vacation now, and hope to get things moving even more in Relics.

If people have things they want to achieve, we're open for it.

Using artwork for characters/Art stealing. (Civil discussion please)

We'll put in our few bits here:

We're no master artist, and can't really draw high-quality character pictures from scratch. Thus we tend to use others' creations. Sometimes we modify them to better fit our parameters.

When we do the former (use others' creations as is), we typically go on deviantArt simply because there are more reliable images there than most other places. When we do, we make sure to check a few things:

• is the image marked as "DO NOT USE"? If so, we skip it, no matter how good it'd fit our character idea.
• does the picture fit the parameters? (gender, age, race, species, birthmarks/scars/etc, clothes...)
• are there any logical fallacies? (pointy-heeled boots on warriors, armor that doesn't protect and/or restricts movement, abnormal physical features)
• do we like it?
• are there any comments on the image indicating that author doesn't want it used?

If the image passes all those tests, we'll use it. But we'll also add a textual description to account for what the image doesn't or can't cover.

If the latter, we will do the following:

• Is the image marked as "DO NOT USE"? If so, nogo.
• Do we like it?
• What doesn't fit our concept on it?
• Can we tweak that on our own, or is it too much work?
• When we tweak such, we do our best to make sure that the final image is radically different from the original, usually through tweaking background and/or lighting. Often, we'll change the color on clothes.
• Finally, if we're satisfied with the result, we'll add a textual description.
• Afterwards, we'll try to contact the author and see if (s)he is ok with us uploading the image on a site like deviantArt.

No matter which of the two paths we use, we always try to credit the author. Especially so if we're uploading an image we've modified to a site like DeviantArt. It might not look overmuch like the source image, but its still based on that person's hard work.

images that aren't tagged with something akin to "DO NOT USE", are generally considered to be public domain. But even so, due credit should be given. Oh, and when we use images here that are unmodified from the source image, we will link to the image on the source site, so that the author is possible to discern.

What is High Casual?

High Casual is essentially advanced, @Ace of Hearts. Such topics are put in the Casual section to attract the casual RPers. It grew forth because advanced was once (long ago) plagued with a considerable number of elitist jerks. The people who use the label tend to either want to attract different players than advanced does, or not quite feel up to running an advanced RP. Many people feel advanced has much stricter requirements than it actually holds.

In essence: Its advanced without the label.

Mahz's Dev Journal

we'd say that there's no real need to have functional links to user profile pages on the subscriptions. far easier to have just links to following:
Column 1:
IC OP
IC last unread
IC Last post

Column 2:
OoC OP
OoC last unread
OoC last post

Column 3:
CS first post
CS last post

and of course the "CS post you want to go to" button.

maybe buttons could be something like this?
<-- (first) >|< (unread) --> (last)

Mahz's Dev Journal

you'll have to do without our goblins for a while starting tomorrow, Mahz. We're going on a vacation then and won't be back for ten days.

For feedback to specific components, its generally better to use dedicated threads. Especially if the components are the big ones that get changed steadily over a long timespan, like the tags.

Mahz's Dev Journal

GMs can change their topic titles, yes.

But even taking that into account, its not something one remembers easily to mark new information.

And some GMs might not feel it necessary to notify everyone about changes.

we rather hold to the belief that the best sort of GM is the sort that doesn't have to go in and haul players back and forth.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@mention user list toggle is still not in,@Genkai.

The Relics

@Enalais, you can assume that the messenger in the IC posts that went to Alessia either also spoke to Garet, or will do so.

Mahz's Dev Journal

nah. we're just semi-insane. At least by our own definition.