The Story of Linicks

Nikolai-The-WolfdogLeave a comment

Since I made the dumb mistake to make a WikiFur article on myself, and a certain user won’t allow me to revert it, I might as well explain what happened just to set the record straight.

Before I go on any further, I really don’t know why I said the “despite a clear link” part. I am the original author of Faux-Pa, so using that tone to incriminate myself was a very dumb mistake. I’ve honestly moved on from this entire situation (if you can even call it that…), but seeing as how I have some alternative opinions about things happening in the furry fandom and world, I know people will try to use it against me. You may find that I use offensive language when speaking to friends, but I am not racist, homophobic, transphobic or otherwise. This is just me being edgy, so if this is the hill you want me to die on, then it better be a damn large hill to fit the entirety of Reddit/4chan/etc. I find that the more offended people get when others use certain words, the more the words become powerful.

Around 3 years ago, on 31 October of 2016, I was accused and banned from e621.net for going into the Furnet IRC channel #e621 and impersonating an admin (Ratte). The person who had done this had then spammed (and I quote) “FUCK NIGGERS” over and over (Paste from an admin used to incriminate).

Just like I said in the email that I sent to NotMeNotYou upon realizing that I was banned, I was not in the IRC channel when this happened. This IRC nonsense happened several hours before I made, in hindsight, a cringy “open letter” to admins because my shitty art was being denied. I wouldn’t have spammed racial slurs in their chat then proceeded to create an “open letter” where I expected people to take me seriously. I’m glad they didn’t. Still, it took a great deal of persuasion to let me back onto the website. I had to go behind NMNY’s back and get the other admins to side with me (which wasn’t easy), and I’m not proud of having to do this.

I still stand by the fact that I was not the one to spam racial slurs in their IRC channel. I don’t know if my account was compromised, considering the person who did this was using the built-in IRC client on e621 at the time, Mibbit. With this client, it was directly attached to my e621 username and password protected through FurNet as well, so I have no clue how they were able to impersonate me impersonating an admin to be a racist troll.

One of the main reasons I’m creating this post that seems like old drama is because WikiFur craves completeness. Despite blanking the article twice, it has been reverted several times to it’s original state. I figured it was a good chance to clear the air, so I said “Fuck it, might as well”.

I’m not asking anyone to believe me, considering the only people who will see my WikiFur page won’t care anyways as they have their own agenda. To quote one of my favourite games:

Just… remove the Dedsec part and replace it with “I have”. Feel free to cringe.

IPv6, and why you should use it

Nikolai-The-WolfdogLeave a comment

What is IPv6, and why should you support widespread adoption of it? Read more in this article!

If you’re on any Windows operating system since Windows Vista, IPv6 is enabled by default. If you’ve ever called upon by your family or friends to fix their internet, you’ve more than likely came across a reference to the protocol at least once.

But what is it? According to the FCC:

” In order to connect devices over the Internet, each device must have an Internet protocol (IP) address. The current IP system is Version 4 (IPv4), which makes available over four billion IP addresses…

…IPv6, the next-generation protocol, provides approximately 340 undecillion IP addresses (see Figure 1), ensuring availability of new IP addresses far into the future, as well as promoting the continued expansion and innovation of Internet technology. “

Internet Protocol Version 6: IPv6 for Consumers

Okay, that’s all fine and well, but how does that translate to us, the consumer? Luckily, there is no set day when IPv4 (e.g. 192.168.xxx.xxx) addresses will up and stop working, but more and more Service Providers are implementing and prioritizing IPv6 infrastructure to take advantage of the new IP addresses. With only 4 billion IP addresses possible under IPv4, the ISPs of the world have been scrambling to scoop up as many of them as possible to reserve for their customers. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority says they ran out of IP addresses to dish out back in 2011. That’s a pretty big deal.

I don’t see all the major Service Providers dropping everything to address this issue, with Microsoft taking nearly 6 years after the IANA ran out to even start playing around with the idea of using IPv6 internally. WordPress still doesn’t support IPv6, which is easily seen when accessing this blog with IPv6-only. Text and images (like images from my ad server and my logo) hosted on Hostinger show up, but any images hosted on WP’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) don’t show up. This is because WP, as well as big names in the tech industry, does not offer IPv6.

dig -6 i0.wp.com

From my research into IPv6, the only benefits of using it that I could find are:

  • IPv6 does not utilize Network Address Translation (NAT), which is sort of a bandwidth hog. This means devices can use Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) to configure themselves automatically when connected to an IPv6 network. This also means that devices can see a marginal increase in bandwidth, which is everything on slower networks.
  • ICMPv6 (the ICMP implementation for IPv6) implements IPSec, which authenticates and encrypts the packets of data sent over an network. This means that IPv6 is arguably more secure than IPv4.
  • IPv6 causes less strain on the network devices delivering content to your face because IPv6 requires less packet processing than IPv4.

On a Service-provider-level, these are all things that would make their lives easier. The only thing that is supposedly holding them back is the monetary cost of upgrading their existing single-stack infrastructures to dual-stack. I find this incredibly difficult to believe. According to The Wall Street Journal, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) is valued at $1.16 billion. According to GovTech.com, a recent unofficial analysis discovered only nine of 1,761 federal Web domains were found to be IPv6 compliant. Our own government refuses to see how important IPv6 adoption is.

So please. If you care about the internet and the wonderful services that it provides, then do you and every other netizen a favour and keep pushing for the widespread adoption of IPv6. At the rate that it is, it’ll take ages before it becomes the de facto standard that we can all benefit from.

If you want to support the fuzzball behind this blog and the content on it, then feel free to buy me a beer/coffee/etc. on my Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/nikolaithewolfdog. Want to become a monthly supporter of my content? Check out my Patreon at patreon.com/NikolaiTheWolfdog.

~ Nikolai

How To: Create Easy White “Sticker” Outlines Around Artwork In PaintTool SAI 2

Nikolai-The-WolfdogLeave a comment

If you want to watch a video tutorial on how to do this, keep an eye out for a new video on my YouTube channel (link in the sidebar).

While browsing around on FurAffinity and Instagram, I’ve found that a lot of artists (especially Telegram sticker artists) like to put a white outline around their art to make it sort of “pop” off the page. For some, it’s a way of making dark-coloured characters stand out when the artist knows that the commissioner uses dark-coloured themes in Telegram. More often than not, it’s simply an aesthetic thing.

So how do you do it?

Mordecai from Regular Show, artwork by me (https://www.furaffinity.net/view/32829801)

1. Make sure you have PaintTool SAI 2 open with your artwork of choice. You don’t have to mix down the layers, but I tend to do this when I’m done with the piece anyways, so it doesn’t matter to me.

2. Using the Magic Wand Tool, select the background around the character. After you’re done with this, do “Selection > Invert Selection” to just select your character. If your character has a background, just turn off the layer that it’s on. If you can’t (as you’ve mixed down all the layers), then skip to 2A.

2A. Again, using the Magic Wand Tool, select “All Similar Coloured Pixels”, set the “Range of Similar Colour” to something high (not too high, as we don’t want to select the background as well), then click around on your character. You can always use the Move Tool to move the selection around to make sure you got everything. If you didn’t, Ctrl+Z twice and try again.

3. With your character selected, do “Selection > Dilate Selection”. Zooming in on an edge of your character (as I’ve done here) might be helpful so you can see how thick the outline will be. How thick you make the outline of your piece is truly up to you, but I personally don’t like them very thick.

4. Do “Layer > Copy Layer” to make an exact duplicate of the layer (or group, for the more organized of SAI users out there) that your character exists on. Put this duplicate layer under the real layer, and feel free to name it something useful so you remember what it is later.

5. Making sure you are on the duplicate layer, use your brush and outline colour of choice to paint over everything. Since the selection is bigger than the character, you should now see a white outline around the character. In the image above, I deselected everything to show how it looks, but don’t do that. You’re not done yet.

6. Using “Selection > Dilate Selection” again, you’ll want to expand the existing selection around your character again. I was pretty liberal with the dilation in the image above in preparation for the next and final step.

7. Do “Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur”. Again, how much you blur the outline of your piece is truly up to you, but I personally don’t like my pieces’ outlines too jagged or too blurry.

And that’s it! Easy-peasy, right? Well, maybe not, but hey! At least you didn’t have to go back in and manually add it, right?

Feel free to share this post around! If this helped you, and you’d like to help me out, then consider sending me a coffee on my Ko-Fi!