Author: LittleFears

Storms & Studios

LittleFears35 Comments

So I thought I’d share a photo of my not-Instagram-worthy studio today. Also, I thought I’d share what yesterdays Storm Deidre did to my new homes fence. Pssh. The fiend! The Fears are on hand to help drop a pallet on a salvageable panel that was pulling the rest of the fence down. Cheers Piscies and… Oh… Deer…

Now, there’s a studio pic. It’s a mish-mash of the cheapest furniture I could get with odd second-hand bits and bobs. It ain’t very stylish but it is very functional. The studio includes a spacious dog crate used as a desk extension (because apparently, my desk chair is nicer for pups to sit on).

The PC was a self-build and cost £300’ish for a 16gb ram, AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with a bunch of old hard drives in. I’ll cover the PC in a future post about the tech the Fears use.

I ended up with two small monitors instead of one big one. A £20 19″ monitor combined with a £4 “16 flat screen TV. Both second hand. The 16″ TV is absolutely dire. It has less than 720p resolution. The monitor is absolutely awesome. I know 19″ is too small for most people nowadays, but the picture is so darned crisp. It’s an odd one because I cannot find it listed anywhere. It has a 1920 x 1020 resolution. But no matter how much I search, I just cannot find any 19” monitors with a resolution that high. Maybe it was one of the first 1020p monitors that were too expensive to make? Whatever, It’s small, but I absolutely love it.

The lamps are of course, meant to help with future videos. The window doesn’t get much light as I’m around the back of the house. So when I’m videoing myself drawing I need every bit of light from my left that I can get.

Oh, that box against the back wall is a delivery of art-prints. I’ve had them nearly two weeks and haven’t gotten the buggers onto Etsy yet! Hopefully, this week…

Some hot-picks furniture links.

Phew. Ever put studio pics or other creative spaces photos online yourself? Leave us a link comments so we can have a perv over your own creative spaces and writing desks.

Red-Nose

LittleFears13 Comments

This weeks #Colour_Collective was Rose Madder. And, well, it would have been rude not too at this time of year, right? 

The website overhauls taking forever. Ruddy, arsin, bloomin, flipping, WordPress 5.0 with its pointy faced Gutenberg of blog destruction. It’s getting there though. Sadly I don’t think it’ll be finished before Christmas.

With special thanks

Weekly shout out to my $10 patron, Warren from IWrite. Without people like Warren, I wouldn’t be able to wake you all with my little fears and you’d probably cry a lot less in the morning than you already do. So please do check out Warrens blog.

Angry Wine

LittleFears54 Comments

“My missus hates it when I mess with her red wine,” remarked Spectre.
“Oh, aye?” asked Sprite. “What’d you do to it?”
“Oh, I just mixed in some orange juice and fruit lumps,” said Spectre.
“Darn, man,” said Sprite. “That ain’t on, bruv.”
“I know,” sighed Spectre. “Now she’s sangria than ever.”

Boom! Haha, get it? GET IT? Bwaha. 

I need better lighting of course, but playing about with videos this week. That works a lot better than I thought.

Original photo by Helena Yankovska on Unsplash

Ecco

LittleFears22 Comments

“Well, you know, I must be one of the prettiest Fears,” said Ecco.
“You’re certainly one of the most colourful,” said Sprite. “I’d say it’s a toss-up between you with your winter plumage and Spectre that time he dipped his private parts in a bowl of glitter.”
“Why thank you… Wait… What?” stumbled Ecco.
“Yeah,” sighed Sprite. “It was pretty nuts.”

Just really playing with some old pens, the Royal Talens Ecoline Brush Pens. We got them ages ago in a Scrawlrbox. Pretty bright colours, but I struggle with watercolours. You’d think I would get on well with the intentional messiness of watercolours, but nope. My brain can’t gel with any watercolour, brush or brush pen. Frustrating, eh? 

 

They’re available on Amazon in bumper packs. if you feel so inclined. Linky : https://amzn.to/2B5KF9Q

Insect Queen

LittleFears11 Comments

There was no #Colour_Collective last week, but I still wanted to do a portrait. So the lovely insect queen steps up for her portrait. She likes sugar, honey and ruining humans picnic sandwiches. 

She’s also available as an original artwork on my Etsy store. 

You can purchase the insect queen here: etsy.com/uk/shop/LittleFears

Ooo, and speaking of Etsy. My new Little Fears prints arrived last week. They look awesome. Whatever printer type they use it puts the ink down far better than my old HP did. I’ll be overhauling the Etsy store and adding a bunch of new prints over the next few days. I will, of course post some sexy photos of them here.

With special thanks

Weekly shout out to my $10 patron, Warren from IWrite. Without people like Warren, I wouldn’t be able to wake you all with my little fears and you’d probably cry a lot less in the morning than you already do. So please do check out Warrens blog.

Fears at Work 2 – The WordPress update

LittleFears86 Comments

Have you tried the WordPress update yet? I notice a lot of people in comments are saying they’re scared of it but haven’t tried it yet. 

Well… Go try it. It’s an update that’s been coming for well over a year. We’ve had nearly a year to try Gutenberg, the new editor, to see if we like it or not. There are options for returning to classic editor, but ultimately, the new editor is coming (or here if you updated this weekend) and it’s here to stay. make a new account or if you self host, create a subdomain and use a fresh install of WordPress 5.0.

If you don’t like Gutenberg you can always try Medium.com for a brilliant writers website. From fiction to politics to lifestyle. It’s a social media built for writing and reading. If you need a homepage, try Squarespace, Wix or Weebly. 

In my opinion, the WordPress team are trying to make an editor that can in some way stand up to Squarespace’s and Wix’s website editors. It has a block functionality that allows you to add new and different things to your blog posts without the need for plugins or HTML. For some people, this new way of doing things is completely awesome. For others, it’s going to really mess with peoples workflow.

The old editor was pretty dated. Squarespace, Wix and Weebly have made website creation very accessible, WordPress was going to start losing a decent lump of new bloggers to the more modern website builders. Not everyone wants to learn HTML or website building to run a blog. Even if it’s just five minutes of their time. WordPress has always lagged behind in that respect.

The downside to this is you get people like me. I’ve been using WordPress to blog since 2004’ish. I’m well stuck in my ways. So the new editors an issue for me. I used WordPress because it was WordPress. Not a block-based web builder.

The reason my own website broke so completely is partly my fault. This website has broken numerous times over this last year and hasn’t even been fully fixed when I’ve done complete re-installs. So when updating to WordPress 5.0, it was a catalyst that blew up every bug, issue, code error and media problem I’ve had this last year. I back up once a month so had access to a folder with my media library, but when importing the websites XML it didn’t want to accept my media library was there. Even using plugins to re-attach all my media, I’m still having to go through and manually edit every single post.

I also have an issue with inline images no longer working unless made with the Gutenberg editor. So that little line of icons at the bottom of every post exploded across my screen and made a right mess. Again, every post on this site needs that edited out. 

My old theme also spat the dummy out and won’t function with WordPress 5.0 so I’ve spent a lot of today figuring out a new layout for the website. Almost there.

The amount of work I need to do on this website is going to take me weeks. It’s a horrific pain in the arse, that’s partially self-inflicted. I could have been far more prepared for this.

So, the thingy of this post. Don’t panic. There are good reasons why my website died so catastrophically. Gutenberg is coming. Like it or not. Go try it now. Don’t fear something you don’t understand. You might like it. You can revert to the classic editor through a plugin, but eh, Gutenberg is the way WordPress want things done now. Reviews on Gutenberg are pretty split. As is often the way with the Internet, it’s easier to rant than to praise.

One last thing. If you hate Gutenberg or find bugs, let the devs know. But have some humanity with it and don’t go abusing, threatening and being a dick to the developers. The internet doesn’t need any more abusive rage.

Fears at Work

LittleFears69 Comments

So stuff keeps happening.

I made an attempt at upgrading WordPress to 5.0. It’s gone tragically wrong. I’ve had to re-install the entire website and I’m unable to upload a back up more than 8mb. I’ve tried a great many workarounds on the internet and none of them seems to be working.

I’ll figure it out, and the Fears will return. Until then, we’ll be crying in our little corner of the net. Throwing pebbles at the server.

Cheers.

Update.

All my posts were recoverable. All of the images are missing. All 1,332 of them. God above. Oh well, that’s my weekend planned then.

Update, update.

Oh god, it’s given me the new editor… Someone! HELP! This thing’s awful!

Update, update, update

It would appear my old theme is not Gutenberg friendly. Also, all my inline images that’s I’ve been using with basic HTML for the last couple of years don’t seem to work with WordPress 5.0.  However this update went down, the entire posting history of the Little Fears (about 1,000 posts) was going to need editing. Balls.

Update, update, update, update

New theme’s kinda coming together. I do miss my old landing page though.

Lucy pt 7

LittleFears7 Comments

George tumbled through the door onto the roof. He could hear the shuffling of feet on the stairs below.
Why?” asked George.
“Oh, we all get our kicks somehow,” sighed Lucy. “That, and my ex-tells me I should channel my hobbies into doing more good for the world.”
“And this is doing good?” cried George.
“Yes, well,” replied Lucy. “But, maybe not for you.”
George looked over the edge at the stained pathways below. The stairwell door creaked open.

Lucy pt 6

LittleFears18 Comments

“Nearly there,” grinned Lucy. “And who’s this?”
“My window cleaner,” grimaced George.
“Thought he was banging your wife right?” said Lucy.
“I thought so, yes,” sighed George.
“Thought so?” asked Lucy. “Shame you changed your mind after he’d taken a tumble through the sixth-floor window.”
The window cleaner squirted Windowlene into Georges’ face and gave him a buff and shine.
“Oh and look at all the glass stuck in his backside,” laughed Lucy. “Hey, I bet that’s a right pane in the arse!”

 

Lucy pt 5

LittleFears6 Comments

 

“Up, up, up,” said Lucy, pulling him up to the next floor.
George stumbled through the door. “My god, this is my old kitchen,” he pondered.
“Ah, the wifey loved this room,” said Lucy. “ She was lovely wasn’t she?”
George glared at Lucy. “She tells me the kitchen table was the first place you two did the business.”
“She’s not…” muttered George.
“Here?” grinned Lucy. “Of course. She’s still in the pantry.”
A moan came from behind the door, George retreated to the stairwell.
“Do you know, the first time I had sex was with my first missus was in her parents’ kitchen,” sighed Lucy. “’This is awkward,’ she said. ‘Just ignore them’ I replied.”
The pantry door burst open, Georges wife emerged wielding her kitchen utensils.

This story originally came from some darker puns between Lucy and Yuffies meeting in the Grey Moon that felt out of context in that storyline. By Spectres beard, I just ain’t feeling it this week, though! Not happy with the quality of writing, humour or story. And I’ve ended up not using the original puns. Doh’eth.

But hey, the bright side. I have a growing library of sound effects. I’m overusing them something rotten this week, but it’s the learning to use them, innit.

Oh, and hey, it’s getting near Crimbo. If you enjoyed Grey Moons story or my old original horrors covering Capricorn, don’t forget they’re available in a lovely smellin paperback available on Amazon. They’d make a fab Christmas gift! (Linky: https://amzn.to/2PjT7ak )