when you fuse a demon and the cathedral of shadows says "Whoops! Something went wrong" thats how you know its good

Resources

lots of useful things. I'll try to keep this page only to things that I actually use and vouch for. if there are any dead links, shoot me a comment on my guestbook. page last updated 8/26/2023.

Art

  • Mirre's marker brush set: my absolute favorite clip studio paint brushes for coloring. the crispy texture on the blending brush is divine
  • Artemus Chalk: another brush set for clip studio paint. been using these since july '23, I like these slightly better than the mirre set for blocking out colors for lineless art, although I still use the blender from the mirre set for shading.
  • cb gradients 3: honestly, all of the cb gradients slap, but I'm linking to pack three as it's the most popular.
  • Vampbyte Line Colors: auto action for coloring lineart in clip studio paint. I've tried out a few other auto actions for tinting lineart, and I keep coming back to this one.
  • Rainbow Noise Paper: in case it wasn't obvious already, I like making my art feel Crunchy. this is one of the textures I slap ontop of finished pieces
  • Color Palette Generator: slap in an image, get a color palette from it. I use this mainly when editing my phone theme (lol) but also occasionally when finding accent colors for an oc's toyhouse profile based on their palette.
  • Glaze: glaze is a tool that helps protect your art from being mimicked by AI. recently they added a web version for it, so even if your computer doesn't have a beefy GPU you can still use it!

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Web Dev/Computer Related

  • Brackets: I write my website in this! having the live preview that changes as I add things is super valuable.
  • HTML/CSS only snippets: what it says on the tin. a lot of neat UI effects done with only html/css (as opposed to using javascript).
  • Pi-hole: network wide ad blocking. haven't used this yet actually because I don't have a pi that can run it, but I really want to set it up. someday!!
  • Markdown for Discord: what it says on the tin. because I always forget how to use markdown.
  • PageCrypt - Password Protect HTML: encrypts HTML pages so you can password protect them without having to touch the server. admittedly I haven't used this one yet, but I really liked the idea for protecting pages on neocities.
  • Toyhouse Live Code Editor: really nice for previewing toyhouse profiles as you're tweaking them, since toyhouse has some quirks from just plain vanilla html/css
  • Toyhouse code snippets and guides (1 2 3 4): handful of different pages for coding profiles for toyhouse
  • yt-dlp: free yourself from yt to mp3 sites. also able to download from niconicodouga, which is my main use case.
  • BlockTheSpot: block ads in the desktop spotify app
  • Have I Been Pwned?: check to see if your email was in a data breach
  • TinyWow: pdf, image, and video tools in browser
  • Convertio: convert files to another file type in browser

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FFXIV

I will say I haven't used everything on this list, but since xiv resources are so tragically spread thin across discord servers and myriad tweets I'm excusing that to put down things either I have used or that I will probably use, at some point.

  • Arcanum Character Card Creator: make a fun info card for your WOL
  • FFXIV Characa: another WOL card creator. significantly more bare bones.
  • Sights of Eorzea: database for places to gpose at, both in the open world and in photo studios. also has guides on gposing
  • FFXIV Open World GPose Locations: more places to gpose. shadowbringers areas only at time of posting this
  • Eorzean Catalogue of Photo Spots: even MORE places to gpose. player homes only
  • NA GPOSE Directory: yet another gpose location database. player homes only
  • Photo Studios I've used (1 2 3): i'll link studios I have personally been to if they have a site of some sort. consider these ones getting the Vita Stamp Of Approval.
  • FFXIV Chocobo Color Calculator: shows you what fruits you need to feed your chocobo to dye it a certain color
  • Faloop!: tracker for hunt marks and fates
  • NPC Reference Sheets (Spoilers) (1 2 3 4): was fervently looking for the last site on this list and ended up finding three more entirely separate ref sites in the process
  • FFXIV Chibis: free to use chibis of xiv npcs.
  • FF14 装備手帳: references for xiv gearsets. site is in japanese
  • Eorzea Collection: gearset references and glamour inspiration
  • Aest: twitter user who posts gorgeous shots of ffxiv scenery
  • FFXIV Textbox Template: what it says on the tin. dialogue textboxes you can use to make mock cutscene gposes
  • FFXIV Quest Box Maker: ffxiv style quest box generator. check out the rest of sebastian's itchio too, he also has a generator for making fake duty cards, along with system dialogue/regular dialogue/speech bubble generators, in case you don't want to futz with a psd.
  • FFXIV Terms/Slang Dictionary: hasn't updated since aug 2022, but still helpful for grappling with the communities specialized lingo, imo.
  • Garland Tools:: several helpful tools for xiv. I use their item database a lot
  • Teamcraft & Guides: crafting and gathering sites. teamcraft lets you set up lists for items to craft and shows you where to get all the items for them. has more features like gearset tracking. their guides section has articles on crafting and gathering
  • Universalis: crowd sourced marketboard tracking.
  • A Recipe Reborn: ffxiv recipes irl!
  • Upscaling Your Screenshots: what it says on the tin. check out the rest of this site, there's more gpose guides!
  • Strange Housing: ffxiv jump puzzle community hosted in private houses.
  • ReShade: shaders to make your game look pretty. you might hear the name "gshade" thrown around. do not download it. the dev is a shithead and made a closed source fork of reshade. download the version with full add-on support.
  • GShade to Reshade Notes: if you're installing reshade fresh, just scroll down to the bottom to get a bunch of nice presets for your game. probably worth skimming the rest of the document.
  • FFXIVCollect: tracker for collectables.
  • Housing Snap: FFXIV housing decorating inspiration.
  • Housing Glitch Guide: what it says on the tin. guide to using glitches for designing ffxiv housing

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Modding

IMPORTANT: come dawntrail, most if not all of these guides will be outdated. dawntrail is changing a lot of things wrt the graphics so mods will be broken for some period of time.

this section isn't intended to be like a "how to start modding from 0" guide, but more so just a roundup of the eleven thousand bookmarks I have. I'm considering modding to be any third party tools outside of reshade. I don't have any 3dsmax guides saved because I don't use it.

  • FFXIV Quick Launcher: launcher for xiv that adds qol features and various available addons
  • Reni Guide: guide for setting up penumbra, glamourer, mare and more!
    • an aside: a lot of the plugins I use got wrapped into one repository linked in this guide, so I will explain them briefly
    • Penumbra: runtime mod loader for xiv. lets you turn mods on and off at will
    • Glamourer: plugin to change and save character customization, including gear and physical appearance
    • Customize+: plugin to scale your characters body parts
    • Palette+: plugin to improve color customization beyond what the game offers
    • Simpleheels: plugin to adjust your characters height according to what shoes they are wearing
    • Mare Synchronos: plugin to sync mods between friends
    • Ktisis: plugin for posing your character
    • Brio: plugin to create additional characters and give you more options during gpose
  • XIV Animation Toolkit: invaluable for making animation mods
  • TexTools: xiv modding framework. I strongly recommend using penumbra over textools, unless you want to get into making mods for xiv (in which case I would still recommend installing textools to a dummy copy of xiv over your main copy)
  • Anamnesis: external tool to pose your character
  • CMP to POSE: converts cmtool .cmp files to anamnesis .pose files
  • (NSFW) Posing clothes separate from a character: what it says on the tin.
  • Animations Spreadsheet: doc with animation codes you can load with anamnesis, has npc and otherwise unavailable animations.
  • Scaling with Anamnesis: edit the size of your characters body, gear, & hair.
  • Transmasc Mods: aggregate of mods for trans masc characters. some links NSFW. hasn't been updated since july 2022 (and has since been deleted from this tumblr) but I thought it was valuable enough to stick the archive.org link up here
  • FFXIV Creators Listing: spreadsheet with a lot of mod makers, pose makers, and studio owners.
  • Vanilla Mashup Guide: video guide on how to make a vanilla mashup
  • Texture Optimization Guide: tips to optimize file size textures for mods
  • Editing a Multi: quick guide to edit a multi and make makeup more vibrant on dark skintones
  • Scale Recoloring: please stop paying for scale recolors.
  • Asymetrical Eye Textures:: what it says on the tin.
  • So you want to get into modding in FFXIV?: mostly a list of tips/advice rather than a tutorial, but it does link to beginner tutorials for blender as an actionable step. (this is a personal opinion, but I think animation modding belongs in easy, at least if you're just dealing with editing vanilla animations)
  • (NSFW) Resizing an entire outfit using Blender: I used this! very detailed.
  • Modding Tutorial for The Body Using Blender: another start to finish guide for making a mod, in this case a vanilla upscale
  • Turntable Idle: simple slow spin for mod previewing
  • Quick tip for fixing textures while sculpting/refitting
  • Animation Modding: I followed this to make my animation mods!
  • XIV Mods and Resources: aggregate site with many guides, some i've covered here but a lot that I haven't.
  • Loose Texture Compiler: makes loose texture mods much less of a pain to set up. see guides to using this here and here.

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Japanese

  • Wanikani: paid, but lets you do the first three levels for free. website for learning kanji, I personally feel like the price is well worth it, for as much as I've struggled with self-study
  • Kaniwani: vocab recall for wanikani. requires a wanikani account.
  • Flaming Durtles: third party android app for wanikani. I enjoy the streamlined lessons and the ability to search by JLPT level.
  • Wanikani Learning Masterpost: post on the wanikani forums with a ton of resources to learn things outside of kanji
  • Kanji Alive: online dictionary for kanji. I like that it shows stroke order
  • Tae Kim's Grammar Guide: you know it, you love it(?). the grammar guide passed around jpn learning circles.
  • Bunpro: spaced repetition system for grammar. paid, has a free trial. I personally haven't used this, but probably someday I'll try it out because I like SRS.
  • Tofugu: blog on japan and japanese. has semi-regular roundups of new products to learn japanese.
  • Nihongo con Teppei: teppei sensei I would die for you. japanese podcasts geared towards language learners. I listen to the beginners one because I have the listening comprehension of a peanut but he offers a variety of podcasts for a variety of levels.
  • NHK News Annotated: nhk news web easy made even easier. because I have the reading comprehension of a peanut.
  • Natively: database of books and graded readers you can filter by JLPT level. also offers korean books
  • NicoNicoDouga Slang: super old article on NND slang. still interesting to look at
  • DJT Site: a website with a huge amount of resources. I use their core 2k/6k deck for anki. I disagree with their opinion on wanikani, but I still think their website is incredibly valuable
  • Steven Kraft's Japanese Projects: exercises to practice verb/adjective conjugation, numbers/counters, and kana.

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Other

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