Rants

These are just some personal rants that I wrote at the heat of the moment, they feature some of my annoyances in the webdesigning world and what I think about them. You can read them if you like, perhaps you might find something there you would agree with :)

Stealing

I was visiting some graphic sites the other day and I was viewing all these CG pictures that other people made, and all these graphic sites decide, “lets use these for layouts because they are so pretty”, so I go look in credits and they put “got off of boyis, or google, or something of that sort. WHAT THE HELL? Why don’t these people credit the place exactly, and with freelance CG work, the artist. The people who DRAW them get no credit whatsoever and are put as “unknown artist”. Furthermore, about 90% of these graphic sites use scans from smaller sites, but they dont even BOTHER to link any of them. I HATE it when they do that. I own a graphic site BUT I link even a one page site, though I scan most of the things myself.

  Sometimes I think there is a chain. And here is the chain, both with graphics and regular sites, which is totally unfair:

artbook scanners (people on IRC etc.) > small scans sites > larger scans sites > graphic sites, don’t credit anyone in this chain

  and then for scanslations:

*manga/SJ scans (scanned by some poor soul) > scanslators > sites that host scanslations, remove credits, and sometimes charge people.

  So personally, this chain really pisses me off. I know some people who take my own scans and never link me back. I know this cause they say they’ll take my scans on my gbook but I see my scan there but no link at all. I think this is totally unfair since I’m the one RUINING my artbooks (that I paid for) and they just simply take them without any care in the world. I also notice that those fan sites that don’t take the time and money to SCANSLATE chapters actually get most of the credit as people go there more and don’t bother to donate to the REAL workers, but to these losers who make money off of other people. Graphic sites themselves take donations off of taking other people’s scans, making something out of them, not crediting them, and taking all the credit. Do they know how long it takes to draw and color a CG image? NO! For god sakes I wish people would just stop and think about others before themselves.

  The next topic of course, is this really stupid almost murderous attitude of graphic sites accusing each other of “stealing codes.” I mean, I can understand stealing layouts, but codes? First of all, did THEY invent HTML? HTML is a universal language, and personally I find such an accusation preposterous. You are not making codes from scratch you are just playing around with it. Give me a break. Tables are not yours, where you position your iframes are not yours. None of that is your’s at all. So please please don’t rant about stealing codes before you stop to THINK about it. No one can steal your codes because I know for a fact you learned HTML from SOMEWHERE and if stealing codes existed you would have stolen codes from what book or site you learned HTML from. If they stole your entire layout, OKAY I can understand that. But stealing code snippets? Please. Most graphic sites do not write their own codes at all. Sometimes I think the web designing community is deteriorating over such kind of stupid affairs. Please please don’t put a “Hall of Shame”, it’s totally childish and really, it just gives the person more recognition even if they did steal.

Elitism, Stealing Again

First of all,
Why in hells name have some web designers begun to think they are better than everybody else! “Elitism” has become a major problem in the webdesigning community in general. A webdesigner does not become a webdesigner simply out of thin air. It takes practice and dedication. And only through these things can people grow. I try out different things, but look at my old layouts, they are so crappy, while others I am very proud of. The greatest thing about “design” is that it differs between every site. Why must every site have the clean look design, or one with lots of brushes, vectors, etc.? Everyone has their own tastes, and we should respect that.

Why is affiliation and link exchange now days about “how many hits” a site gets, rather than “how the webmaster is.” I have met plenty of people who are very nice people, new to what they do, but only if they were given the CHANCE. Why must we always be stingy and pretend to know everything? I can tell you right now, even old webmasters who quit webdesign long ago, could tell you a bunch of new ways of doing things that you could never learn. Back in the day iframes were a huge thing, now it’s php, xhtml, and other things. For me, its CMS. In either case, whichever way you go, people have different ways of doing things.

Second,
Some girl goes to me “Yes THAT site STOLE my coding” so I look at her site, and I am speechless – the person who supposedly stole her code has a simple CSS file. The girl, however, is CONVINCED that this other site stole it because she is using CSS and has the same line-spacing and layout of her header code. Since when do people put dibs on codes? I mean I understand something like a program or set of written codes and database tie-ins like in PHPFanbase, Enthusiast, Textpattern, but what is it with all this CSS stealing? Since when has CSS been your own…

And the sad thing is, they do ridiculous and child-like things to get back to this person. For example, put up a “hall of shame” or have their friends flame the other person’s guestbook. I have know innocent people who have been victims of this ridiculousness and have had to close their sites or simply gave up. Please look before you leap. If it is really a big deal, why not contact them and have a talk?

Third,
A new thing has also presented itself in the form of “names” My hostees’ site was Kage Tenshi Designs (KTD) and some other SITE (also a site that suddenly dropped friendship with me ironically when I didn tget enough “hits” anymore cough ) with the initials KTD flamed her saying “YOU STOLE MY INITIALS” Now tell me if this was not the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard?

People need to lighten up and not take things too seriously unless called for. The sad thing about the internet is, there are NO rules. You can be as rude as you want, whenever you want. But really, why would you want to do that?