easily the most formative media that i've ever experienced was yume nikki. masada-sensei's space ship is one of the greatest het age gappy liminal spaces i've come across in media. at its core it is a man and a girl who cannot communicate sharing a space owned by him and unfamiliar to her. it gives me such heartaching comfort, but you can't stay on the ship forever.

naturally homestuck. its influence was so heavy that i used to be able to clock former homestuck fans in online art communities years and years later. the web-focused approach to webcomics was incredibly influential to me over the plot or art direction when i realized just how much i could do as i continued to study web development. but it had your brocon, age gap if you squint, etc. none of my current ocs were fan trolls but uhhh (throws horns on it)

i think i am most heavily influenced by the feeling some media leaves me with over a literal, more stylistic visual influence. i struggle to say "this is this artist's linework" or "these are that artists's color palettes." within my own art, i focus on a feeling i'm trying to leave a viewer with and build everything else around it. it leaves me open to translate those core emotions across different subjects and mediums.

this is such a nice question 🥺 i appreciate you asking.

hello songbird! this is going to be a pretty long answer:

so the actual booru software itself is open source (you can check it out here) but it is written in ruby on rails which i have no experience with. that said, i am currently building an art archive in astro javascript, which is a static site generator (ssg) designed to quickly develop and manage content heavy sites like blogs. my archive essentially functions like LJ/DW, where you have preview cards for each entry that direct to a page dedicated to that entry, and a tagging system to pull up all entries using that tag. the code looks, feels and writes like html/css with bits of js sprinkled in, and being somewhat aware of your skill set i think it would be much easier to build something that has the functionality you are looking for specifically using astro and style it after boorus if you so desire than actually forking danbooru.

NOW, ALL OF THIS SAID -- i am using content collections which requires typescript. typescript is a form of javascript that forces you to declare the object's type before using it, which is exhausting and frustrating but teaches you a lot and saves a ton of time with troubleshooting. ultimately i really can't speak to the limits of astro without using ts because i started learning astro using ts, but despite the learning curve i highly recommend it. do some research as to whether or not you think ts would be necessary for your needs and plan accordingly. you can always switch while you are working on it but expect a lot of type errors really, really fast.

(i want to add that moving into a new language can be daunting but the most important trait a coder can have is tenacity! it's okay if you feel overwhelmed or defeated but remember, you can do anything a computer can do. make it happen.)

(also i can't do it now but if you or anyone else is interested in seeing archive progress pics, you can check the media tab of my bluesky account or just tell me you want to see them here and i'll start posting them.)

tl;dr: you might be able to get what you are looking for from danbooru using astro js so i would start your research there. i started with coding in public's astro blog tutorial but his entire channel is a gold mine for astro related coding. astro's docs are also incredibly accessible and will walk you through pretty much everything you need to know step by step.

best of luck!

for context, my grandfather was an erotic photographer and i came into possession of his work as well as some tijuana bibles this past year. i was trying to get them all scanned and uploaded somewhere but it's very time consuming and i don't have a scanner at home so i have to go to a friend's house to use hers. as such it's been buried in my thousands of things but i can put up a few of the scans and the pictures i took later today!

at some point i'm probably going to need to put up an interest poll and see if i can't knock some of these (smaller? more easily completed? simpler?) projects out because i don't have the discipline to see them through in a timely manner... but if there is any interest in this i will move it up my list for sure!

also, if anyone has any information on archival and restoration and such, i would really appreciate it. i have no experience with photography and i'm not exactly sure how to handle these, especially given i have next to no information about them.

(i also have to make a page for it somewhere on my main site... in the eternal words of daft punk, our work is never over...)

thank you so much! these are pretty old honestly, i'm sitting on tons of old work that was only ever posted to sfw accounts because i couldn't comfortably merge both worlds. hoping i can share my entire breadth now that i'm not afraid of being stoned to death by teenagers.

for your question! right now i'm worried that i've pushed mallory and darby so far ooc i'm wondering if i should just create new characters... at their core they are just an age gap blueprint and i do have forbidden aus where he is an active predator, i just wonder when they stop being malby...

darby's basic design is blunt bangs + godiva hair (usually a cool color) + horns so i think i would definitely borrow the twin braids either way. i want to keep the red to reinforce the iconography--i've been told bright reds are difficult to work with but i have a lot of fun with them! but beyond that i'm unsure, it's just vibes bro, etc.

i've settled on "wolfsbane" for the au itself and for time being they will go as mallory wolfe and dotty. i'm going to update the tags on my previous posts to reflect this but yeah, you are welcome to share any suggestions or thoughts you might have! i'd love to hear them!