I used to make comics. I know that because strangers would look at my work and immediately share their most excruciatingly banal experiences with me:

— that time a motorised wheelchair cut in front of them in the line at the supermarket;
— when the dentist pulled the wrong tooth and they tried to get a discount;
— eating off an apple and finding half a worm in it;

every anecdote rounded of with a triumphant “You should make a comic about that!”

Then I would take my 300 pages graphic novel out of their hands, both of us knowing full well they weren’t going to buy it, and I’d smile politely, “Yeah, sure. Someday.”

“Don’t try to cheat me out of my royalties when you publish it,” they would guffaw and walk away to grant comics creator status onto their next victim.

Nowadays I make work that feels even more truly like comics to me than that almost twenty years old graphic novel. Collage-y, abstract stuff that breaks all the rules just begging to be broken. Linear narrative is ashes settling in my trails, montage stretched thin and warping in new, interesting directions.

I teach comics techniques at a university level based in my current work. I even make an infrequent podcast talking to other avantgarde artists about their work in the same field.

Still, sometimes at night my subconscious whispers the truth in my ear: Nobody ever insists I turn their inane bullshit nonevents into comics these days, and while I am a happier, more balanced person as a result of that, I guess that means I don’t make comics any longer after all.

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Cake day: November 23rd, 2024

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  • This show has been a balm for my worst nerd impulses since episode 1, and I will miss it. As finales go, I think this was damn near perfect, too.

    Like others have mentioned, Rutherford’s sudden frustration with the Cerritos felt a little off to me, but that’s really small fry in the larger picture of

    PREVIEW_HERE

    a bona fide, stable quantum portal to parallel universes hanging around the Alpha quadrant since 2382!

    Wow, you’d think that would have been brought up even tangentially in Prodigy or chronologically later set shows? It could even feasibly have been used to

    PREVIEW_HERE

    bring Mirror Giorgiou home to her own universe in Discovery s3.

    But what do I know, it might not be as stable as it looked in this episode…





  • There are different ways of approaching microblogs — reading, writing and interacting. You have @s and hashtags in mind already, they’re a good way of finding conversations and engaging with people.

    You’ll find users who write interesting stuff about your favourite subjects — you’d want to follow those to get all their updates. That includes boosts/reposts, i.e. posts by others that those you follow share to spread a message. That will also help you find more interesting people and organisations.

    Now, interaction. I have come recently to Lemmy from Mastodon instances, and I see quite a bit of difference in the etiquette and forms of socialising. Two generalisations that I can think of:

    1. Mastodon and other fedi microblogs were built by users who were fed up by Twitter’s lax moderation of harassment, so they built in safeguards against that; Lemmy was made in reaction to the commodification and heavy handed enshittification of Reddit, but largely expect the same conversations here. They are not the same mentality.

    2. On Lemmy, you post a question or thought in a dedicated community to get answers or start a discussion. Each community has its own room where the discussion is centred around one subject. On the microblog side, you might imagine one big, sprawling social club where people mingle and form smaller groups to talk about one thing, then disperse and join other conversations. And sometimes they just talk about their pets or hobbies to nobody in particular.

    Sorry, I’m writing this over morning coffee and I know I’m only covering broad fragments of the microblog experience as it differs from using a forum. I hope it helps though.








  • Look, at a glance it looks to me like you’re populating a monetised platform with content off the fediverse without attribution. That’s strike one.

    Then you seem to stall for time to implement federation while admitting your developer quit… and continuing the above content scraping. Strike two.

    And from what I read in this thread it appears you’re actively dodging defederation by using subdomains to keep scraping content. Strike three.

    My concern in this is the integrity of the fediverse and its users. Yours, apparently, is “saving” a platform that leeches content off federated platforms to make a buck off those users. I don’t see much chance of agreement on “what is fair”.

    @jwr1@kbin.earth, I stand by that request to defederate.


  • Ugh, sorry to hear about your experiences. Yeah, I’m not going to bat for all bus drivers. I’m speaking in favour of having a human onboard, because the passengers aren’t necessarily an ideal crowd either…

    The role of being a proxy authority figure can definitely turn some asshole drivers further to the dark side… I don’t want to come off as defending those.