It's 2021! Roaring 20s take 2!

Here is your new general thread everyone!
Rant, brag, philosophise, muse, moan, speak as you like! ^_^

Link to the last one: https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/178336/?page=12

Well, I guess I can start off this year by announcing that I've been spending yesterday afternoon and this morning uploading my comics over at Comic Fury. I've just finnished setting up sites for Molly Lusc and Idfestation (Links to those sites have been setup on both of those comics here on DD).

I've removed the links to my Weasyl profile where I also upload the pages of my comics. It wasn't all that accesible to newcomers anyway and feels like it works more like a depository then anything at this point.

I'll admit that I was skeptical of putting my stuff up on Comic Fury at first, considering what I'd read about it here on the forums, but the comics I found over there, and the easy-to-get-into, sandboxy site-layout mechanics, and, especially, that crocodile(🐊🤗) ultimately convinced me to go through with it.

Just thought I'd let you know.

Exposure is good. More power to you. Some folks are banned for life because of the mistakes we've made, don't let us hold you back.

Forgot one of my medications the past week and a half and got really nasty and testy. Other times spaced out and confused. My mood spiraled down and couldn't work on anything. My medications are that finely balanced. Could go off on a some negative spiral and lose touch with reality by not challenging the ingrained emotional perceptions that just aren't true. Ugh. I share this in the hope that my honesty about my illness will help others. Never can tell. Sounds like a downer, but facing all this stuff is actually an upper.

Also the huge emotional downer from finishing my anthology bit. Seasonal effective disorder. Had a week off from work and did nothing but sleep.

Happy new year. Time to take stock of where the head is. Then make a plan and see about doing some fulfilling stuff.

Just want to say that I AM FINALLY DOING THE REBOOT. Just got the final inks back!

Also, the final rough draft of #4 is finished. So that's good.

Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:
Well, I guess I can start off this year by announcing that I've been spending yesterday afternoon and this morning uploading my comics over at Comic Fury.

The historical issues no longer exist as far as I can tell, I'm sure you'll have a fine time there!

And a Happy New Year to all. Did anyone make resolutions? I resolved to make no resolutions as they never seem to go well.

bravo1102 wrote:
Exposure is good. More power to you. Some folks are banned for life because of the mistakes we've made, don't let us hold you back.

Forgot one of my medications the past week and a half and got really nasty and testy.
Happy new year.

Yeah, you too ! Medications : one of mine actually makes me irritable & testy (it says on the box), although I try to be aware & curtail it…

Another Comic Fury loader, I put the first few pages of a new chapter (here too) - after 3.1/2 years, as Plymayer kindly pointed out - on Little Black Dress B-) My other “technically” still alive effort has been 18 months in limbo. SO basically nothing got drawn or loaded for the while of 2020.

I like to make attainable goals rather than resolutions. My goals for the year are

1. To buy a car. My current vehicle has become a money pit of repairs that barely hold it together. (I have my eye on a Kia Soul but am open to recommendations.)

2. Assemble and print volume 5 of Used Books. I worked on cover art this weekend. I'll have all the pages when I finish the current chapter. (Technically, this was a 2020 goal, but my update speed turned sluggish.)

Updating sluggishly again atm. I'm currently suffering from frequent brain issues I have to assume are related to migraines, because they are pretty extreme and I hate to think what else could cause them. I have spells of no short term memory whatsoever, so any task I start, I forget what I'm doing, and it takes ten times as long. I'm also losing vocabulary/communication ability and dexterity. I've lost nearly whole days to being useless. Can't even focus on art or the plot of a TV show. -_- I just play idle games until my brain fixes itself.

Happy New Year!!

I have considered hosting on Comic Fury, but I wonder how many hosting sites are TOO many…I already post/update on…

• My own website
  

• Here
  

• Webtoons
  

• Instagram
  

• Facebook
  

• Twitter
  

I've posted a few strips on Reddit hoping to go viral…and nobody saw them LOL…

I like hosting here because it's a smaller (so easier to get noticed) and has a more community feel. It's a reprieve from the craziness that is social media.

I don't make resolutions, I make goals…because is anything ever “resolved” I mean, I always can improve on art, living healthier, get more readers etc. Mentally 2020 has been fatiguing for me as well (and also been on some medication adjustments)…

Some (comic-related) stuff I would like to do is:

• Create “character profiles” for my comic…the thing is 2 years old and I STILL have not done this!

• Get more involved in this and other comic communities

• Finally get my stuff current on Webtoons and on here.

“Attainable goals” then, for 2021.
Not die.
DO more comic art/story/upload - after a totally blank 2020.

I'm going to continue heeding Kimo's Hawaiian rules.

Goals are deceptive, the unaimed arrow never misses.

It's a question of motivation and planning and then making it happen. Do it, get it done and move on.

And the whole binge Fairy Tail for motivation seems to be working.

Couldn't find some old props Saturday so made a plan to redo them. Got up Sunday and went to work. Satisfied with the results. The comic can go back to updating.

bravo1102 wrote:

And the whole binge Fairy Tail for motivation seems to be working.

The anime series?
That started off really fun, but like allllll shonen fighting anime it turned into a repetative treadmill after a while of constant repitition of a simplistic forumula based around: “Bad enemy threatens us and kicks our arses. We have to get stronger to face them! We got stronger and now we can beat them”

They all start out unique and fun in the begining but after a while they get subserviant to that same plot formula and lose their distictiveness.
Dragon Ball Z, Bleach, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Black Clover, Seven Deadly Sins… and probably Naruto, though I've never seen it and don't know.

My recomendation for any shonen fighting anime is to watch maybe the first 60 to 100 episodes and then quit it forever.

It is what tends to happen when series are protracted long beyond their ability to tell a story, and what tends to happen in any series where that occurs. And of course, when you're dealing with Shounen Jump, they're definitely going to be milking a success for as long as is absolutely possible.

Though I will say that not all of the series are best at their beginnings, and sometimes there is a “second wind” of sorts in stories, where they find themselves again. But in almost every case, even there, running too long just means that they end up going downhill again by the end.

I'm just hoping the new year will be significant improvement. I'm tired of the world constantly being insane in the stupidest possible ways.

In terms of my work, I have a comic that's ready for posting to start, but I just didn't want to post it last year at all. So I've just been building up my buffer!

I'd love to do some more collaborations in the new year. I've been wanting to get more active in webcomics, especially now since there are a fair amount fewer and more people seem to have dedication to their project. And of course, as I noted elsewhere in the forums and in my comics, I'm even actively looking for some guest spots in my comic Space Daddy Adventures! So I hope this year will bring more connections and such.

Let's hope for the best!

That's a problem with a lot of series not just shonen fighting. They get a formula going and just keep re-doing it again and again. Binge watching they all sort of blend together and it can end up feeling like one long endless loop.

I tried binging One Piece and Bleach. I think I got half way through both before I started to lose the sense of fun.

One thing that always seems the same in stories that lose their edge is that they try and raise the stakes to make things more interesting.
But it screws with the world they've made and twists their entire story as a consequence so even though it SHOULD be more interestung because the world you're ibvested in is threatened, it paradoxically becaomes LESS interesting because the world and the characters you care about have to change to accomodate that load and are NO LONGER the same ones you fell in love with.

Stories that embrace the small scale though keep on going and maintaining interest easily…

The new star wars films are a good example. They ratchet the levels up and up and uppppp… and you just can't relate to or care about the stakes anymore! In the last film I couldn't even remember the names of all the planets they kept going to, and how were there SO MANY star destroyers and where did they get all the crews etc etc…
And yet the samll scale stuff between characters and the little scenes like Rei on her boat sailing across the waves etc, those worked.

The Mandalorian is a GREAT example of the samll scale story having all the power of a huge one. They make a massive deal out of a single ATST for example, and that's as it SHOULD be.

The first Avengers film is a good example of that: the single hover carrier was an awesome sight! That was a huge moment. In Captain America Winter Solder they have THREE, and they're meaningless.

Gravity Falls is one of my favorite series. It's small scale throughout, but it climaxes in an actual apocalypse. XD

Gravity Falls was fantastic. One among many stellar recent cartoons. We really got some incredible animated content over the last 15 years or so.

And YES the Mandalorian is everything I want out of a Star War in one show. Fantastic serial storytelling. I'm fascinated to see where it will go next.

I saw a bit of Gravity falls, I liked it.

UGH! It's depressingly hot here right now…
108 degrees F in the old measure, over 42.2 C.
I hate it!
We used to have summers like that here years ago and haven't doe a long time but now they're back again. Like multi week long periods of that weather.

—————-

The scenes from the USA the other day were strange and very embarrassing, with those idiots storming the capitol! It was like something from Baghdad, or Syria, or somewhere in South America in the 1970s.
To think that would ever happen in the USA! O_O
Strange and depressing times.

Ozoneocean wrote:
I saw a bit of Gravity falls, I liked it.

UGH! It's depressingly hot here right now…
108 degrees F in the old measure, over 42.2 C.

Raining over this side Max 21C, Min 20C … and 36 hours of lockdown
for ‘Greater Brisbane’

The scenes from the USA the other day were strange and very embarrassing, with those idiots storming the capitol! It was like … somewhere in South America in the 1970s.

There's a huge irony in having the instigator/supporter of Latin American fascist coups, over the decades, doing it to themselves…
There's an article in Business Insider, interviewing “E.U. NATO” officials, who didn't wish to be named (obviously), saying they really believed it was a genuine coup attempt by the Mango Mussolini - one saying they ere going to advise their parliamentary committee as much, and others quoted as noting that procedures they had actually followed, in NATO exercises with their USA counterparts, had not been followed. One suggested Donny-boy had had military insider assistance. Pence eventually called in the National Guard. when the Prez. proved to be ‘unreachable’
B\

….and speaking of irony

I', assuming these stories are kosher, concerning “Storming the Capitol”

one : man carrying tazer in pocket, attempting to remove portrait, gets auto-tazed in the testicles, multiple times, causing fatal heart attack

two : woman carrying flag stating “DON'T STEP ON ME !”m gets trampled.
I have an awful feeling carrying it may have led to her falling &/or inability to get up again

They were fools, true, but it's dangerous.

Trump's whole thing is just to keep on pushing the limits to see what he can get away with and then move on to the next level. It works because people don't penalise him for it, he's never punished. The cowards in his own party should have shut him down at the beginning of the whole “stolen election” bullshit. Rudy Juliani in particular, he's a real lawyer and KNEW that all the suits were garbage and yet he lied and persisted anyway, he's probably the biggest piece of shit in all this.

I keep thinking back to Nixon and what an absolute class act and icon of style, constraint and honesty he looks like now in comparison to Trump.
It's so hard to believe that for for almost HALF A CENTURY Nixon has been held up as an example of utter villainy, dishonesty, sliminess and craven evil, and yet Donny has been able to get away with shit that makes him look clean and saintly… after the he should be reformed in people's eyes.

Really, have a look back at the whole Watergate scandal- doesn't it look cute? Like a bunch of college kids playing at being spies, it's almost childish in light of where we are now.

Ozoneocean wrote:

Trump's… pushing the limits to see what he can get away with and then move on to the next level. It works because people don't penalise him for it, he's never punished.

Well, it's the story of his life, eh? Never been punished or vilified for anything. Spoiled, petulant, spit-the-dummy rich-arse kid.

I keep thinking back to Nixon and what an absolute class act and icon of style, constraint and honesty he looks like now in comparison to Trump.
… HALF A CENTURY Nixon has been held up as an example of utter villainy, dishonesty, sliminess and craven evil …

Really, have a look back at the whole Watergate scandal- doesn't it look cute? Like a bunch of college kids playing at being spies, it's almost childish in light of where we are now.

Yes, well Tricky Dicky was a villain… but he was also the “real deal” as a Republican. He was no pussy-grabbing son of a millionaire. A self-made man, who had come up the hard way, got a law degree, but not at a prestigious college which always ate away at him. Saw the Kennedys as fornicating rich kids - again sons of a (very unscrupulous and horrible) millionaire. Which they were.
I don't think he'll ever be “re-habilitated” in history, but at least now, he comes further down the list. EvenIF still considered “2nd worst” he's off the page, compared to the Mango Mussolini !!

Since I got Alexay to add a captcha to the signups our spam problem has dropped to negligible amounts!

You've no idea how big this is!
Every day i would have to remember to check the new accounts sign up page when I got up in the morning, no matter where in the world I was, and I would have to go through and manually check every account that didn't look like spam and delete all the hundreds that obviously WERE spam and HOPE I didn't delete a non-spam one in the process.

I had to do this for YEARS! About 8 years at least I think.

I'd have to do that multiple times a day… usually it'd be 300 to 400 spam accounts on average, sometimes up to 900 or 1000.
For whatever reason there would be bit of a break on Sunday and Monday morning (back to normal on Monday afternoon though).
On Sunday/Monday morning there'd only be about 20 spam accounts, usual all about British business, with a Polish slant (polish prostitutes in Britain, polish plumbing companies etc)

For some reason 95% of the spam was Polish in origin, with a smattering of Thai, some American, rare Australian stuff, some German (always prostitutes), and a bit of Russian.
———————————

At the moment we get a few rare spam accounts signing up. they're mainly Chinese in origin I think and usually always advertise essay writing crap.

Ozoneocean wrote:
Since I got Alexay to add a captcha to the signups our spam problem has dropped to negligible amounts!

You've no idea how big this is!
Every day i would have to remember to check the new accounts sign up page when I got up in the morning, no matter where in the world I was, and I would have to go through and manually check every account that didn't look like spam and delete all the hundreds that obviously WERE spam and HOPE I didn't delete a non-spam one in the process.

I had to do this for YEARS! About 8 years at least I think.

I'd have to do that multiple times a day… usually it'd be 300 to 400 spam accounts on average, sometimes up to 900 or 1000.
For whatever reason there would be bit of a break on Sunday and Monday morning (back to normal on Monday afternoon though).
On Sunday/Monday morning there'd only be about 20 spam accounts, usual all about British business, with a Polish slant (polish prostitutes in Britain, polish plumbing companies etc)

For some reason 95% of the spam was Polish in origin, with a smattering of Thai, some American, rare Australian stuff, some German (always prostitutes), and a bit of Russian.
———————————

At the moment we get a few rare spam accounts signing up. they're mainly Chinese in origin I think and usually always advertise essay writing crap.

That sounds like good news:) Any good news in these times are surely welcome. Only four days til' Biden's inauguration day and right now it really looks like that big, orange, toupee wearing, larger-then-life con man is going out crashing and burning. Came in to the big office as a joke, leaving the big office as a joke. I don't think there could have been a more fitting end to that narcissist buffoon^^

BearinOz wrote:
….and speaking of irony

I', assuming these stories are kosher, concerning “Storming the Capitol”

one : man carrying tazer in pocket, attempting to remove portrait, gets auto-tazed in the testicles, multiple times, causing fatal heart attack

two : woman carrying flag stating “DON'T STEP ON ME !”m gets trampled.
I have an awful feeling carrying it may have led to her falling &/or inability to get up again

I heard one of these dumbbells took a dump and pissed in the capitol's halls to “save America”. If this were any other country though…

Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:
right now it really looks like that big, orange, toupee wearing, larger-then-life con man is going out crashing and burning.

Like a giant flaming turd!!! :)

L.C.Stein wrote:

Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:
right now it really looks like that big, orange, toupee wearing, larger-then-life con man is going out crashing and burning.

Like a giant flaming turd!!! :)

A giant flaming turd who's about to go whirling and flushing straight back down into the sewers where he belongs!!!XD

Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:

L.C.Stein wrote:

Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:
right now it really looks like that big, orange, toupee wearing, larger-then-life con man is going out crashing and burning.

Like a giant flaming turd!!! :)

A giant flaming turd who's about to go whirling and flushing straight back down into the sewers where he belongs!!!XD

Wasn't there a comic called Flaming Turd, back in the eighties?

Haha, no idea, but there are fiery poops in the game Cards Against Humanity :p

Yay! The US finally flushed Trump! :D
I saw an old episode of Mythbusters last night and they couldn't use the word “Fart” so they would say “Flartus” or “Trump” to refer to them. Since Trump is a common word for Fart I won't why no one made a bigger deal of that during his abortion of an attempt at a presidency. :/

——————————-

Burning the candle from both ends… Effing bloody treestumps! More and more I find that anything that changes the way my body should work messes me up. Alcohol, redbull, coffee, not enough sleep…

But if I eat enough, exercise, and sleep enough I feel and think great!

People HAVE to go without sleep for various reasons. They also need coffee and stuff to keep them awake for work and life, and they need alcohol and other thing to wind down and get some mental padding for the hardness of life… but those things create their own issues and make life so much worse for you.

But if I eat enough, exercise, and sleep enough I feel and think great!

People HAVE to go without sleep for various reasons. They also need coffee and stuff to keep them awake for work and life, and they need alcohol and other thing to wind down and get some mental padding for the hardness of life… but those things create their own issues and make life so much worse for you.

That's why people always talk about “work-life” balance as if it's some mystical unicorn. I am a natural night owl who works a day job. So I need coffee in the AM to function, and usually a diet soda at lunch to get me though the afternoon. A vicious cycle, I tell ya!