J_Scarbrough wrote:
I am, however, a snob when it comes to the letter U in word balloon fonts: I very much hate those letter Us that look like lopsided letter Vs having sex with uncrossed letter Is.

For a visual aid:

kawaiidaigakusei wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:

Thanksgiving was listening to my twenty something nephew spout his all knowing wisdom endlessly.

I take it, he is your favorite nephew?

It's like looking in the mirror, though much better at expressing and defending himself than I ever was.

J_Scarbrough wrote:

J_Scarbrough wrote:
I am, however, a snob when it comes to the letter U in word balloon fonts: I very much hate those letter Us that look like lopsided letter Vs having sex with uncrossed letter Is.

For a visual aid:

That's the evil of serifs. Bring one in for a upper case “I” and next you know “U” are corrupted.

Thanks J Scarbrough, now I can't unsee it.

The v shagging an I type U has a long history in comics and appears in some of the very best pro comic fonts today. It's a matter of personal preference of course, but don't let anyone convince you it's any less valid than the solitary testicle U.

Ironscarf wrote:
solitary testicle U.

Hitler's ball?

———–

I did an update for Bottomless Waitress and ran out of script again so no more pages for a while.
So I went to do some Pinky TA instead and realised I hadn't written any more stuff! I had to re-read the last 20 pages to get a feel of where the story is going so I could write an ending. It was very painful but I eventually got a sense of it.
Just as I was going to script it out in Google Docs though, I did a search for a Piny TA doc to see if there were any I'd already done so I could add the text there.

WELL… I found a Pinky TA doc and it had just one single paragraph in it containing a short outline for the end of chapter 8. It is beautifully neat, concise, satisfying, and FAR better than the kludge I'd begrudgingly formulated.
I won't be able to draw it out very well, but at least I have something decent to work from!

I find that whenever I lose scripts, the stuff I come up with from memory to replace it is NEVER as good. It's happened before where I've done that and later found the original writing, which was SO much better.

bravo1102 wrote:
That's the evil of serifs. Bring one in for a upper case “I” and next you know “U” are corrupted.

So in other words, it's kind of similar to what happens when you ASSUME, would I be right?

Tantz_Aerine wrote:
Thanks J Scarbrough, now I can't unsee it.

Ironscarf wrote:
The v shagging an I type U has a long history in comics and appears in some of the very best pro comic fonts today. It's a matter of personal preference of course

You're not wrong, and like I said, it certainly is a personal preference with me . . . I'm not even sure why I'm not a fan of that particular type of U when it comes to word balloon fonts . . . I just don't like it.

Ozoneocean wrote:

Ironscarf wrote:
solitary testicle U.

Hitler's ball?

J_Scarbrough wrote:

I'm not even sure why I'm not a fan of that particular type of U when it comes to word balloon fonts . . . I just don't like it.

This is fascinating to me and something I hadn't considered before. I always try to make the reading experience as painless as possible, so is it worth offering a comic in two forms, to reach the widest possible readership? I'm currently a V shagging an I, but it wouldn't take too long to toss out a Hitler's Ball for discerning readers.

FWIW, so long as a comic is one I can invest in, whatever font the word balloons use is inconsequential to me, regardless of what my personal preferences are . . . again, from observation, I've noticed Anime Ace has become rather ubiquitous in recent years, but nevertheless, I'll still read them. For me, other aspects such as the art style, the storytelling, the appeal of the characters are more important to me than the fonts.

Ironscarf wrote:
is it worth offering a comic in two forms, to reach the widest possible readership?

If you're doing alternatives I think you need to do one where all the O's have umlauts because that's cööl, regardless of correct spelling or pronunciation XD

Elon Musks's bed side table photo:



Bless his little heart XD
One of the wealthiest men in the world still feels the need to pose with fake guns. HAHAHA
He's a silly, pathetic dork just like the rest of us.

Though the coke cans are pretty disgusting.

If it wasn't for the Coke stains I would've sworn it was a hotel bathroom.

Ironscarf wrote:
If it wasn't for the Coke stains I would've sworn it was a hotel bathroom.

It does look a bit like that!

I suspect the silly replica display guns were hastily placed there from the positions of pride on the mantelpiece he could “piss-off the liberals”.

Hahaha, that's the level. That there is his level.
Not a sophisticated guy XD

That's always been something that bugs me about the GOP: they literally just go out of their way to piss off liberals (and really, anybody who doesn't agree with them); you don't see the liberals ever doing anything of the sort.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
That's always been something that bugs me about the GOP: they literally just go out of their way to piss off liberals (and really, anybody who doesn't agree with them); you don't see the liberals ever doing anything of the sort.

As a long time listener of conservative talk radio, liberals just have to exist to piss off conservatives.

It was also a big theme in the US History II survey class “Reconstruction to Present” took in college back in the Reagan decade. Good old Professor Gillette. We were even required to read the volume of the definitive biography of FDR about the New Deal. It was only one of the three volumes done at the time.

bravo1102 wrote:
As a long time listener of conservative talk radio, liberals just have to exist to piss off conservatives.

Exactly!! I live in an uber-red state, and take it from me, around these parts, if you're a liberal, or even an independent or a moderate, you may as well be from Mars. One thing I've always hated about voting in elections, whether Presidential, mid-terms, or local elections (Mayor, Sheriff, county agents, et al), the people who run the polling places are always really friendly when you first arrive, but the minute you declare your party and you say anything other than Republican, suddenly that friendly facade of theirs comes down and they act like you're a hobo they want to remove from their sprawling 90-acre yard.

I'm in a red county of a blue state. I'm a registered Republican because Democrats run unopposed in primaries. The only time party affiliation matters is during primaries. Republicans in my state are also a pretty sane bunch because it is a solid blue state. The urban north and west of the state is solid blue and easily outpolls the suburban to rural South of the state.

That's exactly what this southern Bible Belt state is like: it's always only Republicans in the primaries, because they always run unopposed . . . but then, they never do a damn thing for us. Hell, back when the pandemic was at its worst, our entire state became the world's new COVID epicenter during Christmas 2020, because our governor was more concerned about getting as many businesses reopened than he was about the citizens' health and safety - even his wife ended up giving COVID because he wouldn't regulate any of the mask mandates.

Seriously, the politics in this state are awful. Basically, if you don't matter if you don't meet all of the following criteria: wealthy, white, conservative, heterosexual, Christian. Even if you don't meet one of these criteria (in my case, wealth, because I've been working class all my life), then you're screwed.

Ah crypto currency hell… I've just emerged from that again no, over $1200AUD lighter to pay for the next round of fixes to the site after the front page is done.
(it's only half of what's owed actually)

Have to find a better way to fund this stuff!!!!

Bottomless Waitress Patreon maybe? What do you think?

Just thinking as we enter December that there are going to a whole pile of “Best of 2022” lists coming. To use movies as an an example 13,770 movies were released in 2022. Like how many critics saw more than 1% of the total?
There will be lists compiled from numerous sources that may be more inclusive of the total. You figure 10,000 or so are plain wastes of digital file space that still leaves nearly 4000 movies to sort through.

So there's going to be lots of omissions.

Always disappointing to an old movie fan that any person who whose career was before 1960 is usually forgotten on “celebrity passing” lists.

So I'm very skeptical.

bravo1102 wrote:
Just thinking as we enter December that there are going to a whole pile of “Best of 2022”

LOL
All Best Off lists are pointless unless something you like is in them and rated highly 😅
I think that's pretty universal.
And if that's not true for everyone then those people are weirdoes.

—

I just saw a trailer for this Princess Diana thing with Kirsten Stewart. I can't believe this shit…
People actually believe Diana was some sort of ethereal wafe caught up by an evil institution.

Oh my lord.

She was just an aristocrat like the rest! Worse in fact because unlike them she had more freedom and she wasn't as much of a prisoner of class and culture as the rest of the royal family.
She's a pretty blonde woman who people love because she was pretty.

The charity stuff and all that “for the people” guff is what all of them always did. She wasn't unique in that at all in any way.

Princess of supermarket tabloid lovers and conspiracy thinkers.

People were willing to accept the myth of the girl next door right from day one. The mass hysteria over here when she died is still the most surreal thing I have ever experienced.

Ironscarf wrote:
People were willing to accept the myth of the girl next door right from day one. The mass hysteria over here when she died is still the most surreal thing I have ever experienced.

It really was! The flowers… oh dear.
There's a lot of power in tabloid stardom.
I think people forget that that's where the entirety of the “people's princess” myth came from- not from the person, not from anything she did, but driven completely by the British tabloids and supermarket women's magazines who had a super obsession for Diana.
Probably because those publications use royalty as their primary fuel source and Diana marked off all the boxes: more accessible than the rest of the family to them, dating handsome guys, having trysts in exotic places, and being super pretty.

———————

I had so much stress for a very brief spike on Saturday:
Our entire Quackcast was deleted, all shows going back 12 years or so. All gone. Alexey discovered it.
It turned out the STUPID POS host of them Libsyn had close our account without any warning.
I worked out it was because these morons made a mistake on their billing and because our account was late 2 days (due 100% to them), they closed it without an email or any warning.
Not even a note on the account when I went in to check, I had to work out the issue by myself. Their support didn't even bother getting back to me.

We've paid on time for about 12 years, every single month and they treat us like that?
Not even an apology.

Should we choose another host for our podcast?

ThrisbyDude wrote:

You know, I want to go back in time to this place's old forum threads; I mean old, old dating back to late 2003 or so.
I'm just curious to see what the threads were like back then (and no, Archive.org doesn't always work when it comes to that) because I could imagine how lively it was back in the day.

It was a blast!



Btw, that totally sucks what that host did to the quackcast.

Thank God drunk duck has survived this long or I would have lost a lot of my content. For a long time I had no backups and this was the only place some of my files hung on.

ThrisbyDude wrote:
You know, I want to go back in time to this place's old forum threads; I mean old, old dating back to late 2003 or so.
I'm just curious to see what the threads were like back then (and no, Archive.org doesn't always work when it comes to that) because I could imagine how lively it was back in the day.

It was a much different place. I remember when Harkovast and ifelldownthestairs, two users that aren't around anymore (or even active, as far as I know), ran the “Webcomic Review Comic on the Web”. There was also PIT_FACE and Putrid Meat, Roy Duncan with Villain Next Door, and this one comic called Vice and Virtue that got featured once before the creator disappeared. 2009 to 2011 was when this place still had a lot of activity.

—–

After a couple of hiccups in the process, I was able to install Ubuntu Studio on my new laptop this morning. I'm still getting used to the interface since the only time I ever fiddled with Linux before was when my college's radio station used it for their on-air computer some 10+ years ago, but I'm looking forward to diving into all the different open-source creative programs included on this thing.

ThrisbyDude wrote:

You know, I want to go back in time to this place's old forum threads; I mean old, old dating back to late 2003 or so.
I'm just curious to see what the threads were like back then (and no, Archive.org doesn't always work when it comes to that) because I could imagine how lively it was back in the day.

What a horrible place it was with petty tyrants and intolerant monsters, self aggrandizing cliques and poor paupers stuck out in the cold begging scraps from the master's table and having to be satisfied with nothing.

An era that is romanticized and looked back upon fondly when it was as full of greed and barbarity and true monsters in human guise just as some look back upon the middle ages.

Some were hated and wretched outcasts then and still bear the scars of the evil done them. Still so much to learn and still so many more intolerant wretched fiends left to encounter.

The golden age is now, whatever was only looks better in hindsight because there's a tendency to leave off your glasses when looking back so what was bitter in detail sppears all fuzzy looking back.

ThrisbyDude wrote:
↑ Host-hop as fast as you can to another hosting site (Captivate, Simplecast, and BuzzSprout to name a few ‘freemium’ hosts as far as I searched up). If {you know} a company can just shut down your stuff without warning and whatever, that's when you make your move.

Strongly thinking about it!

You know, I want to go back in time to this place's old forum threads; I mean old, old dating back to late 2003 or so.
I'm just curious to see what the threads were like back then (and no, Archive.org doesn't always work when it comes to that) because I could imagine how lively it was back in the day.

It was lively but mainly because our relatively small group was VERY vocal.
This was before social media took off so no Facebook, Twitter, Mayspace etc which meant people used forums as their primary internet communication and social space.
Very different time!


Wow… it was the time before memes, before youtube too and all sorts of things. So weird to think about lol!

Ozoneocean wrote:
It was lively but mainly because our relatively small group was VERY vocal.
This was before social media took off so no Facebook, Twitter, Mayspace etc which meant people used forums as their primary internet communication and social space.
Very different time!

Yeah, I miss that era of the internet . . . granted, I've been on my share of forums where it could be like high school, what with drama, cliques, perceived popularity contests, and the like (hell, I remember one entire forum turned against me, and I was essentially treated like the village idiot) but I've also been on my share of forums where there was a true sense of community to the point that said community could really be like a virtual second family.

In my case, it also helped that I tended to make friends online easier than I did in real life; IRL, even as a kid, I think my quirks and eccentricities bothered people, because they had a tendency to think I was too weird (in more ways than one) . . . plus, being an artistic/creative type of person in a state where sports are a religion unto itself really didn't help either. At least online, forums made it possible to connect with like-minded people who shared your interests, no matter how obscure they were, and honestly, I've developed more meaningful connections with people through computer screens than I have in-person. Yeah, it is kind of sad when you think about it, but this has pretty much been my life.

I will say that I am glad social media has at least made it possible for me to stay connected with a lot of the friends I've met online over the years, as they've gradually moved on from forums and such - before that, I spent many Saturday nights chatting with people on Y!M (back when Yahoo! used to be my primary contact).

I used to wonder what the old Top Drawer was like, because it was shut down about a week before I joined the site and people talked about it for months afterwards. On reflection I probably dodged a bullet there. Any interaction here back then could go the way Bravo describes without warning!

Ironscarf wrote:
I used to wonder what the old Top Drawer was like, because it was shut down about a week before I joined the site and people talked about it for months afterwards. On reflection I probably dodged a bullet there. Any interaction here back then could go the way Bravo describes without warning!

Hhaha! You were still a member of he Top Drawer craziness. It continued after you joined in various was and you joined in with the Day Of The Alts in particular with your Ironscarf's Ghost terry Thomas persona LOL
Jeez, even I was a part of that particular shenanigan.

The Top Drawer started pretty much as what it is now- just a junk drawer for stuff that didn't belong anywhere else. Threads that didn't fit.

After a while people noticed the lack of regulation there and began to play around with the forum format. We had games and it was the super early days of memes… some of the lamest and meanest stuff was just imported straight from 4chan, which I never liked.
We had pranks going and all sorts of silly games and rivalries.

But it was also a bit of a crucible for meanness. Antisocial members gathered there too. And there formed a bit of a high School clique hierarchy with the mean people at the top.
The meaness and silly prankish behaviour started to regularly break out of the Top Drawer and affect people in he rest of the forums and even people's comics and that was the beginning of the end.

We tried to control it, we warned people and reasoned with them, but that never worked for long and in the end Volte6, the site creator and chief admin just had enough and got rid of it.
We tried revving it with something more regulated. That lasted a while but things eventually went the same way again.

It's impossible to control chaos hahaha! And setting limits of it only works if the people abide by them.

-before being an admin I was just a part of the chaos myself XD