To switch up, the DDAwards after party is really turning into a comic jam. If you stopped checking it out because the awards are over, check it out. You can skip the cruddy pages by me. 🤣🤣

Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:
Last time I heard of El Cid was last year when he and I were the judges together on I think it was best action in a comic for the DD awards 2022. Miss the guy as well.

Yeah, that was last time I heard from el cid too.

Before El Cid vanished from the site I remember him posting about getting involved with making video games. He sounded excited about it. Maybe he went on a career path in that field. Regardless, I hope he is doing well.

Whoa! When I tried accessing DD earlier this evening I got that 502 Bad Gateway error message. What was up with that?

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Whoa! When I tried accessing DD earlier this evening I got that 502 Bad Gateway error message. What was up with that?

I won two Drunk Duck awards. The ducki-universe is unraveling.

Seriously though, maybe they were making an update to the site.

bravo1102 wrote:
I won two Drunk Duck awards. The ducki-universe is unraveling.

Seriously though, maybe they were making an update to the site.

“I foresee two possibilities. One, bravo winning two DD awards would put him into shock and he'd simply pass out. Or two, the event could create a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of DD's continuum, and destroy the entire website! Granted, that's a worse case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to merely a bump in the server.”

I just had to paraphrase Doc Brown in Back to the future II on this one🤣🤣🤣

im watching HXH in netflix and im now on the ant atc. its f* up

I just made my first page of my first webcomic ever! :) It will take some time for me to flesh it out, but it's beginning! :)

Congratulations, Eadewacer, that's exciting! I remember being very nervous before uploading my first pages. Welcome aboard!

Eadewacer wrote:
I just made my first page of my first webcomic ever! :) It will take some time for me to flesh it out, but it's beginning! :)

Welcome!



—————–

ABout CF-
DD has more history to deal with in every sense. It's much harder for us unfortunately. We're a much older site. They spawned from us…
We stated out as a small amateur site, then went big and corporate. Then when the corporate stuff collapsed we had to rebuild and resuscitate a site that was supposed to be run with corporate resources rather than a little amateur one man job like CF, as well as having a burden of thousands of old comics forum posts and masses of other data in all sorts of formats as well as years of old and outdated coding.

It was a massively hard job back in 2012 and cost me thousands personally as well as thousands of hours, weekends, late nights. AND the money and time of many other people too like JustNoPoint, and all the hours people like Kawaii put in, then Banes, and Tantz, Emm, and others.

We're not like CF at all. We have a MUCH bigger ship to turn around because of all that history. Without us they would not exist at all. Kyo came from here, he was kicked out so he went to start his own site based on us. Then with out fall due to the TERRIBLE management of our corporate people we collapsed and stayed down for months- that's when they go their biggest boost and just snowballed from there because people left looking for a direct replacement to DD and because it was noddled after us they went there.

Alexey our coder is still working away but it's slow going.

The more I have learned about Kyo's sketchy past and history with DD, the more it makes sense to me why CF is the way it is in terms of how cliquy, picky-choosy their overall community is. DD is definitely more open and welcoming, but I will also still admit that part of my personal problem with CF was I hadn't been involved with such an active forum community in many years, it was something that I really missed, so I may have gotten a little too comfortable settling into their community too quickly before they really had the chance to become acquainted with me, and/or my quirks and eccentricities.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
The more I have learned about Kyo's sketchy past and history with DD, the more it makes sense to me why CF is the way it is in terms of how cliquy, picky-choosy their overall community is.

He definitely outgrew his bad past. He was a little **** back then but he well and truly reformed.
CF was completely a DD-lite that he modelled after us, at one stage the old DD programmers even thought he stole code but of course he didn't. There are a million ways to code up a comic site and he had no need to copy that.

But yeah, it only existed because of us, our people gave that community its start, and our collapse gave it the massive boost it needed to get going.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of that though! Anyone would have done the same in that situation. They were just lucky.

————

My only possible theory for why it's cliquey and so politically particular is that Kyo is a much younger guy, a Millennial with different generational experiences, while DD was always a Gen-X managed site. Our Gen-X members went there and didn't always find it a happy fit, and when their community took off they had a huge influx of millennial and Gen-Z people who often ascribe to more politically tribalist ideas and often tend to be reactionary and too literal, as well as the fact younger people are often more cliquey anyway.
While DD was kept alive by the old gen-x stalwarts who hung on and a lot of older Millennials who were really loyal and stuck with us regardless of how crap things became. Those people have milder, less tribal politics and tend to be more accepting of new people.

That probably has something to do with it too. I'm technically lumped into the Millennial generation, but being in my mid-30s, I'm obviously too old to be a whiny, avocado toast munchin' college student, but also too young to be a Gen-Xer, so I guess I'm kind of in the middle where I kind of don't fit in with most other groups except for those who grew up in the 90s.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
That probably has something to do with it too. I'm technically lumped into the Millennial generation, but being in my mid-30s, I'm obviously too old to be a whiny, avocado toast munchin' college student, but also too young to be a Gen-Xer, so I guess I'm kind of in the middle where I kind of don't fit in with most other groups except for those who grew up in the 90s.

My nephew, who is in the same age group as you, sees it similarly. However he has seen the avocado toast munching college students turn into avocado toast munching professionals as they enter the workforce, wrestle with student debt and plan for mortgages and marriage. The idealism of the youthful college student can often last well into the person's forties and then be burst only by a middle aged crisis and receiving their AARP card in the mail.

To be fair, I'm already an AARP member . . . I was signed up as what they call an Associate Member . . . it's one of those perks where they're not allowed to actually tell anybody unless they ask about it, but basically, if you're not a senior citizen, you can still sign up and receive a lot of the same perks that are otherwise available to their senior members. It's how, for a short while, I was able to get decent dental coverage through their partnership with Delta Dental.

So let me get this straight: after all that striking the Actors and Writers guilds did over AI replacing them and taking over their jobs, Jeffrey Katzenberg has decided DreamWorks needs to lay off a vast majority of its animation staff because AI can get the job done instead? As if this guy couldn't get any douchier.

My scanner died. So much for being productive this week.

Oh no! I luckily have never encountered a problem like that before, however, I do know that it happens . . . as a matter of fact, I remember it happened to my friend's comic many ages and moons ago. . . .

http://idget.keenspace.com/d/20040928.html

So I'm changing my legal name to something I actually like. It ain't the easiest of tasks, considering how in my country there aren't any “unisex” names, everything can either be given to boys or girls, no overlap, we write even names of English, US, German, French, etc origins our own special way that stands out and just makes it look ridiculous… and the predetermined list of names to pick from ain't that long. But I've managed to find two that both look and sound the same where I live and other parts of the world, plus at least they are considered unisex elsewhere. The officials in this office will decide whether one is allowed to change their name to this or that, so I expect I won't have an answer ‘til around February next year. Still, I’m quite excited about it. It's funny, how I won't end up naming a character of mine after myself, but myself after a character of mine. :)

Being that I have the same name of a real life well known author (though of math books) if by some miracle something I wrote was ever published I would go with some variation of my name, probably just initials or even my middle name.
I remember during the title search for my name you see everyone with a variation of your name who has a legal record somewhere whether court case or just having a mortgage. There's even someone else with my name married to a woman with my wife's name though the wife's maiden name was different and they lived in Texas.
My landline phone number was hidden by using the wife and my initials rather than our first names. There were a few people we were trying to avoid. Though I did get calls asking if I was Steven Willoughby the entertainer and song stylist, but never for Stephen Willoughby the mathematician.

And if I Google my name I don't show up until the second page of results. 🤣🤣

Meanwhile, it turns out that I share a very similar name with that of a prominent TV political commentator, and once upon a time when Facebook used to feature trends like Twitter/X does, every once in a while, he would trend, and when he would, a number of my friends would get confused because they'd think I was trending.

Although, I took advantage of the trend one day and trolled Facebook for kicks.

I'm known as Michael John Morris to avoid confusion, though there aren't that many people with the same first and last name as me, there are more now than there used to be.
My online name Ozoneocean is more unique but even for that there was a time when a scummy soap maker wanted to steal it for their bath product.


Ozoneocean is named from a track listing on a Led Zeppelin boxed special issue: The Ocean and Ozone baby. But it's interesting that those two words have a connection anyway: people think the smell of the sea is called “ozone”, while real ozone smells like bleach, not the sea air. XD
Some is ozone is produced by lightning strikes…

-The thing about ozone is that it's very reactive and goes away shortly after it's made, unless it's way up in the stratosphere where it can float around and be stable.
-Despite being made a 3 oxygen atoms it's toxic to living tissue because it's so reactive and therefore burns what it touches.
-It's a deep, dark blue colour, unlike O2 which is a much lighter blue.
-If you need it for industrial use you have to produce it on site because it breaks down and reacts so can't reliably be stored.
-O3 is a by-product of diesel use, so that part of what makes diesel fuel so bad (it's mainly the nitrogen compounds though).
-While ozone is great for the upper atmosphere because it reduces the amount of harmful UV radiation that hits us, it's a toxin on our level.
-It's a good cleaning agent because it kills things. Good for sterilizing stuff.

-I'm not sure if a literal ozone ocean could exist because the planet it would be on would have had to have produced enough of that very reactive compound in the first place, also be very cold, and not have much around that would react with the O3… But it was look very cool… Sort of like Neptune but darker.

I could never figure out a good nickname for me, nor could any of my friends. That is, one or two tried, but it's not funny in translation. So I just stuck to my first names. I'm not particularly ashamed of anything I draw or say or do after all.
Btw., when speaking English I tend to stick to the English pronunciation of Paul. It's quite an international name, so why not take advantage of it?
Google tells me there are several guys called Paul Eberhardt, with Eberhardt as a last name, spread around the world. However, Paul-Eberhardt combined with my actual last name makes me unique in the universe known to Google, which is kind of cool. (Just Paul and my last name isn't enough, though, there are half a dozen others.)

As I inherited all my first names from other relatives - it's an old tradition some German families practice to different extents - I've actually got four first names, not just the two I use, and there is an old grave in Bremen with my name on it. It's actually my grandfather's, but visiting does feel a bit awkward at times.

@Inky: Good luck with the name change! I'll cross my fingers for you that they'll accept it.

PaulEberhardt wrote:
Btw., when speaking English I tend to stick to the English pronunciation of Paul. It's quite an international name, so why not take advantage of it?

It comes from the Jewish language originally doesn't it?
“Saul”, we get it from the Christian tradition from the bible. My first two names “Michael” and “John” both come from there too, but I don't know if they have Jewish versions or if they came along with the original Greek version of the bible…

Every-time I hear someone criticise Muslim people for all having similar names like Muhammed Abdullah etc that are all based on the Koran, I'm reminded that English names are EXACTLY the same, my own most especially hahaha!

Michael is borrowed from Hebrew like so many western names it is straight from the Bible. There's a bit more variety to Western names because of all the translations of the Bible so you get a lot of variation like Miguel, Micah, Michael and Michele and people think they're all different, when it's the same Hebrew root with linguistic variations.

At least Stephen doesn't show up until the book of Acts. Variations on Stephen are incredible. Trifon, Istevan, Esteban, Steven, Etienne. My great grandfather was Trifon (“just call him Steve”. Family knew him as Gigi Russian nickname for “grandpa”) my grandfather was Stephen and here I am named for my grandfather.

One of the coolest people I ever knew was a flamboyant and funny (and very gay) designer in Macy's who went by Steph (another Stephen) he was great. The things he came up with. You know why they start putting up the Christmas decorations in stores in October? It used to take that long for the very overworked and understaffed design staff to do them all.
After hearing to Steph talk about what he went through every year I never begrudge a store starting Christmas early.

Apparently my previous post was deleted for some reason?

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Apparently my previous post was deleted for some reason?

No, you just posted it in the film watch topic by mistake.

Oh. I'm tired. I'm so tired. My new job absolutely sucks . . . when it's not boring and tedious, it's physically and mentally taxing.

InkyMoondrop wrote:

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Apparently my previous post was deleted for some reason?

No, you just posted it in the film watch topic by mistake.

That's so funny XD

FlydiscDude wrote:
Goldbelly.
You can only look at the site's catalogue and menu which looks extremely nice. You can't afford anything from there.

Why pay that much for delivered food? o_O
I'd rather go to a restaurant and have it fresh as well as the whole experience of being there :)

bravo1102 wrote:
At least Stephen doesn't show up until the book of Acts. Variations on Stephen are incredible. Trifon, Istevan, Esteban, Steven, Etienne. My great grandfather was Trifon (“just call him Steve”. Family knew him as Gigi Russian nickname for “grandpa”) my grandfather was Stephen and here I am named for my grandfather.

I used to know a Malaysian girl and a half Filipino girl with the name “Stephanie”. I found it curious they were both called “Steph”. People would say “Where's that Asian girl you were with. Steph? Are you still hanging out?” And I'd have to work out who they meant. XD

Stephen is in my favourite Christmas carol!

"Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay round about
Deep and crisp and even
Brightly shone the moon that night
Though the frost was cruel
When a poor man came in sight
Gathering winter fuel…“

I love that carol. It sounds so ancient, but it was only written by an American in 1853! -the tune goes back to the 1200s though.
I love it so much <3
My next fave is ”We Wish You A Merry Christmas"
Though I only like traditional versions. Hate popsong versions or tinkering with them. It takes away the fun and broad appeal.