MrHoatzin

The production is indeed kinda weak on that one. I am not a huuuuuuge fan of the final print of Fever either. It is infinitely better live. The rest of their songs they're recording now and producing themselves and are hopefully going to be mixed with fewer nonsense touches such as huge yawning voids of reverb in the middle of the sound.

reconquista.bandcamp.com I'm plugging for a friend here ¬¬ Sal Limones having deleted her account some time ago ¬¬¬¬¬¬ tho I guess I did design the logo! So I'm not just sharing random dope music, but have some skin in that game ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ It's just a single and some rough demos on bandcamp so far, but they sound so good live omg

I'm pretty sure a few of the kids would get that it's satire. But I'm afraid of poe and I'm afraid of humorless parents and I am afraid of even coasting close to themes that could derrail the class. It is difficult enough to hold 30 kids on topic as it is without encouraging them to play a game that allows them to objectify a female npc in three different ways. I would not think twice if these were high schoolers :/ Ugh, its so weird to be in a position of having to make these sorts of calls.

It was great until ¬¬¬¬¬ And on second playtru I met your barmaid.

Argh, just spent all day reading these (well, mostly those by merritt kopas and Porpentine, still have to take a stab at a lot of the other ones you've posted here) and they're nice and all, but damn, too weird, postmodern, queer for me to show it to my middle schoolers. The Queer Pirate Plane is perfect were it not for the random queer in the title which I'd have to tapdance around somehow. Maybe I can just say YOU KNOW QHEER AS IN WEIRD!! The KE$HA one is great, but there is cursing in it and potentially complicated themes, uh... the arrow one is good and short, but maybe not atomic enough? Cuddlefish is cute and fun, but also um, not quite G-rated enough because of depictions of INVERTEBRATE SAME-SEX/DRAG NOOKIE. Hero Room is perfect, do you guys know of any other ones light and airy along that line? My kids are all into Homestuck which has its fare share of complex relationships and queerness and cursing, but they didn't get into Homestuck because some teacher told them about it, so while I'm positive they'd eat KE$HA up and be all into making something like that, I can't really be the one to show it to them... maybe if they were in high school I wouldn't freak out about it as much, but they're not and I'm not equipped to jump into these topics at all, or deal with parent fallout were that to happen.

I've been working on this story for a while now. I am not anywhere near done with Hobo Lobo. Ok, that is not true, the light at the end of the tunel is so visible. I just have to free myself from daydreaming about the other project, work, real life, fun, self-loathing, twitter, etc to actually wrap it up. The new story is shaping up to be in a format of a puzzle-less adventure game, where you the reader are the compass of the protagonist, but there are no real puzzles to solve or conversation options to navigate. You're just exploring this world and there happens to be a character that you're sortof following through his story. And he talks to people and you get to decide which lines of dialogue to pursue or in what order. Gates are formed by story beats that you need to read before narrative will continue out of an area, or explicit moments of navigating away from an area, like leaving down the road starts the much-talked-about journey with no turning back, etc. I came up with this story while thinking of something to debut this new web-based comic cms that I have been thinking of and building on and off (mostly off) for at least three four years (ugh, whois storyboardo.com says domain was registered 08-nov-2011). The cms, Storyboardo, what little of it I have built is kinda badass! The proof of concept is sexy and there is nothing like it out there still. I imagine it as a decent basic solution for anyone to host their comics in a classy setup but it will have some other tricks up its sleeve. Namely layers—with backgrounds, sprites, styled text objects and any kind of arbitrary content definable into a new layer type—with its own properties tied to rules for display, methods of interaction, behavior—in the admin side and the frontend. On the frontend, as a reader, when you click the next button, sometimes it will move you to the next page, sometimes it will change the sprites around, sometimes it will just advance the speech bubbles. Storyboardo effectively adds pacing and special effects and pans and zooms and freer visual editing abilities into the repertoire of your webcomic artist-writer. SO! Do I build it? I have a proof of concept and a small mountain of PHP backend groundwork, a working purpose-agnostic data server that is the backbone of everything else I'll graft onto it, smatterings of AJAX and a fun extensible oo structure. The interface is fun and unobtrusive. I'll have fun with the v0 default design for it. But it is going to be such a huge time sink to get it off the ground. My update schedule history is fucked as it is. Herzog the Vile is technically still only taking a break. But but Storyboardo's a neat idea! I can totally make it and make the world a better place. Lots of good karma and hopefully some secondary good vibes from other people's adventure game-comics! :tup: But but but, I really want to tell my story and not get bogged down in the production and maintenance of an open source project. Hobo Lobo for all its promise of novelty is clunky as hell. Due to the games I have played with z-indices, I can't plug in accelerated CSS transforms of today's whizbang web upon its main parallax movements without breaking everything. I dread making some kind of unforeseen deal with the HTML of today in making Storyboardo that will bite me in the ass in the medium-long run. Even now, four years later, I can't make a good mobile version of Hobo Lobo. Only way I see to get it on tablets and phones and looking good is a rebuilt nativeish (i.e. not html) code special edition. / But Storyboardo is not about cutting edge effect-heavy motion stuff with a million PNGs requiring infinity production to make happen. It is a bit more resilient a structure. And having something technical to bite into will keep me sane in those times when I need a break from writing, drawing, etc. But I get to deal with technical things if I decide to go the non-Storyboardo route, so I get my fix of wearing many hats anyway. And I yearn for the possibilities of effects and polish that come from not building for the clunky broken bullshit that is the web and its production pipeline. :tup: The audiences of today would not be baffled by my comic-like non-game if I release it as one as they might have been a few short years ago. And maybe I can sell it more easily as an executable than a website? I was thinking about giving a prologue for free and selling access to following episodes of the story through some kind of tbd store mechanism that would plug into Storyboardo... but on the other hand in-app purchases are a known quantity and I probably don't have to dick around with boilerplate code nearly as much. Having it on computers around the world makes it more real somehow than if it were sitting on a single server and merely visited. It is really an opportunity cost thing I guess. I waste so much time locked in weird abstractions as it is, of thought, of engineering. Who cares for yet another sexy cms with ideas and whatnot? I just want to get my stories in front of people. But Storyboardo could be its own word-of-mouth marketing engine that delivers said stories in front of people... etc etc etc What do you guys think?

So...? Should those answers point me in one direction over another?

Probably. The next comic project is an large world-building undertaking with many episodes/chapters/arcs in it. It is a lot of PHP and JS and HTML and CSS—but I do want to make it so that one could poop out an archive of assets and an xml/json that could be agnostic of the web Storyboardo, but it would need a Storyboardo built in something else to work. I dunno if it can ever really automagically be divorced from JS tho if the story is too coding-intensive. I've been making CMSs for a decade and change. I know what I am doing and what I want it to do that, say, WordPress or Codeigniter or Drupal are not meant for. If anything, trying to anticipate too much before I commit to any solution and put down code is tripping me up. I am commenting it exhaustively, but I might need help writing more robust documentation. It could be a stepping stone for artists who're not well versed in programming. Just like Flash was back in the day. It is more than a widget, it is a full-featured website CMS on its own. It wants to live alone on a domain, or at least have its own dedicated nook. You could poke a hole in it and put a forum or wp there tho. Nope, the spine of it, the layer mechanism is largely in the concept stage right now. I have a working prototype on the side which needs to be chopped up and rebuild to be more extendable. I am thinking about making it GNU. Everything I am using is GNU GPL-friendly. If I want to make a community around it, I feel that would be better way to go than a tool I have to sell and support extensively.

But I'm tired of the internet and its technologies! On the other hand, I am good at it and could make something nice as a last hurrah before I become a jaded old internet man.

You build in layers in the editing mode, and you get the flexibilities that go with that. Layers are backgrounds with sprites for characters and speech bubbles. Imagine a marriage of photoshop's layers and flash's timeline with keyframes. That is what editing Storyboardo will be like. As a reader on the front end, when you click the standard slideshow nav arrows, if there are keyframes it will move to the next keyframe, if it is the end, it will try to load the next page. At any keyframe the editor can toggle the visibility of layers (and they will pop in or pop out according to their pre-defined default in or out animation) and/or define some kind of JS function that gets executed. Long comic conversations of old with their tall stacks of bubbles can now be split into multiple back and forth bubbles. Changing expressions, moving dudes around, basic directing goes a long way. A derivative layer type could be a conversation, which consists of a back and forth dialogue text block with different participants given different coordinates for bubble placement—and sortof grafts itself across as many keyframes as the conversation necessitates—or alternatively hijacks the prev/next buttons until it's exhausted, whichever method ends up having a more coherent implementation. A custom layer could be Sierra-style conversation with a vignette closeup of the person talking, with some kind of sprite-based (or whatever) animation cycle. I guess it all comes from my annoyance at having text and images share the same real estate. I never liked that about comics and this is my attempt at side stepping the issue and making something that would facilitate more comics formatted like something halfway between Homestuck and the traditional comic. The end result will be something more movie-like than comic-like. There will be no inherent need to split pages into panels, but there is no reason panels couldn't be used. This will give way to shitty found clipart & rage comics, and that's great, who cares. I am more excited about making adventure games in it—a setting to explore by clicking on hotspots, things to collect. In this paradigm a page becomes a room, and characters can be proper animated sprites. Remove the next/prev buttons and move between rooms/pages through doorway hotspots, and presto! A savegame system can work either through logging in or through cookies, depending on what makes more sense relative to the complexity of the gamestates that need to be saved. But also, eh, I could just jump straight into making my story in something else. Get to use particles. Use LUA or whatever instead of JS/JSON. Have path-finding characters if I want to... Another for Storyboardo would be getting to devblog it. Making it out in the open could be fun...

I don't want to force anything on anyone, christ. I took exception to the point that because Apple Cider has never, ever explicitly listed herself as poly, the world ought to take that automatically and absolutely to mean she would never, ever be open to dating someone who is, or a couple, under any circumstances. That explicitly clarifying this point is somehow an afront in and of itself. I was talking about that parenthetical in her post, completely independently from the fact that the person asking in that specific scenario was an uncouth jerk. We're all assuming a lot of random different things about the vague hypothetical scenarios at hand apparently. My "clarifying the point" as above has been taken to mean out-of-the-blue interrogation by a belligerent stranger—which is insane!

I feel the need to clarify that I am in no way arguing that women have a duty to submit to dudes breaking boundaries, which I feel sideways accused of.

I don't disagree with anything you've said, Deadpan. There is a lot of nuance in how relationships work. My bottom line is that things in relationships need to be talked through and not taken for granted.

Sorta but not really. Interested in friends does not appear in search results for other things, but is still stealth present, hanging out, congenial—shielding one somewhat from being propositioned by randos, while allowing one the leeway to make the first move. For example.

All I am saying is having INTERESTED IN FRIENDS checked on OKC without any kind of explicit explanation and total absence of anything related to poly anything (i.e. assuming monogamy to be a set-in-stone default unless otherwise stated, burden of responsibility being on the wide world to make correct assumptions) and then being outraged that people would dare ask is dumb—aside from how dumb it is to just filter for bi girls and spam them artlessly.

We (me+Sal Limones on these here forums before she deleted her account on account of much too much time spent arguing the feminism thread) have tried to have explicit boundaries about what is and isn't permitted (homo only, no falling in love, no pet names, etc), but we found out that we were constantly renegotiating and breaking them in arguably edge ways. Instead, we settled on a system of talking through what is going on in our extracurricular relationships, with the other having a power of veto over things.

Absence of no doesn't mean yes, it means UNKNOWN. Your little strawman there makes it sound like I'm advocating rape. People have all kinds of nuanced personal reasons for filling out dating site bureaucracy in a specific way, and in my experience I can only make educated guesses as to why. Say we hit it off online, and we go on a platonic friend date and we seem to hit it off real well irl and I like you. A) At some point you mention your bad experience with pushy jerks who don't listen and just wanna fuck you. You keep giggling and smiling at my stupid jokes, your pupils dilate and you look away coyly whenever our eyes meet. If A, I will probably not be pushy or ask at all. If B, I will definitely describe what dating me would look like (if it hasn't been established, that I am poly, can't do an exclusive soul-melding gig, but that I'm not into random hookups etc), and ask how binding your FRIENDS ONLY blurb is. If A+B I will just wait and see if you're a flirty person in general or if there is something more to B instead of being a pushy jerk. Why perceive clarifying boundaries to begin with to be an affront to your sovereignty?

Ugh sorry about this, I hope it is as coherent as it feels in my head. I get that people are creeps, that they proposition in crass, counterproductive ways, that women just get treated shittily all around, that bi people are subject of prejudice from all sides, vilified, erased, etc. I also think that absence of absolute negation to openness to poly things doesn't mean that you would not be open to it under right circumstances to right persons. It is a dating site after all. The thing is, I don't really care much for creating an insular community of poly people that can sit separate from the mainstream society—like the gay community, safely ghettoized and neutralized in its radical potential. I want to stumble upon someone who strikes my fancy and feel free to inquire about connecting with them, either on a purely sexual or a more emotional level or anywhere in between. Feelings are fun and complicated. There is so much drama and freaking out about tone and manners and insult and trauma in the way relationships are managed or mismanaged, conceived or misconceived, and explained or not explained to young people. Everyone needs to chill out about perceived transgressions and impropriety and boundaries and just talk things through. Sex is a big deal and not a big deal. Human relations are infinitely negotiable and the wacky ossified institutions of marriage, monogamy, heterosexuality, monosexuality are socially pernicious bits of social engineering encouraged by both sides of the state+church good cop+bad cop shtick and should be seriously reconsidered. The more I look at it, queer seems like the baseline, not the exception. I am kinda bummed POLY is even a THING, like the formulation of "I AM POLY" implies that it reflects a kind of inner material truth about me versus others which is not justified. All I am doing is allowing myself to fall for other people and negotiating all of my relationships with an extended latitude. This is not something that muggles cannot do, it is just that everyone is trained by literary tradition, telenovelas, taboos, etc that non-monogamous non-heteronormative behavior results in jealousy and crazy mad drama antics and that this is why it is an abnormal way to be. To a large extent this same stigma of needing to BE A CREATURE OF A CERTAIN MOLD, to recognize yourself as a taxonomized other, besets a lot of bi people who don't act on half of their attractions because they're afraid of being labeled as gay. Because they don't feel gay all the time, they might as well stay default, and not act—but it is the acting itself that creates that illusion of material nature in the social sphere to begin with, not the other way around and the available labels are entirely too limiting (see Judith Butler). Why do we have to go through the ordeal of labeling our material nature before we even know we're into it, whatever it may be? A lot of married people also go cruising for the wrong reasons, to solve their busted relationships, giving the whole poly thing bad rep. I'm a very competent lover. Why not deploy these finely-honed skills on other cool people? I don't have to automatically elevate them to the same status in my social pantheon that my partner of 7 years has. She has veto power over who I date. And we trust each other. When you start talking to people about what to expect from a relationship, you notice how arbitrary the divinely-sanctified lattice of relationship rules is and how much it varies person-to-person. Romantic relationships like all relationships are built up, you accumulate affect and trust and gain power over one another. It is not really a binarily binding thing the way we traditionally implement it for some reason. And then some people just don't feel like it, and that's totally fine. This is about doing what feels right after all. Sorry for slutting up the life thread

Oh snap! I live in San Antonio—but PAX caught me unawares this morning—if any of you guys wanna meet for drinks or whatever after the dealio, lets.

I understand that at different times in their lives people are looking for different kinds of relationships with different formats of commitment. Some people just can't wing it, and that's cool. But the more I think about it, the more I'm as knee-jerkilly annoyed by people who self-righteously groan at polyamoury as they are at my supposed moral failings and apriori assumed creepery. It's great that you're exclusively into the patriarchal property arrangement view of relationships and all, but in my experience most people don't ever really think about having different kinds of relationships with different degrees of intimacy with different people concurrently because it is such a huge taboo, everyone is sour at the idea and there's no role models out there. How does one figure out you might be up for it if not by asking? This is the same kind of tone macho dudes get when a gay guy approaches them—as if being solicited by The Other taints them in any way at all. HOW DARE HE ASSUME SUCH HORRORS ABOUT MY CHARACTER, etc.

Just go to your local tianguis and buy a proper papier-mache calavera.

I would've chopped that poll into several, damn. Or you could have people sort them by order of preference and basically do an instant runoff. Then make all of them in order in which people voted for them cause you just have to do all of them anyway, no? I am looking forward to Dune tho!

This thread grows so fast, I'm so proud. Maybe this was mentioned but maybe not. Speaking of historical examples of counterpatriarchy and some societies around ancient Messopotamia, it is important to bring up what is going on in west Kurdistan right now. I was kinda late to the freaking-out-about-Kobane party but observers who've been paying attention for the past couple of years are calling it an armed social revolution led by women. In the west media it has largely been covered TMZ-style "28 Sexiest Freedom Fighters of the Levant" but there is some real cutting-edge feminist experimentation on going away with the capitalist nation state, seen as the source of the bondage of women and permanent barrier to peace, in the region and in general. My trek through learning about this stuff started with Dilar Dirik and I've yet to really make sense of how all of this stuff works on the ground, but it sure looks fascinating. And it's happening live.

That police is supposed to solve crime and protect the people is a clever bit of propaganda. The purpose of the police is to hunt for code violations and enforce property rights.

I wonder if upresing with some kind of fractal tool and then manually buffing or adding some considered texture—aided by dummy 3D geometry and lighting or not—would be quite good looking without having to rebuild everything from scraps?