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I tried RSS back in the late aughts - problem was, nearly everything I read at the time was a webcomic, and their RSS feeds amounted to little more than update notifications. Full syndication was rare then, I can't imagine how rare it is now.

Do I use RSS? No. But the feed on my webcomic has gotten over 8,000 hits since I added a redirect from the old feed location a few weeks ago, so it's definitely still in use.

I bought my PC to build and render 3d environments and assets for my webcomic. The fact that Steam was the second thing I installed and the Orange Box was the first PC game pack I bought is gravy - if the hardware can't be used for productivity I have no use for it and I'm not wasting money on it. Entertainment is a secondary function.

That said, the fact that Borderlands, Skyrim, Just Cause 2 etc. are all running barely-localized console interfaces makes me feel like the PC is a second-class citizen, shoved to the back of the line in favor of consumer hardware that can't do anything else. :-/

1. Best overall - Menage a 3.

2. Funniest - Sam and Fuzzy.

3. Best art - Massively subjective, I'll go with Supernormal Step.

4. Most relevant to me - Why, my own of course! Among The Chosen. Finished two chapters of Dead City Radio, produced a prequel, and got series production heading forward again after four years going back and sideways.

1. Best overall - Menage a 3.

2. Funniest - Sam and Fuzzy.

3. Best art - Massively subjective, I'll go with Supernormal Step.

4. Most relevant to me - Why, my own of course! Among The Chosen. Finished two chapters of Dead City Radio, produced a prequel, and got series production heading forward again after four years going back and sideways.

1. Best overall - Menage a 3.

2. Funniest - Sam and Fuzzy.

3. Best art - Massively subjective, I'll go with Supernormal Step.

4. Most relevant to me - Why, my own of course! Among The Chosen. Finished two chapters of Dead City Radio, produced a prequel, and got series production heading forward again after four years going back and sideways.

Talk about irritating - a few months ago (maybe longer), Google decided my handle is a plural. So now if I want to googlebate, I have to search for "solios -solio" (and throw in a few other minuses to weed out Matrox, etceteras). Google's first hit for 'solios' is not solios (there's a shock), whereas the first hit on Bing is something me-related. There's also this - a case example of Bing coming back with DWIM and Google sticking its thumb up its ass and getting drool on the floor.

Google was fantastic when there weren't any real alternatives - now, Bing is (largely) Better, and intertia is the only thing that's keeping me using it. Inertia, and Bing's UI doesn't feel quite as 'clean.'

Combine with the clunkiness of Analytics and GMail's refusal to sort by name or date (yes, you can SEARCH but sometimes you need a SORT, it's FASTER), and Google isn't particularly good at anything these days - they just happen to serve up a useable array of related services. They're more convenient than higher quality (and supported) alternatives, and some cases (iPhone, for example - at least for now), there is no alternative.

If Google's threatened 'socializing' of GMail goes through, it had better be opt-in. Not opt-out.

Agreed.

A few years ago (back when I only had a couple of chapters done), a fan of my webcomic contacted me and told me he wanted to make a wikipedia entry for it. I said "sure!" and gave him some fun facts to run with. He wrote the entry and posted it.

Since I:

(a) can't afford to advertise
(b) don't want ads on my own site
(c) don't "get out much," socially speaking
(d) am telling a ridiculously obtuse story that has little or none of the usual tropes that auto-generate an audience

- I wasn't "out there" in the community, but more importantly -

(e) had a big fat DENY ALL robots.txt that prevented google et al from scraping my site...*

A couple of asshole admins decided the comic wasn't "noteable" enough and binned the entry. It limped over to comixpedia where it hasn't been updated (or, as far as I know, even read) since. I've gotten maybe one or two hits from it in the past two years.

In the meantime, pretty much every other webcomic you can possibly think of has a wikipedia entry varying from nicely detailed to ridiculously overdone.

Which I suppose is more of a commentary on the social nature of the internet than it is anything else - it isn't enough for a thing to exist. Somebody has to be out there promulgating it, carving out a niche for it, building a community around it, etceteras - or it effectively doesn't exist.

While I think the "NOTHING LINKS TO IT IT'S NOT NOTEABLE DELETE" policy held by some of the more strong-willed editors is bull, and while that's kept me from contributing edits - or even from being a real piss-ass and re-posting the entry for my comic - I still think the interweb is better with wikipedia than without it.

The one change I'd like to see? As long as the damned domain resolves and there's content there, then a website exists and a wikipedia entry about it is frigging valid. Who cares if it's "notable?"

* Long since removed, to some effect.

And... ummm.. Where exactly is the appeal in the TabletPC?

They're loads cheaper than a Cintiq. And more portable.

As an artist, I thought a tablet PC would be awesome. However, the one I tried was a big letdown in terms of application support - Adobe apps are unuseable in portrait mode. :/

I do my reading before bed and on the john.

My perspective and verbage comes from the fact that I work two full-time jobs : the one I have to and the one I want to, and have adapted my entertainment intake accordingly. <3

While the gameplay was more accessible - which I have no complaint with - the game itself seemed designed to piss me off. An extremely predictable story focusing on very unlikeable characters? An extremely predictable story focusing on very unlikeable characters that I'm forced to plod though and can't avoid? SIGN ME UP!

If I want a predictable story and unlikeable characters, I'll play one of the PlayStation Final Fantasies. If I want an RTS, there's a nice list of options, virtually none of which try to jam a story up my nose.

Game? Fine. Story? Could have been much better. Characters? My own extras are more interesting.

"Case examples (which I've encountered on a monthly-to-weekly basis since around the time I hit that puberty thing: Men muttering (or bellowing) ZOMG WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT ASS?! or otherwise spluttering when some moderately pleasant whatever walks past. I'm a guy, and I find that shit disgusting. Stop it."

No. I won't stop it. Now do you mind telling me why you find it so disgusting? I don't bellow by the way, that would be rude but when they're out of ear shot who the hell does it harm?

By the way, how is the above any different from you having pictures like this on your website?
http://amongthechosen.com/candy/cat_candy.php

Hypocrite much?

Wouldn't surprise me. :|

Liv Tyler and ELVES AT HELMS DEEP just totally make my nuts SCREAM in agony. Nevermind the original Tolkein incongruity of Teh Undead Army - I can almost stomach that, but man. Liv and the overdone, nuked-to-DEATH sequence of over-endings put me off. Probably because I had to pee. :P

I've seen some of the commentary on a couple of the movies - a friend of mine STILL tents his fucking khakis at the mention of anything even related to LOTR - and from what I've seen, I completely agree with what you've stated - the lower quality bits are totally the ones that WETA and crew have added to "improve" the original.

Conversely - and I say this as a creator - it's hard to not want to put your stamp on a thing. Especially when, in their case, the original creator isn't around to dissaprove of the alterations!

Yeah, it's an issue. The major difference is in boot time- X is up and struggling to load apps while 9 is still spamming extensions across the bottom of the screen. My issue in this case is that while zero-to-dock time is faster than Windows or MacOS, OS X still takes a few moments of disk-thrashing, proc-chocking sluggishness before it'll even let you use auto-launched apps.

I agree that switching was a pain - especially if you tried to do two things at once. My favorite example of OS 9 goofiness was running SSH and an FTP client at the same time - start an FTP transfer, then switch to SSH... and watch the FTP transfer slow to a crawl.

Good times!

Conversely, if you're running ONE application 90% of the time - I live in Photoshop - the idea that the OS or any other application can force my running, focused app into swap just because it feels like it is incredibly frustrating, and one of the things that irks me about OS X.

All you guys who slept through Physics and ended up with a Liberal Arts degree instead contributed to this situation.

* A Mad Tea Party
* Among the Chosen
* Boschen & Nesuko
* Bulletproof
* Crackling Silence
* Indavo
* Level
* Midnight Gurl
* Mondo Mecho
* Monica Furious * Reman Mythology
* Seraphic Blue
* Terinu

Padding text to allow this to post.

I have isolated the city-experience within me and have examined it closely. The idea of a city fascinates me. The formation of a biological community without a functioning, supportive social community leads to havoc. Whole worlds have become single biological communities without an interrelated social structure and this has always led to ruin. It becomes dramatically instructive under overcrowded conditions. The ghetto is lethal. Psychic stresses of overcrowding create pressures which will erupt. The city is an attempt to manage these forces. The social forms by which cities make the attempt are worth study. Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.

Leto Atreides, The Stolen Journals

Everything on your list still spanks the shit out of Marvel, Image, and DC's offerings in terms of signal to noise. The same could be said of record labels - I liked Front Line Assembly before they turned into Just Another Haujobb Wannabe, but I'd be hard pressed to wipe my ass with the majority of the Metropolis catalogue.

Signal to noise aside, the biggest issue facing webcomics isn't the quality of the work but the quality of the presentation. Horrible site aesthetics, whiny or distracting ad placement, bad standards compliance... worst of all, bad archive interface... comic artists obviously aren't web designers and it shows.

Hell, my own project went through several layout revisions before my friends stopped browbeating me about the navigation, so I'm not the only one who takes issue with information design.

Groups like this are all over the place.

Just in terms of webcomics, fleen was one of the earlier "networks"... and there's also dayfree press. The bit of Major News, as it were, is that it's a bunch of comics that were previously keenspace "titles" peeling off- ugly hill is the only newcomer to the batch. Keen isn't the Mount Awesome some people have made it out to be - if anything, it is to webcomics what livejournal is to drama... and these guys have all apparently realized it's time to move on.

Personally, it's nice to see shortpacked free of keenspace advertising feces- bullshit reduction is something I can always get behind. Joining a network looks like it's a good thing for all parties concerned, if it's something you're comfortable doing.

My own comic is going into its third year without being a member of a network, without having run a single ad. I might get shit for traffic but I know exactly what I'm displaying on my site- display and control of presentation is a huge concern of mine, at least for the time being. I'm sure one of these days I'll get sick of obscurity and spend more effort on increasing project awareness than I currently am on project production. Maybe eventually, like these guys, I'll find some like-minded media creators who want to conjoin into some sort of co-prosperity sphere.

...albeit shittily in my case...

Pencilling, inking, and scanning is ultimately faster than diddling a 3d mesh into a render that's even close to what you have in your head. Not only that, but if you want, say.... variable line weight or a very specific style of hatching, you'll have pages of sequential art done by hand before you can get a single render to look right.

This stuff definitely has its uses, but it's never going to replace the traditional media, at least not completely.

Me, I draw all of my humanoids. Everything else is fair game for any other technique.