I used to make comics. I know that because strangers would look at my work and immediately share their most excruciatingly banal experiences with me:

— that time a motorised wheelchair cut in front of them in the line at the supermarket;
— when the dentist pulled the wrong tooth and they tried to get a discount;
— eating off an apple and finding half a worm in it;

every anecdote rounded of with a triumphant “You should make a comic about that!”

Then I would take my 300 pages graphic novel out of their hands, both of us knowing full well they weren’t going to buy it, and I’d smile politely, “Yeah, sure. Someday.”

“Don’t try to cheat me out of my royalties when you publish it,” they would guffaw and walk away to grant comics creator status onto their next victim.

Nowadays I make work that feels even more truly like comics to me than that almost twenty years old graphic novel. Collage-y, abstract stuff that breaks all the rules just begging to be broken. Linear narrative is ashes settling in my trails, montage stretched thin and warping in new, interesting directions.

I teach comics techniques at a university level based in my current work. I even make an infrequent podcast talking to other avantgarde artists about their work in the same field.

Still, sometimes at night my subconscious whispers the truth in my ear: Nobody ever insists I turn their inane bullshit nonevents into comics these days, and while I am a happier, more balanced person as a result of that, I guess that means I don’t make comics any longer after all.

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Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: November 23rd, 2024
  • haverholm@kbin.earthtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music
    7·
    58 minutes ago

    The intent sounds fine, but as @[email protected] points out, it offloads the actual responsibility of filtering on MusicBrainz and WikiData.

    It’s not hard to imagine MusicBrainz being flooded by users trying to circumvent bans by editing tags. Or incorrectly tagging bands they don’t like or agree with to get them banned.

    Funkwhale probably isn’t big enough in itself to make a huge splash, but this proposed ban does add another target to the extreme right’s hit list. It seems a little iffy to me to make an open project like MusicBrainz that target?

  • haverholm@kbin.earthtoFediverse@lemmy.world•What exactly is the Fediverse?
    2·
    3 hours ago

    I’ve been following this scene for many years, back when diaspora and friendica had a reasonable shot at promoting their own protocols rather than (what would become) ActivityPub — XMPP was still on the table as a possible avenue, as well.

    There were lots of projects and developers pulling towards a general, shared goal — decentralisation — but with different code bases (ah, and did they want a distributed network or a federated one? Semantics like that ate almost as much time as agreeing on shared protocols). It was by no means a given that StatusNet would evolve via PumpIO into ActivityPub.

    All I’m saying is, yes, ActivityPub is definitely the de facto protocol by now, but rather than look at this from a technology POV, I think it is worth taking a broader perspective of utility.

    The Fediverse is, by that definition, a network of federated and interoperable server instances. As is pointed out, Matrix and XMPP are federated protocols, just not federating with the larger AP network. Heck, even Signal used to federate before Whisper closed its server off.

    Federated chat is pretty much e2e-encrypted by default — I don’t know that that has been successfully implemented in AP yet. In that regard, the fediverse is more fragmented than it needs to be.

    Defining the fediverse around ActivityPub rather than the broader goal of federation and interoperability, we may lose sight of projects that are developed outside of the W3C, and might be the future of the fediverse.