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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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About ssokolow
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Ontario, Canada
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Did you notice the suspicious font?
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ChronosCat reacted to a post in a topic: Story, Monday 3 Feb 2020
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ssokolow started following Story Friday 9, March 2018, Story, Monday 3 Feb 2020, Q&A Friday March 15, 2019 and and 4 others
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*nod* That concerns me too and, as far as I can tell, I'm very much like Dan in many ways relevant to what I like to read and write about. I suspect the difference is that Dan feels the pressure to keep a schedule while I'm much more willing to delay producing something in order to meet a certain standard. After all, everyone productive agrees that "perfection is no good if it means you never get it done" but where to draw the line is a fuzzy thing. (For my story ideas, I'm taking the "plan out the whole novel/fanfic first, then fill it in like a progressive JPEG, then only share it with strangers after it's more or less done," approach... something that keeps getting me dopamine hits from a trickle of insights I never could have had from writing in linear order, which cause me to make significant but proportionately worthwhile changes to the character bio charts, backstory, etc.) Heck, once I clear out some more urgent projects, I have a Scrivener competitor in a very early stage of development where the ability to pull up note cards which share a certain tag (eg. character bios) in a cross-comparison display is on the TODO list specifically because I'm finding it's starting to get laborious to double-check that my characters aren't evolving toward too much similarity as I continue to develop my conceptions of them.
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ssokolow reacted to a post in a topic: Story, Monday 3 Feb 2020
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Don't forget to bring back the ye/you object/subject split for formal/plural second-person. (That's where "Hear Ye, Hear Ye!" comes from.)
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This is one thing the Japanese language gets right. The first-person pronoun is gendered, so you advertise your gender identity whenever you talk about yourself, and talking about others as definite referents isn't, because third-person pronouns developed from words for referring to servants, so they just keep reusing the person's name instead.
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The annoying thing is that, as unhelpful as it is, there is a historical reason for people to be resistant to they as a singular pronoun. There are four roles a "they" can serve: 1. Plural referent 2. Indefinite referent 3. Abstract referent 4. Definite referent Everyone agrees on 1 and using "they" for 2 and 3 has been around for roughly 500 years (just as long as using "he" in the same roles) and you'll even find it in the odd bit of legislation. The only objections to using it in this role come from 19th and early 20th century grammarians trying vehemently to make gender-neutral "he" the standard. The truly new thing that feels wrong to people's intuition is using "they" for a definite referent. For example, "I talked to Jake the other day. They are doing well." Our intuition has been trained that, if we know a person's gender, "they" is wrong and, as much as I consciously agree that it's for the best to accept "they" in that role, it doesn't change how that expectation has grown deep roots. (Similar to "to who", given that a who/whom subject/object split is needless complexity which provides no additional expressive power to the language or how my mother can't get over how her teachers drummed it into her that the non-literary use of "tragedy" popularized by journalists was wrong.)
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ssokolow reacted to a post in a topic: Story Friday July 6, 2018
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It also didn't help that Hitler started micro-managing his generals as the war went on, and he wasn't as good at it as they were: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK419Nlp8eU
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...and I'm going to assume it's a sucker bet that any spells Ashley gets will be transformation-related.
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Hmm. Light green's never really been a favourite anime hair colour of mine and I don't envision it really suiting Ellen, so I hope it looks better in Dan's mind's eye than mine. That said, I'm not sure what it is (how they use their facial expressions?) but I get a vague but accurate sense of "that looks like Elliot/Ellen not Ellen/Elliot" when looking at the various panels, even before the difference in hair shades was brought to my attention... and that says many good things about how Dan's skill developed.
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ssokolow reacted to a post in a topic: Story, Wednesday May 2, 2018
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I wasn't able to find a link, but you reminded me of one of the cartoons in my The Far Side Gallery collections with the caption "Zoombies: The Driving Dead".
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ssokolow reacted to a post in a topic: Story Monday April 16, 2018
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ssokolow reacted to a post in a topic: NP Friday Apr 13, 2018
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I meant drive it home to the readers. (ie. Remove any doubt in their minds that Ellen is happy as-is.)
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To be honest, I'd forgotten about that wand altogether. (My fault. Mucked up my sleep cycle and trashed my memory retention for the period it was covered in-comic.) The wand would be even better, narratively, since: It ties in with the whole "magic will become more commonly known" thing that was just decided. It would foreshadow that, given time, the decision by magic to not change may result in availability of gender spells comparable to in Magus's world. It would drive home that Magus and Ellen are different people with different lives, cultures, and desires.
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Not necessarily. My memory of the details is hazy, but there might be another option that'd be better for narrative purposes. Did Tedd have to use it on himself for the spell's outcome to be controlled by the target's desire? If not, then it'd be a great way to "prove to the readers" that Ellen is happy the way she is.
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Why do I get the feeling that Tedd's spell's ability to reset default forms was intended as foreshadowing relevant to this?
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In hindsight, probably. I was just saying that, back when I first read it, I didn't see the featurelessness of the boxes as a flaw because warehouses full of cardboard boxes are also a thing.
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I always assumed they were cardboard. (You'd be surprised at some of the tricks available manufacturing corrugated cardboard boxes for heavier-duty applications.)