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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!

ssokolow

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Posts posted by ssokolow

  2. Posted

    38 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

    On the one hand I enjoy seeing people embrace the fun of transformation. On the other hand, every once and a while I get concerned that Dan is making his characters more and more similar over time to a level that is unrealistic (and potentially could lead to them no longer feeling like distinct characters); I'm feeling that concern again. (Other examples: Both Tedd and Elliot are nonbinary/gender-fluid. All of the main 10 except Justin and Nanase (and arguably male!Tedd) are some form of bisexual. ...Though at least those examples are of things which don't get enough representation elsewhere. Having most of the cast being interested in transformation just feels indulgent.)

    At any rate, yay for blurry-sunburst-with-bubbles background in panel three! Yay for diagonal-lines-and-bubbles background in panel four!  

    *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.

    ChronosCat reacted to this

  3. Posted

    7 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Anyone who objects to using they/them for singular should be required to use thee/thou for singulars, too.  Let's have some consistency here!  ;-)

    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.)

  4. Posted

    6 hours ago, ijuin said:

    Meh, what bothers me on pronouns is when somebody is playing guessing games by not showing or telling you which pronoun they want yet getting offended if you do not guess correctly. I'm sorry, but if you want to be referenced differently from how you appear to be presenting, then you'll have to tell me that.

    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.

  5. Posted

    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.)

  8. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    11 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    Unfortunately, Magus is exhibiting behaviors that would seem to indicate that Magus alone knows what is best and right.  Evidence and the opinions of others are irrelevant.

    I meant drive it home to the readers. (ie. Remove any doubt in their minds that Ellen is happy as-is.)

  11. Posted

    10 minutes ago, Aura Guardian said:

    Tedd's spell is only ever permanent when used to swap genders of the user of the spell. The wand Tedd made should be plenty for Ellen to swap back in case of the worst.

    Since then Ellen would be the caster.

    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:

    1. It ties in with the whole "magic will become more commonly known" thing that was just decided.
    2. 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.
    3. It would drive home that Magus and Ellen are different people with different lives, cultures, and desires.

  12. Posted

    2 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    So Magus throws a magic tantrum, and Tedd just fixes everything in the morning?

    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.

  17. Posted

    20 minutes ago, animalia said:

    On another note I REALLY hope the death flags we are getting for Pandora turn out to be a red herring and she just gets badly wounded instead.

    Likewise, partly because being able to anticipate that sort of thing and be proven correct makes a story more boring.

  19. Posted

    50 minutes ago, animalia said:

    One reason I ask is because if there is no known physical reason why it occur why is it we only hear of Gender dysphoria and not stuff like racial dysphoria? Since I am not an expert on these kinds of subjects I wanted to try to gets some facts before kicken open any potential cans of worms

    It's a phenomenon in the brain. That kind of specificity of understanding is still in the minority in neurobiology... especially with things which are rooted in prenatal and neonatal gene expression, rather than genetics. (ie. which genes are activated at which stages of development, rather than which genes are present)

    I don't have citations, but the way it was explained to me is that just as with the instincts like hunger and sexual attraction, we also have a deep-seated instinct which tells us what gender we are.

    It's already a well-known fact that glitches during prenatal cell division can send different regions of the body off on divergent plans, so it makes perfect sense to me to think of being transgendered as just a neurological counterpart to the myriad of intersex conditions the body can express, similar to things like having one ovary and one testicle, being physically female but with testes in place of ovaries, etc. (In this case, it would be a glitch that triggers the development of the "wrong" identity instinct compared to the path the rest of the body is on.)

    ...and, given that being gay isn't a choice and identical twins can have different sexual orientations, it'd make sense that a similar mechanism would be involved in sexual orientation.

    Autism Spectrum Disorders are another example of something we're still working to pin down, which have a developmental component, and I recently saw an article about how there's a correlation between autism and the child's grandmother smoking during pregnancy, which should give you an idea of how complicated this whole gene expression mess is.

  20. Posted

    The commentary reminds me of how one of the four DVD-extra episodes for Steel Angel Kurumi has Kurumi and Nakahito in disguise to follow Karinka on a mystery date...

    For the second time in the series, Kurumi chose to a suit, bower hat, and fake moustache for her disguise (she has long pink hair) and put Nakahito in a blue dress and yellow hairbow, resulting in this exchange (paraphrased).

    Nakahito: Kurumi, why do I always have to wear the dress?
    Kurumi: But you look so cute like that, master!

    I can't remember which time this was, but here's a screencap showing their outfits.

    ...come to think of it, that wasn't the only way Steel Angel Kurumi was had unusually human female characters for its genre. (Ironic given that they're gynoids.) Karinka is one of only female characters I can remember who ever used profanity in an English dub and also one of the few female characters I can think of in any shōnen anime/manga who started out as "conspiciously and unattractively crude/tomboyish" yet wound up "cute", not by betraying who she once was to appeal to boys, but because she no longer felt the need to rebel while, at the same time, was realizing that politeness was a more efficient way to achieve her goals.