My general rule is that if one of the blogs I follow goes a full month without posting, then their link falls off my daily visit list and goes into the "dormant" folder, which I go into about once a year.
As I write this, it's been five and a half weeks since Beta-Waffle has posted anything. Problem is, I don't want to put that link into the graveyard. Anyone know what's going on with DiGiKerot? (Did something bad happen to him? If so, is there anything I can do to help?)
UPDATE: Meanwhile, some tremendously good news: Sixten found another job. That means he won't be deported.
1
His twitter is at twitter.com/digikerot and sees some activity.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at June 15, 2012 05:25 PM (5OBKC)
2
I rarely visit blogs "personally" - I just subscribe to the RSS feed and let Google Reader handle it from there.
Posted by: gaiaswill at June 15, 2012 05:36 PM (ar9uP)
3
Steven can keep dead blogs in a folder of a feedreader, I'm sure, but the question is about the blogroll rotation. I purge inactive blogs from blogroll too.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at June 15, 2012 06:07 PM (5OBKC)
5
Oh, gosh darn it, I only thought it was about two weeks since I posted last. Doesn't time fly and all that...
Basically, I herniated a disk carrying my luggage back from an anime convention about eight weeks ago at this point, and it's still giving me some grief. It's pretty uncomfortable to maintain my usual drawing position for long enough to actually draw something, and otherwise I've just been kind of feeling too frazzled at the end of the work day to finish typing anything up. Throw in a few other diversions (spent most of last weekend in a London cinema - the most recent Ghibli flick was much better than I was expecting, lots of Mikan boxes), and it's just really been a case of trying to find both the time and something to post, as opposed to an intended absence.
I'll totally find the time to post at least something this weekend. Probably not something interesting, but at least something...
Posted by: DiGiKerot at June 15, 2012 09:07 PM (dXIkx)
6
I'm glad you're not dead, and I wasn't trying to nag.
1
I try to be fair, I really do. I mean, I love the Nolan Batman films.
But Avengers was the hilarious longshot gamble, and I find it awesome that it paid off. Doing a serious, dramatic Batman isn't half the challenge that is taking the Avengers, doing them practically straight, and successfully selling it to everybody.
Posted by: metaphysician at June 11, 2012 08:36 PM (3GCAl)
There are some online comics I occasionally follow, where the art is amazing but the update rate approaches the abysmal.
Dresden Codak has been updating pretty regularly recently.
On the other hand, Outsider hasn't updated since March 5. Sheesh.
I stopped reading Freefall. He's been good about his 3-times-per-week schedule, but since it's a 4-panel comic, the story is moving very, very slowly, and it's reached a point where
potential genocide imminent in just a few story hours, with Sam and Florence trying to prevent it I just can't read it any more. I think I'll wait a few months and then catch up all at once. With luck, by then the crisis will have passed.
(I still think it's going to turn out that without his mask, Sam looks like Cthulhu.)
The most recent strip from Real Life has a reference I don't get. I'm woefully uncool, I guess. "Why doesn't Ted just tell his damned kids how he met their mother?" Who's Ted?
Update rate on Argon Zark is down to about a page per year. Just to show you how stale it is, Bill Gates is one of the villains in the current story line, and Gates retired from Microsoft in 2008.
UPDATE: Speaking of online comics, if you want a laugh (and a considerable helping of schadenfreude) check out this thread on Metafilter, about the Walker recall election in Wisconsin. They're trying to hold out hope that Barrett will come from behind and win it. As I write this, NBC, Fox, and the NYT have all called it for Walker. With 56% of the vote counted, Walker is 15 points ahead. It ain't even slightly close. This is a huge blow-out.
I stopped worrying when I started seeing columns written by left-wing pundits talking about how this didn't really matter, and how a Walker victory might actually be good for Obama. When your opponents start whistling loudly past the graveyard, it's time to invest in graveyard futures.
Expensive, what with shipping to another planet and all, but well worth it. For (a) it is awesome, and (b) as the store says: By buying this thing you are not only just getting something cool, you're also helping independent artists stay fed and protected from the elements. Over half of our artists now live indoors.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 06, 2012 06:51 AM (PiXy!)
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I was worried about Freefall back when Florence was
unconscious with her memory impaired, deep in the Ecosystems Unlimited complex. However, she survived that, and has already
demonstrated that the "robot-lobotomizing" program is reversible, so I'm not as worried this time. Besides, Sam is on the case - what can go wrong!
Posted by: Siergen at June 06, 2012 03:43 PM (PuIGa)
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That second one must have happened since I stopped reading, and indeed it is a relief to know about it.
10
I do not recall the second item being true at scale, just that
for the two known test subjects, the damage wasn't permanent because their day memory hadn't been made permanent; they could still be reset to a pre-wipe state..
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 06, 2012 05:36 PM (fpXGN)
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The worst trend I've seen in webcomics lately is withholding the next strip until the donation's jar is filled (Typically somewhere around $20). This is terribly destructive, since first, if you don't have a regular schedule, that cost's you readers right there, but the second is that not all strips are created equal, and as your storyline winds down to an end, so do the donations.
Hopefully this trend will be self-curing.
Posted by: Mauser at June 06, 2012 10:46 PM (cZPoz)
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Some webcomics have been pulling in crazy money on Kickstarter for printed copies. There's OotS'es $1.2 million, of course. Erfworld was already in print but got $80k for a motion comic (i.e. partly animated). Almond Quest got $60k, Modest Medusa got $11k for book one and $8k so far for book two, and TwoKinds (which I've never read) is at $177k and still climbing.
Of course, most of those put their stuff out there free for years first, but that's a whole lot of $20 tip jars.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 07, 2012 06:56 AM (PiXy!)
Katie has been doing a great job of posting every Monday, not to mention updating Aikonia every Monday.
Considering she's holding down a full course load in college right now, that's pretty good. (At least I think she is. Maybe she's graduated by now. The years pass by so fast.)
TVTropes looks to have grown into something beyond the wildest dreams of the guys who created it. I just found a cool entry there: "Russian Proverbs and Expressions"
Remember with Reagan used to say, "Trust but Verify"? Turns out that's a Russian proverb: Doveryay, no proveryay
I was looking for "Trust but Verify" because I wondered if it was a real trope on its own. I wanted to add it to the Bodacious Space Pirates entry to describe the situation on the bridge of the
Golden Ghost Ship at the end of ep 12.
I've been adding a lot to that one. It's fun. What's perhaps more fun is to add an entry, and then to come back and see that someone augmented it. For instance, I added "Playful Hacker: Lynn Lambretta". And someone added Courier to it -- and they were right!
I also added Lethal Chef, and White Haired Pretty Girl, and Funny Afro, and Large Ham, and Mood Whiplash.
1
If they had a Japanese equivalent, I might be interested. There should be more than "gouni itte wa, gouni shitagae".
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 19, 2012 12:14 PM (5OBKC)
2
How funny you post this. When I was working in suburban DC for a FEMA contractor back in the late eighties, a buddy at work gave me a little two-sided thing like a nameplate that sat on your desk. On one side was "Trust but verify" in English, and on the other side it was in Russian.
Good times back then...
Posted by: Tex Lovera at April 20, 2012 03:07 PM (DvLEA)
On the other hand, the word intelligentsiya has the
opposite meaning: cultured, educated, sophisticated persons involved in
creative or scholarly professions, in other words, Gentlemen and Scholars. These are likely to speak classical Russian. Though some use this word to denote posers and use the word intellektualy for the real [ McCoys]. Lenin, for instance, meant the posers when he
said "Intelligentsia is the crap of the nation, not its brain".
It's also a borderline curse word for a stuck up snob who
thinks himself better than "the common people". An exchange of
"nekulturnyy" - "intelligent neschastnyy" can be common.
It's also Older Thanthey Think. For example when Anton Chekhov, a famous Russian playwright, was asked: "Are you an intelligent (that is, a member of intelligentsia)?", his reply was: "God forbid, I have a profession!" — he was a practicing physician up to his death.
Nowadays this word almost invariably refers to an ivory-tower
intellectuals so engrossed in their high and noble ideas that they often
forgot what they mean, until those ideas turn into their exact
opposite.
obrazonanets, roughly translates as educationated person and is a term introduced or popularized by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
meaning someone who has formal education (usually a university graduate)
but has very little actual knowledge; originally this term referred to
graduates of 'political faculties' who were taught the communist
ideology and not much more, now it usually refers to graduates of
'diploma printing shops' or people posing as intelligentsya with evident lack of actual knowledge or sometimes even basic education.
This reminds me of a certain former law professor who didn't know anything about Marbury v. Madison.
Posted by: pgfraering at April 23, 2012 05:40 AM (icN4a)
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Ironically, nobody but "intelligentzia" uses "obrazovanetz". It just never caught on.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 23, 2012 09:26 AM (5OBKC)
5
Hmmm, Is Lilly Bell a "White Haired Pretty Girl" or a "Dark-skinned Blonde"?
Posted by: Mauser at April 23, 2012 11:07 AM (cZPoz)
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Her hair isn't blonde. It's kind of pale violet, which is what they use for white hair to distinguish it from blonde (yellow).
7
Well, the entry says Dark Skinned Blonde includes white hair as well. But we really haven't seen enough of her to see which other trope characteristics apply to her, so it's hard to sort out if the white hair or the dark skin rule the sorting.
Personally I just like the combination.
Posted by: Mauser at April 24, 2012 02:59 AM (cZPoz)
Aziz needs recommendations for kid-friendly anime to show his girls, ages four and nine.
Read the requirements before you do a title-dump, OK? Seems like every time I ever see anyone ask for recommendations, they get handed a huge list of titles which directly violate the requirements. Ever eager to help, people simply list every title they've ever heard of, whether it makes sense or not.
So, for instance, it's true that Puella Magi Madoka Magica features young protagonists, has a life lesson, and induces a sense of wonder. But it ain't a kid's show, is it? So don't list that one.
I suggested Shingu but I'm not actually sure it would be a good choice, especially for the 4 year old. The story is just too complex for a little kid to keep up with.
I thought about suggesting Ichigo Mashimaro, but there's no life lesson, and no sense of wonder. That's pretty much the case for any gag series, I think.
And I'm sure he doesn't want to show Naruto to his kids. Or Gundam Wing. Or Evangelion.
Seems like Azumanga Daioh is marginal. Chiyo-chan could be the identification-character for his daughters, and though it's a gag series it does have a long term sense of progress, and the characters do change. (At least some of them, Sakaki-san and Chiyo-chan mostly.)
I have a suspicion he's a bit like Waterson. He doesn't want vast wealth, and he doesn't want the hassle. Having been through the production process once, he doesn't seem to want to go through it again.
6
Respect it, yes. Believe it's wrong and pray every night that he comes to his senses, also yes.
Posted by: Wonderduck at March 09, 2012 11:13 PM (Ds9fh)
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Tell you what, every time I get a new volume of Yotsuba&! I am flat-out amazed at the artwork.
Having made my own silly attempts at drawing manga I can see how much work has gone into just about everything. The guy hardly uses any screentone; just about everything is drawn!
I vote for "hope and pray he comes to his senses" too.
Posted by: atomic_fungus at March 10, 2012 03:18 AM (si27V)
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I suggest Ultra Maniac. It's pretty light, there's magic, inanity, and save for one scene with an over eager butler, there's nothing scary about it. Tried and tested with my daughters, who were about 8 and 6 at the time. The show's maybe 4 or 5 years old now, but it'll hold up well enough.
Posted by: scotaku at March 10, 2012 06:17 AM (qr1SC)
