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 6 months ago
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Cake day: November 23rd, 2024

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  • Same thing happened to me. If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

    Here? Blocking just means you don’t see the troll, but they can continue to inflict all kinds of havoc on your post scores. Ironically, “karma” isn’t a thing on Lemmy like it is on Reddit, but votes are still used to rank your posts.

    I guess there are a hundred great folk on here for every preteen edgelord, but that kind of nonsense really spoils the fun of this platform. Sorry to see you get downvoted for a perfectly reasonable post.


















  • Agreed, Nextcloud has gone from a lean little personal cloud to a hulking enterprise hub.

    If you’re after something that’ll just sync your files between devices, try Syncthing. If you need files available online, maybe something like filestash or, like somebody else suggested, SFTPgo.

    There are also tiny, lean calendar and contact server apps out there if you decide you need those. After self hosting NC for years I’m really happy spreading out the tasks over dedicated services rather than having all my eggs in one basket.