Oho. Nikolai's not so dim. Maybe he can find out what this Fae prohibition is about. Maybe it's connected to Twilight?
And about your rant: hmm. You're setting yourself a difficult task, wanting to create something where the same content works in two rather different media. Bits of your rant remind me of the discussion on page WebComics/Discussion. I agree with your points that something [OzyAndMillie]-style works, but it'd be rather hard to do proper story-style plot in that format; that things like MegaTokyo come out seeming very slow in web form, and that the early part of MT book 1 worked in print because of the wibble providing a break; and that in general you need to only highlight the most interesting or relevant bits to tell the story in a readable way - this is the case for any storytelling medium except Life, but particularly important for gradually-released WebComics. I wonder whether it could work if each printed double page spread had one page of comic on the left and some rant/info/text on the right? --AlexChurchill
That's a good idea.. why didn't I think of that? :) - SunKitten (and I rather like the idea of Life being a medium for storytelling...)
Well, I can't tell the difference on the web with the size, but I'm not a good person to ask that sort of thing. If you go for a fixed format you lose some of the advantages of a web format - which would be a shame. Then again, the way you've been releasing LookingForTheSun has worked well enough. --Vitenka (As for pf - I'm completely and utterly lost. Again)
I want something that's updated regularly and often - every month-and-a-half isn't often enough... sorry ^^;; - SunKitten
Fluff
The title seems to me to be overly harsh. Did I miss a big chunk, or did a lot less stuff happen in this one than in most? One (seemingly farily minor) character found out that another character is a high-elf, which wasn't being kept a secret as far as we know, anyway? Re: Scanning at high resolution - interpolation is all - most of that extra resolution is fake. Not that this is necc. a bad thing, of course - since the scanner can probably do such interpolation better than a bit of software. --Vitenka
No, the scanner pretends it can do something stupid like 9600x9600. Its actual resolution is 1200x4800. My previous and very old scanner was pretty much the same - 1200x1200 real, 9600x9600 pretend - SunKitten
Oooh, nifty then. 300 optical used to be consumer level - guess things have improved in optics whilst I wasn't looking. --Vitenka
The old scanner is about 5 years old ^^. As to the conversation, the mention of Nikolai's status is one of those things that naturally happened in the conversation. Nikolai wanted to ask about Fae/Elf? pairings, but they normally aren't forbidden, so he had to clarify. Sylvai's reaction is just how she would react. It's not the point of the strip, just the way the conversation would go. I like Sylvai; she's easy to write :) - SunKitten
Fair enough - but does that mean that the entireity of todays strip was just time-filling? No other information seems to be transferred. --Vitenka
(PeterTaylor) Except for the place in the library to look for further information - "Try the legends books".
I don't think "Try the library for ancient mythical history" is actually unknown information. --Vitenka
Strips grow from what is happening in the thread and what has happened in other threads that are relevant. When I try and make one happen in my head, I generally think what the next step would be for the character/s involved. Then the context is introduced, and the characters in the context come up with the conversation, with themselves or whoever, hopefully with some humour. Then the resulting strip or strips is checked for plot, humour, characterisation and 'fit', and gets altered or chucked depending on what I think. This can result in strips with little humour and much plot, or little characterisation and some humour. This particular strip grew from Nikolai needing to find out about the situation he's in with Peri. The obvious candidate for him to ask is Sylvai, since she'd do anything for 'true love', and I added some characterisation with her new boyfriend, first seen in 'Passing Time'. Sylvai herself is amusing. So Nikolai and she were put in this situation - a random meeting, since she's not seeing the main characters very much now, and her main point of contact is Peri - with some extraneous information added such as his exam timetable, which is not entirely irrelevant. They said what they would say, and it got broken into two strips, which together contain some characterisation, an attempt at humour, and a bit of plot/information for Nikolai to deal with as he sees fit. That's how they happen - and it's why some strips end up being a bit pointless. It's why 'Dropping In' got discarded at first, and why I chucked a recent strip of Megaera. I thought this one scraped in on the right side of the line; maybe I was wrong. Sorry - SunKitten
I'm feeling that I've touched a nerve now - if so, I apologise. It just seemed to take a lot of panels to acheieve very little. I suppose compressing the conversation would have been hard, without making it seem more forced than it does. Perhaps just taking a scene of him walking away to the library thinking 'ugh - how does he cope?' whilst she burbles away about "wow you're a high elf" and "I don't know anyway" in the background - then the rest of the strip would be ready to be filled with whatever awaits us on friday. Or random pictures of phoenices and toothy-cats ;) I just don't think there was enough here for two full strips. --Vitenka
Not really (why do people think I'm annoyed when I'm trying to explain stuff?). What awaits you on Friday is a different thread, so wouldn't have fitted - I don't like jumping scenes. And I didn't want to do a mega-long comic for last Thursday because they take a lot of work - what, maybe 14 panels to get them both into one strip? I'm getting lazy, I suppose ^^;; And it's not obvious to me that Nikolai would have thought to have looked in the legends books - it's a law, it belongs in the legal books to which he has no access, not being the Queen of the Fairies ;) So I wanted to prod him into looking there (and have given myself more libraries to draw. I hate drawing the inside of libraries...). And, it just seemed to fit into two nicely *shrug* - SunKitten
(PeterTaylor) You could avoid drawing shelves by showing the character at a desk by a window looking through one or two relevant books. Wouldn't work for the spotting-a-random-title strips, but hey.
Not if he's going to be moving around, which he probably is. But yes, there are creative ways round it. I just seem to end up drawing lots of books. Whatever I do >.< - SunKitten
Blame the limits of PlainText?. My point is that it's not not-obvious to the readers that he wouldn't look there sooner or later. Though yeah, maybe you needed to prod him into it and point out to us that he cared enough to go looking immediately. I dunno. I'm not sure where you're going with it. I suppose my whole point was "These two pages seemed a bit thin" and your reply was "Yeah, I know - I stretched one and a bit into two" so I guess there's not much more to say ;) --Vitenka
You're not supposed to know where it's going :) I don't think I stretched one-and-a-bit into two, though. I thought there was enough there for two strips, especially with a bit of humour added. Sylvai's response to her ethical dilemma was supposed to be funny and it got a laugh out of MoonShadow. Maybe it's the sense-of-humour difference, I don't know. In a way, it's good that people are looking for plot and not necessarily funny any more :) - SunKitten
What everyone knows...
Igors in Cornwall
must resist joke...... CANT RESIST! you want to see igors, only in cornwall only in cornwall they've got igors! [to the tune of "lions in kenya"]macloud [forgot to add sig]
PeterTaylor loves "Unnatural Language Processing" as a course title. The Black Arts seem to cover quite a range - biology, CS, theology.
(EditConflict:) I love the BlackArtsTripos course list! Especially ExperimentalPaleontology?. (And once again I'm reminded of PhilipPullman? with his ExperimentalTheology?.) What's /Megaera doing in the last frame, rubbing her eyes from tiredness or slapping her face because her boyfriend is chatting to /Rin? --AlexChurchill
Trying to stop her toothy-bird from eating rin? --Vitenka (Prior frames seem to have the bird acting very much like a ferret with a hankering to pretend to be a scarf)
Nothing she can do...
Aw! Poor Meg...
Snake psychologists: they're called [SnakeCharmer?]s ^.^
Jaffa cakes make things better
It's so sad, yet intriguing. Poke. --Vitenka (JaffaCakes are nummy, but somehow insufficient here, I think. Now, I'm a wondering whether this rule is going to turn out to be dark or insufferably petty-yet-taken-seriously.)
Yes. The two girls' romance troubles have a certain amount in common - but we the audience don't know yet whether /Peri should "just trust him" the way /Megaera should in her case, or whether it really is something that she should have told him... (Well, she should just trust him - but one could argue that he should just trust her too.) --AlexChurchill
I just need to point out, since it needs to be done again - ThatCannotBeFemale :) --Vitenka (Doesn't change the story much, just makes some of it seem a bit oddly worded)
Huh? But... but... which one can't you see as being female? Both of them look quite distinctly female to me *puzzled* --K
Likewise. I should add I love /Peri's expression in panel 6: wonderful narrowed eyes in not so much suspicion as pretty much certainty :) --AlexChurchill
Correction. JaffaCakes make things better, except for those people with egg allergies. It's one of the few foods that rankle with me particularly. But - poor /Peri yes. I didn't think we'd seen that vulnerable a side of her before - I wasn't expecting her to cry. Still, it probably shows /Nikolai cares deeply for her, if the rule matters that much to him. --ChrisHowlett
Work before play...
Very nice. One of the better ones, and I love the newsgroups of choice. But especially I love the look and comment about stalking - throws several of the prior strips into a different cast entirely. --Vitenka (Though I must say, I thought this strip was at least based upon CambridgeLife. How unrealistic can you get, doing revision?)
Hmm? Her ex-master is the /MysteriousEvilDude, and so I'd expect the protegé in question is /Niea. Who I was just thinking the other day it's been a while since we heard from. I don't think /Rin's been deliberately stalking /Yozhik or anyone - somewhere between befriending and investigating, at worst :) --AlexChurchill (pardon my lack of accents, Dasher doesn't do accented letters with the English alphabet selected Fixed.)
(PeterTaylor) What's VLSI in this context? Presumably not related to hardware...
Very large scale integration. Integration of precisely what, and how this may be accomplished with the use of basic materials such as coloured chalks, a pair of tweezers, a large expanse of floor, a magnifying glass and a few cc of mouse blood, is left as an exercise for the reader - this is the Dark Arts tripos.. ;) - MoonShadow
YAY! more rin! hehe study first, stalk later.... especially like the evil minion recovery newsgroup.macloud
And bat pyjamas! Don't forget the bat pyjamas! --ChrisHowlett
Bad habits
Just because someone has to say it... NekoNomicon?. --Vitenka
Truly fabulous. I want to see. Except it sounds like not a film but a convention. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there'd been an anime convention by that name, actually. Lovecraft would be disappointed: he tried so hard to be un-conventional... --AlexChurchill
To me, it sounds almost like a McGuffin from an anime series. --Requiem
PeterTaylor wants to know where the horror is in a documentary about German origami.
Why, it's non-Euclidean of course. ^_^ --Requiem (Lovecraft reference)
Nooo! The SpacialVisualisation? engineers are upon us! Fungiforms shall rise from the seas! Dreamers will go to sleep! --Vitenka
Poster blurb: "The protagonist solves the classification of 4-manifolds. His conscience expands, his inner eye is opened and as he looks through it he sees the Elder Gods looking right back at him.." ;) - MoonShadow
I have 1-13 of Saishuheiki Kanojo, which I strongly suspect is the series you're missing bits of. Should that be useful... --TI
Yes (it's the same name!). That'd be great, thanks. I'd quite like to have it anyway, to give it a second chance - SunKitten
What a very random T-Shirt it is too. Is e not noticing evasion, or just too polite to mention it, I wonder? (Hey! GenderNeutralPronouns came in handy after all!) --Vitenka
Took me a while to make the obvious connection between the T-shirt and the minion comment - I'd read the M as being for Mage... --CH
... but what do the 'B' and the two 'M's stand for? "<Clickety click> BMFH" meant nothing to me, so I assumed the conversation came from something else. --M-A
B evil-overlord FH would have made the joke more obvious. I was reading the clickety-click as an html tag! --Vitenka
Kazuhiko freely admits to not having got this until PeterTaylor mentioned BOFH above... Now he has though, he's guessing the M is 'minion' not 'mage'...
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