Christi/Enni/lemji ('lem-jay')/Chris is only for The Bit // 26 // Australia // Abstinent // CisFem // Faith, Memes and Fandom // Member of Crab Day Rogue Squadron // Several Shenanigans Later // Sometimes I create stuff (tag: My creations) // In this world it is Beak or be Beakered // Reblog is Love, Reblog is Life, Reblog your Bretheren to Bits // Icon Commissions Open on ko-fi! https://ko-fi.com/christi_in_space/commissions
after 4 years of drawing webcomics, this is my wisdom:
start now. now. now now now. or else you’ll never draw this damn thing
it’s fine if you don’t have the entire story figured out yet, it’ll happen naturally
draw what you want to draw!! webcomics often run for years, so you better work with something you like
don’t overcomplicate things. a simple, efficient work flow is your top priority in order to stay consistent
bullshit some things. trace background refs. reuse poses. draw your character’s face from different angles and just copy paste it in to save time. be smart about your work baby
take breaks if needed. webcomic burnout is real
sometimes, a panel or a page looks bad. shit happens. move on
lettering is actually really important and super hard to pull off
it’s your comic. do what you want forever!!!
I’m begging you again to work smart, not hard. reuse backgrounds. use brush sets for webcomic artists. trace 3D objects. use 3D models to pose your characters
you may need hours or days to draw one panel, but people will look at it for 5-8 seconds. keep that in mind
a simple background is better than no background at all (avoiding the white void increases the quality of your work by a ton!)
sometimes the anatomy needs to be a little off to make an interesting shot/panel. that’s fine, don’t worry about it too much
at least 2000px canvas and 300 dpi for good quality results
it’s okay to stop by the way. it’s okay to move on from a project if you no longer find joy in it
I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.
And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.
I hope you don’t mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc
and that’s the same attitude that underlies all the ‘the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it’ or 'fanfic isn’t real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel’ type of takes come from.
this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told
when that’s just not true.
the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.
there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you’re starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren’t bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?’ or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences’ because your audience is already invested, they’ll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn’t.
there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you’re relying on the audiences imagination. there’s a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience’s imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.
there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it’s essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it’s a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor’s season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.
Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it’s the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.
Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that’s happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can’t assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person’s view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.
Fanfic isn’t a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn’t a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.
I just saw an acquaintance use “👖🛝” in place of the word genocide and. like. at what point are we going to decide that this kind of self-censorship is too degrading to abide anymore.
“grape” “sui-slide” “the panini” I feel like I’m surrounded by Rugrats who overheard the grown ups talking about the news.
This is mean, but when I’m in a safe context to do so, I love pretending I don’t understand what they mean and forcing them to explain in plain language.
It’s not mean. You are so normal. If someone uses these terms when speaking to me directly I’m going to end up on the news.
I call this collection of screenshots “idiots of /r/whatsthatbook”.
And finally, my go-to example for Tiktokese/ridiculous unnecessary self-censoring:
Okay we all love to talk about golden retriever boyfriend and black cat girlfriend a lot, but what about golden retriever girlfriend and black cat boyfriend??
will never understand how people like and glorify ussr lenin communism and all that crap when ukrainians were so angry for what it did to our country that people were demolishing lenin monuments in every city with their bare hands
the crimes, the cultural repression, the famines, the economical setback, the environmental damage, the slavery, the oppression of everything and everyone, no way to see the life outside of your country otherwise you’ll be imprisoned as soon as you get back, the realisation that nothing ever belongs to you and can be taken away any second, the horrible quality of things, the poverty, do i even need to go on
When they aren’t denying it happened, or saying the Ukrainians deserved it somehow, they’re instead just using the USSR to talk bout how “patriarchy and white supremacy ruined the Soviet Union.”
And it becomes not a lesson on how communism is shit, how socialism is shit, they just twist it into being how white people and men ruined utopia. Not that their ideology is garbage and their values are trash, but that the fault was men and white people, which they argue was the source of what repression, famines and economic fuckups existed. They refuse to acknowledge anything bad happened that wasn’t rooted in religion, Europeans and the male sex. The only time they ever acknowledge the bad wasn’t deserved, they acknowledge the bad and deflect the blame from their precious worldview.
not mine. found on reddit, but my god scam bots on ao3 are both embarrassing and hilarious 😭 I was told their usual goal was to either get users’ personal informations/money through fake commissions or get them to delete their fics so that these bots could ‘safely steal their works to train their ai without writers being able to claim ownerships of their own works since the original sources were deleted’ but I don’t even know what the point of this is. just to scare people for fun? because some people might unfortunately believe them. just to troll?
I was also told that if they were commenting as a guest comment, they sometimes used the urls of random innocent and legit users (since anyone can use any name they want if they’re commenting as a guest user), which is just bad for the innocent users who were impersonated by these losers.
anyway, if you got a comment like this, report them for scam.
it’s also important now more than ever for us all to leave nice comments on the fics we like. with the rise of scam bots plaguing ao3’s comments section, getting a genuine, nice comment from a real person means so much to writers who gave us these wonderful fics to enjoy for free.
I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +6k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search.
Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog*
*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted. Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat.
I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing:
1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month) 2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog) 3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it) 4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not) 5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)
**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted.
So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes.
P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything.
this is actually really useful if you have an art blog full of years of work that you otherwise no longer have access to the original files. A lot of the art I have in the early days of my art blog are in that boat. I did this process JUST for that reason and I was pretty astonished at just how many pieces of media it backs up! (literally all of it) Drawings I didn’t even realize were sitting in my archive due to having been posted to text posts or undercuts, or untagged for years! It’s worth it if just for that, even if tumblr isn’t shutting down or deleting your blog.
reference.
Tested this, it works as advertised above. Grabs all text posts, image+gif posts (both original and reblogs). Preserves tags. Does not grab videos or audios.
STEP 0: For any of this to work, your blog must be visible outside Tumblr
0.1 Account –> Your Blog –> Edit appearance
0.2 Under “Visibility,” be sure “Hide blogname.tumblr.com” is OFF
0.3 If the “Password” section exists, make sure “Password protect this blog” is OFF
STEP 1:
1.4. Download the file called “Mac OS X 64-bit/32-bit installer”
1.5. Install by double-clicking on the downloaded .pkg file and following the prompts. You’ll need to enter your password. You may need to change System Preferences –> Security & Privacy to allow the install.
STEP 2:
2.1 Download the “tumblr-utils.zip” file.
2.2 Downloading the file should automatically unzip it into a folder called “bbolli-tumblr-utils-30e140a” in your “Downloads” folder.
STEP 3: SKIP ALL PARTS OF THIS ENTIRE STEP
STEP 4:
4.2. Hit Command-Space and start typing the word terminal. Finder should find the Terminal application. Double-click it to run. The terminal window should open up.
4.4 (Windows only, skip.)
4.5 type cd ~/Downloads and hit return.
4.6 type cd bbolli and hit tab. Terminal should auto-complete to the entire name of the folder you downloaded in step 2 (“bbolli-tumblr-utils-30e140a”). Hit enter and you should be in that directory.
STEP 5:
5.2 type ./tumblr_backup.py yourtumblrname and watch the script do its thing.
(The dot slash in the beginning is important!)
Thanks for sharing the Mac instructions! I just did ‘em and it all worked.
also for step 2.2 if it doesn’t automatically unzip, just double-click it and it should unzip into the same location. The precise file name might also be different toward the end.
None of my blogs are adult, but I still recommend doing this because sloppy Tumblr is sloppy, and it’s always good to have backups of your stuff - especially when a platform has proven itself to be unstable!
Thanks for sharing the
Mac instructions! I just did
‘em and it all worked.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
