Hello Ashley! Returned To An Old Story Of Mine And Trying To Rebuild Large Parts Of The Plot That Didn't

How do you feel about the fact that Book 1 of Unsounded written in prose would be like one or maybe two books/volumes and take much less time? I often think about stuff like that as a comic artist :o

It’s true, but it would be a different beast. Stories are so dependent on the medium. Think about how they change between books and film, between film and tv, between comics and novels! Watchmen the comic and Watchmen the film are related, but they’re third cousins at best. Are the ATLA comics really a seamless transition from the show? Does FFVII the OG game really feel like it came before Advent Children? I am sorry I only have Boomer examples

Unsounded in prose would lose all the sight gags; the moments of surprise or awe when you load a new page to see a new creature or location or sudden story turn. Reactions that are told with a heart-wrenching facial expression would instead have to be limned in words.

And words are great, words are super powerful, but words do their own thing and have their own strengths. You can paint scenes far more powerfully with words than you can with comic art, because with them, you’re painting on the infinite canvas of the reader’s imagination. But at the same time, you’re losing specificity and some potential impact. Well-done art affects us deeply. We’re drawn to it. We want to see faces.

Anyway, this has actually really been on my mind the last few nights because I’ve been listening to The Neverending Story, which I’d never read before, but I’ve always really enjoyed the movie. And though the plots are basically the same, they are SO different to me! I dislike Bastian so much in the book, and like Atreyu so much more. It was totally opposite for me in the movie. And it’s all to do with the actors.

So I don’t know, Anon, it doesn’t bug me that yes, the plot of the Unsounded could be told faster in prose, in books. Because a work is more than its plot. Webcomics in particular are this crazy modern format that let us communicate like this in-between every page. We have memes and in-jokes and can speculate on mysteries and dream and hope about upcoming pages. It’s cool!

Novels can do this too, of course, and serial fiction has been a thing for centuries. Webcomics are a pretty neat evolution of that.

Anyway, I forgot my point.

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

Well now you and Anon have me rereading Ch14 and I've noticed that... Lemuel is much kinder than Duane! Sometimes it feels like Duane is mostly kind when it's convenient, whereas Lemuel looks out for others even outside of his immediate sphere. Heck, just one example: Duane heard how Lem had to strangle someone to death and... didn't even blink twice! I know they're at war, but that seemed so cold. I don't know! tl;dr They're great characters that make me think :)

It’s an interesting observation! I think that Lemuel and Duane are both very kind, but they are also pretty masculine. And at the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, it doesn’t seem that masculinity generally allows a man to easily give voice to his concerns and emotions. So Duane wouldn’t hear that Lemuel had to strangle a foeman to desperately save himself, and then turn around to Lem and ask if he was doing okay. He wouldn’t even do it in private. Likewise Lemuel wouldn’t ask Duane how he was doing after his travails at the Academy and his scary stint in Fachlyne. They just weren’t raised to talk to each other that way. Blame it on them mostly not having a mother, or on their grandpa being a hardass or on Alderode generally expecting men to be so emotionally opaque - but it’s not how these boys communicate with each other

But it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other or don’t do kindnesses for one another. Duane worked very hard to get himself transferred to the same Order as Lemuel. Duane’s very presence is in fact a great show of concern for his brother’s welfare. Seeking him out to fight alongside him in that first battle in ch14 was an act of kindness and concern. After the vliegeng falls from the sky, Lemuel goes into the chapel with Duane to be with him because he knew how nervous the whole thing had made him. The Adeliers may not *say* the right things to each other, but they are *there* for each other.

There were some other more subtle relationship dynamics at play in that chapter as well. In a sense, Lemuel’s ability to show concern for others was a privilege he could afford because he wasn’t an officer. Duane was, and didn’t feel he could show too much compassion because that’s a vulnerability. His charges would respect him less and have less confidence in their own roles if he wasn’t always a paragon of authority and strength to them. So he was always very concerned with their physical welfare, but showing concern for their emotional welfare was off the table.

(you see this learned pattern perfectly repeat fifteen years later with him and Sette)

You also see the brick wall between them in chapter 7 after their stickfight. Duane nudges a brick out of it and invites Lemuel to tell him why he’s been acting weird, but Lemuel does not budge. And Duane does not insist. Just like he never followed up with him in the army. Lemuel breaks down and bawls in his arms one night and Duane looks totally lost, defaulting back to how he would comfort him when he was a little boy. Lemuel holds on to his asploded comrade’s tooth and Duane just yells at him to burn it. Lemuel hacks up a giant boar in the wake of another comrade’s death and Duane continues on with his duties. Lemuel sets a cart of war prisoners on fire and Duane decides not to ever think about it again for fifteen years.

No, I don’t think the issue is one of a lack of kindness. It’s not knowing how to express his (frankly quite severe) concern for his brother in a socially acceptable way. Duane would have done anything for Lemuel, would have died for him happily, but he didn’t have the emotional tools to do what Lemuel really, truly needed.

"Curiosity Killed My Beia" A comic I did for The Spinoff's Comic of the Month

What's the difference in pronunciations between the Ss in Ssael and the S in Soud? Are they, perhaps, pronounced the same, but spelled so as an artefact from Old Tainish? What about the Mm in Mmatont- how's that pronounced?

Double S is a z. Double m is an m with a stop after, treat the mm like its own syllable. So it’s mm-atont. Like, yum, delicious traitors. Mm-atont.

Double n works the same. ssh- is the same. Double L I borrowed from Spanish, and is an english y, with the interesting New Tainish tweak of becoming a separate syllable if it’s at the end of a word. So sshupall (friend) is pronounced probably nothing like you’d imagine! It’s four syllables. ssh-oo-pah-yeh.

Originally I considered using more apostrophes and diacritics in Tainish but fantasy languages are always tattooed up with marks like eighty year old bikers. If French can have utterly unintuitive orthography, so can Tainish, by gum.

this test of the mountain

Man i love fishing

Those who approach the New Testament solely through English translations face a serious linguistic obstacle to apprehending what these writings say about justice. In most English translations, the word ‘justice’ occurs relatively infrequently. It is no surprise, then, that most English-speaking people think the New Testament does not say much about justice; the Bibles they read do not say much about justice. English translations are in this way different from translations into Latin, French, Spanish, German, Dutch — and for all I know, most languages. The basic issue is well known among translators and commentators. Plato’s Republic, as we all know, is about justice. The Greek noun in Plato’s text that is standardly translated as 'justice’ is 'dikaiosune;’ the adjective standardly translated as 'just’ is 'dikaios.’ This same dik-stem occurs around three hundred times in the New Testament, in a wide variety of grammatical variants. To the person who comes to English translations of the New Testament fresh from reading and translating classical Greek, it comes as a surprise to discover that though some of those occurrences are translated with grammatical variants on our word 'just,’ the great bulk of dik-stem words are translated with grammatical variants on our word 'right.’ The noun, for example, is usually translated as 'righteousness,’ not as 'justice.’ In English, we have the word 'just’ and its grammatical variants coming from the Latin iustitia, and the word 'right’ and its grammatical variants coming from the Old English recht. Almost all our translators have decided to translate the great bulk of dik-stem words in the New Testament with grammatical variants on the latter — just the opposite of the decision made by most translators of classical Greek. I will give just two examples of the point. The fourth of the beatitudes of Jesus, as recorded in the fifth chapter of Matthew, reads, in the New Revised Standard Version, 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.’ The word translated as 'righteousness’ is 'dikaiosune.’ And the eighth beatitude, in the same translation, reads 'Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ The Greek word translated as 'righteousness’ is 'dikaiosune.’ Apparently, the translators were not struck by the oddity of someone being persecuted because he is righteous. My own reading of human affairs is that righteous people are either admired or ignored, not persecuted; people who pursue justice are the ones who get in trouble. It goes almost without saying that the meaning and connotations of 'righteousness’ are very different in present-day idiomatic English from those of 'justice.’ 'Righteousness’ names primarily if not exclusively a certain trait of personal character. … The word in present-day idiomatic English carries a negative connotation. In everyday speech one seldom any more describes someone as righteous; if one does, the suggestion is that he is self-righteous. 'Justice,’ by contrast, refers to an interpersonal situation; justice is present when persons are related to each other in a certain way. … When one takes in hand a list of all the occurrences of dik-stem words in the Greek New Testament, and then opens up almost any English translation of the New Testament and reads in one sitting all the translations of these words, a certain pattern emerges: unless the notion of legal judgment is so prominent in the context as virtually to force a translation in terms of justice, the translators will prefer to speak of righteousness. Why are they so reluctant to have the New Testament writers speak of primary justice? Why do they prefer that the gospel of Jesus Christ be the good news of the righteousness of God rather than the good news of the justice of God? Why do they prefer that Jesus call his followers to righteousness rather than to justice?

Nicholas Wolsterstorff (via chamerionwrites)

Made a mouthwashing animation yayyy