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Worlds & Stories Discussion Board / Re: Comic of the Month
« Last post by lwise on May 05, 2024, 07:07:05 PM »
If anyone is interested in landscape rendering -- this is computer assisted art but without any AI -- E-onsoftware's Vue and PlantFactory are now totally free with a perpetual license!  https://www.bentley.com/software/e-on-software-downloads/
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Worlds & Stories Discussion Board / Re: Comic of the Month
« Last post by Jitter on May 05, 2024, 03:13:12 PM »
Thanks Linebyline, I knew I could count on you!
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Worlds & Stories Discussion Board / Re: Comic of the Month
« Last post by Linebyline on May 05, 2024, 12:11:15 PM »
Wow, I've been slacking on keeping up with this thread. Barely scratched the surface of the Witch Door. Still need to finish Chirault. Sadly (but fortunately, for backlog purposes) I think I'll have to pass on Root and Branch for NSFW reasons. It sounds interesting, though!

I don't think I have any pitches ready to go, but I'll double check. If not, I'm sure I can come up with something, but the writeup may take a little while.

Meanwhile, Rising Sand is updating again. Vainglorious and Phantomarine are going strong. Suihira's still on indefinite mental-health hiatus. Widdershins is too, as of January.

EDIT: Okay, that didn't take as long as I thought.

Inner Space is a completed comic by Renee LeCompte. The homepage is the cover; click through to see the first page.

Our heroine is Mag, a wingless gryphon-like creature with a lot of fear and not a lot of patience. In her defense, she just woke up with amnesia in an environment filled with danger. She's probably handling it better than I would. But she spends a lot of time in the gray area between terrified and exasperated.

Well, really, all the areas are gray. The comic is pencil-shaded. It's quite lovely in my opinion, even if it could stand a little digital post-processing to improve the contrast. Also, it's kind of an old comic, so you might want to zoom in to read it comfortably at modern screen resolutions. (120% is nice and comfy on my 1080p laptop screen.) But the characters' faces and body language are clear and expressive. Environments vary widely from whimisical to perilous, to whimsical and perilous, to cozy, to oppressive. You may run into the occasional action scene that's difficult to parse, or lettering that's too small and blurry and gray to read comfortably, but if you can get past that, your eyes are in for a treat.

I still don't have a good place to post excerpts, but here are a few representative pages: 25, 179, 95, 15.

The story follows Mag as she tries to piece together who she is, where she is, and how she got into this mess. And also not die. Helping (and/or "helping") her is the adorable and only slightly obnoxious Id, a hyper little kid who knows her way aroud (somewhat; more than Mag does, at any rate) and has all the confidence Mag lacks, while lacking most of the self-preservation instinct that Mag has.

This has all the makings of a fantasy road-trip buddy comedy, and that is a big part of teh story. But be warned, it also goes to some dark places. This is ultimately a story about Mag's mental health. The worst of it is, as we learn fairly late:
Spoiler: show
the reason she's in this situation is because of a failed(?) suicide attempt.


There are scenes of peril that won't faze SSSS readers, but definitely read it through once before handing it to the youg'uns. There's no gore, but I hesitate to say there's no violence given the amount of time Mag and Id spend getting chased by monsters. At least one character gets swallowed whole. There's a case of significant head trauma toward the end, though we don't see anything graphic. No sex or nudity. Well, okay, there's pretty much constant nudity, but it's the no-pants-funny-animal kind, so probably considered SFW in most jurisdictions.
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Worlds & Stories Discussion Board / Re: Comic of the Month
« Last post by Jitter on May 05, 2024, 10:10:44 AM »
Hello all, it’s May already. May I interest someone to present a comic?
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General Discussion Board / Re: General Discussion Thread
« Last post by thorny on May 04, 2024, 10:36:27 AM »
A viewpoint from many years later:

If you have a great time in high school: excellent! A lot of people do overall, even if they have some bad moments; and you very well may be one of them.

If you don't have a great time in high school: there's very little connection between having a good high school experience, or a good teenage experience in general, and having a good life later on. Many of the excellent people, living good lives that they'd chosen, who I got to know and love as an adult had a bad time in high school.

-- if you're scared specifically of in-school violence: I'm afraid I can't speak much to that. That was certainly a problem some places while I was in high school; but news distribution was a lot different at the time, and we rarely heard of problems that weren't local to us. I will suggest being careful of where you get your news from, and also recommend only checking news occasionally, not making it a continuous part of your day -- I know that's a lot harder to do than it used to be.
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General Discussion Board / Re: General Discussion Thread
« Last post by Keep Looking on May 04, 2024, 04:44:59 AM »
Hiya, good to see you!

At least from my personal experience (as a kinda socially awkward nerd), my tips for high school would be "don't be afraid of talking to different people and making friends" "if your friends suck and start treating each other badly, don't be afraid to leave them" and "if you do leave a group of friends, don't be scared to try and find a new group".

I say this because I left a friend group who were treating each other badly, but I didn't make new friends until I moved schools and spent two years being sad and lonely. To be fair, making friends was kinda difficult, but there were people I probably could have befriended if I hadn't been so apprehensive about it.

Also: try not to get too caught up in people's drama, it never really turns out well. Teenagers can have drama over a lot of stupid things.

On the academic side, pay attention in class and try and keep on top of assignments and things, but it's ok if you don't put 100% of your effort into your schoolwork - good grades in high school can be helpful but they really don't make or break that much of your future. I did not take this advice (or at least I understood it conceptually but could not bring myself to do it) and I was very stressed in my last few years.
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General Discussion Board / Re: General Discussion Thread
« Last post by noonnoommoon on May 03, 2024, 11:38:57 PM »
Probably a strange question to ask in a forum of Adults, but! Does anyone have any tips/tricks for someone who's going to be a high schooler next year? I'm. Kind of scared ngl...
Also hiii I haven't been here for like half a year
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General Discussion Board / Re: General Discussion Thread
« Last post by Jitter on May 03, 2024, 05:31:38 PM »
I have a friend who is a teacher, nowadays in Texas. I just can’t wrap my head around the way she repeatedly mentions having been in lockdown and of days when she’s debating whether she should send farewell messages to her own children. Several times a year. Being a teacher is not supposed to be a high risk job! How can it possibly be that things are that bad?

We had a school shooting in Finlad just recently, a 12-year old shot one classmate dead and two others were seriously injured. But this was the first incident in over 15 years. In the US there were 207 school shoorings in 2010-2019. Since 2020 to date it’s at 193 (source Wikipedia). Are we quite sure the end of the world has not already happened?
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General Discussion Board / Re: General Discussion Thread
« Last post by Glass on May 02, 2024, 10:23:37 AM »
The world is in a particular kind of way at the moment - chaos is constant, but it seems tragedy is haunting the 2020s more than usual.
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General Discussion Board / Re: General Discussion Thread
« Last post by thorny on May 02, 2024, 10:16:17 AM »
That is indeed terrible. I'm sorry for all concerned. And how are we getting 14 year olds into such a state? (And I wonder whether they could have stopped the child without shooting him. News stories don't seem to be addressing that, at least so far.)
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