you know how in comics, the text is all capital letters? I’ve never understood that. so I asked some comic artists, and I’m thoroughly unsatisfied with every answer I got. it smells to me like comics are like this, simply because they’re like this. it’s one of them traditions that nobody questions

so I dug around a little, and I’m already starting to suspect I’m right about that

(boost this post if you think it’s interesting and tell me your thoughts, please and thank you)

the “it’s for visual clarity” argument doesn’t make sense to me at all in the modern day, when printing is such high quality, the text is all way bigger than any novel, and a lot of comics are read digitally anyway, on modern, extremely clear screens, where people can zoom in if they want to

heck, expanding on the novel comparison, even large print novels sometimes still have smaller text than comics do, but even when the size is the same, novels are still much less “visually clear” since the font is thinner and all the text is crammed so close together… but pretty much everybody who doesn’t have dyslexia reads novels just fine, and not only do comic fonts not help dyslexic readers at all, text in all-caps is more likely to harm them than help them

you know when all caps did make sense for visual clarity? pulp comics. when they were printed on thin, crappy paper with crappy ink on crappy printers in the name of high volume, where there was a very high risk of ink bleeding, which would harm readability. in other words, it wasn’t done because large, all-caps text is inherently clearer, but because it’s less susceptible to that particular technical limitation. bigger letters don’t bleed less than smaller letters, they’re just bigger, which means they’re less unreadable when they do bleed

you know what actually matters for “visual clarity” in general? font choice, bubble placement, use of color if applicable, and adequate outlines when outside of bubbles. the text itself is irrelevant to its clarity

I have yet to find anything that substantially supports any real, practical, provable argument that all-caps text in comics in the current day is actually beneficial for anything, other than staying visually consistent with all the other comics that do the same thing, which itself is a pretty bad argument if you ask me. if anyone reading this has any real, actual evidence, be it supporting my position here or against it, please share that with me, I’d appreciate that

but I’m real close to reaching the conclusion that comics should write their text in sentence case and probably should have been doing that for the last 50 years. if I ever strike it rich enough to commission an artist to create a comic for me, I’m probably going to either force them to write the text in sentence case, or do the typesetting myself

who would win:

• a 4k raytraced AAA interactive blockbuster movie with hundreds of hours of gameplay, Hollywood-level cutscenes and voicework, and a budget of over $1 billion USD
• some MMO from 2004 that looks like this

so, random thought but

the way that files are organized is as a tree structure. there’s a root directory and then nodes can either be folders or files, which implies that a file can only be categorized under one folder at a time. and obviously this works pretty well for the most part but I feel like it might be a bit reductive at times too. for example what if I’m organizing pics by theme and I have a pic that fits two themes? I can’t put it in both folders at once unless I want to mess around with hardlinks or symlinks or something

but what if there were tags instead of folders? a file can have an arbitrary number of tags, and tags can have subtags (for example “pics” -> “by theme” -> “spooky”) that way files can show up under multiple “folders” (tags) at the same time, by design

there is probably some unknown unknown that makes this a terrible idea btw - it’s just something I’ve been thinking about

Gothy song of the day: Yan Wagner - On Her Knees

sometimes there comes along about which I like to say that it "serves cunt". this is one of those

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHIh1rTv67E

#goth #darkwave #minimalwave #ebm #postpunk #gothic #krismusicposting #music #song

I recently learned the word superlinear (for describing a math function that increases faster than a linear function could increase) and I’m so glad that I know it now because before I would be like:

“it increases exponentially. well okay like, I know ‘exponentially’ has a really specific definition in math and I’m not sure if this is specifically exponential but, the rate at which it’s increasing is itself increasing. does that make sense?”

every single time lol

I fucking love games that have the bare minimum of story in order to tell you who you are and what you’re doing

but then the world is so vibey that you want to read more anyway, and it turns out there’s a bunch of optional lore that you can read to learn about anything you want

Mass Effect’s codex system is my absolute favorite example of this because the lore is unlocked as soon as you start wondering about a topic, and you can access it any time in the pause menu with no bullshit

for some reason I hate RPG elements when they’re framed as attacking an enemy but I love them when they’re framed as Clicking On Rocks

like why the fuck do I love Runescape but not Pokémon? they’re effectively the same thing: do a braindead simple task an unreasonable number of times in order to unlock a slight variation on that task that you have to do even more times

what’s weird too is that WoW’s combat-oriented progression systems frustrate me. but the crafting progression systems? fucking love them

maybe part of it is I just like being able to make my own gear and see the aesthetic change of wearing different gear that looks cooler and better

for a long time I thought speedrunning meant “go as fast as you can” and to me that means exhausting myself rushing, which is not sustainable and not fun

but now I understand that it probably means “play the game so frequently that going fast is almost automatic”. it’s not that in their head they’re frantic for the entire run - instead it’s more like the “slow is smooth. smooth is fast” philosophy:

they started at the fastest pace that they could complete all of the required tasks with no mistakes. (this was probably pretty slow at first) then they practiced at that pace until they were able to go faster while still making no mistakes. and then they got faster and faster

so it’s not exhausting and hectic for them - it’s a practiced skill that feels natural

and to be honest, I wonder if the whole concept of speedrunning came from autistic people replaying their favorite game over and over. starting at a normal pace and getting faster over time until they started wondering “how much faster can I go?” because trying to be faster added a new layer of fun to a game they already loved

starting to think that I should stop posting eight million polls per day. sorry everyone

(I do want to continue the build-a-partner thing eventually though. I feel like I probably just asked y’all too many questions back-to-back with no real reward yet. so instead I’ll probably pick the traits that I want to write about (from the tie-breaker poll) and try to paint a good, evocative picture of them. and if folks are interested then I can do the lewd questions that I was saving for dessert, because I would love write erotic/kinky things about that character)

hi fedi i have a request for a friend who doesn’t use fedi

do yall know any artists that are good at drawing robots/dolls and do commissions? any suggestions are good, so if this is you or someone you know or whatever, feel free to promote!

• carrie

congratulations to Boba Fett - the galaxy’s first visor drone to come out as nega-trans

winning 100,000 internet arguments about why Linux is better than Windows or why FOSS is superior or why enshittification is bad

is still worse than helping one (1) non-technical person install Linux on their machine that can’t run Windows 11. or helping them install and learn to use LibreOffice because they can’t afford Office 365. or teaching them how to disable the spyware and adware on their Windows machine

for every person who’s staunchly anti-FOSS, there’s someone trying Linux for the first time and overwhelmed by driver issues, or someone who simply doesn’t know how to find good free software, or someone who wants to learn photo editing and can’t afford Photoshop

so don’t be pushy or smug or argumentative towards those who have already made up their minds. be informative and helpful to those who are open to help. tell them what their options are and be ready to provide support if things go wrong

looks like Windows 11 just updated and installed Copilot on my PC (including the incredibly invasive screenshotting “feature”). but thankfully O&O ShutUp 10 had already pre-disabled Copilot and it’s still disabled now, so all is well

I’m ngl I would never recommend that anyone use Windows 11 unless they’re also going to run O&O ShutUp 10 alongside it

you either die elegant and minimal or live long enough to see yourself become bloated and kludgy

the less interesting a YouTube video’s topic sounds, the more interesting the video will be

anyway today I am learning about the history and culture of Chinese takeout menus