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JohnnyEnzyme

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JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod , (edited )
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Oh rabbits, I forgot to format the titles properly. So then, I believe they are:

  1. Ducks
  2. Cherry
  3. Bangkok Temple
  4. Summer Meadow
  5. Crown Flowers
  6. Sunflower Harvest
JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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TBH ducks are complete bastards, yet I still love them.

Much like kitties, perhaps. XD

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Oh, rabbits!
Oh hey, give Astrid one these from me, okay?
It's...❤️

Via your favorite Python of choice, not just Michael Palin!

(now you got six to choose from, let's not have the pressure get to you, haha)

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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That's exactly right.

It's also right that sometimes we wish, eh... not to know for the sake of 'brain regularity,' haha.

1978: rainy day in the Ivory Coast (Clément Oubrerie) ( i.imgur.com )

I love how the sketchiness of the inking works perfectly with this rainy scene. It's from book one of the terrific series Aya de Yopougon, scripted by Marguerite Abouet, recounting her life spent living in a small town in Côte d'Ivoire, late 70's. At least, that's the starting point. I'll try to do a proper overview later,...

JohnnyEnzyme ,
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Well, notice the final version does include Fuji. For some reason OP neglected to post it, so here: Sea is for Cookie

(and yes, this was a random encounter!)

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Cool, thanks! One of the reviews there mentioned a service I wasn't aware of, which I've now edited in above. ^^

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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I liked it a lot and wished they’d do more in this universe

Ah, great. Glad that worked for you. And I agree, I felt they were really just scratching the surface after setting up such a fertile premise.

That said, as someone who's normally not a fan of anthropomorphic animal scenarios, I can nevertheless recommend the incredible District 14 series, as well as Bryan Talbot's five Grandville books. I found them both delightful, with intelligent world-building, altho the former was more whimsical and light-hearted whereas the latter more noirish and violent.

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Exactly.

Lol, I've been in many, many internet fights across the decades, and for some reason we've never even come close to that! (me, I blame a naked mole which I saw running around here earlier)

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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❤️

JohnnyEnzyme Mod ,
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Interesting how Moeby brings in so many cultural elements I associate from around the world and blends them in to a relatively harmonious whole. It makes me wonder what his world and cultural philosophies were like, how much he studied history, and how long he spent on detailed visual designs like this.

I remember reading a co-interview he had with Miyazaki, and while the former seemed to speak clearly and comprehensively, Giraud seemed to be speaking as if from dreamland, with the interviewer and Miyazaki frequently not quite sure what he meant(!) But maybe that makes perfect sense for one such as he.

OTOH, watching this fun video, a younger Moeby seemed utterly present, focused, and in the moment, altho of course there wasn't a lot of dialogue, and the format was very different.

JohnnyEnzyme Mod , (edited )
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Oh yes, Willow. <3
Indeed, I personally wanted be... "Madmardagain," was it? (the Val Kilmer role)

I any case, I love this series you've turned up here, matey.

To me, it just goes to show how movies can go through so many planning-aspects, with the final-product barely resembling all the initial work put in to it, you know?

***You again!*** (Yves Chaland, from "Bob Fish") ( i.imgur.com )

This is from the book Les cybers ne sont pas des hommes ("Cybers are not men"), in which François Landon wrote the script. The book follows a format in which text appears on one page, then a wordless splash page on the next. I found the 1st/3rd-person narrative rather surreal, almost cynical in tone, in which a couple...

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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It's fertiliser, enriching the earth! ^^

JohnnyEnzyme Mod ,
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I have a... less than wholesome feeling about this!

JohnnyEnzyme ,
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Yes, I found it well-written but not all that enlightening. I recognise that it made sense for SpaceGhost/CheapSkate to build his sites out by hand in the true spirit of DIY, but that doesn't seem too practical or advisable for most folks.

The various federated software & networks may have their weak points and inconsistencies, but far as I can tell it's still best for volunteer site runners to work within that framework so as to remain connected to something bigger than just their little personal corner of the internet. Is it really so expensive a thing to federate? I seem to recall that some instances can host for only ~US$20, which doesn't seem bad at all. Images are arguably best stored at other sites like Imgur, anyway.

@Blaze

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Tolkien’s short stories

I remember a lot of them being in poem form, something I had to be in the right frame of mind to get in to. But I liked getting more backstory on Bombadil in particular.

Indeed, I kind of get a kick out of Tolkien fans arguing to this day what kind of being Bombadil was.

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Honestly, BD has been a huge motivator for me continuing to work on my French.
The DuoLingo app isn't perfect, but it's helped me a lot, especially when combined with Google Translate and a couple other resources.

JohnnyEnzyme ,
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There's absolute mass quantities, as Beldar the Conehead might say.

It's easy enough to guess that plenty of people just grabbed a community name in case they might find it useful one day, but I'm guessing plenty of others legitimately started up a community, put some effort in to it, then ultimately got discouraged and abandoned it. A big part of that likely due to not being able to attract many subscribers and contributors.

Personally what I've found is that if you really want a community to grow, you need to seed it with content on a regular basis; preferably daily. Posting bots are probably a good way to help with that, altho if the sub looks like it's little more than bot posts, I don't think users will be inclined to post or comment much.

What I haven't quite figured out myself is how to incline users to post on their own, but hopefully with time that issue will kind of resolve itself due to sheer user count.

Btw, see here:
https://lemm.ee/c/fedigrow

JohnnyEnzyme ,
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Hmm, it looks like you're mod of ~three fairly dormant communities that have very small user bases. Unfortunately, at that size I wouldn't think there'd be much in the way of regular comments, much less guest posts.

In my case I was lucky, because a co-mod and regular poster happened to join in early-on, and we were able to build up the first couple hundred users fairly quickly.

But something else that I think helped a lot was that our community is very visual-oriented, so it was pretty easy to find users who were perfectly happy to join up just to look at pretty images without necessarily clicking links or putting too much thought in to anything deeper. So pandering to the lowest common denominator of user interest seems to work nicely for building up base numbers. That said, there's still a lot of growth we need to do, which likely involves outreach of some kind or another.

JohnnyEnzyme ,
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Oh shoot, I meant the above for @small44 actually, i.e. OP. I don't believe you had replied to me at any point, hence that wasn't meant for you.

That said-- I'm not too sure the "90:9:1" rule applies so well to the FV. For one thing, it seems like a good number of subscribers tried out Lemmy (etc) at some point and then went back to Reddit (etc), meaning they're no longer really here. Another point is that since the FV moves a lot more slowly than Reddit, I question whether FV users are as active here compared to other places.

About the bias of me seeing only part of Small44's community numbers due to filtering by my own instance-- you're right of course, but after double-checking their overall global numbers, they're actually only a tiny bit larger. Ironically or not, most of their users came from my own instance (lemm.ee). So their numbers across three communities are really too small to ever be properly viable IME.

So something like the kbin worldnews community I mod has literally thousands of inactive subscribers.

Geez, that's... not good. :S

https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]

JohnnyEnzyme ,
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I remember this craziness.

I remember that craziness because as a young adult, I was working nearby and saw the smoke clouds.

...and of course, it was all considered ok.

I'm unaware of anyone at all those days who considered it 'all okay.' On the contrary, it put a kind of national spotlight on Philly police' brutality going back to the Rizzo days, and doubtless contributed to Rizzo never being mayor again. And I think even amongst the folks who believed the bombing was justified, a large segment had to admit that it obviously went very, very wrong.

All that said-- yeah, as a nation I'm not sure we learned a damn thing out of all that. The police certainly didn't appear to.

JohnnyEnzyme ,
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I'm not surprised there was a deal of confusion about it. It was a complicated affair that doesn't have much analogue in contemporary history AFAIK.

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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the ‘musician’ looking closely like Jules-de-chez-Smith

Oh wow, that's gotta be him! Oh dear, does that mean he's a spy, too? lol

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Out of the examples here, Nävis' son Yanno is the humanoid with the 'black eye':

https://www.google.com/search?q=Yanno+from+Sillage&udm=2

***When Franka met "Rix,"*** i.e. how practical is it for main characters to find romance, anyway? (four pages, FR) [**NSFW**] ( i.imgur.com )

Someone in an Asterix forums recently complained that Obelix never got a proper love interest, and it got me thinking... I mean, it seems that across Asterix, Lucky Luke, Tintin and probably many other popular series, very few (or outright none?) of the main characters discovered a bona fide romantic partner, and I suspect that...

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod , (edited )
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Cool, thanks for that link! It seems there's a point being made there that somewhat echoes one of my own, in that while the two leads are affectionate, the albums themselves don't seem to devote too much time & space (haha) to them being romantic or outright sleeping together. That seems to reinforce the idea that such things might be at odds with the overall aim & philosophy of the series. *shrug*

In any case, Laureline was conceived from the beginning as a main character, right? So what I'm curious about is when a successful series later adds a main character via the mechanism of a love interest.

Smurfette from Les Schtroumpfs is sort of a sideways example, but in her case she was moreso just a main character being added that wasn't the GF of anyone in particular.

Or if you remove the romance angle, then the biggest examples I can think of right now would be the Tintin series adding Haddock and then Calculus. Altho they obviously worked out beautifully, there was always the chance that readers wouldn't appreciate them, requiring Hergé to 'fade them out' one way or another.

I feel like there's got to be an example when things like that don't work out, but I think it also goes to show why so many series have been cautious about that kind of thing.

EDIT: Oh wow, I just double-checked and realised that Laureline was not originally a colleague of Valérian, but rather a peasant girl from 11th-century France who joined up with him in the debut album Bad Dreams. So she technically was added to the series, but since we're talking the very first album... hmmm. :S

EDIT2: Ooh, I just thought of another candidate! That would be Nävis from Sillage (Wake in English) hooking up with a Human-like male and producing a son ("Yanno") who later joins her in the adventures.

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Damn, Franka is such a cutie and so strong and dominant at the same time!

I do tend to prefer female leads, I think because their stories tend to be more interesting, less gimmicky, and more 'telling of the human condition.' OTOH, I'm also a sucker for beautiful babes, and Franka is a nice compromise I think because she lets me be a horny teenager at one level, but also someone kind of awestruck by how clever and powerful she is as a character. So... yeah, lol, I agree!

So, Animah is maybe the best example so far after Rix, who Franka does have plenty of sex with (mostly implied, but still). I haven't read any Incal in a long time. :S

Btw, I just found out that in a later album Rix betrays Franka, and deus ex machina, is indeed promptly killed off, seemingly confirming my thoughts in the post. It can work for stuff like Franka and The Incal, but would be a disaster in other works.

I guess Stel and Atana is a little more iffy for me. That was one of the first Moeby stories I ever read, and I distinctly remember the male (Stel?) becoming obsessed with Atana and chasing her away. I guess in a later volume she finally accepted him, but then it was revealed that the whole sequence was merely a dream-fantasy, right?

I still refuse to consider that episode canon and I never will!

Haha, I can understand that. Personally I'm a bit torn, as I've always liked Le Retour de Martin Guerre and other imposter stories / films, but I guess I see yours and others' point that there was simply too much of Skinner's backstory to simply throw it all away like that, yup.

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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M'oiselle Jeanne is a solid example, altho only kind of scratches the surface, I think. From what I've seen, she and Gaston are stuck in a schoolboy - schoolgirl admiration stage without it ever becoming anything more serious. This allows the series to relegate her to the status of being just another office character who Gaston occasionally interacts with a little more closely, as you mention.

It would be adorable, but I’m not sure if there’d be a point to it other than fan service.

Yeah, I agree. It works for the chief's wife "Impedimentia" in English, but she's also a nagging, generally unlikeable character. It would be too disrespectful I think for Obelix' wife to be anything like that, and OTOH if she resembled Geriatrix' nameless bombshell of a wife, it wouldn't really make sense, either. Both Asterix and Obelix work best as free-spirits I think.

Contemplating the **Land of Mu** (Hugo Pratt, from ***Corto Maltese***) ( i.imgur.com )

This story finds Corto reuniting with many friends from previous stories, searching for the Mu, the fabled lost city. The Mu story is incredibly convoluted, making this a particularly hard translation. Lots of statements contradicting previous statements. It took me a while to come to the decision that Pratt was doing this on...

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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...it’s precisely on this line between concept and rendering where and illustration of discovering a non-existent continent should be.

Very interesting observation. Me like!

Anyway yeah, I'm a big fan of 'in-betweener' art, i.e. more than just a sketch, but not quite 'completely finished art.' Most of my own art is in fact just like that.

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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TBH I'm nowhere near the 'controlled-looseness' of Hugo Pratt's ink and watercolors, but I sent you a link, yeah.

***Whoopsie.*** (more fake Tintin covers and other goodies) ( i.imgur.com )

This is the cover of a book, and unfortunately I found the contents rather mediocre by the standards of all the fun fan-based Tintin art out there. So I'm going to pivot by moving on to a few more hand-selected goodies I've uploaded below. Some of them involve film references or artist homages:...

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Hmm, I was kinda puzzling over what you meant by "political," then it hit me that maybe you meant the landslide of crazy alter-egos that showed up later in the book!

Then it hit me again that the book was published in 1974, when I seem to recall a major, popular psychological effort to break down one's being in to different aspects, like "id," "ego," and "superego."

Holy shizzle, author Nicole was swinging at some major, respected piñatas right there! XD

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Was that an attempt to say "what's this shit?" perchance...?

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Ugh. As an active French-learner, I just give up:

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-say-what-the-fuck-or-wtf-in-French

&^!@$

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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It's the german-accented french that's confusing both me and google-translate:

https://i.imgur.com/GegxRiP.jpeg

"I *know*; that's what bothers me." (from ***Tiny Dracula*** by Nathan Olsen) ( i.imgur.com )

I don't know much about Olsen other than he has a Danish-Norwegian surname and his art vaguely fits under the umbrella of 'LC.' Specifically, I enjoy the playful style he uses in his comics. More samples from Tiny Dracula here:...

JohnnyEnzyme OP Mod ,
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Yet if the urge strikes me, can I just make posts? is there a certain format I should adhere to? Do we consider English comics also as part of this?

Sure, feel free to post when the mood hits you. You don't have to follow my format. I think the sidebar lays out everything you need to know, but there are also some posting tips in the FAQ. I personally consider the UK part of the the overall "Euro" experience, so please fire away with Moore or other Brits.

Altho yes, I know what you mean about certain UK creators straddling continents as it were. Bryan Talbot and Pat Mills come to mind...

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