Bad webcomics

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Or, and work with me on this, the rates of left-handedness was reported at increasing frequency because methods of research and acquiring volunteers improved. The only tangible citation this has, and it's dubious as hell. You can't hope to "educate" people skeptical of yourself when you use flowery language without a sliver of credibility.

Here's an actual citation. Nobody is surprised that Sweden is significantly more open and accepting of LGBT-related issues. Yet, for some reason, then rates of suicide in transgender populations is almost identical to America. So if all we need to do is be more encouraging of the trans population, why aren't the rates lowered in Sweden?

The left handedness comparison is also atrocious as an analogy because if a person forced to use their right hand their whole life wants to use their left hand, they just use their left hand. Even in the worst possible examples, they're not going to be hurting themselves any time soon. Comparatively, if a people who was male their whole life decides to be female, it requires a concoction of hormones and surgeries which cannot be described as anything but destructive. I understand there's a certain suspension of belief for an analogy to work, but there's a difference between skipping logical hurdles for a clearer comprehension and a completely awful analogy.
 
If being left handed allowed you be free from all criticism, and simply identifying as left handed granted you those protections, you'd see a ton of malignant narcissists suddenly become left handed and gofundmes for $12,000 so they can buy left handed scissors
 
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Or, and work with me on this, the rates of left-handedness was reported at increasing frequency because methods of research and acquiring volunteers improved. The only tangible citation this has, and it's dubious as hell. You can't hope to "educate" people skeptical of yourself when you use flowery language without a sliver of credibility.

Here's an actual citation. Nobody is surprised that Sweden is significantly more open and accepting of LGBT-related issues. Yet, for some reason, then rates of suicide in transgender populations is almost identical to America. So if all we need to do is be more encouraging of the trans population, why aren't the rates lowered in Sweden?

The left handedness comparison is also atrocious as an analogy because if a person forced to use their right hand their whole life wants to use their left hand, they just use their left hand. Even in the worst possible examples, they're not going to be hurting themselves any time soon. Comparatively, if a people who was male their whole life decides to be female, it requires a concoction of hormones and surgeries which cannot be described as anything but destructive. I understand there's a certain suspension of belief for an analogy to work, but there's a difference between skipping logical hurdles for a clearer comprehension and a completely awful analogy.
My grandfather was left handed when schools still did right hand only thing. While I'm sure it wasn't exactly pleasant or intuitive, it didn't cause dyslexia, learning disabilities or extreme anything. Actually it mostly just trained him to be able use both hands almost equally good. For example he would pick berries faster than anyone because he could pick with both hands same rate. Sure there were activities that he preferred one hand over the other, like writing with his righ hand and eating with leaf hand, but in general he had little issues doing stuff with whatever and this served him fine in life.

So yeah... I don't think this is the comparison they are looking for.
 
My grandfather was left handed when schools still did right hand only thing. While I'm sure it wasn't exactly pleasant or intuitive, it didn't cause dyslexia, learning disabilities or extreme anything. Actually it mostly just trained him to be able use both hands almost equally good. For example he would pick berries faster than anyone because he could pick with both hands same rate. Sure there were activities that he preferred one hand over the other, like writing with his righ hand and eating with leaf hand, but in general he had little issues doing stuff with whatever and this served him fine in life.

So yeah... I don't think this is the comparison they are looking for.
my Grandfather was lefthanded, and he lost that hand in a sawmill accident as a young adult. (Also they probably punished lefthandedness at school sooooo). So he was pretty much forced to write with his right hand from then on out.

I guess if we were to follow the tortured analogy of the comic in question, this would be akin to that Jazz kid who can't get a hatchet vaj because of the hormone blockers taken too soon, lol.
 
My grandfather was left handed when schools still did right hand only thing. While I'm sure it wasn't exactly pleasant or intuitive, it didn't cause dyslexia, learning disabilities or extreme anything. Actually it mostly just trained him to be able use both hands almost equally good. For example he would pick berries faster than anyone because he could pick with both hands same rate. Sure there were activities that he preferred one hand over the other, like writing with his righ hand and eating with leaf hand, but in general he had little issues doing stuff with whatever and this served him fine in life.

So yeah... I don't think this is the comparison they are looking for.
My grandfather was ambidextrous after the same experience. He just got used to using both hands. Honestly, it could be used as a shitty allegory for conversion therapy working, since all you gotta do is use your non-dominant hand over and over and it'll feel natural!
 
Greg Dean / Mae Dean, creator of Real Life Comics, made fun of Comic Sans in a comic last week, then received backlash from the community because "DYSLEXICS USE COMIC SANS. REEE!" , then doubled down and posted a 13-tweet thread full of autism about fonts, which he has since deleted.

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Late af, but this twat's self-important idiocy is making me MATI and I feel compelled to weigh in. Spoilered on account of the terminal levels of spergery about shit no one with a fulfilling life cares about.

In spite of all the 'graphic design is my passion' memes, no serious type designer (not any graphic designer, mind, someone who actually has proven their autistic resolve by designing a typeface and thus knows the amount of obnoxiously anal and ungrateful work it entails) will dare shit on Comic Sans because, atrociously overused and puerile as it is, the guy who designed it sure as fuck knew what he was doing.

To put it on terms of his half-arsed chef analogy, imagine Comic Sans is treacle. It makes sense only in the very specific context of a pudding. If you, as a chef, marinate your steak in only treacle, chances are it's gonna taste like shit unless you're really gifted, and treacle is not gonna be the one to blame for your incompetence.

Picture a sign in the motorway. The font may not look nice in the a e s t h e t i c dribbble shots you use to pad your portfolio. Brilliant, guess what, it's not supposed to. You were able to read the sign easily, at a distance, while in motion; it had one job and it delivered, therefore well designed: now shut up.

Bonus autism round: this nonce's witticisms on Gill Sans are a hell of a wasted opportunity.
 
Ok fine since youre doing a read and review I'll break kayfabe.

That 3.5 pages single spaced shit on Rando is less SJW and more inline with classic liberal thought of "why do we have to be such dicks to each other all the time? Can't we show some compassion? PS My farts smell AMAZING today." Regardless, I did not need an archive of the "laughing my ass off bottom text"; 1/0 was bad enough, his Poly & queer follow up was gratingly pretentious, I didn't see any need to go along for the ride of his transition journal.

And while I look forward to your summaries, the art isn't eye-gouging and the script is too weighty to be "bad" in the traditional sense, so I'm not sure if it really qualifies as a bad web comic... at least not while Moon over June still exists.

Okay, so I just finished reading the next 50 or so comics in Forward. And I actually felt kinda bad bringing it up on the bad webcomics thread because I've started to like it, but I'll do this one more time here, specifically to highlight something it does rather well and something that Questionable Content does badly:

Robots.

Tailsteak actually made a QC comparison himself at one point, which was to point out how unrealistic it was that even though QC takes place in a world where futuristic robots and body modifications exist, it's still not possible for trans women to get a functioning vagina. It was only done that way in the comic because Jeff Jacks wanted to write about a trans woman, internal consistency in the setting be damned!

Of course, Tailsteak goes on to say that his comic does take place in the futuristic world that trans people only wish that they lived in. I beg to differ. While I'm sure a great many of them would prefer it this way, the ones who proudly define the movement's goals would hate it almost as much as they hate the real world.

For one, there would be no social norms to enjoy breaking, In a world where everyone uses the same pronoun, there'd be no fun to be had from changing it. After all, the people using non-standard pronouns typically only do so amongst their own little community and no one else. They enjoy how insular their community is, and deep down wish it could stay that way. Because when everyone is trans, no one will be.

Anyway, that was a tangent.

QC's robots live amongst humans in a modern setting as their theoretical equals. That last part is important. While early QC saw 'AnthroPCs' as more or less equivalent to household pets, the recent strips show them as a thinly veiled metaphor for some as-of-yet unspecified group of Oppressed People.

This of course, is rife with the assumption that a robot (essentially a collection of tiny switches) can be alive and have consciousness, which I think is some bullshit

Ever since the QC robots got upgraded to human-sized bodies (which the wiki says happened in strip 2001. Insert HAL 9000 joke here), Jeff Jacks has been going out his way to confer personhood on these machines. Often they are only visually distinguished from humans by their unusual skintones, square-cornered speech bubbles, and one or two lines on their bodies.

And then we get strips like 4433, which pretty much shouts the subtext in your face.

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Whereas Tailsteak, on the other hand, actually shows robots as mere creations of man, with a one-track mind set on achieving their intended purpose. Despite having near-human intelligence and being able to imitate emotions, they are correctly regarded as things. His robots are also more mechanical looking. And while every human we've seen so far is referred to using they/them pronouns, the robots are invariably described as 'it'.

I'd show you a page, but I can't find just one that exemplifies it best. But just start at page 1 and work your way forward. There is also this brilliant quote from one of his after-comic bits (the ones that often take longer to read than the comic itself).
Zoa, like Doc, does not have emotions or an ego. It is an AI. If it displays a facial expression, it is doing so on purpose, for a purpose.

This, my friend, is the right was to do robots in a sci-fi. A human society that treats robots anything like the way they're depicted in QC... probably won't be a human society for very much longer.
 
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Okay, so I just finished reading the next 50 or so comics in Forward. And I actually felt kinda bad bringing it up on the bad webcomics thread because I've started to like it, but I'll do this one more time here, specifically to highlight something it does rather well and something that Questionable Content does badly:

Robots.

Tailsteak actually made a QC comparison himself at one point, which was to point out how unrealistic it was that QC takes place in a world where futuristic robots and body modifications exist, it's still not possible for trans women to get a functioning vagina. And it was done that way in the comic because Jeff Jacks really wanted to write about a trans woman, internal consistency in the setting be damned!

Of course, Tailsteak goes on to say that his comic takes place in the futuristic world that trans people can only wish they lived in. I beg to differ. While I'm sure a lot of them would prefer it, the ones who proudly define the movement's goals would hate it as much as the real world.

For one, there would be no social norms to enjoy breaking, In a world where everyone uses the same pronoun, there'd be fun to be had from changing it. After all, the people using non-standard pronouns typically only do so amongst their own community and no one else. They enjoy how insular their community is, and deep down wish it could stay that way. Because when everyone is trans, no one will be.

Anyway, that was a tangent.

QC's robots live amongst humans in a modern setting as their theoretical equals. That last part is important. While early QC saw 'AnthroPCs' as more or less equivalent to household pets, the recent strips show them as a thinly veiled metaphor for some as-of-yet unspecified group of Oppressed People.

This of course, is rife with the assumption that a robot (essentially a collection of tiny switches) can be alive and have consciousness, which I think is some bullshit

Ever since the QC robots got upgraded to human-sized bodies (which the wiki says happened in strip 2001. Insert HAL 9000 joke here), Jeff Jacks has been going out his way to confer personhood on these machines. Often they are only visually distinguished from humans by their unusual skintones, square-cornered speech bubbles, and one or two lines on their bodies.

And then we get strips like 4433, which pretty much shouts the subtext in your face.


Whereas Tailsteak, on the other hand, actually shows robots as mere creations of man, with a one-track mind set on achieving their intended purpose, Despite having near-human intelligence, they are correctly regarded as things. And while every human we've seen so far is referred to using they/them pronouns, the robots are invariably described as 'it'.

I'd show you a page, but I can't find just one that exemplifies it best. But just start at page 1 and work your way forward. There is also this brilliant quote from one of his after-comic bits (the ones that often take longer to read than the comic itself).


This, my friend, is the right was to do robots in a sci-fi. A human society that treats robots anything like the way they're depicted in QC... probably won't be a human society for very much longer.
I really want to give you some shit enjoying War and Neoginas, but tbph that craving is really more about it been having been over a decade since I've been able to give anyone shit about liking 1/0.

so instead I'll focus on the only important part of your post:
ROBOTS HAVE FEELINGS TOO. CHECK YOUR HUMAN PRIVILEGE.
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Is it just me or has Handstab actually gotten worse at art?
 
The left handedness comparison is also atrocious as an analogy because if a person forced to use their right hand their whole life wants to use their left hand, they just use their left hand.
I've known a couple people who said nuns would hit their knuckles with a ruler when they tried to write with their left hand, but they were really old. This isn't a thing anyone still alive is likely to have experienced. There was some weird Catholic bullshit about it supposedly being your evil hand.
 
I've known a couple people who said nuns would hit their knuckles with a ruler when they tried to write with their left hand, but they were really old. This isn't a thing anyone still alive is likely to have experienced. There was some weird Catholic bullshit about it supposedly being your evil hand.

"Sinister" literally means 'left'
 
Is it just me or has Handstab actually gotten worse at art?
Yes and no. He no longer uses a standard set of stock figures, so points for actually drawing each panel now. But it turns out that he never bothered to actually improve; his stock figures only looked good because he could afford to actually take his time making them, then make up for that extra time by making pages extra quick.

Slightly off-topic, but making a page a day is actually a pretty demanding schedule. There's a reason why old newspaper comics stuck to just three panel joke strips, and it's the same reason why professional comics require a team of people to make a ~20-page issue each month. In Jeph's case, he could manage a page a day because assembling what is effectively your own digital paper dolls is pretty easy. Now that he's dropped that method, he's stuck with an upload schedule he started years ago, and so has to sacrifice what little quality he might actually have managed.

Or the stupid nigger can't draw. One or the other.
 
Yes and no. He no longer uses a standard set of stock figures, so points for actually drawing each panel now. But it turns out that he never bothered to actually improve; his stock figures only looked good because he could afford to actually take his time making them, then make up for that extra time by making pages extra quick.

What are you talking about? All his female characters are still stock. You can chart their progress from normal hairstyles to hipster-dyke that would to make an actually butch lesbian tell her to tone it down a notch.

Slightly off-topic, but making a page a day is actually a pretty demanding schedule. There's a reason why old newspaper comics stuck to just three panel joke strips, and it's the same reason why professional comics require a team of people to make a ~20-page issue each month. In Jeph's case, he could manage a page a day because assembling what is effectively your own digital paper dolls is pretty easy. Now that he's dropped that method, he's stuck with an upload schedule he started years ago, and so has to sacrifice what little quality he might actually have managed.

Or the stupid nigger can't draw. One or the other.

Tim Buckley used to do the same for CAD, and also had a daily upload schedule. The differences there are Timbo never properly learned how to draw before he moved to digital paper dolls, he did actually stop and while he is not winning any awards, his current drawings are atleast competent.

Also while Tim Buckley was a giant oozing asshole, he managed to mature. And also never let himself get bullied so hard he had to stab himself in the hand. LOL.
Literally worse then Tim Buckley.

Also, just a sperg, the new papers stuck to 3-panel jokes because that's what the newpapers would print. The old comics of the first part of the1900s also ran daily with intricate panels (and tinyass words, get magnifying glass kids). OG Phantom and Prince Valiant were sick.
 
I've known a couple people who said nuns would hit their knuckles with a ruler when they tried to write with their left hand, but they were really old. This isn't a thing anyone still alive is likely to have experienced. There was some weird Catholic bullshit about it supposedly being your evil hand.
It’s not just Catholics. Ben Franklin was a Protestant (not a Quaker, like everyone believes), and he was beaten for using his left hand as well.
 
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