haverholm
I used to make comics. I know that because strangers would look at my work and immediately share their most excruciatingly banal experiences with me:
— that time a motorised wheelchair cut in front of them in the line at the supermarket;
— when the dentist pulled the wrong tooth and they tried to get a discount;
— eating off an apple and finding half a worm in it;
every anecdote rounded of with a triumphant “You should make a comic about that!”
Then I would take my 300 pages graphic novel out of their hands, both of us knowing full well they weren’t going to buy it, and I’d smile politely, “Yeah, sure. Someday.”
“Don’t try to cheat me out of my royalties when you publish it,” they would guffaw and walk away to grant comics creator status onto their next victim.
Nowadays I make work that feels even more truly like comics to me than that almost twenty years old graphic novel. Collage-y, abstract stuff that breaks all the rules just begging to be broken. Linear narrative is ashes settling in my trails, montage stretched thin and warping in new, interesting directions.
I teach comics techniques at a university level based in my current work. I even make an infrequent podcast talking to other avantgarde artists about their work in the same field.
Still, sometimes at night my subconscious whispers the truth in my ear: Nobody ever insists I turn their inane bullshit nonevents into comics these days, and while I am a happier, more balanced person as a result of that, I guess that means I don’t make comics any longer after all.
I was eyeing microblogpub for a while, but now that development has stalled I’m coming around to GTS as well — should I ever self host a single user fedi instance.
There are different ways of approaching microblogs — reading, writing and interacting. You have @s and hashtags in mind already, they’re a good way of finding conversations and engaging with people.
You’ll find users who write interesting stuff about your favourite subjects — you’d want to follow those to get all their updates. That includes boosts/reposts, i.e. posts by others that those you follow share to spread a message. That will also help you find more interesting people and organisations.
Now, interaction. I have come recently to Lemmy from Mastodon instances, and I see quite a bit of difference in the etiquette and forms of socialising. Two generalisations that I can think of:
-
Mastodon and other fedi microblogs were built by users who were fed up by Twitter’s lax moderation of harassment, so they built in safeguards against that; Lemmy was made in reaction to the commodification and heavy handed enshittification of Reddit, but largely expect the same conversations here. They are not the same mentality.
-
On Lemmy, you post a question or thought in a dedicated community to get answers or start a discussion. Each community has its own room where the discussion is centred around one subject. On the microblog side, you might imagine one big, sprawling social club where people mingle and form smaller groups to talk about one thing, then disperse and join other conversations. And sometimes they just talk about their pets or hobbies to nobody in particular.
Sorry, I’m writing this over morning coffee and I know I’m only covering broad fragments of the microblog experience as it differs from using a forum. I hope it helps though.
uBlock’s source code is hosted on Github I think, so maybe they’re not so keen on openly disrupting their dumb AI.
Github itself has a helpful guide though, on how your firewall may be blocking Copilot. Might be possible to just ban all traffic from these URLs and be rid of it?