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PMush Perfect posted:Speak of the Devil, and he shall appear.
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Sep 22, 2017 03:31
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ArgumentatumE.C.T. posted:i view kazerad's activity on the internet as a useful resource to be utilized with appropriate distance and context Aw, that's just mean and overly-reductive. I'm a mid-tier essayist at best; the fact that so many people vehemently disagree with the things I write should be proof of my insufficience on that front. AellaGirl hits a lot of the same ideas on definitions and group dynamics in a much more tactful and experienced manner, as well as doing an admirable amount of data analysis on sexuality. If you're going to vaguely reference her, I feel it's only appropriate to directly link her.
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Sep 24, 2017 02:25
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ArgumentatumE.C.T. posted:you have truly fascinating tunnel vision
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Sep 24, 2017 02:51
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ArgumentatumE.C.T. posted:and don't you have comics to write
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Sep 24, 2017 03:21
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Zerilan posted:I think kazerad still posts? Then there's people like the Fanboys guy who actively tried to improve after hearing a bunch of criticism here. There's probably few cases of people leaving due to negatively rather than just losing interest. I still come by, although it feels like there's just less happening on SA in general than there used to be. At least in my perception, it used to be one of those major active communities you were expected to watch for feedback and criticism, but over time it sort of faded into a group of friends bonding over shared interests and distastes. I mean, just looking at the bunch of posts above, there are maybe three people who have been here less than five years. There's nothing explicitly wrong with that, but I can understand creators having less incentive to stick around.
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Nov 22, 2017 22:19
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PMush Perfect posted:Let me see if I can find the part in the thread where Kazerad showed up because he got eviscerated and it was beautiful. I'm here all the time! This thread is what reminds me of webcomics I used to read five years ago, and then tells me that they've been spontaneously canceled with at best one page of conclusion.
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Apr 7, 2018 01:51
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As someone who pushes Undertale on everyone, I can kind of get where Tycho is coming from? My experience is that the game tends to fall really flat with people who aren't inoculated to JRPG tropes to the point of accepting them as normal. Stuff like the rock pushing puzzle and literal handholding at the beginning are really offputting if the player doesn't recognize it as parody. The intro cinematic about humans and monsters feels cliche and boring if the player doesn't get that it's so generic that it is almost definitely going to be subverted. Even the core idea of killing/sparing monsters misses the mark if the player assumes the talk/fight options are balanced and the game wants them to use a mix (as most games do), rather than defaulting straight to attack and ignoring the other options like most JRPG players. I'm sure Tycho recognizes the tropes, but I think beneath the $1 words his criticism is that the game exists almost entirely in the context of other games. Rather than setting up expectations and then subverting them, it relies on the player expecting the game to work like a normal JPRG. (It's also worth noting that Deltarune actually addresses most of this. It spends longer on setup, plays its first puzzles straight, changes the context on the "once upon a time" cutscene, and uses the party members to emphasize violence/diplomacy as a choice.)
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Nov 7, 2019 02:29
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PMush Perfect posted:And Kazerad is not exactly the beacon of humanity's strengths and nobilities, which must be a terrible surprise to hear about the writer of cat girl emotional torture porn. Man I don't think any webcomic artist should be regarded as the beacon of humanity's strengths and nobilities. The best I can say is that I try to listen to everyone I can, and outline my thought processes to the point where if I'm completely wrong, it's at least kind of clear how I got there. You know, so observers can learn valuable lessons like "don't spend so long making a flash game that flash dies".
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Dec 13, 2019 23:31
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Unless I'm forgetting other instances, I think the term "dissuasion tactics" was actually from a Tumblr post where I argued allies who accidentally harm their own cause should be treated the same as opponents who intentionally do harm. I remember using the word "dissuasion tactics" instead of "opposition tactics" because I didn't want to make it sound like I was suggesting these bad-allies should be hurt, just that they should be viewed with distrust and gently reined in a little. I dunno, the whole thing was kind of dumb; if you want to see it I'll just link this really good counterpoint someone made. I used to keep it close to the chest, but I think my OCD is kind of a terrifyingly open secret at this point? Like, the condition gets popularly stereotyped as problems with handwashing and door thresholds, but it often ties very strongly into someone's approach to right/wrong. A person with autism might not understand social situations, but a person with OCD can end up in the scary position where they know something will have social consequences, but have to do it anyway because they feel like it's the right thing to do. The best chance the afflicted person has at avoiding these sort of situations is to genuinely believe they are in the wrong, which is why I try to pay attention to what everyone is saying and - when taking a potentially controversial position - provide routes where people can contact me if I am unknowingly operating off inaccurate information. I just want to stress that, if you disagree with me, I am very easy to contact and will listen. And yeah, I know, this itself is a case where I should let it drop. I'm sorry, I'm trying to rein it in. Mare Internum good. e: YggiDee posted:I think part of it is the unspoken fear that finishing your old popular webcomic for a new thing is a gamble, and if your audience jumps ship you have to go back to your awful retail job. Kazerad fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Dec 14, 2019 |
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Dec 14, 2019 01:45
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mycot posted:I think the attitude of using criticism to justify anything (because criticism is good and only had artists reject it!!!) was an aspect of broader internet culture even outside SA. As a broader internet issue, I think the problem would be better described as critics not taking rejection well. At least in my experience, artists tend to be incredibly receptive toward criticism and love seeing what others think of their work, positive and negative. But, this comes with the caveat that not everyone's tastes can be simultaneously met. Like, I personally think SFP would've been better if Allison's attempts to "fix the world" brought her closer and closer to being a full-on antagonist, but I can understand that the author probably wanted to write a less-dark story where Allison's attempts to be a better hero ultimately work out for her. That's probably the sort of story his core audience wants, too. I used to be that "criticism is good and only bad artists reject it" type of person when I was younger, until this time an author found some friends and I while we were lambasting his work. He wasn't angry or anything; he respected our opinions and just kind of explained what he was going for on the parts we didn't like, and why it was probably connecting with his audience better than it was connecting with us. It was a kind of sobering experience for 19-year-old me to realize that my ability to dislike something didn't necessarily make my feelings important. But like, I can completely understand where someone who builds their identity around criticizing things might try make their criticism matter by establishing consequences for going against it. It's not that the criticism is being used to justify harm, but that the harm is an attempt to make their criticism matter. Criticism (even the mocking variety) can be a positive thing, but it has to be recognized as an exploration of one's own tastes and preferences, rather than an attempt to harm or exercise control over a creator. Like, SA mock threads are at their best when they're full of creativity: fixing character designs, polishing punchlines, and discussing the sort of things that would make them personally like the comic more, analyzing and displaying their own tastes and preferences. Discussion like this can also be beneficial to creators, since negative opinions are rarely given privately and directly. Like, every once in a while I'll get fanmail that sounds like it's walking on eggshells, and if I point it out, the person usually will detail horrible experiences they (or friends) have had with creators they attempted to be critical of. Some people will only feel comfortable being negative when they have safety in numbers, and to some degree environments for that need to be respected and preserved.
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Apr 16, 2020 21:57
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PMush Perfect posted:I'm surprised he hasn't shown up like Beetlejuice to dig himself deeper yet.  I'm always here, you guys have the best comic recommendations. But when someone brings up the slow update speed in my stuff or sense that nothing is getting better, I think the best I can say is that it's not for everyone. I like things that take their time and move in excruciating detail, and seeing if I can make little things like not drinking for one day as big of a deal to the reader as they are to the characters.
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Jan 24, 2021 05:09
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PMush Perfect posted:Kazerad, on one hand, I kinda feel guilty making GBS threads on something that someone clearly works so hard on. Obviously I don't think I do, but I'm pretty sure everyone feels that way about themselves. The best I can say is that I try to run everything I do past a lot of proofreaders, particularly if I'm touching a sensitive topic that I don't have first-hand experience with. The reason I try to Beetlejuice my way into conversations like this one is to make sure I'm at least aware of and engaging with criticisms that don't come up with the proofreaders. I've never made it any secret that Prequel is me trying to get better at comics and writing, and I think this is a part of that. Katia doesn't have a particularly easy time in the story, but the majority of the cast is female, and I don't feel like she's being particularly singled out for it? When it comes to criticisms that the story is needlessly cruel, I admit it's hard for me to respond to because I know that a lot of my readerbase strongly relates to Katia and the emotions she feels. If I portray these struggles as some minor thing she works through early in the story while on the way to becoming a Proper Protagonist, I think it would be kind of needlessly demeaning to the people who see themselves in her position. Something they frequently say to me is that they have trouble finding other fictional characters who capture those feelings they feel, and I don't really want to lose that.
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Jan 24, 2021 07:09
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Xarbala posted:Still, the national political throughline from gamergate, to pizzagate, to Qanon, to storming the Capitol definitely makes any past pro-gamergate remarks embarrassing as hell at a barest minimum. I started writing about the topic because I was doing a blogpost about 4chan at the time, which meant I was going there a lot to figure out how it worked. The timing was such that I saw the initial GamerGate stuff when it was first going down, and a lot of the retroactive reporting on those events did not strike me as accurate. The reason I keep the old posts chrono-order-linked on the side of my Tumblr is so people can see the exact progression of my views on the topic, since I think it is important to have a window into that, even if some of the things have retroactive corrections noted on them, or links to really good counterpoints that might otherwise get lost in the notes. I would argue that a lot of my predictions came true, but in ways I didn't expect (e.g. I wrote about how these conditions tend to create create niche markets that are apathetic to outside opinion, but didn't really foresee the creation of weird isolated-information-markets like QAnon people). Some of the stuff I said back then I think holds up pretty well, like the post about exercising control over anonymous groups. Other stuff, like the gift card thing, I like to think is a result of me being 6-years-worse at articulating my points. Thankfully, I write fanfiction about an ex-cultist who always says things the wrong way, so struggling to overcome a degree of dumbassery kind of tracks.
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Jan 25, 2021 04:13
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:30 |
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Nuns with Guns posted:He's obsessed with people talking about him or his comic. He set up google alerts and poo poo to help notify him whenever either his online handle or his comic are mentioned anywhere online. I don't think that's obsession, I think it's just part of making something! The whole reason services like Google Alerts exist is so companies and creators can track discussions about their work. It's a really good source of feedback and good way to find communities interested in your stuff - or critical of it, which can be just as important. Tracking discussions is very common practice for businesses, but still kind of stigmatized for artists, so I feel obligated to speak up in defense of it when it's criticized. It's hard enough for self-employed artists to make a living, and I don't think there's any reason to make it harder by stigmatizing the tools and tactics used by non-art businesses - especially tools and tactics specifically designed for finding and connecting with an audience. And I know that sometimes talking about these things makes me the villain (e.g. saying that it's okay for artists to work for low pay), but I also think these are ideas that should be given a degree of defense (e.g. nearly every webcomic in this thread got its start as someone doing artwork for no pay other than exposure. It was a conscious, tactical choice that we made rather than working for someone who would pay us a livable wage outright). I swear I'm not trying to be a nuisance or poo poo up the thread, I just feel like sometimes I get mythologized into an inaccessible evil figure, and I want to stress that pretty much all my writing is readily available online (including my 8 year old Tumblr, where you can read my 8-year-ago takes on things), and I am very easy to get in contact with (a@foxmage.com, Kazerad#3286). If I say something that is factually inaccurate or morally wrong, I do want to know, and I'm not averse to correcting or reneging on things I said ten years ago. I make no claims of being 100% correct, or particularly eloquent, but I would like to work toward both of those as a goal.
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Aug 22, 2022 09:41
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