(EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

What can I say? It doesn't fit above, put it here. Also the location of board rules/info.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

If I think about a problem, it often helps to explain the question/problem to someone. Usually, this already gets me a step closer to the solution.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Dormouse559 wrote: 29 Apr 2018 01:57
LinguistCat wrote: 29 Apr 2018 01:05 Does anyone else try to research something and then as soon as you ask a question somewhere, your "google-fu" gets about ten times better for that subject?
I'm much more likely to experience the irl version of this. Like, it used to be that when I couldn't find something, I'd ask my mom to help me, but then almost instantly I'd find what I was looking for.
I noticed decades ago that if I couldn’t find some address I only had to ask a stranger for directions and then I’d suddenly realize I was right there.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Creyeditor wrote: 29 Apr 2018 13:49 If I think about a problem, it often helps to explain the question/problem to someone. Usually, this already gets me a step closer to the solution.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Creyeditor wrote: 29 Apr 2018 13:49 If I think about a problem, it often helps to explain the question/problem to someone. Usually, this already gets me a step closer to the solution.
John Wisdom once said that philosophical questions, if asked fully, answer themselves. I find it's true of most questions people ask - at least, questions where they are confused, rather than questions where they simply lack access to the data.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguistCat »

Salmoneus wrote: 29 Apr 2018 16:34
Creyeditor wrote: 29 Apr 2018 13:49 If I think about a problem, it often helps to explain the question/problem to someone. Usually, this already gets me a step closer to the solution.
John Wisdom once said that philosophical questions, if asked fully, answer themselves. I find it's true of most questions people ask - at least, questions where they are confused, rather than questions where they simply lack access to the data.
In my case it was probably asking the question that helped me better articulate what I was looking for in key terms that I could then use to search. But asking better questions is the first step to getting better answers I guess [:3]
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by fruityloops »

If I took a bug and made it very humanoid with a human personality while not sacrificing his animal instincts....would you relate to him?
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

Personally, no, probably not. You can't please everyone though.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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fruityloops wrote: 11 May 2018 20:42 If I took a bug and made it very humanoid with a human personality while not sacrificing his animal instincts....would you relate to him?
possibly, depends on what type of bug and on their personality. I did just that about 6 years ago with a video game I didn't quite finish... though the player might not realize they're arthropods with their suits on.... But I still relate to them as much as I ever did to the humans in that game. See background of pabappa.com if curious .... most of the time they appear with "bomb suits" , effectively becoming Bombs. It's ambiguous what happens to their middle legs while their suits are on, because out of the suit they have six legs . That said, if I can relate to a bomb, even a 4 legged one, I can relate to an insect. Just try to make sure it has some way of expressing emotions and looking thoughtful.

It may be worth noting that Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, tried to run a strip called Gnorm Gnat and was denied. It took c.20 yrs for him to draw a Garfield strip story arc that featured an insect as the main character.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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fruityloops wrote: 11 May 2018 20:42 If I took a bug and made it very humanoid with a human personality while not sacrificing his animal instincts....would you relate to him?
Obviously if you wrote it well enough, I'd 'relate' to a cabbage.

But in general, I'd probably think "why is the author pretending to write about an insect, when they're clearly really writing about a human in a strange hat, but throwing in a few entymologically-inaccurate insecty bells and whistles?"

Of course, it would depend somewhat on the genre. If you're writing Antz, that's different. Or if you're writing some weird mindbender in which superficial characteristics change unpredictably, that's another thing - Samsa starts out acting like a human, doesn't he? If it's just a plain fantasy, though, I'm going to find it lazy and superficial.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by alynnidalar »

Well, let's see, the Protheans in Mass Effect are somewhat buglike, aren't they? I should think most people relate just fine to Javik (although like most Mass Effect species, he's arguably just Sal's "human with a hat"). Certainly plenty of people have sympathy for the rachni, myself included, and they're both buglike and not particularly humans-with-hats.

I think you're overthinking these things, truth be told. Write what you like and refine it as you go.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by fruityloops »

it's jsut that with all these people i talk to that have issues with bugs, it use to discourage me alot. now a days, it just doesn't bother me.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Is anyone fooled by those Wells Fargo commercials?
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

eldin raigmore wrote: 29 May 2018 05:38 Is anyone fooled by those Wells Fargo commercials?
You'll have to be more specific.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

shimobaatar wrote: 29 May 2018 06:38
eldin raigmore wrote: 29 May 2018 05:38 Is anyone fooled by those Wells Fargo commercials?
You'll have to be more specific.
They say they’re sorry for the scandal; they’ve restructured; they’re trustworthy now; and their top priority now is their customers’ welfare.

Who would believe that? And why?
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

eldin raigmore wrote: 29 May 2018 14:29
shimobaatar wrote: 29 May 2018 06:38
eldin raigmore wrote: 29 May 2018 05:38 Is anyone fooled by those Wells Fargo commercials?
You'll have to be more specific.
They say they’re sorry for the scandal; they’ve restructured; they’re trustworthy now; and their top priority now is their customers’ welfare.

Who would believe that? And why?
Oh, I guess I'm really out of the loop, then. This is the first I've heard of a scandal.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

shimobaatar wrote: 29 May 2018 17:54
eldin raigmore wrote: 29 May 2018 14:29 They say they’re sorry for the scandal; they’ve restructured; they’re trustworthy now; and their top priority now is their customers’ welfare.

Who would believe that? And why?
Oh, I guess I'm really out of the loop, then. This is the first I've heard of a scandal.
Wells Fargo had set unrealistically high sales targets for its employees, and to meet those standards, employees opened up to 2 million accounts in customers' names without their consent. Then Wells fired thousands of employees, then some executives resigned, then it paid a fine.

And this year, it paid another fine after being accused of illegal lending practices.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

They had about five if-they-were-a-person-they'd-be-in-jail scandals in about two years. They're virtually a mafia at this point.

[Not that their rivals are any better. Flagrant disregard for the law and ethics is the norm for large banks. Remember when it turned out HSBC were advertising themselves to the mexican drug cartels on the basis of how great they were at illegally laundering drug money?]
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Why are there so many blonde Koreans in Korean manga?
In real life I’ve never met a blonde Korean; not even one who had dyed their hair.

There are also a few more blondes than I would have expected in Japanese and Taiwanese and HK manga; but significantly fewer, it seems to me (I could be wrong.)
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by alynnidalar »

Weird hair colors are pretty common in manga in general. I've always heard (and it seems plausible) that a major reason is simply to make characters look more distinct--after all, most Japanese people have similar hair color, so giving your characters a variety of hair colors immediately makes them look different from one another.

But I've never actually read any manhwa, just Japanese manga.

(the associated trope is You Gotta Have Blue Hair)
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Pabappa »

eldin raigmore wrote: 21 Jun 2018 18:04 Why are there so many blonde Koreans in Korean manga?
In real life I’ve never met a blonde Korean; not even one who had dyed their hair.

There are also a few more blondes than I would have expected in Japanese and Taiwanese and HK manga; but significantly fewer, it seems to me (I could be wrong.)
This is called mukokuseki in Japanese and goes beyond manga. It means that the characters are human, but belong to no specific ethnic group, and therefore cant be out of place. THere are various facotrs involved here and Im really just guessing at all of this but I think it makes sense .....

My only experience with manga-related art styles is 1990s video games , but in those games it was a necessity to have different hair colors among the characters because due to the low resolution of early video games there would be no way to tell them apart otherwise. Many games had characters that were exactly identical except for their colors, and the colors that changed tended to be those of their outfits and hair. Furthermore, it helps when the backgrounds are mostly dark to have characters that are mostly light ... when I made a video game, I made almost all of the humans blonde because the backgrounds were primarily dark blue and to use dark hair made it look like the characters' head was cut in half. I used low resolution, tiny sprites on purpose, but at least into the mid-1990s there was really no choice if you had dark backgrounds anywhere.

But Ive also been told the same thing about manga .... the drawing style of manga diminishes facial features and accentuates hair and hairstyles, so it makes sense that readers would learn to distinguish the characters , especially females, by their hair colors. if theyre *all* blonde, on the other hand, I suspect that;s just the artist's personal preference. a blonde female lead character is pretty common in the West and manga is "non-racial" so it makes sense that a blonde female lead character would be common in Japanese art as well. And that's actually the main reason why I went with blonde hair in my game instead of one of the other colors.

Its also possiuble that the manga youre reading may have a Western audience in mind. Again going back to video games, most of the video games I played in the 1990s had white lead characters, even if none of the other factors such as visibility were a big issue. e.g. Mario was Italian, supposedly patterned after an Italian window-washer working in Japan. From the same era, there was Link, who is depicted with light hair, sometimes blonde, even though in the NES color palette it made him slightly less distinct from the background and made one less color available per screen. This persisted past the NES days though ... in Sony's Intelligent Qube, you can play as a white man or a white woman, but no Asian characters, and this seems to have been original to the game, even in the Japanese version. And in Seiken Densetsu 3, whi9ch was released *only* in Japan, the characters have light hair, and even in one desert area their skin color becomes dark but not their hair.

Lastly, even though Asians naturally have dark hair, hair dyeing has a long history in Asian countries, so even if they arent born with it, theyre familiar with the concept and even a story set in medieval Japan could feature different hair colors without being unralistic. Hair dyeing was also well known to the ancient southern Europeans ... i know that blonde hair dye of some sort was used in ancient Rome, and some other cultures' men dyed their hair red (whether this means a fire red or cherry red I dont kn0w).
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