#Scaling Web Applications

[duckapus]

Andrew's Omnitrix Playlist

First off, yes his aliens have names like Ben's. I don't know why he's decided to give his forms goofy pun nicknames considering what he's like, but then he and Tulip are unfortunately pretty similar in a lot of ways.

Starting Playlist

Boulder-Dash (Goron)

Gorenado (Looney Toons-style Tasmanian Devil)

Web Surfer (Code-level Program)

Bird Brain (Chozo)

Mayhem (Rabbid)

Shortfuse (Bob-omb)

Enerjaws (Harmonian Shark)

Webstinger (Ariados)

Honeytrap (Disgaea-style Succubus) (no I am not kidding. the instincts are strong enough to mess with his personality similar to Rath, and between the name and the species you can probably guess what those changes are, though even like this his heart (such as it is) still belongs only to his wife) (it's the designated flier too so it gets a lot more use than he'd like)

Cry Spy (Minecraft Warden)

Unlocked

(to be updated as story progresses)

[muwangadesigner]

Efficient Web Application Management with Modular Designs

When designing with modularity in web application development the sole main focus is enhancing efficiency, scalability, and maintainability . This actually possible by breaking down an application into independent, reusable modules. In contrast to a monolithic approach, where all components are tightly coupled, modular architectural design structures the application into separate, self-contained units. In such case, you can modularize the account verification, product management, and payment processing.

This separation allows web developers to work on individual modules without disrupting the entire system, making updates, debugging, and feature additions more manageable. Just like by following Laravel’s modular principles using Service Providers, Repositories, and Packages, teams can develop cleaner, more structured codebases that are easier to scale and maintain.

Support Parallel Development and Flexibility

Modular architecture enables software development teams to build, test, and deploy individual features independently. If one module requires changes or optimizations, it can be modified without affecting the rest of the application, reducing downtime and improving development speed. So, the modular architecture is particularly beneficial for large-scale applications like an office furniture online system, where different teams may handle inventory, customer management, and order processing as separate modules. Try implementing modularization with Laravel, you'll achieve a robust, high-performing, and future-proof web application that efficiently adapts to growing demands.

[primathontechnology]

Ember.js Performance Optimization

Discover essential Ember.js performance optimization strategies to scale your web application efficiently. Learn best practices, tips, and techniques to improve speed, reduce load times, and enhance user experience in Ember.js projects.

[robomad]

Scaling Node.js Applications with PM2

Scaling Node.js Applications with PM2: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction As your Node.js application grows, you may need to scale it to handle increased traffic and ensure reliability. PM2 (Process Manager 2) is a powerful process manager for Node.js applications that simplifies deployment, management, and scaling. It provides features such as process monitoring, log management, and automatic restarts, making it an essential tool for production…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[katamari-of-luv]

Every new Spamton Sweepstakes page I've found so far:

(Spoilers if you want to find them for yourself! If I missed something, feel free to add on!)

Clicking the "What's next?" link at the bottom of the main page takes you to /chapter3/, which simply reads "Not applicable." and has an ellipsis for a page title. UPDATE: Holding down the left arrow on your keyboard on this page causes the word "But..." to slide in from the right side of the screen.

Manually inputting /chapter1/ yields the same result (notably without the "But..." -- thank you rollingdanielle for pointing this out), while /chapter2/ reads "Applicable." instead. /chapter4/ has a red pixel slowly fade in at the center of the screen. Clicking that takes you to /chapter4/message/, which appears the same at first glance but actually contains several hidden links under the red pixel:

These link to one of two different six-second audio files: e.mp3 ("fading in" sound effect?) and m.mp3 ("fading out"?). I would love to hear it if anyone else finds a way to translate the "message". The placements of e's and m's don't appear to coincide with either binary or Morse code, but I could very well have missed something. Perhaps something Wingdings-related but I'm only a third of the way done with writing this post and that would be my fifth time pausing to puzzle out this one page. Maybe later.

UPDATE: HOLY SHIT. This comes from convobreaker on Bluesky's very informative thread. The layout of the audio file links correspond to a QWERTY keyboard, and the m.mp3 links match up to letters that can be unscrambled to spell /chapter4/thankyou/. The page is titled "How long did it take her to smile?" and presents you with two boxes to input text and a button to confirm. Pressing it with nothing in either box or anything but a valid email address in the first displays the text "Unknown contact." Pressing it with only a valid email address in the first box gives you the hint "She never smiled?" Filling the first box with an email address and the second with anything at all replaces everything with text reading "Thank you." Presumably the correct answer will send you a response.

On that note, /chapter5/ (titled "back") sends you here:

1 is unclickable, 2 takes you to d.mp3, a six-second drum and organ loop (that I could swear I've heard before-- can anyone identify it?) (UPDATE: Thank you to vividviolence and rollingdanielle! It plays before fighting Berdly for the second and final time in the Snowgrave or Weird Route, and may imply the "Applicable/Not Applicable" text refers to whether a Weird Route is possible in a given chapter.), 3 leads to ma.mp3, a warbling sound effect that fades out towards the end, 4 takes you back to /chapter4/, and 5 is h.mp3, a short acoustic guitar-like clip. It seems like manually inputting any "chapter" pages past 5 only takes you to room-dogcheck (they don't redirect, just display the little white dog).

Upon returning to the main page, clicking the "glitches and secrets Web Ring" banner, and continuing through to the /egg/ page via the "clues" link, a new link can be found embedded in the words "secret cats". /rain/ is another of Noelle's private journal entries, regarding the time she invited Catti over to play a "sillyriffic" Cat Petters minigame together. As per usual, she reminisces on seeing things in video games nobody else is able to replicate (but suspects Kris of knowing about it this time?) The "try it yourself" text leads to a playable version of this minigame at /rarecats/. The green dancing cats bouncing around the screen award points when clicked in accordance with the rarity scale on /rain/. An "angel wing" cat causes a stained glass window to appear onscreen and fade after a few seconds. Clicking that in time brings you to /windows/, a page titled "Aren't you forgetting something?" containing many instances of the same window sprite repeated over and over.

Each window links to a different combination of the same six words. Every page except one brings you to /room-dogcheck/. The correct combination, /lostwheretheforestwouldgrow/, leads to a page titled "ROOTS" which displays a blue tree that slowly floats up and down. It plays a single somber piano note the first three times it's clicked, then sends you back to /windows/.

UPDATE: Thank you to theyloy for tipping me off to this! Clicking the tree three times actually takes you to /window/ with no S. All the windows but one are now scrambled versions of the phrase /thepoorchildren/. Clicking and dragging to "draw" on this page, titled "Therapy", for long enough eventually reveals the red tree the man who gives you eggs hides behind, and clicking that links back to /egg/.

And last but not least, there's a new clickable area in /ramb/. The red desk at the front of the swanky, inviting green room now leads to /romb/, a silent set of wooden doors with the page title "No one will shed a tear for him." Clicking on them plays a door-opening sound effect and causes the screen to go black for a moment, then this text appears:

The text cannot be highlighted, and clicking either of the empty spaces plays the ma.mp3 sound effect associated with Chapter 3 via the /chapter4/message/ page discussed earlier in the post. This is wholly conjecture, but it may be of note that the spaces appear to be the right size to contain the word "egg".

UPDATE: Thank you once again to rollingdanielle! After clicking the door, but before the text appears, you can ctrl+A to click an invisible button floating around the screen. Doing so changes the page title to "You can never defeat us!!! Let's rumble!", plays ma.mp3, and then redirects to /chapter3/. This text could possibly be used in the Lanino and Elnina fight, as the speaker refers to fighting alongside at least one other person and "rumble" could be a pun on thunderstorms.

With that, I've listed off everything I know! Again, you're welcome to reply or reblog with anything I may have missed. Just one more month and Deltarune will be Tomorrow...

[damlahayal]

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[beakers-and-telescopes]

With the fast fashion industry… how it is… finding sustainable ways to make fabric is super important.  Fibers from synthetic fabrics make up 35% of the microplastics that make their way to the ocean.  Natural fibers sourced from plants or animals are much more environmentally sound options, including silk.

Currently, the only way to get natural silk on a large scale is to harvest it from silkworms.  You’ve probably heard about the strength and durability of spider silk (it is 6x stronger than Kevlar!) but as of yet there hasn’t been a good way of getting it.  Raising spiders the way people do silkworms isn’t really an option.  Spiders need a lot of room to build their webs compared to silkworms, and individual spiders don’t produce that much silk.  Plus, when you put a whole bunch of spiders in captivity together, they tend to start eating each other.

Attempts to artificially recreate spider silk have also been less than successful.  Spider silk has a surface layer of glycoproteins and lipids on it that works as a sort of anti-aging “skin”- allowing the silk to withstand conditions such as sunlight and humidity.  But this layer has been very tricky to reproduce.

However, as scientists in China realized, silkworms produce that same kind of layer on their silk.  So what if we just genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk?

That is exactly what the researchers at Donghua University in Shanghai did.  A team of researchers introduced spider silk protein genes to silkworms using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and microinjections in silkworm eggs.  In addition to this, they altered the spider silk proteins so that they would interact properly with the other proteins in silkworm glands.  And it worked!  This is the first study ever to produce full length spider silk proteins from silkworms.

The applications of this are incredibly exciting.  In addition to producing comfortable textiles and new, innovative bulletproof vests, silkworm generated spider silk could be used in cutting edge smart materials or even just to create better performing sutures.  In the future, this team intends to research how to modify this new spider silk to be even stronger, and they are confident that “large-scale commercialization is on the horizon."

[mlembug]

the current landscape of webdev needs to know that I don't need web applications that scale up to millions of users, I need web applications that scale down to 5 users or less

[beesmygod]

if you were making a syllabus for a comics class, besides the obvious (homestuck, hark a vagrant, a comic from KC green, a comic from ONE), what comics would you say best represent webcomics as a medium/ are needed to represent the medium? I always liked your hitmen for destiny rec and was wondering if you knew anything else like that

if we're talking about representations of the format rather than just examples of good comics, i think the choices would be really different. for one thing i would cut hark a vagrant and kc green comics since, while both good, they "operate" more or less the same as print comics and utilize the internet primarily as a means of distribution rather than incorporating it into the creation process (beyond making colors websafe, when applicable)

as a lowbrow example, jerkcity (or whatever its called now) is a purely web-based creation. the scripts are private chats dumped into microsoft comic chat and generated from pre-made software assets. im not a fan personally, but there are xkcd comics that make conscious use of the web-medium/infinite canvas to create comics that can literally only exist in a web format (homestuck is the same, but on a massive scale which would make it hard to teach in this scenario). bouletcorp (english website dead? huge loss imo) featured quite a few comics that took advantage of readers needing to scroll in order to obtain more information. e.m. carroll's horror works capitalized on the use of scroll and click to induce tension in the reader. dinosaur comics managing to squeeze decades of comedic juice out of clip art dinosaurs arranged in the same layout every day.

i feel like a class about webcomics should be about the comics that differentiate it from the print medium, if that makes sense. manhua would also fit into this but i would choose cutbu as the example bc i love cutbu comics lol. they came back last year just so everyone knows. with a comic called 28th century superfan

[abyssalzones]

What's your comic writing process like? I'm starting to get into making my own comics and I really admire your work!!! Any advice?

Ah, intrepid traveler, you've done well to journey to this secluded mountaintop spire, in search of the answers you seek. I indeed can provide such forbidden comicmancy knowledge... at the cost of your mortal soul...

coughs. anyway, I'm going to warn you immediately that what works for me does not work for everyone else, and in my experience the way I do things can prove very slow and discouraging for anyone who is more interested in the actual "drawing the damn comic" part of the process. I only do it this way because I enjoy weaving a narrative web that feels not only fully contained but re-readable, but my projects are often so long and my memory so shitty that I can't just keep all of it in my head! It would spill all over the place and make a really embarrassing mess of brain-juice. Not ideal.

but as for my own process, uhh... I suppose a comic would be fitting, right?

a little choppy but you get the idea.

as for turning words into art, I've been experimenting with figuring out the best way to do that for a little while now. Originally what I was doing for something like Ad Astra Per Aspera was to take my "script" and sketch it out on paper very loosely, before transposing that onto my canvas and working from there:

...but, I've found that can make it kind of difficult to space everything around on your standard page-size, and the thing I'm having the most problems with currently seems to be finding the sweet spot of panel-size proportions. So, I've taken to printing out standard thumbnail templates (you can just find these on google) and sketching very tiny panels in those, which seems to give me a slightly better sense of scale... (mild chapter 5 spoilers, sorry ad astra fans)

but I have yet to totally pull through on this, so who knows, maybe I'll try something else in the future!

As for advice, this is probably most applicable to me, but as a disabled artist I have a very hard time managing my workload without literally working myself into injury. I don't think I talked about this publicly but when I was working on that ten year anniversary comic I was literally drawing every single day for 3 solid months. Sometimes, in my case, I really can't bring myself to stop once I've latched onto an idea, and sometimes I find the most rewarding thing I can do with my time is to draw- but I seriously cannot overstate: Do not fucking do this.

You will fuck up your wrist, your back, your neck, your eyes, and probably your mental health. It's a well-known fact that mangaka have a lower life expectancy than the average japanese person due to the intense workload imposed on them by deadlines and personal expectations. Comics are a very demanding artform, and even though I'm not on any sort of mandated schedule there are times where I've toiled away at something when I likely should have been exercising or taking vision-breaks. Therefore the best advice I can give you is to chill the hell out.

Namely, find parts of the process you can be lazy about, and embrace the laziness! You don't like digitally sketching? Don't do it! Skip it, or maybe find a way to traditionally sketch things out in advance like I do. Hate lineart? Don't fucking do it. You really don't feel like wasting your time writing 72k words of comic scripts? ...then, don't be like me. skip that part. I'm a flawed human being and what works for me might not work for you.

The second most important piece of advice I could give is to read comics. Of all kinds. The reason for this is pretty self explanatory: In order to figure out your own comic-making style, you should first pick out bits and pieces from the artist's buffet to add to your plate. Manga, graphic novels, american comics, european comics, weird niche little webcomics, funny papers, anything and everything. This advice rings true of pretty much any art form, but I find it to be essential to honing comic-making skills because so many things you feel will just come intuitively often don't. and that's okay! nobody is born knowing how to leave space for speech bubbles or shape their panels in a way that imitates stretches of time. The best way to figure out stuff like this, in my experience, is to study the "masters", and then after becoming well accustomed to the basics, figure out what rules you want to bend or break to create your own style.

I consider myself to be in equal parts a writer and an artist, which lends itself well to making narrative comics, but maybe you're a bit more of an artist and want to focus on panel-by-panel visual storytelling. Or, conversely, maybe your talents lean closer towards writing, and the art itself is more of a secondary skill. Regardless of your unique blend of talents you can and should make a comic, you should just also be aware of your strengths and try to hone in on those- there will always be opportunities to build up skills you lack, but focusing on what you do best will always lead you in the right direction.

Anyway, that being said, here are some recommendations in no particular order:

Monster, Naoki Urasawa (!!)

Bone, Jeff Smith

Witch Hat Atelier, Kamome Shirahama

The first IDW run of Transformers comics (namely More Than Meets the Eye and Lost Light)

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (!!)

Through the Woods, Emily Carroll (really any Emily Carroll comics)

Kill Six Billion Demons (webcomic) (!!)

Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo

The Third Person, Emma Grove

Tintin, Hergé (can be super racist please be wary)

Dungeon Meshi, Ryoko Kui

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Cucumber Quest (webcomic)

Jellyfish Princess, Akiko Higashimura

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda (!!)

Note that I did not grow up with manga so I am seriously behind on a lot of extremely influential japanese comics such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, basically any of the original Shonen Jump comics, but they're widely considered building blocks of the genre so if you love the artform I think you should give them a try! Same goes for classic non-shonen manga genres like various Shoujo, Josei, Yuri, Gekiga, ETC.

same as above applies to a lot of classic DC and Marvel works, I unfortunately am just not a big fan of superhero comics... but I'm sure there's good stuff in there. a couple of my mutuals talk about booster gold and the blue beetle all the time so I'm assuming there has to be something worthwhile.

...and many, many, many more that I'm forgetting! I noticed as I made this list that, to my knowledge, hardly any of these are made by black or just non-japanese-mangaka BIPOC artists, which makes me sad about the gaps in my own comic collection. Therefore, anyone is welcome to add their own recommendations in the replies!

now go forth, and combine images with text!!!!!!!!!!!

[headmateelevator]

can we have a prismatic pal finn, a star-time vee, and a twisted pebble? srry for 3 in one rq but. the ffragments. you kno

..Vee, Finn, AND Twisted Pebble..! take care of them, will ya?

name(s) - Finn , Finnley , Fisher , Brook , Fish , Scale , Ocean , Lazuli , Goldie , Esox , Sun , Glimmer , Bennett , Flori , Silver , Gem , Gemini , Pisces , Mari , Marine , Sea , Collie , Tri , Sphyrna , Nori , Nemo , Gill , Coral , Reef , Aqua , Ariel , Dory , Tuna , Guppie , Guppy , Cory , Piscus.

pronouns - he / him / it / its / wave / waves / fish / fishes / swim / swims / sea / seas / co / coral / co / cod / aqua / aquas / mar / marine / wa / water / fi / fin / fins / co / cory / doras / prawn / prawns.

gender(s) - transmasculine , fish gender system , aquariumgender , troutgender , fishstelic , somnolentuspiscis , spacefishgender , fishiegender , fishtelevisic , koigender , lexifishic , fishlexic , oceanibreezic.

orientations - biromantic demisexual.

role(s) - mood booster , beauheur , hyperfixation keeper , ADHD holder (if applicable) , humorist

species - fishbowl-thing toon.

source(s) - Prismatic Pal Finn - Dandy's World.

emoji(s) - 🐟 , 🎣 , 🐡 , 🐠 , 🪸

likes - fishing , telling FAR TOO MANY jokes , science related stuff (finds science cool , might not actually know too much about it) , books , studying sea life , doodling on any paper it gets waves hands on , showers / baths , ANY hyperfixations of the system.

dislikes - feeling dry , being told to stop talking , itchy clothes , understimulation.

front triggers - fish jokes , himself being played ingame , aquariums , showers / baths , anything aquatic.

faceclaims -

( 1 - 2 - 3 )

name(s) - vee , vii , v1 , veronica , cyber , orbit , cosmo , erudiae , destriae , hunter , harmony , harmonia , healia , abunie , presiven.

pronouns - she / her / tech / technos / technologys / he / him / his / web / webs / website / cy / cybers / it / its / click / clicks / vi / virus / digi / digitals / .exe / .exes / they / them.

gender(s) - agender , webthing , genderbotic , techcoric , bluestaric , purplestaric , constellunyx , cosmideityfem , frilluaic , techlexic

orientations - biromantic , ace-spike

role(s) - drowser , verbal protector , night guard

species - TV toon.

source(s) - Star Time Vee - Dandy's World

emoji(s) - 🌌 , 🪐 , 💫 , ☄️

likes - night time , watching gameshows , some sourcemates (specifically any star time variants) , having necessary arguments , being online , stars.

dislikes - loud or what tech deems annoying people , people who start arguments for no reason , people the system generally dislikes , hot weather , starless nights.

front triggers - star time sourcemates , night time , online activity , gameshows , being played as ingame

faceclaims -

( 1 - 2 - 3 )

name(s) - Pebs , Bark , Claw , Fang , Buddy , Spot , Fetch , Ruff , Wolf , Digger , Growl , Howl , Cooper , Dale.

pronouns - he / him / they / them / ba / bark / barks / gro / growl / growls / cha / chase / chases / ru / run / runs / pla / play / plays / bo / bone / bones / ho / howl / howls / mea / meat / carc / carcass / blo / blood / shre / shred / gu / guts / go / gore / han / hangry / hu / hun / hungry.

gender(s) - doggender , bodyhorroric , corbeatsonusic , emptic , slashpupgender , thingmutt , muzzledcanineic , muttgender , dogthing , dogtailwagic , streetdogferalic.

orientations - nonhuman4nonhuman , dog4dog.

role(s) - protector of all trades , DNI holder , anger holder , emotional enhancer.

species - Twisted Dog Toon

source(s) - Twisted Pebble - Dandy's World

emoji(s) - 🐶 , 🐾 , 🐕 , 🦴

likes - eating meat , sourcemates (specifically other twisteds or Dandy , and sometimes other mains.) , yelling at people , running around , hanging out with pets , scaring people (just a bit,,) , chewing things , the sun.

dislikes - others being too loud , most people (at first) , cloudy weather , being tired , uncomfortable clothes , wearing too many layers of clothing , being too hot.

front triggers - Dandy fictives / kins / etc , himself being brought up , arguments , current fronter being too mad , overwhelming emotions , meat being served , dogs.

extra info - probably semi to non verbal

faceclaims -

( 1 - 2 - 3 )

THIS WAS SO FUN!! sorry if the packs are a bit smaller than usual due to there being three, if you need more just let us know!!

also sorry for capitalization errors and such! a lot of us worked on this one, so some things might look odd!!

AND ALSO OBVIOUSLY SORRY FOR THE WAIT WE SUCK

[out-of-the-curve]

I have 15 asks, 1 art request, several reference sheets, two short comics, stuff to finish for my birthday, a baking project for cooking class, a 3d scale project for art class, and college applications to do. I think I am going to explode… I'll just post whatever’s covered in webs from my drafts. After that, posts might be even more sporadic for the rest of the month because I have my finals next week, and I'm going to completely collapse when they're over.

[geekysciencemom]

I wanted to get the word out about what is currently happening in regards to Section 504.

Section 504 is an important law that protects people with disabilities. Section 504 says you can’t discriminate against disabled people if you get money from the United States government.

Schools have their own rules regarding Section 504. Students who don't qualify for an IEP will often be placed on a 504 Plan. This plan helps make the learning environment accessible to the student who has the plan. Within this plan, you will find the accommodations that the student needs to be successful at school. A student can have academic accommodations in both the K-12 and college settings. College students can also get living accommodations if they live on campus. People can also request accommodations in the work place.

Health and Human Services have their own rules for people with disabilities when it comes to providing access to medical health care, this includes dentists and behavioral health. There is a wide range of accommodations that health providers are required to provide under Section 504.

This is all thanks to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which Section 504 is included, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which is attached to Section 504.

Section 504 regulations were signed in 1977. Last year, the rule was updated. This was done due to what happened during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Among other important protections, the rule now covers:

Discrimination in medical treatment: The rule addresses discrimination in medical care and ensures that medical treatment decisions are not based on biases or stereotypes about people with disabilities, judgments that an individual will be a burden on others, or beliefs that the life of an individual with a disability has less value than the life of a person without a disability. These include, for example, decisions about life-sustaining treatment, organ transplantation, and rationing care in emergencies.

Community integration: The rule clarifies obligations to provide services in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of individuals with disabilities, consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C.

Accessibility of medical equipment: The rule adopts the U.S. Access Board’s accessibility standards for medical equipment to address barriers to care, like exam tables that are inaccessible because they are not height-adjustable, weight scales that cannot accommodate people in wheelchairs, and mammogram machines that require an individual to stand to use them. The rule requires most doctors’ offices to have an accessible exam table and weight scale within two years.

Web, mobile app, and kiosk accessibility: The rule adopts the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA accessibility standards for websites and mobile applications. It also requires web-enabled systems in self-service kiosks in medical providers’ offices to be accessible. These provisions are particularly important given the increased use of websites, apps, telehealth, video platforms, and self-service kiosks to access health care.

Value assessment methods: Value assessment methods are often used to decide whether a medical treatment will be provided and under what circumstances. The rule prohibits the use of any measure, assessment, or tool that discounts the value of a life extension on the basis of disability to deny, limit, or otherwise condition access to an aid, benefit, or service.

Section 504 is now under attack. There is a court case happening right now where 17 states are trying to end Section 504. If they succeed in ending this foundational law, the laws attached to it (the ADA and civil rights laws pertaining to race and sex) will be in jeopardy.

The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) provides additional information about the court case as well as steps to take to protect Section 504.

"This page explains what the lawsuit Texas v. Becerra is, how Texas v. Becerra threatens Section 504, and why Section 504 is important. Further down on this page, learn what you can do to help."