#high capacity magazines

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Opinion | No one needs an AR-15 or any gun tailor-made for mass shootings

By the Editorial Board

The Post’s investigative series on the AR-15’s dominant place in the United States’ marketplace and psyche sat atop the Post website on Monday, the day of its release — until, hours later, breaking news replaced it. Three adults and three children had been killed in a Nashville school shooting by a 28-year-old assailant with three guns, including at least one AR-15-style rifle.

These attacks are always heart-wrenching. But they’re not surprising anymore — neither the massacres themselves nor the weapons used to carry them out. 10 of the 17 deadliest mass killings in the United States since 2012 involved AR-15s. The names of the towns and cities where these tragedies took place have become familiar: Newtown, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Parkland, Uvalde and beyond. The Post chronicles the journey this now-iconic rifle took from military-issued firearm to off-the-shelf bestseller, and underscores the danger in the public’s embrace of a weapon the Defense Department once lauded for its “phenomenal lethality.”

“I don’t know why anyone needs an AR-15,” President Donald Trump reportedly told aides in August 2019 after back-to-back mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso. There’s no good answer. The AR-15 was designed for soldiers, yet its associations with warfare eventually became a selling point for everyday buyers. “Use what they use,” exhorted one ad displaying professionals wielding tactical rifles. Now, about 1 in 20 U.S. adults own at least one AR-15. That’s roughly 16 million people, storing roughly 20 million guns designed to mow down enemies on the battlefield with brutal efficiency. Two-thirds of these were crafted in the past decade — and when more people die, popularity doesn’t fall. Instead, it rises.

The AR-15, The Post explains, is materially different from traditional handguns. The rifle fires very small bullets at very fast speeds. The projectiles don’t move straight and smooth through human targets like those from a traditional handgun. Their velocity turns them unstable upon penetration, so that they tumble through flesh and vital organs. This so-called blast effect literally tears people apart. A trauma surgeon notes, “you don’t see the muscle … just bone and skin and missing parts.” Another mentions tissue that “crumbled into your hands.”

A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that “disintegrated” a toddler’s skull.

This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.

Even thinking about these injuries is horrifying, so much so that crime scene photos are often kept confidential. But the gruesome reality of what an AR-15 can wreak poses an argument in itself: There is no excuse for the widespread availability of these weapons of war.

No single action will stop mass shootings, much less gun violence more generally. The Post’s reporting is only more evidence of the need for a ban on assault rifles. It’s evidence, too, of the need for a ban on high-capacity magazines. Rules restricting how many rounds a gun can fire before a shooter has to reload are more difficult to skirt than flat-out assault rifle bans, which sometimes prompt manufacturers to make cosmetic changes that will reclassify their products. A number is a number. These prohibitions might face legal challenges, but lawmakers in four states have recently added caps. More should follow.

Think of Sutherland Springs, where the shooter, armed with a Ruger AR-556, got off 450 military-grade bullets within minutes, killing 25 people including a pregnant woman. Think of Dayton, where the gunman needed only 32 seconds to hit more than two dozen people with 41 bullets. That’s because he was equipped with a 100-round drum magazine. Even a 30-round magazine — the industry standard these days — would have forced him to reload at least once. A 15-round magazine would have forced him to reload twice. The Post’s analysis of the time this would have taken reveals the lives it could have saved: potentially six of the nine who were killed, in the case of a 15-round magazine.

Think, in contrast, of Poway, Calif., where a gunman killed one person at a synagogue and injured three others with a 10-round magazine before running out of bullets. Members of the congregation moved to confront him as he fumbled with another magazine, and he fled. Children who survived Sandy Hook told their parents they ran away while the assailant was “playing with his gun.” What they’d seen was plain enough. The shooter had stopped to reload.

The AR-15 has become a cultural symbol. But what kind of culture tolerates death after death after 10 murders — or after 27, or 49, or 60? Respect for the Second Amendment doesn’t require standing by while 6-year-olds are torn to shreds. The nation needs to act on guns. The AR-15 and weapons like it are a good place to start.

[bighermie]

Here we come SCOTUS

[qupritsuvwix]

Good luck. You’re missing a very important fact. Even if you ban the sale and manufacture of certain types and brands of rifles, a la the “laundry list” laws of the eighties, it won’t make a difference. You can’t confiscate enough to make America “safe” or “gun-free”. There are enough semi-automatic rifles out there to arm several million people if they each have only one. And many gun fuckers have multiple examples, with plenty of ammunition. The only hope we have is the more intelligent firearms owners getting tired of idiots making them look bad and deciding to clean up their act. Because most firearms owners are not violent and intent on murder. They are not heartless. They have just been given very few options. Some of them believe that the time is coming when the Shit Hits the Fan. There is no such thing as “civilian society” when cops murder with impunity and stand by while active shooters rage. There is no “civilian society” when a deposed president inspires insurrection and suggests that the next civil war might occur real soon. Unarmed citizens are not civilians just because you think firearms are “weapons of war”. When the next insurrection occurs you might be happy that some liberals own rifles. Because your “thoughts and prayers” that “assault weapons” will stop making your life difficult if enough people clap their hands is a fantasy. And stop babbling about “common sense gun laws”. If common sense actually existed, then nobody would be allowed to purchase a firearm without undergoing at least a basic firearm safety course. But it doesn’t.

[desiringnothingness]

I am disappointed that I actually got triggered by a stupid PETA comment. City leftists are so ignorant from cradle to grave propaganda (cartoons, then school, then social media, then tv, then news, etc) that they aren’t even aware of how ignorant they are of other lifestyles. And yet these people have so much control due to being in a mob of indoctrinated sheep.

My diocese is withdrawing drastically from the rural areas here to concentrate on “marginalized” communities in the city. When have the Ozarks not been marginalized? Whether the community is a French community that goes back 300 years (in the presentation the diocese made a lot of 200 years references, as if they are not even aware of how long these communities have been around before deciding to abandon them) and never assimilated with the English speaking Scots-Irish settlers, or German settlements, or the majority Scots-Irish communities who were pushed into the less desirable hill country by English settlers who got the best land (just like what happened with the Appalachians), these areas were marginalized from the start.

The rural communities, especially in the Ozarks, are still marginalized through a lack of funding for education and fewer programs than what city people get.

Special needs in education? I couldn’t even get my kids evaluated at school for autism or whatever holds them back socially because their grades weren’t bad enough. The school just didn’t get enough funding for special needs and evaluations, so they ignored all but the most severe academic or social problems. When we got them into a licensed clinical social worker, she said the only people qualified in the area to make the evaluations were with the schools. I gave up since there wasn’t anything the school would have done for them anyway, because this area has the wrong demographics to get funding for much of anything. Too white and “privileged” with all the roadkill and hunted game we get to eat out of poverty.

Health care? It took 6-12 months to get a kid to a psychologist for a first visit, despite having severe depression and having trouble staying in class due to social anxiety. My son had a growth on his foot and was referred to a specialist to make sure it wasn’t cancer. However nobody here would take Medicaid insurance. It took a couple years to find a specialist for that (2 hours away) who would take Medicaid and see him. Guess what? It was at a Jesuit run teaching facility in the city.

City people mock rural people for being inbred and stupid. Then the cities get the lions share of all the funding for education and we get the scraps. At least we can think for ourselves out here in the country, because many leftist city folk lack critical thinking skills. Just look at PETA as an example. Schools don’t seem to teach students how to think for themselves anymore.

Even the Catholic Church neglects the rural parishes here. We have a food pantry run by the local parish through Saint Vincent de Paul organization, and a Rural Parish Health Clinic that I would be surprised if they got significant funding from the diocese. That is it, and we do it ourselves. There are plenty of programs for the city though.

And now the diocese plans to merge the majority of the rural parishes so that they can concentrate on the “marginalized” city people. Parishes 250-300 years old are all being reduced to one parish per county. Funny thing is, the diocese knows plenty of numbers about demographics, funding, attendance, etc, but they don’t know anything about these parishes. They don’t even know how old these parishes are.

So thanks to demographics, even the diocese is abandoning and marginalizing the Ozarks. Too white and too poor to get anything.

And these city people have the arrogance to tell us how to live, after hogging all the funding for themselves. You shouldn’t have guns. How do we protect the livestock that you buy for food then? I have lost sheep to cougars, and on Facebook some idiot said I should be honored that such majestic animals are eating my animals. Huh? I also lost sheep to coyotes, and for years I made sure to lure my sheep into the barn I converted from a garage to keep them safe. Then the neighbor’s dogs (a boxer mix and a pit bull who were killing for fun) killed off the rest in one afternoon this year. Six sheep with mortal wounds in one hour, one lingered on a couple days and we brought him inside to try to save him with daily vet visits. My daughter was with him when he breathed his last. That is why dogs running loose in pastures often get shot on sight, and if I ever get back into livestock I will have to do the same instead of complaining to the neighbor about his dogs running wild or trying to scare them off with snake shot.

You want to put down a sheep or goat because they won’t recover or because you can’t afford the beef prices and yet you still have to feed your kids? (That money from beef isn’t going to producers like us in the country. We are going out of business because the money we get paid by the packing plants is not increasing but our costs are increasing due to inflation. Especially the gas and diesel prices from Biden’s attacks on domestic oil production, but anyways back to the humane and quick slaughter of an animal). I have found a shotgun slug to the head will drop them instantly without twitching. Of course a .223 from an AR-15 or a .308 from an AR-10 to the head (it is close range so wasting meat by shooting the heart area like in deer or boar hunting is unnecessary) will kill them, but sometimes they twitch from nerves firing and you have to make sure their heart stopped and are really dead and not suffering. Same with a pistol.

Nobody needs a magazine with 30 rounds. Really? You obviously never went boar hunting and found a whole herd of them. Or came across a bear. Some people will use an AR-15 for boar hunting, but often in a tree or a tree stand. It is barely adequate for boar or bear unless in the right spot. Boar are tough, with gristle, thick bones, thick hides, and tusks that will gut a dog quickly. The .223 caliber (5.56 mm) round might bounce off in some places I hear because the bone is thick, or it might get lodged, cause an infection, and kill them next month. Too late, if your kids are hungry and you can’t afford food but all the government aid goes to the cities. Food stamps? There’s a work requirement for them here. So you need to place your shots well on this animal larger than you, that is aggressive and wants to kill you. A few extra rounds might help, or preferably an AR-10 with 30 round magazines of .308/7.62 rounds.

God help you if you are dumb enough to hunt a herd of boar with a 5 round magazine. Keep your dumbass in the city where you belong.

[attactica]

How Long Can You Leave Magazines Loaded?

[aaaaatillathenun]

ugh we love cognitive dissonance a middle schooler was killed in a school shooting by a teenager there. 5 more people are injured, 1 in critical condition. When will this stop. When will there be a ban on guns

[don-lichterman]

Fact Check Team: How effective has gun control legislation been?

Fact Check Team: How effective has gun control legislation been?

WASHINGTON (TND) — President Joe Biden has said a Clinton-era ban on assault weapons is one of the solutions America should be looking to in order to decrease mass shootings. The National Desk’s Fact Check Team has been digging into the … Source link

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Democratic-backed ban on assault-style rifles and large-capacity magazines enacted after a deadly mass shooting in Chicago's Highland Park suburb in 2022 that left seven people dead and dozens of others wounded.

The state's high court in a 4-3 vote rejected arguments by a group of plaintiffs led by a Republican state Representative Dan Caulkins, that the ban violated the Illinois Constitution by not applying the law equally to all citizens.

Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker in a statement called the ruling "a win for advocates, survivors, and families alike because it preserves this nation-leading legislation to combat gun violence and save countless lives."

In January, he signed into law the measure, the Protect Illinois Communities Act, which bans the sale and distribution of many kinds of high-powered semiautomatic "assault weapons," including AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, and large-capacity magazines.

Justice Elizabeth Rochford, a Democrat, wrote that the constitution's equal protection and special legislation clauses did not bar the state's legislature from treating certain citizens differently than others by exempting them from the law.

Those exemptions applied to people who complete firearms training while employed in law enforcement, the military and private security and individuals who already owned the prohibited guns before the ban was enacted.

"The Act attempts to balance public safety against the expertise of the trained professionals and the expectation interests of the grandfathered individuals," Rochford wrote in an opinion that was joined by three of her fellow Democratic justices.

The ruling reversed a lower-court judge's ruling in the plaintiffs' favor. Justices Lisa Holder White and David Overstreet, both Republicans, and Mary Kay O’Brien, a Democrat, dissented.

The plaintiffs also argued the law violated the right to keep and bear arms under the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. But Rochford said the plaintiffs waived that argument by not raising it at the lower-court level.

That Second Amendment argument is central to separate ongoing federal lawsuits also challenging Illinois' law.

The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court last year in striking down New York state gun limits on carrying concealed firearms announced a new legal standard requiring firearms restrictions to be "consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."

That ruling has made it more difficult for lower courts to uphold new or existing gun regulations, several of which have been declared unconstitutional.

[postersbykeith]

[abibliophobiaa]

Comfort (smut is ok too)

I havent laughed like this in a long time

Forced proximity

Eddie munson

🌛🌜

thank you for your sweet request. had a lot of fun with this one. little ex-lovers to lovers again with rockstar!eddie ahead. warnings: mentions of alcohol and 18+, minors dni for p in v sex. || 2k words

You don’t mean to bump into your ex boyfriend at the bar. You’re meant to meet up with a date—someone your roommate, Robin, had set you up with. Said it was a friend from her undergrad program, that he was great and was a high school history teacher. Only he’s not here now, hasn’t shown up and it’s been well over an hour. Which is a shame, truly, because he sounded safe; vastly different from the man actually sitting before you now, twirling the ice round and around within his glass. 

And it’s not that Eddie isn’t safe, it’s just that he’d gone off on tour nearly a year ago and it rocked the foundations of your relationship to the core. He asked you to come. Through teary goodbyes as he climbed onto the tour bus all those months ago, he asked you once more. Begged for you to come, to embark on this new journey, to be there. But you were studying, working on your graduate degree, and he understood. He’s always understood, and though it pained him he climbed on that bus all the same and told you you’d make it work. 

For a bit…it did. 

You enjoyed the random flowers he’d have sent to your apartment, the gifts that would arrive at your doorstep on your birthday and other holidays, the phone sex when the guys had long gone to bed for the night. 

But eventually, all things change. 

 Phone conversations became sparse, conversation heavy and limited, spoken through whatever crappy phone booth he could come across on the road. You reminded yourself on those hard days that he always promised nothing would change, that time and space couldn’t take away what the two of you shared, but it changed you. 

You suggested it one day. Taking time apart. You with tests coming up, him with the constant late nights. You weren’t connecting like you once did, you told him, and winced when you heard his shaky exhale on the other line. It breaks you to break him, because if there’s one thing Eddie Munson has always been, it’s giving. You could ask for the moon and he’d wrangle that and the stars for you. He’d do anything to make you smile, to see you happy, to let you know just how honestly and truly loved you were. 

So he granted you that. Told you he loved you enough to let you go and hung up the phone on the receiver. It had been four months since that day. Four months of wondering what he’s doing, what he’s been up to. Four months of capturing his face in a magazine at a newsstand on your way home from work in the bustling streets of New York City. You bought them every time. Flipped through the colorful pages and traced the features you knew like the back of your hand, if only just to see him in some limited capacity. 

It’s nothing like having him across from you now. There’s never been anything really to encompass the punch to your gut that’s an inevitability when those amber eyes dart your way. 

“Can I sit here?” he asks, and he’s already sitting when you finally nod. “You alone?”

“I was supposed to be meeting up with someone.” He flinches at your honesty and nods. His dark hair dances along his black leather jacket, thumb running along his bottom lip as you continue eagerly, “What are you doing here?”

“Playing a concert tomorrow, as you know. We had the day off today.” He pauses at your frown. “You got the tickets I sent you, didn’t you?”

“I did,” you admit, remembering that they’re on the fridge back at your apartment. You’d been shocked when he sent them. Had meant to reach out…just hadn’t yet. “I’m going, if that’s what you’re wondering. With Robin.”

“Good.” He chuckles, mouth drawn into a smile that shows his dimples. “Your date is an ass, you know—for, uh, standing you up.”

You offer him a pleasant smile, twirling your own drink in front of you as you say, “I’m enjoying my company just fine.”

It’s as easy as breathing, the two of you falling back into conversation. You suppose that’s the nature of a friendship forged when you’re kids, and a romantic relationship that only came later. But you fall back into step like old friends and lovers, catching up on the months lost, of the guys in the band, your happenings in school, how Robin is doing. You talk about Hawkins and how Steve visited with the kids last weekend. And before long you’re walking back to your apartment, bubbles of excitement dancing in your belly at the prospect of spending more time with Eddie. 

“You sure you want me to come back?” he asks, all boyish grins and fingers toying with a curl that he drags along his plush lips. 

“It’s going to snow anyway. And my apartment is closer than your hotel,” you tell him, just as you drag him inside. “Robin’s out for the night anyway.”

You don’t intend to stay up most of the night talking. But you do, huddled together on your couch, giggling together until your sides ache and your cheeks hurt from grinning so much. Somewhere, in the midst of the movie you pop in and set to watch, a bowl of popcorn positioned in Eddie’s lap, the two of you drift off into sleep. Leather jacket pressed against your cheek, the tattoo of his heartbeat loud in your ears, the comfort of his familiarity calling you home. 

In the morning, you’re both on your sides. The popcorn, now likely stale, sits on your coffee table. Eddie’s fingers press into the dip of your back, his thighs slotted between yours, his face just millimeters from your forehead. It feels normal, and there’s a feeling of right that stirs in your chest from just simply having him close to you like this.

“Hey,” he murmurs, eyes closed, head nuzzling into yours. 

You don’t push away, don’t try to move. It feels nice, this nearness to him. Your fingers slide up and along his back, brushing against skin beneath his shirt. “Hi.” 

You’re met with those eyes that could have you falling in love all over again. Then again, you don’t think you ever truly fell out. “I haven’t laughed like that in a long time,” he whispers, thumb coming up to run along your cheek gently. 

At the slow drag of the digit back and forth along your jawline, your heart stutters. “Me neither, Eddie. Look—I’m really sorry for—”

His next words tumble out in a breathless rush, “Do you think you could give us another chance? I’m done with the tour in another month and then I’ll be home. Here. And I want to do it with you.”

It’s a beautiful dream; sounds like everything you could want and more. But the logistics, the reality of what that looks like. “Eddie…you’re in Hawkins when you’re not working, and I’m here in the city—”

“I’ll move in.”

You break out into a disbelieving laugh. “Did you just invite yourself to move into my apartment?”

“I’ll move in…if you let me. If you want me to,” he says slowly, looking you firmly in the eye. There’s a severity there you’re unused to on his features. “Look, it’s not going to be easy, and I know that. I should have been more supportive on the road last time, should have called you more. Fuck, there’s a lot of things I should have done, but I shouldn’t have let you go. I should have gotten on the next plane to New York and been here.”

You’ve both made mistakes. Endless ones. Too many to count. In your heart, you understand letting Eddie go—letting your love go—is one of the gravest. 

“Your career skyrocketed—”

“Doesn’t matter. You were there for all my shitty shows with the five drunks in our crowd, and you were there when we played our first festival. You were there when we got signed with the record label. And I’m a fuckin’ idiot.”

It’s crazy; it sounds crazy, but it feels right and you’re blurting out your next words without thinking about it, choosing to try, choosing to believe, “I have three conditions for you moving in here.”

The hand brushing your cheek stops. “I’m listening.”

“You kiss me every morning and night when you’re here.” 

“Easy.” He leans down and nudges his nose against yours for emphasis. At the soft nod of your head, he leans down and captures your mouth with his, swallowing the hum that swells in the back of your throat. 

You reluctantly pull away, teasing the line of his nose with your own. “You promise to separate your lights from your darks before throwing them in the wash.”

He smirks, huffing out a laugh. “Babe, I’ll even do the dishes.”

“Tempting,” you tease, sliding your hand around his back and dragging it across his abdomen. His stomach twitches under your touch, amber eyes liquefying as they glance down to where your skin brushes his. 

“What’s the last one?” he asks, a pointer finger coming to tip your head up to look at him. He places another peck on your lips, maneuvering the two of you on the couch so you can shift over onto your back, one of his elbows resting beside your head to prop himself up. 

Your fingers slide up and over his heart, resting over the place you’d broken some months ago now, the same place he was willing to open up to you and lay bare once more. “We will never ever break up again. It killed me the first time. Been my best friend since we were kids, Ed.”

“I know, sweetheart, I know.” His palm moves to lay over yours, forehead dropping to rest against yours. “Never again. Gonna make sure you know every day just how much you mean to me. I love you.”

“I love you, too.” And you mean it. It’s never been something that stopped; it’s a certainty just as the sun rising each day is. “So how soon can you move in?”

“Well,” he hums, sliding a palm down your side, along the curve of your hip, around the bend of your knee that spreads to accommodate him between the cradle of your hips. “Seeing as we’re snowed in, we can practice now.”

Your kisses are slow and languid, as is the way you undress one another. Fingers coming to slide his jacket down his arms, to help drag the tee shirt beneath up and over his head until his wavy hair springs free. He slides your jeans down your thighs, making you giggle when he blows a raspberry into your abdomen after you kick your thong free from your ankle into a heap on the floor alongside the jeans and boxers he’s since removed. And it’s a honey sweet sigh as he flops over onto his back and you sink down onto him, relishing in the fullness of being with the man who holds your heart after four months without. It’s the soft build of your impending release, husky moans from the man beneath you, quiet moans spilling from your parted lips. It’s the ringed fingers helping you rock against him, his hips undulating beneath yours, driving you closer and closer to your tipping point, the rasp of his voice as he breathes out, “I—ah, fuck. Made for me, sweetheart.”

“Missed you, Ed. Missed this. Missed us.” 

“That’s it. Take what you need. S’ gorgeous, baby.” 

As you shatter around him, sated and spent, and drop down to rest against him, with his fingers trailing up and down your bare spine, you relish in the fresh start, a love to nurture. 

And a few days later, you relish in the new home you start to build as you help him unpack and his things become one with your own. 

-

-

[canmom]

comics and animation have a lot in common, but one interesting difference is that arranging pictures in space rather than time means there's a tradeoff between the amount of drawings you use to show an action, the amount of space each drawing is given, and the amount of pages you cover which determines the 'pacing' of the comic.

if you slice the page up into a lot of tiny boxes to show many stages of a motion like an animation, then each panel has correspondingly less space for background details, and it may affect the aspect ratio of panels. if you give yourself space for a large splash panel, then the pace will slow.

one solution to this problem is to break the convention that a panel is a single 'frame' of action and show multiple images of a character in the same background. Kentaro Miura did this sometimes, and Tradd Moore (on here - @traddmoore) is an expert who uses it frequently (I'll reblog his spiderman comic in a minute). Kamome Shirahama, a genius at creative paneling, also uses it in a couple of places.

a similar trick will have a single background continuous across multiple panels, showing a static 'camera shot' at different times.

the limitation of these methods is that breaking convention makes the panel a little harder to process - you need to make absolutely sure you cue the reader clearly about where to enter the panel. and it requires action that involves a large movement so the drawings don't overlap. so most authors use it as a 'once in a while' thing.

an opposite approach, used in early parts of Superpose by Seosamh and Anka and Goodbye, Eri by Tatsuki Fujimoto, is to go even harder with the cinematic convention and give each panel the aspect ratio and detailed backgrounds of a film camera, taking all the space you need - Superpose opens with about two panels per page which may be very similar to each other, creating a very deliberate sense of pacing. to pull this off you need to be either extremely fast at drawing like Fujimoto, or accept your comic taking a long time to get anywhere - and you also need to be very good at placing the camera in space. you're basically drawing fully rendered storyboards at that point.

one of the interesting difficulties of comic-making is controlling pacing. if you draw many very similar panels it will convey a sense of high concentration and intensity, or a heavy atmosphere, like a long take in a film. much like in prose, if you spend a lot of pictures on something it draws attention to it. so you want to use the 'slow down' sparingly for effect.

as in animation, you're also limited by your own capacity to draw all those pictures, and moreover the space to put them. this is one reason why comics in magazines tend to be sharply limited in page count, and webcomics tend to be very slow compared to other forms of serial fiction. (perhaps manga can make heavier use of pacing tricks by virtue of cheaper printing and endemic overwork. i don't think that's the full story though.) meanwhile, when Transmetropolitan started to experiment with manga-style pacing, apparently it upset fans who felt the story progression was being diluted. when reading Transmet in one go, though, you don't even notice. what works well in an anthology of hundreds of pages may work poorly in a serial.

i think the pace of the reader is often controlled primarily by the text - at least for me I find I sometimes have a tendency to jump very quickly over panels to get to the next bit of the story and have to consciously slow myself down to make sure I don't fail to appreciate the art. so while a series of text-less panels is effective artistically, you might want some words to act as speed bumps. but too much text per picture and your comic becomes exhausting to read, like Subnormality. and you don't want to over-explain what's conveyed perfectly well by the pictures, as many older comics do.

ideally, you use your text, small panels and large panels to create a sense of rhythm. a big splash panel can act as the full stop in a sentence, or a longer take after a series of rapid cuts. negative space is an especially powerful device in the right hands: when you hit a page of Chainsaw Man or Berserk that is almost entirely white after several pages of dense illustration, a character bursting into the void, there's an immediate 'wow' effect before you even process what's happening in the illustration. (i can't seem to find the chainsaw man example i had in mind, so here's one from berserk.)

and on that note, the other thing that comics have that animation doesn't is the impact of being confronted with the whole gestalt page. in the manga I was helping Fall translate when she died, We Are Magical Boys (Bokura wa Mahou Shounen), Fukushima Teppei frequently puts one panel much larger than the others so it dominates the page, usually a close-up or full length character portrait, allowing the cuteness of their unique art style to treasure centre stage. Sandman, which I'm currently rereading, is full of elaborate page compositions, where a drawing might not even be a panel per se, but a visual element. Witch Hat Atelier is full of elaborate borders and clever compositions. just look at this...

how did she come up with that! the absolute madwoman! the right side is relatively standard Atelier (establishing shots, the main cast eagerly stepping out of their panel) but on the left, we have a set of panels falling down from above onto a large splash panel. even though this image is concurrent, the panels invite us to appreciate it in chunks, and the page as a whole has this great visual of the pages of a book, continuing the image of the previous page. (more of this on upcoming post on Atelier)

a character emerging from their panel to overlap others, breaking up the monotony of the grid and adding a sense of depth to the page as a whole, is a reliably appealing motif. also, drawing one panel borderless, so it implicitly continues behind the other panels. large areas of black and white and choices of colour saturation can convey a mood to the page as a whole.

the danger you run is always the loss of clarity. the reader must be able to tell what panels to read in what order without thinking about it. Sandman will sometimes do a double page spread where you're supposed to read across both pages, and this consistently trips me up. Dresden Codak is by an adhd author and her drive to give every page an elaborate layout is very familiar to me, but especially in Hob, it messes with the flow of the comic overall.

so every comic page, every comic, is a fascinating balance of all these factors. how to create a strong, visually interesting composition, control the pacing appropriate to tone, create a thrilling sense of rhythm... all without sacrificing clarity.

not much more to say about this as yet, it's just something I'm thinking about while trying to lay out a page of Ghost Barrier. my tendency is to generally use larger panels, and try to be creative with layouts, but you have to consider not just each page in isolation but how they relate to other pages. so to make the splash panel land, I need to contrast with a denser page immediately beforehand.

the more I make comics the more of a feel I'll get. cool medium!

[probablyasocialecologist]

There are enough highways, apartments and offices, malls and hotels, restaurants and theme parks—this despite an ongoing crisis of housing affordability. In the over-carbonised economies of the world’s wealthiest countries, maybe we don’t need to build any more, or only do so in a very targeted manner: hospitals and archives, cooling centres, housing and amenities for climate refugees. Even in these cases, there is often the capacity to reuse and redistribute what we have—to reconsider the role of design as one of maintenance, repair, and adequate comfort.  Some buildings are needed. Class A office space and luxury condominiums, not so much. After the Covid lockdowns, the vacant office space in New York City could fill twenty-six Empire State Buildings. Seems like enough. Yet there are still cranes in the sky, still new towers on the boards—indeed, the production of the built environment (and not only in New York) is essential to a growth economy. Any form of enough-ness goes against this premise of relative economic strength being measured by growth, or really by the growth of growth—how much has the GDP gone up, and at what rate? To suggest that, individually or collectively, we already have enough goes against the very foundation of consumer culture. Many life worlds are organized largely, if not exclusively, around accumulation, wanting and getting more—more stuff, more space, more savings.  The health of the US economy in particular is measured by rates of consumer spending, and through this measure implicitly directs the global supply chain. What, for example, is the carbon cost of the resurgence of interest in Barbie? The plastics, the shipping, the advertising, the repainting of houses. And given the carbon intensive energy regime that hums beneath this always-growing global economy, all of this—stuff, space, savings—is dripping in oil, vibrating with carbon intensity, keeping the arrow of emissions pointed inexorably upwards. The Austrian/Puerto Rican economist Leopold Kohr referred to this as Skyscraper Economics—how high can we build? How much can an economy grow? Is there a measure of health, or wealth, that is not about this competitive increase, but about a horizontal redistribution? At last year’s Beyond Growth Summit in Brussels, this was framed as a distinction between “ecologically harmful growth competition and well being cooperation.” Architecture’s fealty to growth, investment, and financialization is caught up in this distinction, and faces the challenge of finding opportunities for creativity within a new set of constraints. Why, when a new building is announced on Instagram or in a glossy magazine by some proud firm or client, do we see square footage, a few swanky features, but no mention of the estimated carbon emissions of the building’s life-cycle?

[mariacallous]

"I’m proud we beat the NRA when I signed the most significant gun safety law in nearly 30 years! Now we must beat the NRA again! I’m demanding a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines! Pass universal background checks! None of this - I taught the Second Amendment for 12 years! -  violates the Second Amendment or vilifies responsible gun owners." 

[akkivee]

my hypster magazine finally came in the mail lmao and man the special feature talking about how the world is coping without mics is very interesting??? like:

crime as a whole is at an all time high

within ikebukuro, the police are doing fck all about it so the bb have volunteered their services to making the civilians feel safe

ichiro’s been a mediator within more casual disputes, expressing his desire to talk things thru if possible, jiro’s got his whole high school as a neighbourhood watch and saburo’s set up a huge surveillance system to keep watch

in yokohama, the sea port has been particularly targeted and the report says the police and yakuza have teamed up to protect the flow of commerce. katengumi has stepped up to protect the territory and rio is keeping watch via satellite images and drones

in shibuya, dice complains of disruptions in gambling dens and the lack of real gambling has dulled his senses lol. he’s trying to compensate by making his own gambling game lol and he hasn’t been able to pay his phone bill due to lack of funds so he hasn’t been able to talk to ramuda or gentaro

curiously, neither of those two were mentioned in the article, save for dice using the section to try to reach out to them

in shinjuku, the day is desolate and the night scene is busier than ever. doppo’s company has been particularly hit by logistics nightmares as they’re haemorrhaging money due to lost medical equipment. (doppo’s boss has been accusing him of stealing funds and doppo claps back asking what exactly has he been managing currently lol)

shinjuku central hospital has been at full capacity with patients due to the inability to fend off armed criminals. fragrance has seen a significant uptick in patrons

in osaka, businesses have taken a sharp turn towards maliciousness, with scams at an all time high. sasara and rosho advise not to go out at night alone, and rosho, as a teacher, further explains that adults have a duty to protect minors, especially as a person who has been affected by scams in the past. neither sasara nor rosho have heard from rei in a long while, stating dh is on hiatus because of it

in nagoya, petty crimes are up because there seems to be a restlessness amongst them without the mics giving the populace the power to stand out. hitoya himself watched a dude climb up nagoya castle literally for the memes. the court of law has been barren as of late so nobody is being tried for crimes but he believes justice will prevail in due time

kuukou and jyushi have taken up patrolling nagoya in order to persuade others into not doing crimes and all three of them still practice rap battling together