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Good morning. Have you been finding that your comments to Making Light are being blocked? When this happens, are you informed that your post contains “questionable content”?
Our fault. Sorry about that. Try again.
One of our bloggy crew here at Making Light was a little too quick with the “blacklist” button in MT-Blacklist, and unwittingly added “…” to our list of disallowed IP addresses. Everyone with an ellipsis in their comment has been getting bounced.
It’s fixed now.
I trust the Making Light residents have already encountered the Questionable Content cartoon.
Ellipses in the IP address? How does that happen, exactly?
It appears to be an artifact of the way MT processes addresses. When there's a long URL address, they display it with "..." in it somewhere. In the MT Blacklist process, the display box for the URL is even smaller, and can show "..." as the entire address.
Maybe this is just me, but I don't think I'd wear a T-shirt with the caption "WEBCEST" to lunch with my Mom as the character in that comic is doing.
But then, I presume it is named "Questionable Content" for a reason.
If you read the previous strip (#457), you'll see that Mom is rather ebullient.
This comic is the entry point for Marten's mother--- who is apparently a professional dominatrix by trade...
Yes kids, it's questionable content. Possibly NSFW, depending on where you work.
An ellipsis in the IP address can't be the explanation for the problem I was having yesterday, I think, since posts both before and after the rejected one (and from exactly the same location) went through fine. There *was* an ellipsis in the body of the rejected comment, though: would that have been the problem?
(Posting from a different IP address today.)
It's a good cartoon. Content varies, and tends to be more irreverent than offensive. Also, note that since the comic is a riff on "indie rock" culture, most of the t-shirts the characters wear either represent obscure bands, retro culture, or some parody of either.
I can see I've got to add another webtoon to my list of daily/weekly rounds, already standing at:
Didn't happen to me, 'cause I haven't posted anything recently, but it sure would've, 'cause for some reason I've become addicted to ellipses, and use them almost as much as Céline... [testing...!]
Was that a real typographic ellipsis '…' or just 3 dots '...' ?
My webcomics of choice, in no particular order
(no links, but all are easily googled):
Penny Arcade
Joy Of Tech
Megatokyo
PVP
Ctrl-Alt-Del
Diesel Sweeties
Applegeeks
Real Life
Questionable Content
The Devil's Panties
Queen of Wands
Something Positive
Piled Higher and Deeper
Wah. New webcomic to read. And I'd been so good about planning to do some work this evening...
Apropos of absolutely nothing, except that the folks who write and comment here seem all knowing: Does anyone remember a movie called, Celene and Julie Go Boating. If I remember it was very long and had no actual plot, but I am driving myself nuts trying to figure out if it was an actual movie or not. Sorry to go way off and beyond topic. I know I could google, but am also wondering if anyone knows what was going on in this movie (assuming it existed).
So that's probably why I got the perplexing "Questionable Content" box while trying to post a comment the other day.
On the other hand ... having a bunch of tiny rabbit turds scattered hither and yon within a comment ... might be considered just a little ... questionable.
I don't know anything about it, but it is a movie and it looks like the title you want is 'Céline et Julie vont en bateau'
I like to think that all my content is questionable. Or at least dubious.
On webcomics: surely, surely, you are reading Phil Foglio's Girl Genius?
Yup, I remember seeing Celine and Julie Go Boating, as it was called here, when it first came out (1974, apparently <feels old again>). It seems to only be around on VHS tape.
Strange, and over 3 hours long, but not without its rewards if you go with it. Reviewers described it as "the most realistic demonstration of a dream state I have ever witnessed" or having a "surreal childish logic", so I can understand that you might think you just made it up of bits & pieces in a hypnogogic(sp?) state.
Perry Bible Fellowship
The Maakies
Freefall
Lore Brand Comics
Her! (Girl vs. Pig)
Beekeeper
Whew, I feel like a webcomic piker. All I read regularly is Wigu + Overcompensating.
Occassionaly I read Achewood and Cat and Girl.
A friend of mine sends me to read Bob The Angry Flower sometimes.
I will not fall into the abyss ...
Kevin & Kell
Freefall
21st Century Fox
Ozy and Millie
Of those that update regularly:
Two Lumps
Kevin & Kell
Sluggy Freelance
Something Positive
Girl Genius
Rob & Elliot
I also occasionally check in on:
Hello Cthulhu
Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki
...but updates on these are rare.
I was following "The Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi" but it seems to be over. (Really it was more of a "Dexter's Laboratory Doujinshi"...) And the sequel features Cartoon Network characters that I never followed.
Any thoughts on Penny Arcade's beef with Harlan? After reading some accounts from others who were there I'm souring a bit on Gabe. Still massively funny comics, though.
Ghastly's Ghastly Comic.
Casey And Andy.
For good web comics, I'm surprised to see that no one mentioned Christopher Baldwin's "Bruno".
I saw Celine and Julie Go Boating about 15 years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. I only remember a few things about it. There's a little girl in it named Madeleine, in an apparent tip of the hat to Proust, and at one point they run up an endless (and well-known, to Parisians) flight of outdoor stairs.
It's a silly movie, but fun.
You can buy the french DVD here. Presumably you need a player that's encoded with whatever region France is in (sigh).
Mary -- if you have a DVD-ROM drive in your computer, (and if it is similar to the DVD-ROM drive in my computer), you will be able to watch DVD's regardless of what region code is on 'em.
A-and, how can you guys be discussing web comics and nobody mentions either Scott McCloud or the masterful Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep? At the latter site, Apocamon is one of the best things I've ever read in any format, but the whole site is well worth checking out. At the former site, I'm sad to say that he isn't doing Morning Improv these days; but when he was, he wrote The Junk Bar which is enough to put him on my list of all-time greats. Both McCloud and Farley have blogs, neither of which I really follow.
Mary, There are multiple solutions, some outre, some ordinary; the easiest is to google the cheat codes for your dvd player. Almost every single brand has them, since people in Europe hate to be locked out of american region (R1) disks.
Less easy ways, in increasing difficulty: using dvd ripping software (free and readily available online*), finding cheat codes for your DVD-ROM drive, installing a cheap, second DVD-ROM drive for an additonal region**, flashing the firmware, or, in the case of the PlayStation, resorting to disc-swap hacks or mod chips.
Note that some dvd players can't transmute PAL (.uk style tv) or SECAM (.fr style tv encoding to NTSC (.us/.jp style tv), but dvd playing software that you can run on your computer almost always can.
Jeremy, That's not entirely true. The firmware in many DVD-ROM drives will "reset" what region they are supposed to read if you put a disc from a different region in. But they will only do this magic trick a handful of times. (For some apple laptops, the magic number is 5.)
If your drive silently accepts out of region discs, then you either have a problem (it's resetting silently) or a bonus (the firmware is non-compliant).
R.
*as you might expect, there is a whole community devoted to producing software for this kind of thing. Some of it is rediculously easy to use. I'm reminded of Bruce Schnier's saying about making bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
**Region 2 (R2) includes Europe, the Middle East, Japan, and South Africa, so a second drive gets you pretty much everything except Bollywood (R5). See the pretty map here. Note that most non-American/European source disks aren't region encoded anyway, since region coding is only a benefit to large producers.
Oog, that kinda sucks. Well I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Right now I have only used my DVD-ROM to view a European (region 2) disc -- American discs we watch on the TV. I guess I'll try and find cheat codes if and when I need to. Thanks for letting me know.
Patrick Farley is really ticking me off.
Imagine, working a day job so he can eat instead of working on his comics. Some nerve!
Seriously, the guy should be getting wads of $20 bills stuck in his pockets by ninja financiers so he can do his thing. His site hasn't been updated in a year, and that a genuine shame.
Jeremy,
No prob. I eat this stuff for breakfast. I forgot to mention that the cheat codes is that they are permanent on most dvd players, and disable macrovision as well. This is key if you are an educator who needs to put a clip on vhs. (Vhs has one primary advantage over dvd in the classroom: you can cue directly to the thing you want to show without resorting to menu surfing.)
I'll note that its entirely possible that the European dvd was not actually region-coded. Like I said, it only benefits large producers.
-R.
I'll note that its entirely possible that the European dvd was not actually region-coded.
I'm pretty sure it was because my (non-computer) DVD player would not read it. I put it in and the thing just said approximately, "Unrecognized disk format" or words to that effect.
Hmm, in my experience most players will explicitly tell you that it's the wrong region; but your mileage may vary.
Dan Guy, there's some discussion of PA vs. Ellison over in Open Thread 49, if you hadn't already found it. I'd be very interested to see accounts that portray a different perspective on things.
Daily comics:
Foxtrot
Get Fuzzy
Sinfest
Dr. Fun
PVPonline (At least in part to mock his tardiness)
Something Positive
Unshelved (just added this one, but the ML crew should love it)
Multi-update-per-week:
Penny Arcade
Goats
Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Panda Xpress!
Weekly:
Full Frontal Nerdity
Alpha Shade
Creating a comics folder and using the Firefox "open all in tabs" feature means I can read all of the above in about 5 minutes. It's a great way to start the day.
People don't mention [your favorite comics here] only because they haven't encountered them yet--I find I'm always discovering Webcomics that are new to me that have been around forever -- it's all good.
A wonderful piece on the Artristic History of Webcomics is new and engaging and will be of great interest to many of you, I'm sure.
But who was the genius organizer that thought putting Harlan Ellison on a stage with Gabe and Tycho was a smart idea in the first place? I can't wrap my head around that bit of preposterousness to begin with. Analogies fail me. It's like seeing Samuel Beckett getting into an argument with Ren and Stimpy over a parking space at Legoland. Not something which should exist in a sane universe.
There's a little girl in [Celine et Julie] named Madeleine, in an apparent tip of the hat to Proust...
If I saw a little girl of that name in a French film, I would think first of Ludwig Bemelmans; given what happens to the madeleines in Proust, that interpretation is a tad bit creepy. Even for the nouvelle vague.
Jeremy: it may be a non-region-coded PAL DVD; I have one such bought in Dublin (a U2 DVD-single). Plays fine on my computer without asking for a region code reset, but won't play on my standalone DVD player because that only does NTSC.
Pikers. I read almost sixty webcomics. Granted, not all of them update every day.