As long as I can remember, I’ve always loved to make people laugh. My sense of humor was initially rough, to say the least, but as I got older, I paid more attention to what made people laugh, I learned to gauge my audiences, and I lost my fear of being the subject of a joke. By high school, I was making several friends based on nothing more than my wit. It wasn’t very long, however, before I got my first phone, and I learned how to text. It was a whole new medium with a whole new context to account for. A major part of my humor relies on the audience’s knowledge that I’m CLEARLY joking. For example (WARNING: I’m about to explain an already “meh” joke, so strap in), if a friend’s ex were dating another guy, I might suggest that the friend beats on his chest and roars like a gorilla to prove he’s the alpha. Now, chances are, no human is this weird, and if you know me, you know that I’m not this weird. That, combined with my facial expressions and voice, serves to get the joke across. Over text, however, it’s a bit more of a reach. I don’t have my presence, my face, or my voice to back me up. All I have is that little blue speech bubble. Initially, a lot of people had trouble understanding my humor, but as a writer, I adapted fairly quickly. Luckily, I already knew how to be funny in a written medium from experience, so I used things like capital letters, ellipses, and an established texting voice to get jokes across. It also helped that my audience is more or less the same as in person, just in a different context. I’m still talking to my friends and family when I text, I’m just not there. Today, I would say that most of my humor actually comes out in texts, since it allows me to send weird reaction gifs/pictures, cocky emojis, secret texts in awkward situations, and screenshots of other people being weird. Image taken from smartphowned.com Some people, like my parents, still have not caught on to text communication. My mother is like I was initially: literate, but not quite as well-versed in the new medium. She usually texts very briefly, even in a humorous group chat with my sisters, and sometimes she uses language that communicates differently over text. She uses multiple question marks casually, maybe not realizing that they convey a sense of urgency. Most texts I’ve gotten from my mother, though, are a simple “ok.”
My dad, though, is a far different story. He has trouble with even the most simple text message because he keeps buying technology that he doesn’t understand, expecting me and my sisters to help, but we usually can’t, either. He had a blackberry when we had flip phones, and now that we have iphones, he has an android. Unfortunately, this, along with numerous other factors result in texts like “o k. Lov u. Take later?” Sometimes, texts from my dad have to be treated like heavily coded messages, and my siblings, mom, and I have to use each other as ciphers. Throughout my life as a writer, I have been massively influenced by media technologies. Since my life has never been characterized by an excessively large social life, I had to learn most of my information about people and culture from media. The three most important media to my development were television, music, and comic books.
I’ve been watching TV for as long as I’ve been able. TV wasn’t a privelage to me, it was a basic human right. I was shocked when I eventually found out that some of my friends had limited access to TV because of their parents. That was never the case for me. I watched TV every chance I got as a child, crying when Teletubbies would turn off, binge watching my sister’s dvds, and eventually using Netflix to do character studies on movies and shows. Some of my earliest memories in life are of watching, imitating, or playing with the merchandise from Power Rangers, my first favorite show. To this day, I’m still impressed by the impact that show had on me. Without Power Rangers, I wouldn’t be into superheroes, I wouldn’t be into hard rock, and I wouldn’t be nearly the same person I am today. Another media that has affected me in unexpected ways is music, specifically hard rock. The first band I ever truly loved was Trapt and their one radio single, “Headstrong.” Seeing as I was seven years old when that song came out, that song was unusually hard for someone my age, but it reminded me of the fight songs that played in my favorite cartoons, video games, and best of all, Power Rangers. Unfortunately for my parents, that was not the end of my hard rock obsession. One year after “Headstrong” was popular, Linkin Park released “Numb,” and I was hooked. I still listen to a bit of Linkin Park, among many, much harder bands, today. Hard rock has always been a major influence to my life. It got me through tough times, it was there in my best moments, it introduced me to some of my best friends, and it’s what I always listen to when I write or draw. Hard rock’s signature sound influences every pencil stroke and every key I press. Finally, the most important media in my life is undoubtedly the comic book. When I was nine years old, I was obsessed with Linkin Park and Power Rangers. Things like video games and toys were great responses to these high-energy media, but there was nothing that spoke to me more than my first comic book, Ultimate Spider-Man. Spider-Man and other comic books became the focal point of my childhood. I had been drawing since the age of five, and seeing artists like Mark Bagley bring images of my favorite superheroes to life was mesmerizing. I knew that that was what I wanted to do, and it wasn’t until seventh grade, after four years of drawing almost every day, that I found out I was wrong. I didn’t want to be an artist, I wanted to be a writer. Seven years later, and I’m still writing, drawing, and digitally producing comics, I own almost 4,000 comic books, my room and almost everything I own are covered in superheroes, and anyone that knows me knows me as the superhero guy, the comic book guy, the Spider-Man guy, or Spider-Man. My website design is based on my previously-existing site, thelegacycomics.com. I made the original through wordpress, and although that platform works well enough, it’s very limiting on someone as visual as I am. Coding it from scratch allowed me to completely do my own thing, and that’s exactly what I did. I used online tutorials to make most things on the site, but I tweaked almost all of them in some way, some more than others. If I had a problem, I looked it up on sources like w3schools or coding forums. I was a little disappointed to find out that most of the things I wanted to do required Javascript, but I improvised around that.
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tutorial.zip | |
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File Type: | zip |
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Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.
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