SlickRiptide

Those Wacky Brits have some writers too!

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Here goes nothing. My entry, Pacific Storm. A mean little Crey experiment at the beginning of a journey to meet her idol, Capt. Mako.

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I'm curious what elements you used for Ms. Storm's face. Take away the horns and the mohawk and paste it onto a huge frame and that's a pretty good approximation of what I was hoping to accomplish for the "Creature" look.

Code reviews are the programmer's redlining. *heh*

Okay, that one wins!

The /em camera emote pulls out an old-fashioned flash-bulb camera. You should get a pose of him flexing on the beach for a photo-shoot. You just need a helper to be the photographer.

While I wouldn't discourage you from doing that, neccesarily, XHTML comes with its own set of baggage and that won't fix the problem if said problem is actually in the CSS.

*edit*

I think I can tell you what's going on. I'm just not entirely positive whether switching to Strict will solve it and make further advice just confusing.

IE does funky things with textalign:center under Transitional that it won't do (or shouldn't do, at any rate) under Strict.

Simple advice - If switching to Strict doesn't solve the problem entirely, then either remove the absolute positioning in the #container class or else specify a "top" and a "left" for the container.

What's currently happening is that you have specified absolute positioning, and you haven't specified any coordinates, so it's inheriting from the previous block. That is, the centered headline.

Under Transitional, IE has a tendency to to treat "text-align:center" as "center this entire block" instead of "center the text inside of this block". That affects the current top/left coordinates when your #container tries to figure out what its default top and left values should be. If you draw an imaginary box around your "container" you'll see that the top left corner is precisely at the center point of the headlines preceding it.

This is also why switching to Strict may be all it takes to fix it - You still don't need the absolute positioning, but it will at least be inheriting correct values when it guesses where it should be positioned.

If you don't need the absolute position for something in particular, I'd just remove it, personally.

*envies the stalker*

One of the quirks of the DeviantArt system is that an artist might have scads of NSFW art safely tucked away in her gallery, making a link to her page seem acceptable. Then a new piece gets added and it shows up automagically in Recent Deviations, and your acceptable link is suddenly unacceptable through no fault of the linker.

Is there a way to create a link to a DA page that insures a PG view of the artist's home page, even if that possibly means NOT showing Recent Deviations?

Did you get a *FREEM* shirt?

Since you're using auto margins, try changing your DTD definition from Transitional to Strict.

*snerkle*

Quickie Entrie - I'm not real crazy about this pallete, though some folks have done some interesting things with it.

Captain Hazmat - Cleaning up YOUR neighborhood!

He really needs a fire extiguisher backpack in there someplace.

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Mmm... This is delicious... Wait a moment,

THAT ISN'T CHOCOLATE...

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This is full of win. I may have to steal that design.

Query:Interpersonal intimate interaction?

I had this same problem trying to come up with a "creature from the black lagoon" style of villain. I ended up with something that was really only creaturish if you used your imagination. *heh*

What the heck - 'Lectric Eel and his little pal Moray!

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Gee thats real big of you sport , its awful nice of you to wander into the forums and start kicking peoples sand castles down as your one and only contribution to the art forums .

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Oddly, the owners of those sand castles are not the ones making a fuss. I don't think it's because they're afraid of me and need someone to protect them.

Accepting for the moment the supposition that I AM in fact, a pretentious windbag, what's a good way to prevent someone like me from disrupting the community in the future? Scarf-girl says this sort of thing has been hashed out before, but I can't see any way for a new visitor to know that. Expecting new visitors to "just know" or "be reasonable" may not be the best course of action when there are differing values for what's considered reasonable.

I'm scratching my head to see the hate, but clearly I started this thread assuming I was one of the offenders. *shrug*

I apologize to Turbo-Ski and Scarf-girl as well as anyone else I've personally offended. If that's not sufficient, well, I guess it'll have to be insufficient.

*heh* I think that sort of critic falls under the category that Slavedawg took exception to.

While this is an emotionally charged issue in several respects, it's been a useful discussion so far. In the interests of escaping moderation, I'd suggest that we attempt to refrain from personal responses and judgemental statements like "this or that is cowardly".

The thread was started because there's a community here and the community has a right to set its standards for acceptability. If I have a goal here, it's to speak the standards instead of leaving them unspoken until someone gets their feelings hurt. What good is it to offend people to the point that they stop participating?

I disagree with the proposition that you're only entitled to critique things if you've paid your dues, but that's a side-bar to the question of whether critique is appropriate at all.

I agree - if antennae make the character for you, why be constrained by the character generator?

I'd also suggest posting a request in Jay's costume thread, but I wouldn't hold out too much hope - You know that someone would immediately make a Moon Maid clone and that'd be enough to get it killed.

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Art is, IMO, created to be critiqued.

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This has hit a nerve, so I'm going to clarify a bit.

Nobody (well, hardly anybody) creates art thinking "I hope somebody critiques this". They create it because the act of creating gives them a feeling of some kind of pleasure or accomplishment or catharsis or just plain satisfaction.

Art is an experience. Sometimes the artist is aiming to provide a particular experience. Sometimes just a vision. Sometimes she puts little thought into it at all and it's just "fun".

The act of viewing the art is the act of experiencing what the artist has wrought. IMO, this inherently involves some level of critique on the part of the viewer, regardless of whether the resulting opinion is positive, negative, or something else.

I'm not suggesting that makes voicing your critique any more appropriate in this venue, just saying that it's an inherent process, even if the viewer doesn't neccesarily have the words to describe the experience.

I summarized that in the interests of brevity and missed the mark. That's my bad.

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more often than not, a chip on their shoulder just waiting to lash out at something.

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I'd consider that an overly broad generalization, particularly given that "I liked the lighting in this piece" is, while positive, still a critique.

I find the undercurrent of "critique is about changing the piece and it ain't going to be changed" rather interesting. Not at all what I expected.

On a side note, in the interest of "fair's fair", I've altered my .sig to point to a few fan fics I've posted in the Roleplaying section. If I've criticised your work or your commission and it affected you negatively, then I offer you the opportunity to return the favor. If you feel so inclined, I only request that your criticisms be honest ones.

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Frankly I find SlickRiptide's posts in the art forum either offensive or an utter bore to read. I tend to just naturally skip over them like how I didn't really even read his opening post here.

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Which is why they invented the phrase "Your mileage may vary". Also the ignore button. Feel free to use it. I won't mind.


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I don't think art should be critiqued unless the artist asks for it. I particularly find it distasteful when someone becomes overly critical over something a collector/artist might be showing off.

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Is detailed positive feedback better or worse than "Nice job!"?

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One rules stands true; I won't change a piece once I consider it done, and once a customer has signed off on it. Once it's done, critiques are mostly meaningless unless the 'lesson learned' can be applied to the next piece. Other than that, they're just academic.

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Hmmm... That's an interesting response. I'd see critique of any sort from "That's nice" to "The usage of color in this fashion made me think of thus and such" to be about exploring the experience of the art, not of controlling the artist.

Foo made me LOL also, so take that as you will. *heh*

My main concern in starting this thread is preventing some sort of "chilling effect" on the community. If there's a general feeling that's what's happening, then I can live with keeping my opinions to myself.

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I don't agree with your statement that art posted requires a response

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I didn't mean it quite like that - more that art has a tendency to evoke a response and that a strong response calls for some consideration of WHY it's a strong response.

It's primarily a question of venue, I think. Do people think of this as the "living room" venue where they show off their art to their friends and expect an appropriate response or do they think of it more as a "gallery" where a more critical response is to be expected, regardless of whether it's desired?

I wanted to address something that LadyJudgement said over in the MMO Art thread, so I've started a new thread here in order to avoid a threadjack over there. This should in no way be construed as an attack on LadyJudgement.

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Evidently everything is open to critique, not only works in progress, but works that are finished. There's a tendency for the artist to get defensive with their vision, OR to thank the third party for their observation and move on to the next one...

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I'm feeling an implication here of a feeling that critique is a bad or harmful thing unless it's done in the context of someone asking for help with a work in progress.

Is that the general feeling of the forum regulars? When someone posts the art they've created or commissioned, do most such people expect or desire to receive a chorus of "Nice!", "Good job!", "Smexy!" or "Congrats!" and nothing more?

I'm not passing judgement (not intentionally). I'm looking to understand the impression I get from LadyJudgement that s/he feels the forum is, ah, "less neighborly" nowadays and whether that feeling is a widespread one amongst the regular readers here.

I'm one of those that falls into the category of "likely to critique a finished piece". Critiquing a WIP is mostly a pointless exercise for me; it'd be like posting a destination sales tax routine here and asking whether I ought to use XML or a plain-text scanner to process the data. Most of you wouldn't know or care about the difference or about the project. When it was done, though, you'd probably have an opinion about how much tax you were being charged. *heh*

Anyway, I personally feel like I should usually say something useful about the piece. Even if I loved it, it helps the artist if she knows what it was that I loved. If I disliked something, then it may or may not profit her to understand that feeling, but at least I'm not dismissing it as unworthy of any kind of intelligent consideration.

Art is, IMO, created to be critiqued. The moreso if it evokes a reaction from the viewer; I'd imagine that the worst scenario for an artist is that you create art and nobody cares.

The flip side, of course, especially with commissioned art, is "this art is for fun, it's not meant to be taken seriously". There's some truth in that view, from the point of view of the commissioner. From the artist's point of view, I'd imagine that even the fluffiest piece of art still involves a certain amount of pride of craftsmanship as well as some small artistic vision. Given that, it seems to me that qualifies it for some kind of examination of WHY it evokes a response if it does, in fact, evoke one.

A negative response is still a response.

In any case, I'm willing to live by the "house rules" and just say nothing at all, if everyone agress that the "house rules" are "either give positive feedback or don't give any feedback" or "don't critique commissioned art that the poster is showing off". I'd just like to know if there's some agreement on what the "house rules" are.