sam-ph

[sam-ph]

Gary Taxali illustration for an article titled "Paving Over the Fossil Record"

[sam-ph]

Duck Amuck | Director: Chuck Jones | Studio: Warner Bros. | USA, 1953

[sam-ph]

#sadness #i don't want to look edgy #but well sometimes you feel sad and you don't even know why #i'm probably overwhelmed too it doesn't help #so what is better than a crude drawing to a express that #yeux de chien battu

[sam-ph]

"How to step out of the picture" a new Secret Knots comic! I hope you like it. As usual, this webcomic is made possible by the support of kind Patreon followers. Check out the different tiers (there's even a free one!) for extra content, sketches and more.

[sam-ph]

Part 8 :]

I….sigh….I sense a lot of bad grammar in here but I’m too tired to care right now. Whatever is wrong I’ll fix it tomorrow👍

Imma pass out now. Hope you like this update or at least can understand it ahah

Previous

Masterpost

#yesss #coming to the good stuff #Oscar dipping his toes into the space horror genre Ward has been in this entire time #impossible odds... this is the usual we want to read from Cass #also digging Holly marmor's form #glad to see it again

[sam-ph]

Sometimes, I draw some pages I'm not really proud of. Some panels are okay, but the lack of defined backgrounds hurt this page, I think. Still, even imperfect, I let it go out

#spellworth #spellworth update #webcomic #fantasy comic #magic school

[sam-ph]

Same character, 98 pages difference

(curious? y'can read that here)

#best way to get better at comics is to draw one #webcomic #what a glow up #original character #this is the page i'm currently drawing aka there's a buffer before you get to see this one

[sam-ph]

Part 7 … :1 The great braincell awakening as I like to call it

Previous

Masterpost

#oscar ready to mayhem #also this update answered how they understand each other #give a hug to Holly #marble sky

[sam-ph]

first ll prev ll next

Update on may 9th.

Hello, if you’re old reader you might be confused. This is completely rewamped chapter 5, kindly forget everything that happened in the old one. I’ve made some changes on some other chapters to fix continuity errors this caused, so it’s more or less smooth reading experience now. See you next time and I hope you enjoyed this change haha

[sam-ph]

Part 5 :]

Oscar got into space the only way reasonably available to him - put all his money in a stack, and then climbed on it until he reached earth orbit

Previous

Masterpost Ref

#oh noooo #noooo ward #dont break down #good ol' angst angsting #... also is this the first breadcrumb of a future reality check for Oscar in x pages?

[sam-ph]

It is past 1am and I am thinking about @somerandomdudelmao’s Marble Sky, and this lightly bonked my writers block on the head for long enough that I wrote a little thing.

The world is green. Green, bleeding from the lights and from his insides and from the space where—

—

Ward wakes up shaking, crumpled on the floor like an old paper someone couldn’t be bothered to throw away. 

The world. Is green. Green and pretty, green with plants and vines, but for a moment something inside of him screams like something’s clamped over his mouth and his blood is burning and—

But it’s not green like that. Here, the green isn’t the immediate threat. The threat is one of them, bigger than him and probably put there to make sure he doesn’t try to escape.

“Oh. You aren’t dead,” the alien says.

That’s… not reassuring. But also not the threat he’d been expecting?

“Are you by any chance one of the talking ones?”

Something is wrong. Everything is blurry, and when he goes to rub his eyes, he finds gauze and okay, that. That is going to be a problem for later. Once he’s safe. Once he can let panic overwhelm him without the lack of attention putting him at risk of—

“I am,” he says.

“Cool. So they found another civilization to destroy. Hungry?”

Them. Like this alien, this alien who looks so much like them, doesn’t trust them. 

It’s ridiculous, but at this point? Ward just wishes he could’ve just been thrown in a normal prison cell. Just one normal, reasonable thing that made sense would’ve been nice. And yet, he’s sitting in vegetable prison with someone who might be an ally but is also probably very much not anyone Ward can trust. How does someone even end up in vegetable prison?

“What’s with all these greens?” he asks, because he can’t just demand answers. “Are you in jail for being the only vegetarian here or something?”

Good ole sarcasm. A great way to be eaten by aliens! Hey, maybe they consider humans a vegetable.

“You’re radiating negative energy at me.”

No shit. “Wanna guess why?”

“Hey, I’m not with those— Wait!”

Uh oh.

“You said greens! You know what color is?”

Um?

“You must have eyes!” And then the alien moves towards him, without a second thought, like they know anything he does, running away or fighting or yelling for help, won’t do anything. Ward flinches away from their outstretched hand. 

(An outstretched hand, moving towards his neck, slicing him open like the specimen he was. An outstretched hand, with his blood on it, and he couldn’t move couldn’t fight it couldn’t—)

“Yes. So?” he snaps.

“Can I touch you?”

“Wh— No.” No.

“Please,” the alien says, “I won’t hurt you. I swear.”

Ward… could try saying no again. He could try to move away, try to talk about this, try to save himself from whatever’s going to happen. He wants to, he really wants to.

But. Sculptor didn’t listen, didn’t care, they just cut into him with a smile. And this one is larger than him, and they said they wouldn’t hurt him, they swore it, they asked for a favor, they look desperate, so maybe, maybe he’ll be safe. Maybe this will keep the alien from dropping whatever this act of an ally is.

The world is green, and Ward reaches out a hand and says, “Here. Happy?”

And the alien reaches out a hand and— 

And lightly touches his. Gently. 

—

The world is green. And in the middle of it is someone who looks a lot like him.

#first fanfic #i mean it's not mine but it's still cool to see authors getting theirs

[sam-ph]

I drew a fanart piece for @somerandomdudelmao’s incredible Marble Sky Comic :] I saw an ask awhile back where someone made a comment that Oscar is living a rom-com while Ward is living a sci-fi horror, I thought that was pretty funny, so I made this to kind of emphasis the point :]

[sam-ph]

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

[sam-ph]

new random page for you, the 85! aka the latest, where i break the 180 rule (... a bunch of time I suppose)

if you like what you see, maybe check the rest here

#webcomic #spellworth #no respect for legibility #(kidding i hope it's readable)

[sam-ph]

Part 5….i think?

Big woman. Big hair. Oscar being an idiot👍

Previous

[sam-ph]

Alien beauty standards hehe

Previous Next

[sam-ph]

the vast