Of all the classes I took in college, honestly the ones I find most useful in the "real world" were the ones on race, class, and gender in media.
Also I still appreciate that one 300-level class for actually getting me to do legit original research before I dropped out.
(I wrote about portrayals of women and queers in the five most popular webcomics. Turns out hit webcomics have audience sizes comparable to primetime television.)
@starkatt what were the comics, btw? I'm sure one of them was Sluggy Freelance... :P
@green iirc it was penny arcade, SMBC, Questionable Content, xkcd, and Cyanide and Happiness.
@starkatt huh... I guess Sluggy was past its peak by then. I can guess that PA performed--poorly on the subject in question. XD
@green the paper was okay but also I made some really embarrassing mistakes.
@starkatt no Homestuck? and tbh I didn't know QC was that big
@noiob I was going off of traffic numbers I found somewhere. iirc that's when Homestuck was in slow updates purgatory?
@starkatt idk much about Homestuck except that it has a massive fanbase ^^ but eh, I should've figured that there are no good numbers on that kinda thing
@noiob I've tried to read it twice and bounced off both times. It's kind of a mess. My ex said it "succeeds despite the author, not because of him."
@starkatt I tried reading it once and got stuck in some kind of text-based RPG before the story even started ^^
@starkatt one of the problems I have with webcomics is that I will totally binge it until I'm up to date so if it's too long I won't make it
@noiob @starkatt yes, I do that too! sometimes I have to take the archive in chunks, if it's really big. though for some of the longer story comics, I'll occasionally go back through the archive on my own to remind myself of things. which also points out very, very clearly when a "story-style" comic is actually being made up as it goes along, without a plan or plot *cough*WapsiSquare*cough*
@green this was in like 2013