I've been reading things written in ToBI and it's hard. There just aren't great pedagogical resources for learning ToBI. The MIT course, this chart, etc.
This article in the recently published 'Prosody & Meaning' is impressive in that it establishes the existence of a variety of lexico-accentual collocations (aka tropes) in the English vocabulary. This is significant; it means that intonational theory doesn't have to focus on abstract examples as much as exemplars, which tend to have very specific meaning tied to them. This is an approach to grammar I really do enjoy, and you see it pop up in conlangs sometimes e.g. Kalusa. They also point out that the accents, besides being prominent in terms of discourse functions, also recur in ordinary words; Calhoun, the author, points out that 'meatball' and 'government' have very particular and common contours that don't seem to have a discourse function; that's just how they're most often said. This is a fantastic insight, & it has all kinds of implications for learning languages. They didn't get too much into boundary tones (not at all in fact); they also pointed out various trouble spots with regards to ToBI analyses (e.g. speakers' ranges effecting perception of local maxima, upstep's neglect). The greatest boon was listing the tables of profiles & the words that fit into them. I think using the list could help make a writer more accessible, and I'm going to see if I can't get this kind of thing into TVTropes. These clever turns of speech are just too much to ignore; and though I think speech gets short shrift on TVT, I think this may be a chance to really improve that.
I'm also looking into making a comic but I don't think I have the time or the will. I also don't have a story right now that isn't one of those "Gee whiz! Why don't I..."-derivative things. I think something is cool until I get down to it and I realize I don't feel strongly about it--or even writing, for that matter.
I was looking into 3D software anyway and I realized there are a lot of mediocre webcomics that use CG. I think it's because they never spend more than 15 minutes on the visuals or the plot; perhaps too, CG is too demanding and they get roped into designing too much background. The characters are also unattractive. Not too mention, emotionless. Unremarkable. The camera focus is usually in need of a lot tweaking. CG is one of those things where I feel like there should be several drafts and therefore several people involved telling you what looks bad, at least. It shouldn't be too hard to do those drafts on the other hand though. If there's one thing about CG, it's that no-one appreciates how much really work actually goes into it. No-work comics with stick-figure art usually at least have punch lines though, and most CG comics are serious rather than humorous. The thing about both bad stick art and mediocre CG is that they're both really consistently something on one level (for stick art, it's its inconsistency) while for CG it's consistent but it's consistently not what it's supposed to be representing.
Hey, there isn't any reason why a very mixed style a la Klimt shouldn't work. Or Sealab.
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