Toonbots -- random thoughts, January, 2001

(Jan 4, 2001) (the toon)
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. This, now I say this is drawin', boy, yes sir!

(Jan 7, 2001) (the toon)
Yay! Today is the two-to-the-fifth Toonbots! Aren't round numbers great?

I added a few more things that I can modify in a drawn figure. There are still too many restrictions to really call it convenient, but I'm almost getting to the point where this doesn't all seem like a colossal waste of time. I guess my next trick will be drawing primitives other than ellipses. Imagine what I'll be able to do with triangles! Rectangles! Polylines of arbitrary sidedness! The restriction that's really bothering me, though, is that the order in which the drawing primitives are drawn (and thus in which they conceal one another) is fixed, and fixed in a really stupid way, in that they're sorted by stroke color, then fill color, then line weight. This is completely braindead, even though it made perfect sense at the time.

Incidentally, all this work with Image Magick is starting to pay off, too. I'll be using Perl scripts plus Image Magick to do a quick and dirty workflow procdef illustrator and I'm considering using it for a tool to create a graphical portrayal of traffic patterns within a web site. Nothing is ever wasted.

(Jan 8, 2001)
Joe Nadeau has, as he says, "inadvertently" made a video for the song "My Primary Sexual Display Frill is Too Orange", itself fan art related to the excellent Acid Reflux. He downloaded it basically at random from Napster. As we all know, Joe is a true genius of the random, so check out his video here and laugh yourself silly.

Joe is incredibly good at Flash. He's not good at connecting with reality, but he's one damn spank Flashist.

(Jan 10, 2001) (the toon)
Ugh. Tired. Just finished a six-page proposal for a biggish workflow project (for me -- very small as workflow projects go in general, which is why I have about a 95% chance of getting the contract). Did I mention it was in German?

Oh. And the Toon-o-Matic can draw lines now! Lines + ellipses = stick figures! They need facial features, though, don't you think?

(Jan 16, 2001) (the toon)
Whither Toonbots? I liked having a storyline, such as it was. I have to think of some more.

(Jan 17, 2001) (the toon)
That Dot is a card. Needs to be dealt with.

(Jan 18, 2001)
So I archived the message board because I just couldn't stop thinking about the overhead of that silly antiquated Perl script running months and months of messages on every hit. The archive script writes nice readable static pages, one per thread. They're fun to read and a lot more convenient than the active archives. Then if there are more than 256 active posts, and if the oldest thread is older than a week, it trims the oldest thread. Just one per day. But that should keep things manageable. I love automatic content management.

(Jan 20, 2001) (the toon)
If Toonbots makes less sense than usual today, blame it on the Pokey the Penguin archives I've been reading all day long. MY BRAIN IS FRIED, POKEY! HOORAY! I WIN!!!! Must ... close ... browser...

(Jan 21, 2001) (the toon)
I've been doing this for three months now. That's flat-out incredible. I really thought the first toon would be the last one, just a big joke so I could be in the in-crowd like Lee Herold and BoxJam. And here we are. I have a dancing stick figure drawn by the Toon-o-Matic, not as elegantly as I might have liked but still more miraculous than I had any right to hope in three months of very part-time effort. Amazing. And I'm still having fun. And of course the Jihad is making defenestration a household word again. Life is good.

(Jan 26, 2001) (the toon)
I like this episode. It's what I'd consider classic Toonbots, if such a concept makes any sense given the metamorphoses this strip goes through. But I really like it. With any luck, we'll see more rollicking madcap stuff like this in the coming months.

In other news, looks like my doctoral work is getting back underway. I'm starting work with Douglas Hofstadter here at IU. More accurately, I have already started said work (and in a way, I've been working on this stuff for years, it's just official and much more concrete now.) I've also taken over the research group's Web site. Sheesh. As you can see, my work is cut out for me, as there has obviously been a great deal of attention lavished on this site.... Nothing like a little pro bono stuff on the side, eh?

(Jan 29, 2001) (the toon)
This episode took some serious work. I even had to debug panel layout to get the frame of the central panel to be suppressed! But it was worth it. I like Hick with eyes, don't you?

More of the same in February