Toonbots -- random thoughts, February, 2001

(Feb 13, 2001) (the toon)
Sigh. Nine days since last update. My strategy heretofore has been to let the strip write itself. Abruptly work has become more interesting and I haven't had the creative impulse to do the strip. I just don't have any good ideas that don't require improvements to the Toon-o-Matic. Plus, the Jihad has lost Emsworth to the Scholarship Demons, and *snif* nothing is quite the same any more.

So OK. Here it is. Took me all of five minutes to write, and the usual handful of milliseconds to draw. Drop by the forum and tell me what a slacker I am. I dare you. I double dog dare you.

(Feb 14, 2001) (the toon)
Wow. Two in two days. My karma feels better already. Thanks to gopher for the URL to the modernhumorist.com site, which contains absolutely wonderful WWII/Cold War-style Internet propaganda posters. They're truly works of insane art. My kinda stuff.

A propos of nothing, I see that I've had 127 hits to the Toonbots home page since Monday morning. It's Wednesday. All I have to say is... who are you people?!? Don't you have anything better to do? Or is it just gopher obsessing on the fact that I hadn't updated for over a week? Why aren't any of you coming to the forum (hint, hint) and swelling the ranks of the PAFTWJ? Is it the wolverines? I told Emsworth wolverines would be a problem, but nooooo, would anybody listen to me? No. Now our High Chancellor of Defenestration is recuperating -- they tell me that the arm reattachment was successful and with physical therapy she should be as good as new, so she's defenestrating infidels on a daily basis now. Why, just yesterday she defenestrated everybody on the Chopping Block forum. Again.

It's wild and wacky, folks. You can't pay for entertainment like this.

(Feb 23, 2001) (the toon)
Well, I refuse to apologize. Things have been hectic here at Toonbot Central. I lost my largest account this month, and basically have buried myself in my open-source workflow toolkit as a prelude to heavy marketing. As that sucks up the creative juices, there's less left over for Toonbots or the Toon-o-Matic. Plus the panic over losing an account which starting in May of last year provided 40% of my income for 2000 sort of put a damper on the ol' Muse as well.

The good news is, through judicious application of chutzpah, I seem to have succeeded in converting my next-largest account into a much larger account. So it looks like the panic factor, at least, is abated for the time being.

Yeah, so, call me out of it, but this week was the first I heard of ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US -- and, let's face it, the Toonbot has found its voice. That's just too good to pass up. Well. That and Pokey. HOORAY!!!

Long-winded today, ain't I? Well, I'm not done yet. I'm considering some major overhaul work on the Toon-o-Matic. This would entail (1) refactoring of the ImageMagick interface into a Tcl-scripted standalone application, (2) definition of a lower-level XML drawing specification, (3) definition of a sort of script-fu interface for the Tcl drawing app, (4) rethinking the structure of the Toon-o-Matic to consider it a translator from a high-level, cognitively motivated description language (the XML specs you already know and love) to the low-level drawing spec language. This process would have a couple of interesting spinoffs, but would have the regrettable effect of making the Toon-o-Matic far less baroque.

So my question is, assuming that anyone (besides gopher) has looked at my code, would anybody of you miss the baroqueness in favor of more applicability to real-world problems?

(Feb 26, 2001) (the toon)
Welcome to Toonbots, where catchphrases go to die.

More of the same from February (if you dare).