Sunday, January 15, 2006

Explanation

Blunt Cogs is an idea I had shortly after a series of posts and comments over on Anti Barney’s site, based around the idea that we’ve got very little real idea who anyone in our little group is. When Footeater tried summing up everyone in a single word, it made me think that most of us probably appear as almost cartoon characters to other bloggers. And when I recently revisited the early entries of Anti Barney and found Joke Mail’s comment of

“By being adopted by Dr Maroon, and winning such a prestigious award, you may have inadvertently got yourself caught up with all sorts of trouble - jokers, mad doctors, talking animals and bile merchants just for starters. By staking out your ground as being both foul mouthed and witty, who knows what you have let yourself in for”

I found myself thinking, “This would make a fucking good cartoon strip”

We have a wide variety of characters, most of whom are quite capable of making fucking hilariously funny comments on equally amusing blog posts.

The idea here is that you are all capable of coming up with outrageous situations and witty comments, so why not create cartoon strips of us?

I’ve recruited Kim to help build the cartoons (I knew him during his university days and have a list of things that he wouldn’t want the rest of the world finding out about).

What he needs from you are:

1. A cartoon version of yourself. This means that you can create yourself in the image you want to project. None of us are ever going to be able to verify it. You can scan an image you like, create your own on your computer, or use one of the online character generator programmes listed below (Kim & I used the Southpark one). Be creative.

http://www.planearium2.de/flash/spstudio.html (South Park)

http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heroMachine2/heromachine2.asp (Hero Machine)

If you know of any others, let us know.

If you create an image around 300 x 300 pixels, then it can be shrunk or cropped as necessary.

2. One, two or three panel scripts based on any of the bunch of us listed on the right. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just funny. But, anyone who doesn’t submit a version of themselves for use either gets left out of the strip, or runs the risk of someone else creating a less favourable version of them.

You’re all a bunch of egotistical cunts who I’m sure will be chuffed to bits at the idea of showing off in another media, but if anyone really doesn’t want to be involved, then let me know and I’ll remove you from the character list on the right.

I have no real idea whether this will work or not, but it has the potential to be a bit of a laugh if nothing else. We just have to play this by ear and see how it goes.

If you’re unsure about anything, just leave a query in the comments.

Kim’s e-mail is available on his profile, so send him your pictures and script ideas to him and we’ll see how it goes.

Below is the first one put together by me & Kim. Can you do better?

8 comments:

hungbunny said...

I thought that said "put together by Mel & Kim". I'd pay money to see that cartoon.

Good idea, and an excellent name.

the anti-barney said...

In the name of fuck,you've got to help me,I've mislaid Barney.I opened this site to practise on and now I've killed him.Will the best looking one of you step forward,please.I already posted a comment praising your cartoon from Anti-Barney and that got lost too.

redhead83402 said...

ok, El B ~ I'm in ~ it DOES look cool ~

the anti-barney said...

Fuckin'deadly ,deal me in,I made up a cartoon me,now what ?

Dr Maroon said...

YOU'VE made up a cartoon you? How? I thought you needed help plugging the bastard in.

I made a cartoon me as well. Can I save it? Can I buggery!

El Barbudo said...

If you've managed to create a character on the South Park site, you can't save it to a file directly. what you have to do is use the "Print Screen" funtion on your keyboard, which will copy an image of the whole page onto your clipboard.

Then you can paste it into any drawing/paint programme you might have and crop it down to size.

Then save it as a .jpg or .gif file and send it to Kim. His e-mail address is (you will need to construct this):

kimayres
then the @ symbol
then gmail.com

he will then store and use the character images you've created.

Kim Ayres said...

Anti Barney, yes, your site is fucked. Almost.

But there is a way to retrieve it.

Sort of.

Copy and paste this message into a Word document, or Notepad or something and print it out so you can read it while you're following the instructions

Go to your Blogger Dashboard and get into Change Settings.

From there go to Templates

In this section, go to Pick New and take it from there.

Blogger will have kept all your postings and comments, so they will all magically reappear once you have chosen your template and republished your blog.

However, you will have to customise it all again as you will have lost all the links and your awards and stuff.

But, all is not lost, if you're not too scared of playing with the code.

Go to Google and type in Vaporise Barney, and your site should come up at the top.

Now, instead of clicking straight on it, look for the bit at the bottom of the entry that says "cached" and click on that. This will give you a version of the site that's about a week to 2 weeks old.

Now go up to the menubar on your browser and go to "View" then "Source" and up will pop a text document which has all the code from your site in. If you scroll down through that, you should find the bits where you did the links and you can copy and paste them back into your template at the appropriate place.

I've made a copy of Google's cached page of your site, so if all else fails, e-mail me and I can send it over.

Hope that helps

Foot Eater said...

Well, I've sent my cartoon image to Kim. Now all I have to do is work out how the fuck to create a cartoon strip. I'm thinking swords, flamethrowers and El B's beard.