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TheBench.org: Community Cartooning
BlueCalx- writes, "TheBench.org, from the makers of Penny Arcade, just opened. They provide graphics pictures of a kid, a squirrel and a bench and you have to create hilarious situations for them to get into. They already seem to have an impressive following. Open source has reached cartooning, eh? "
I once drew a cartoon with a leather couch, a sheep and a cheerleader... my mommy took it away from me when she found it.
That cartoon was yours?
That's so awesome I loved it!
End of pointless, but hopefully ego-gratifying post
I looked at their files, and instantly improved on some of the layers (like taking out the white chunk between Gabe's legs, as well as part of the bench on his layer).
As well as removing the pac-man logo to it's own layer (so it's easier to sub in whatever you want, or change his shirt color...)
But I'm sure this has already been done by other people - who else has better files?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
It's about /.
Actually, it has a squirrel on the front...
g
http://www.thebench.org/img/strips/952204937.jp
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Well, *this* troll is here to tell you that your .sig is in error. "No infinite chain of causes" doesn't mean that the universe does not exist; it merely makes the universe's existence dependent on the Axiom of Choice. Hoo-hah!
Spot On! People creating Comic Strips please remember one vital piece of information, they need a punch line. If it can't be funny then please let it make sense.
As if that would be hard, given that any of "Cathy," "Garfield," "Rose is Rose," and "The Family Circus" is significantly funnier than "User Friendly." For that matter, I've excreted turds that were significantly funnier than "User Friendly."
The main page for Penny Arcade Claims to be funnier then Userfrendly... do you think that's true?
I think they are better than most of the strips on Penny Arcade. I sat down and read most them one night, and I never even chuckled once. They are just lame.
Too bad they aren't uhm.. FUNNY!
is where the squirrel dumps a steaming hot bowl of grits down the little bastard's pants. thank you
It's much better than userfriendly. It's new and fresh while userfriendly is stale as last weeks poop.
Reminds me of the now-defunct Dysfunctional Family Circus... Except DFC was funny.
PNGs are generally the same quality as GIFs, and often smaller. Try gif2png and see for yourself.
If you're trying to decide which file format to save your images in for file size reasons it's pretty easy. Gifs/PNG's are good for images of text or cartoons (ie. images with a few colours.. although a lot of the time images with a few colours could be saved in vector/flash formats for greater savings). JPEG are good for photos... or images with more than 256 colours. The 16-256 colour range is a little difficult to decide. With the encoding algorithm of GIFS if you examine the colour pattern of your image for lots of slightly vertical lines or many colour changes (ie, no large blocks of colour) -- gif may not be your best choice (same goes for png).
I should send in the story of how I got a bully to finally leave me alone, but broke the handle on my clarinet case in the process.
Actually, you can find some of the most funny stuff here:-)
That site is down. Here's a mirror
Amazon has patented cartoon creation with kids, squirrels and a bench. Legal wrangling has begun over the definition of a bench.
... rest of story found - yea, right, who cares?
My all-time favorite has to be this one, it just never goes out of date.
See #44.
Ho ho, yeah, that "Making fun of slashdot" one was so funny I nearly had an apoplectic collapse myself. They should send that in to Car Talk or something. A real sidesplitter.
or if you really enjoy pathetic losers capitalizing on how much their lives suck, go for talesofwoe.com. bound to make you shed a tear, or at least get pissed off.
Someone in the crowd may have cheered. Or maybe it was a cough, I couldn't tell. But it's important, that is for certain.
Hopefully, this is the end of the story.
make up your goddamn mind asshole, am i supposed to suck or be f'ked? Oh wait, your post is as informative as the front page story. Sorry, my bad.
this has got to be the worst idea to ever come out of Openhype ever.. I prefer to be entertained by the genius and wit, of a person inspired and motivated to make us smile and laugh..
this is junk.
Moderation doesn't work on Slashdot, why should it work elsewhere?
Look in your favorite O'Reilly bookstore shelves for the book with a walnut on the front.
uhh, because it's posted by an anonymous coward?
all of Thier posts start at 0.
Hrm. It seems to we down.
Well, umm, uhh, yeah. There you go I guess.
Divx
What about Pathetic Geek Stories on The Onion?
You send in a, well, pathetic geek story from your childhood, and it is rendered in a comic.
the only good comic strip: www.jerkcity.com
Theodore Sturgeon.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
I check it pretty regularly now, just for people like chickenfinger and frippy. It's funny. (better than a lame-ass user-made comic strip, anyway.. you should see what people send THE AUTHORS if you want to see real crap.)
Open source has reached cartooning, eh?
Time was when this sort of activity was called merely "collaborative," and even that was considered more than enough buzzword. I'm not sure why the "open source" label would be appropriate for something like TheBench.org, unless a red-hot IPO is in the offing.
They should make it so that you can't submit your own artwork. It's too open-ended that way -- contributors are concentrating more on wacky pictures than on good jokes.
That, and some moderators -- unless you're trying to entertain 6-year olds...
Actually the one about DIVX I really like is this one. I've been reading Penny Arcade ever since one of the guys who makes Bleem (I think it was Rand) linked to a comic about it. But I think the comic before it is my favorite ever. "You can't uninstall evil."
This should turn into a fun waste of time for many geek like myself! :)
When digital comic strips started becoming big, what jumped out at me was what a change it made in the talents required to draw a cartoon. I've always wanted to do cartooning, and I can come up with punch lines and situations with little effort, but my problem was being able to draw consistently between frames. And since each frame has to be drawn separately, it could easily take four or more hours to do a single strip. It was difficult to put forth that much effort in order to bring a throwaway joke to life. I'd rather have made a wisecrack at a meeting.
:)
But now, with cut-and-paste cartooning, it's easy to pump out the strips. The drawing aspect and time consuming portion have been removed. And it's fun! I laughed at the Red Meat strips with dialog from Star Wars pasted in verbatim. The average strip at TheBench.org is lightly funny in about the same way as most strips I've read, at least as funny as most things printed in the Sunday paper. I suspect that if Dilbert or Mutts or other popular recent strips (though Dilbert is over ten years old now) had construction kits, the average person could be about as funny as Scott Adams. In general, this makes me wonder at the value of most Internet strips. I could pump out a User Friendly strip in fifteen minutes, and it would probably be funnier than the originals. Is that worth a book deal or merchandising? Basically, all the jokes tossed out over breakfast at the dorm cafeteria or amusing things you think of saying but never do can be pasted into a strip and be funny. This is much different than having to spend a year or three writing a novel. Is doing this for a living respectable any more? (Okay, you could take the angle of putting yourself in a strip and wearing short skirts and boots so geeks will drool over you
I wouldn't worry. The website I work for got slashdotted once when we were using a crappy virtual server which can't put up with *any* stress, and MySQL was the least of its problems. It uses PHP3 too. I believe slashdot itself uses MySQL, and obviously it needs more simultaneous connections than the sites it links to.
They talked a while back about them getting pr0n as submissions. Obviously, they deleted those.
But they won't "censor" anyone's artistic expression by not posting anything. The rules are really quite lax; this should lead to a lot of creative things.
-- BlueCalx | http://nickd.org/
Cool idea, though the quality of the results varies a bit (some very funny). Kinda reminds me of something I recently set up on my Doodle web site: Add-on Stories. They can either be based on one of my Doodles, or based on the writer's own idea. Each story can have mutliple threads branching at any level, and you can always click a link that will show you the full story along one thread, or multiple alternatives at a particular level.
It's pretty new, so there's not much there yet. Perhaps you could change that...
</shameless self-promotion>
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
If anybody actually likes thebench.org strips (like I do) and wants a nifty perl script I wrote to download all of them you can grab one here (its on a 56k modem tho I should be online for days so the ip should be good for a while) It might take some tweaking and has problems with strip #'s that are actually missing on the site, but it serves its purpose.
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This sig will make it clear that ANYONE can use this post for ANY purpose WITHOUT the written consent of the NFL.
Obviously the previous post was flamebait but I feel I need to reply and say that you are incorrect, www.thebench.org has only been up for a few days but the people at penny arcade have been making bench strips for a few months (one every sunday). Then they had the idea for a bench contest where loyal fans would make up there own and submit them for a prize. They had so many submitions that they decided to make it a regular thing. But only posting one every sunday left a bunch of strips out in the cold and thus came the idea for thebench.org.
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This sig will make it clear that ANYONE can use this post for ANY purpose WITHOUT the written consent of the NFL.
LOLROTL!!!!!
check this one
jag.
this seems similar to a site called "Fish Fight". The site owner would start by drawing a simple underwater scene, and then readers could add either a fish or a human, (taking turns) to destroy each other. It was fun when it got rather bitchy - someone for the fishes team would draw an octopus attacking the human's boat, and then the next update would have a scuba-diver cutting off the octopus' legs with a chainsaw. This would go on until the image had no more room, and one side would be declared the winner. I don't think this site is still operating, does anyone know the URL?
Why is the universe here? -Well, where else would it be?
This reminds me a lot of It's A Dysfunctional Life and the late, lamented Dysfuntional Family Circus off of SpinnWebe.
Those have been (were) running for several years now, it seems. Check it out, if you've never been there. Funny site.
Do they _ever_ get off thet bench?`I've flipped back ~10 strips, and they'er still on that damn bench! Am I missing something here or what?
At the risk of hubris, here was my strip: Strip #430
[
I was initially drawn into TheBench.org due to its non-complex, yet funny struggle between Gabe and the squirrel, who practically did nothing, but still irrates Gabe. Then to find, with BenchCraft (the origin of The Bench being a community cartoon) I could accually make my own strips. By using images from other strips, and a little by myself (I am a bad drawer, which limits me) I could create a comic of my own.
The site is lacking in a way to respond to the comics. There should be some way to rate them and respond to them, sorta like how a precursor attempted to do with a collection of TheBench scripts, http://thebench.laer.nu/, which filled the lack of TheBench.org until it finally appeared. That site had no responce, but did organize comics by author, date, and views. Author and views are very helpful, because generally you will like what most people like (not always, but better than random sifting) and when you find someone's strip you like, generally they will have a few others in a similar manner which will also be enjoyable, if they have anymore. I have only one so far, I like to think them over first to ensure highest quality to my own standards of course. It might benefit some comic posters to do the same. Just because you can make a strip, does not mean you should.
Its nice to see TheBench.org and Penny-Arcade.com get recognition with a slashdot article. Hope it did not obliterate them. We always hurt the ones we love, eh, slash? I submitted this as a story a few days ago, I guess it was passed over until more were sent of it, or this one came first.
Also, you can check out my strip (dont scream at me for linking to it! I am only human!) at http://www.thebench.org/index.php3?stri p=78. It shows my view on the inner struggle of Gabe with the squirrel. At least I think it is funny.
That brings up another thing. Humor is in the eye of the beholder, kinda like beauty, expect, sometimes it does not apply for beauty. Whoever made a comic, which you don't think is funny, probably thought it was funny to them. Its like how I might find a terrorist blowing things up in movies hilarious, just becuase of how dumb it is, while others find it serious. As with time and space, it is all relative.
There's my two cents,
Hope it makes sense!
Stop Rhyming, I mean it!
Anybody wanna peanut?!
(Sorry, that was random, but I just felt like it.)
Just thought I'd Point out that all the Bench Cartoons suck.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Somehow, I knew some troll would have to say that.
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-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes
...is a moderation system. That way, we would note have to search through all of the bad cartoons to find the good ones.
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-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes
yee haw more funny stuff- -----------
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-pf
Make affiliate bucks
-pf
Make affiliate bucks
Hmm, 101 connection limit .. you can customize all this stuff.
You realize that would mean 101 Apache's at 3MB-10MB+, plus memory for each MySQL thread.
If you've got that much memory, then you ought to have the processor speed to handle many many httpd->mysql hits per* second. My poor PI-233 at home does 20+ per second on a user-lookup-table, for instance.
That's a-lot-a-hits-and-web-servers
-Jay J
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
jeepers marty,
obviously the people at slashdot aren't J majors or they would have studied "timliness." - the bench has been out for over a month. still funny tho.
-FluX
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Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Userfriendly is much funnier. Any cartoon which claims on their site to be funnier than a more popular cartoon deserves not to be read anyway.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
Use JPEG2000 with wavelets to get the best quality to size ratios. Plug-in may be required on some platforms, but that's the same for PNG. (Hasn't UNISYS stopped chasing .gif users because of the bad publicity and the impending patent expiration?)
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
let me know what you think
please don't be too harsh, I'm a geek, not a comedian. :)
I love the idea of "open source cartoons" I think it could catch on.
That is why I innovated connection pooling.
Stupid gringo!
yeah, they filter out any explicit strips, and any that are over 50k.
Sure, the bench is nice, but most people who make strips need to get a better sense of humor. the best ones are posted on PA's main site.
i agree, it would be good to have large-scale moderation. but there is some form of it in the bench section on PA's main site. Updated weekly with the best of the benches, no crap. Well, some crap, but relatively, it's good.
Use JPEG2000 with wavelets to get the best quality to size ratios. Plug-in may be required on some platforms, but that's the same for PNG.
:-)
.gif users because of the bad publicity and the impending patent expiration?)
;-)
Cool.   Never heard of that one!  
(Hasn't UNISYS stopped chasing
I would expect that it would be in their best interest to quit...   I haven't heard anything recently on the issue...   although you would think that in a similar case, Amazon.com would quit with their patent issue...   Besides, it's an impossible task to try to hunt down every gif user...   sortof like those who have been trying to hunt down every DeCSS linker...  
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Interesting concept.   Based on a quote that they list from Galbraith, I deduce (perhaps incorrectly) that anything goes and there will be no censorship perhaps (I can imagine what some might do to with that site's comic strip)?   Southpark II anyone? (no slam on Southpark fans)   ;-)
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
All the graphics are saved as jpegs even though they all have large swatches of single color and sharp boundaries between colors. They really should be saved as gifs.
.gifs and a Unisys patent (ie., Unisys demanding that web sites using .gifs pay a fee)...   and folks like ESR got involved?   I distinctly recall a "Burn the Gif day" and some strong "encouragement" for folks to drop .gifs in favor of other graphics formats, most notably .png.   Not sure how well a .png would improve the quality but .jpegs can be pretty decent.
But wasn't there a big hullaboo about
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
PNGs are generally the same quality as GIFs, and often smaller. Try gif2png and see for yourself.
Cool...   Thanks for the info.   I have gif2png but never got around to trying it, probably because I like jpegs (though they're always so huge).   I did sortof agree with move to go to pngs, so maybe I will!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
You'd have to be able to browse through the new ones a couple of times, of course. Once you've done that, though, you should be able to move through the "Hilarious", or "Funny", or "Clever", or even the "Not Funny" or "Downright stupid" strips with ease.
Of course, this should only be implemented if it is written well enough to prevent abuse.
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I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm sure it means something....
I've got those messages a couple of times since thebench was slashdotted, but I was able to get rid of them by just reloading the page. I don't know if this was coincidence or what, but it did work for me.
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I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm sure it means something....
This is cool!
If Bill Gates had a nickle for every time windoz crashed he would be rich. Wait a second he does.
Well, back to The Bench I can't wait to get started!
-Earthman
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
Would that be a 3com or a handspring? Where can I get the prc file for that? Is it available in color for the new IIIc?
I've noticed that people don't consider punks as computer people. Look at the Bench.org, there are two punk related strips (one of them is mine). Are there any ideas as to why? I mean I've used Linux for two years (my first kernel compile was when I was 13), and set up my own network (complete with network server and proxy). That and I wanted to pimp my strip.
Who spent a couple of hours writing code for a page like that? I have to thank them.
Please visit my homepage @ http://blueplazma.tripod.com
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dude, that was awesome. you made my day. long live pants!!
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Well hgalhagahlghgalhgghlaghahgh, I'll be dipped. It certainly is down, isn't it? Here's a mirror.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
No mention of collaborative cartooning would be complete without Slow Wave, a truly awesome comic strip drawn by the inimitable Jesse Reklaw. Every week features his rendition of someone's dream that they've sent him. Neat.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Unfortunately, most of the comics that people submitted are stupid, and totally without humor. Go browse the archives. I haven't found one that is even remotely funny or clever.
"90% of everything is crap." I forgot who said that, but it definitely applies to many sites where users submit the content. Let's hope it doesn't get this bad on Slashdot!
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Penny Arcade is where this originally came from. One of my favorites would have to be this one about Linux or maybe this one.
Well, those who follow jerkcity will recognize this one.
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
make sure that your cartoon is cooler than User Friendly, or at least state it in every cell.
All the graphics are saved as jpegs even though they all have large swatches of single color and sharp boundaries between colors. They really should be saved as gifs. In almost every one, there are visible distortion around the boundaries. This is especially true in the ones that have text.
</rant>
There are already several /. comix up. Here's one.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
The Bench, as a community, needs flexible community standards. While I feel that the creators do have the right to retain some of the control over their "property," I think that letting visitors moderate/vote their opinions of the resulting set of comics is a great way to raise the overall quality, without making it draconian or losing sight of the "participation" aspect of the project.
If it had a "top ten this week" gallery, I'd visit regularly.
As it is, I couldn't help but submit my own attempt at humor.
(All good things in Moderation? =anagram> Handiest old monitoring goal.)[
With persistent connections enabled these limits don't seem too difficult to reach. Ugh.
javier
A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama!
If The Bench is going to become a daily spot for me like Real Life, PvP, or its father, I NEED some way to sort through the.. 30-80 odd submissions a day is it?
Open Source only really works when everyone is striving at a common good, yes? The most successful open source projects (/. included) always have a central cabal or something leading the way. Right now all The Bench has is Gabe, Tycho, and their weekly pick for Sunday.
So Gabe, Tycho, if you guys are reading this (damn well better be)... you need a voting/moderation system on The Bench.
Making fun of tomb raider
Tasteless zombie humor
Holy Quake3 Batman
Diakatana
id software is watching you
Fun for the kiddies
Best Geek Girlfriend
I feel the need for speed
And finally....
Making fun of slashdot