The comic was surreal, profane, incoherent, hilarious, self-aware, self-loathing, etc. It managed though its mannered-nonsense approach to vocabularian freestyling to birth what indirectly became one of Metafilter’s favorite memes, “hurf durf butter eater“. The whole mess is a little hard to explain other than that everybody was probably pretty high at the time.

Jerkcity HD, then, is a brand new blog collecting submissions of reworks of the original Jerkcity strips by anybody and everybody, so long as you abide by a few rules. With the original Jerkcity being daily updated for 15 years now, the chances of actually catching up with the archives are vanishingly slim, but I don’t figure that’s really the point, so let’s not worry about it. The point, such that it is, is that people are jumping in and the results are lovely and awesome and so on.

I’m digging it, and looking forward to seeing all the weird directions people take these reinterpretations in. I’ve got a bunch of ideas of my own, and have chucked my first submission in their (reportedly a bit crowded already) bin, but here it is in the mean time, reworking this strip shown above:

It’s called We Have Such Films To Show You—that’s the blog for the show, there—and you can listen to episodes there or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS.

We recorded our first episode a couple days ago, going over the original 1987 film (written and directed by Clive Barker, the horror author whose novella The Hellbound Heart was the basis for the film), and it was a fantastic time and two hours just flew by. If you’ve seen the film or are otherwise familiar already with the Hellraiser franchise or Barker’s work, you’re pretty much the target demographic already, but we talk in enough loving, rambling detail about the content of the film that it’s probably plenty listenable even coming at it cold if you enjoy listening to a couple of enthusiastic nerds bullshitting about the pros and cons of 80s horror filmmaking.

We’ll be doing another episode every couple weeks.

And, so, yes: I wrote this parody on Sunday, recorded it Monday morning, and did the video edit (from footage from the Star Trek epsiode “The Trouble With Tribbles”) Monday afternoon, and here we are:

Keen-eyed fans of Swift’s videography will note the visual/narrative parallelism to the original video of the second-chorus barroom brawl, because that’s just how we do things in my head.

Few birds in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.
~ James A. Guineafowl

James A. Garfield; the guineafowl, which apparently tastes like chicken.

It’s been a bit of a haitus for presidential birds lately as I’ve gotten myself distracted by other things, but here we are again, and it’s nice to be back in the habit, though I sort of wish I’d done this one before I took a break to give my wrist time to recover.

I learn something from every bird I draw, and what I learned from this one is NEVER DRAW A DAMN GUINEAFOWL. Oh, it’s terrible, all those wee negative-space white dots everywhere. Nothing but dots and a tiny bald head. Nice bird to look at but next time I’m just taking a photo.

Garfield, for his part, went and got himself shot a few months into his first term and lingered the better part of another three months before finally shuffling off the ol’ coil. I was at his memorial in Cleveland last summer, by whatever odd chance, where I also pointedly touched Eliot Ness’s memorial because I am a scamp.

But! One of Garfield’s big legacy achievements (with some post-mortem followthrough from Chester A. Arthur) was cleaning up the Post Office! Yes, he cleaned house on some serious postal corruption, apparently. Finished the job that Grant sorta kinda started and then Hayes started some more. You don’t clean a post office quickly.

Keiko O’Brien was a recurring character on Star Trek: The Next Generation and, more so, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; she married transporter honcho Miles O’Brien on TNG in the fourth season, on the same episode where the viewer was introduced to her, and pedestrian marital strife between her and Miles was a frequent touchpoint of her appearances.

I’d never thought a whole lot about her as a character until I introduced her and Miles as characters in Larp Trek, the comic I’ve been doing for the last few months that supposes that the crew of the Enterprise makes up Deep Space Nine as a role-playing game because their holodeck is broken. And the comic is set prior to when viewers ever meet Keiko, which means I can define her relationship to Miles however I like as a dating couple. And it turns out that that’s a hell of a lot of fun, especially since I decided they’d skip inventing new characters for the game and instead just play each other.

This is a sketch based off a recurring Keiko image I use in the comic. Also:

And a sketch of Picard. Feels a little like he came off as a cross between Sir Patrick, Kevin Spacey, and an Archer character, but what do you do.

This and the Keiko sketch were done with a couple of charcoal pencils that have been sitting in a drawer for years now and I’ve finally given a go. I never used charcoals before that I can remember — maybe once in middle school art class? — though I used to draw a lot with pencil so the idea of shading is sort of a familiar comfort. I feel awkward with these particular charcoals, and I don’t know if it’s the pencils specifically or me just not being used to the specific feel and friction of these.

The Picard sketch I did first, and it’s significantly smaller than the Keiko sketch, probably three inches high to her six or seven, but on much better paper. I think larger is the way to go with these because it feels less fiddly, but I should avoid trying to use them on cheap paper in the future for sure. But interesting to play around with in any case.

But and so, also:

I had this idea a little while back, thinking about how much I like the Dune universe and the story of Dune an awful lot but boy is it a bummer. And I thought, what if it wasn’t a bummer? What if it was just, like, an awesome childhood this Paul kid has? What if it was The Happy Life Of Paul Atreides, you know? So I played around with a couple ideas.

Like Leto and Jessica don’t need to be tragic figures. They could just be Mom and Dad.

And the family moves to Arrakis, and that’s a whole pile of adventures.

And maybe key conflicts get rewritten to be more like an extended family get-together than a violent struggle for life and death and the fate of the galaxy.

I’ve got a lot of specific ideas for vignettes, but haven’t really organized my thinking on the whole thing and am not sure about how to even start approaching a coherent visual take on it all. But Paul as a little kid having a ball, but maybe still a touch of Kyle MacLachlan to his face? I think it could be fun.

I’ve been drawing these for a few weeks now, ever since I knocked out Theodore Crowsevelt as what I thought at the time was a one-off joke, and now I’m just about halfway done with the series with #1-19 (and Teddy at #27) done already. I’ve been pretty happy with the results so far and feel like I’m actually developing my drawing a bit in the process (not to mention learning a bit about birds and human presidents).

So: here’s a bunch of bird presidents. I’ve posted each of these as a blog entry with a bit more info about the respective bird and president and notes on my process, so if you want more detail go ahead and click on the name above a given image.

Bird Presidents

#1: Grebe Washington

#2: Guan Adams

#3: Ptarmigan Jefferson


#4: James Manakin

#5: James Macaw

#6: John Quail Adams

#7: Andrew Jackdaw

#8: Moorhen Van Buren

#9: Warbler Henry Harrison

#10: John Lyrebird

#11: James K. Stork

#12: Chickadee Taylor

#13: Mallard Fillmore

#14: Penguin Pierce

#15: Blue Jay Buchanan

#16: Albatross Lincoln

#17: Kagu Johnson

#18: Ulysses S. Grouse

#19: Rutherford B. Hawk

#27: Theodore Crowsevelt

A detail experiment of Teddy:

A detail sketch before I drew Lincoln for keeps:

Let me triumph as a bird or not at all.
~ Rutherford B. Hawk

Rutherford B. Hayes; the red-tailed hawk, one of a big variety of birds that fall under the “hawk” label but one which I’ve always especially liked for some reason.

This one goes out to my good friend rtha, for reasons.

Hayes got into office under contended circumstances; there was significant dispute over electoral votes in 1876, and ultimately the whole mess might have gone either way and by sheer count of non-disputed electoral votes was weighted heavily toward Samuel J. Tilden before it was finally resolved with Hayes taking the big chair and a bunch of compromises made on the whole Reconstruction situation. Woo, politics!

Also apparently he was big on the gold standard, so once Ron Paul gets out of the game maybe folks can re-animate Hayes at try and get him to run again.

I like the poem in its own right, but I also like it as a meme—refitting it to varying situations is a long-running joke on Metafilter, where all sorts of things seem to turn up in iceboxes or to prompt the need for forgiveness or to be describable otherwise as being x, so y, and so z.

I have in fact previously written a silly random This Is Just To Say generator, if you want to just reload to your hearts content. And Metafilter friend Joe Saunders collected mefi variations for a while on a tumblr.

But, so, yes: I got to thinking about the idea of the poem as a note, from someone to someone: why not from William to his wife, Florence? And if he’s leaving a note, why? How did those circumstances arise? What about the world where Bill didn’t eat the plums?

And so William Can’t Sleep gives the player a chance to explore that small set of moments. You can dotingly recreate the poem as we know it, or, depending on your actions and reactions and inactions, produce one of several possible variants, or something more or less totally unrelated.

It’s really just a learning experiment (a “Hello World” in programmer parlance) for a new game development environment called Twine that I’ve been interested in trying for a while. Twine’s particularly interesting because it was designed specifically to be really, really easy for folks to learn to use. It succeeds wonderfully at that.

And not easy as in “compared to programming a game by touching actual metal wires together in the belly of a mainframe computer”; there are a lot of game development tools that are easy to get started with or relatively simple to work within compared to a full-throated traditional programming environment but which still present a very steep, very imposing wall of conceptual and practical barriers to someone who doesn’t already know a bit about software development. They’re useful, interesting tools, but they are not beginner-friendly.

Twine is easy as in “if you can understand how a Choose Your Own Adventure book works, you can do this”. A basic Twine game is as simple as a text description of the current situation the player is in and further description of maybe a couple of choices of how to proceed: do you want to push the lever, or go out the window? You write out labels for “push the lever” and “go out the window” respectively, and Twine will link those to the page you make that choice from.

So the code for the first page of You’re In A Garden Or Whatever looks like this:

You're in a garden. There's a tree nearby with some fruit on it.

* [[check that tree out]]
* [[just chill out, whatever]]

That’s it. Double square brackets for a link, and Twine will look for another little page in your collection of pages named that. Here’s what my page titled “check that tree out” looks like:

It's a big tree, with a whole bunch of fruit on it.

* [[eat some fruit]]
* [[man, it's nice out today]]

And so on. My game here has only 20 pages (or as Twine calls them, “passages”, which is a clever play on their role as both short passages of text and conceptual game “rooms” leading one to the next), and just a few more than 800 words, and I wrote it up in maybe an hour including debugging a couple of bad story links I’d created. I spent almost all of my time actually having fun building a thing, and I’m excited to tackle something a little more ambitious now in terms of story content.

If you like the idea of writing up a simple bit of interactive fiction, or grew up on Choose Your Own Adventure books, or always liked the idea of text adventures but couldn’t stand dealing with the guess-the-verb nature of classic text parsers (‘get sword’ … ‘I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GET SWORD’ … ‘oh bite me, game’ … ‘THERE IS NO BITE ME, GAME HERE’ … ‘augh!’), give Twine a look. It’s free, it’s a cinch to install on both Windows and Mac boxes (and works with a little nudging on Linux as well) and it won’t give you a headache. There’s some nice, short, gentle walkthrough videos at the bottom of the Twine page that will show you everything you need to make something at least as polished as the game linked here.

Really all you need is a story you want to tell and a willingness to sit down and write it. Twine does a magnificent job of getting out of your way and letting you do just that. Give it a shot.

(Confidential to seasoned programmers: Twine does provide some more advanced facilities for more complex game interactions, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can write and read arbitrary variable states, you can inline arbitrary HTML and include CSS styling, you can toss in your own JavaScript hooks, etc. It is excellent at not making things difficult for the novice game writer but it’s got a bit of horsepower under the hood too if you want to go looking. If you like the idea of writing a game as in using-the-written word but want to be able to do clever programmatic things with the environment or game mechanics, there are a ton of little Twine hacks out in the wild that prove that that is very doable.)

Margaritahell.