Bad Gods Debut
Bad Gods is up. It will update this coming Monday, then every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until there are no more. After that, who knows? Hope you enjoy it.
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Bad Gods is up. It will update this coming Monday, then every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until there are no more. After that, who knows? Hope you enjoy it.
It doesn't look like the podcast is up yet, but the text version is there.
There's a great article in the New Yorker about the science and psychology of artificial sweetener. Unfortunately, it's not online, but they do have an amusing but less informative article about Tab fanatics in the media industry.
No poll. I couldn't find a free poll service that wasn't cheesy in some way, and writing a poll script would take time away from my preparations for the launch of Bad Gods: The Miniseries.
Someone asked what the hell I was talking about, so this is for those who have not tracked my every stray thought over the past six months: Bad Gods is a series of small, short animations. They're kind of like YTMND, they're kind of like some of the really short bits on Robot Chicken (I hadn't seen Robot Chicken before I started Bad Gods, but some of their stuff has the feel I'm going for), they're kind of like animated versions of comic strips, and I hope they're kind of just unusual and unexpected. I was going gangbusters on them a few months back, then I got sick and then I got employed and now I'm just getting back to them.
Anyhow, Bad Gods is still going to launch June first, at badgods.com (currently password-protected). It will update either twice or three times a week, and will run about six weeks.
So it looks like Bad Gods will have fifteen or so entries, or "flams" as someone suggested a long time ago, and for now I'm not going to be doing more. I was originally going to put them up on a M-W-F schedule, but I thought I'd put that decision in the hands of you, the people who at least theoretically care somewhat. So, I present the first Slumbering Lungfish poll, lazily thrown together with help from the good people at Blogpoll.
Update: I should mention that each individual entry is about ten seconds long, if that makes any difference to you.
Update again: A lot of people are having trouble getting the poll to work, so I'm going to cancel it and try again next week.
Well, it looks like I'm going to San Diego Comic-Con at last. I'm not exhibiting, mostly I'm going to do the fanboy thing -- getting stuff signed. In particular, I'm looking forward to meeting some of the people who have provided me free Web-based entertainment for years, and supplying praise and/or drinks as appropriate.
If any of you fine readers are going to be there as well, I would enjoy to say hi. I'm not sure exactly how these sorts of things work, but drop me a line at loretmp-ccz@lungfish.com and I'm sure we can figure something out using the power of brains.
So, after some thought, I've decided to part ways with Kotaku. The saddest part is that I met my fellow writers at E3 and they all seemed like nice people, so it's a pity I won't be working with them any more. But, in a nutshell, being a good blogger on a site like that takes more time than I have to spare, so rather than do a limping job I decided to focus on other things.
What other things? Well, I've decided that I've been sitting on Bad Gods for too long. Whatever I have ready to go on June 1st, I'm going to put up. Not all at once, it'll go up over five or six weeks, but it's silly to keep putting it off.
So Kotaku has up my longest article for them yet: The Cynic's Guide to the Microsoft E3 Presentation.
I hope you may enjoy it.
I'm off to E3 this morning, where I will be covering things for Kotaku. Chris Livingston is holding down the fort over at Table of Malcontents, and this blog will probably lie fallow as it tends to do in times of stress, joy, or indifference.
When I return, I will be laden with E3 swag, which last year was not as good as I had hoped. It was kind of lanyard-heavy. A man only needs so many lanyards.
I recently got the Wigu comic I ordered from Jeffrey Rowland. It looks nice; it's smaller but on higher-quality paper than your average black-and-white comic. I enjoy his webcomic Overcompensating, but it's nice to get back in touch with the Tinkle family again. Plus I got a nice Topato sticker that now adorns my iBook because I'm apparently one of those people that puts stickers on his iBook.
Anyhow, fun stuff. You can get one from his order page yourself, if you're struck by such a whim.
Trek 2.0, Boldly Going to Hell
By the way, I don't get referrer logs for these, so if you see a link to one of my columns in a prominent place, I'd be pleased to hear about it. I usually check Boing Boing, Metafilter, and Fark, but beyond that I'm generally in the dark.
So, okay, I did my little "Tigga Please" joke, and a few days afterwards I entered "tigga please" into Google, because of ego. Among other things, I came upon someone selling Tigga Please t-shirts. My first thought was "Wow, someone sure turned my little joke into a T-shirt fast." But there's a 2004 copyright on the image, and archive.org has a cache confirming that they've been selling the shirt for nigh unto two years now. So, coincidence.
And then, this morning, I'm watching Robot Chicken on the TiVo and one of the Shirt Tales (Shirt Tales! I feel much better about making Smurf jokes) is wearing a Tigga Please shirt. The episode's new, but I imagine there's some production time behind it. So, another coincidence.
I guess it's just a joke whose time had come. Or whose time came about a year and a half ago, not sure about that.
What interesting to me -- because it's about me -- is that I have kind of an odd way of approaching stuff like this. I don't feel at all bad about coming up with the gag after Tastes Like Chicken did, because I came up with it independently. But if I had thought of the joke and sat on it instead of doing the graphic, and then I had run across the TLC shirt by accident, I never would have put it up. It doesn't really make sense, but if I know someone else has done the same joke, even if I came up with it independently, I don't like to publish my version.
Sometimes I'll come up with a pun or a play on words, and I'll think "I bet someone else has made this joke before," but I won't search for the phrase because I want to be able to use the joke, by my own strange rules, if the opportunity presents itself.
