Joining the recent cascade of Garfield remixes, Garkov combines the cosmic power of Garfield strips with the galactic energy of Markov chains to create a comic generator that ranges from the strange to the incomprehensible to a quintessential summation of the Davis oeuvre.
7:43 am, June 6, 2008 -- 15 comments
Wow. This is… awesome, and manages to be both more interesting and weirder than Arbuckle (and that’s saying something).
I’m going to lose so many hours of precious, precious life giggling at this.
Oh this one is perfect: http://joshmillard.com/garkov/savestrip.cgi?strip=2514
Wow, a reference to a 20+ year old one-off Bloom County joke. AWESOME
I’m miles away from grasping the concept of Markov chains, so these are just complete and utter non-sequiturs to me.
It would appear as though you Loredotted this web site.
This is great. I was reloading repeatedly and enjoying the absurdity until I got one that, to my great surprise, made perfect sense: http://www.mandaliet.com/images/garkov.jpg
Ha! Thanks, Lore. Between you and mefi and reddit, the site took a real pounding yesterday, but it seems to still be standing. I definitely need to rework my save-and-display backend stuff, but as long as it’s still generating the strips themselves, I’m happy.
Frank, take comfort: even if you do get the Markov principle (and it’s not too tricky, really, honest!), they’re still mostly bizarre non sequiturs.
Also, I’m happy to report that the busted save button and the busted hall of fame have both been unbusted (and, thanks to a cleaner, mysql-based implementation of same, should STAY that way).
FS: What, really? What was the Bloom County joke?
Frank: A Markov chain isn’t difficult to understand. Start by taking some source text, in this case, a collection of Garfield comic strips. Then have a computer scan through them, noting how often each word comes after each other word. Once done, you then start off with a seed word, and choose the word to come after it according to those probabilities. Then do the same with that word, and the next, and the next, until you decide you’re done. If greater coherence is desired, then treat each “word” as a word pair, triple, or longer.
So, If “pepperoni” comes after “oranges” 9 times out of 10, then if pepperoni came up in a chain, oranges would again follow it 9 times out of 10. This often makes for text that kind of makes sense in small doses, but in which longer chains change subject unexpectedly, confuses word sense for each other, and just meanders meaninglessly.
Regarding Garfield remixes, have you seen:
http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
Remove the titular character and what you have left is often poignant and frequently funnier than the original. I would love to see this done with movies. Sixth Sense with out Bruce Willis’s character for example.
John H.: the title. “Presidents don’t do Mondays,” is a gag from a Bloom County parody of Garfield.
lol, I can’t believe I wasn’t the only one who got the Bloom County joke.
OK, this is weird… I just had to shoo my cat away from my plate of lasagna while loading Garkov strips. Not only is this absolutely true, but incredibly weird, since my cat never EVER tries to disturb my plate of food.
ZMannZilla, I should really have disclosed the site’s “induce live cats to emulate Garfield” feature. Disable javascript if it’s a problem.
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