The Baconatrix

This week's image isn't so much a strip as it is just a completely silly painting. This is the Baconatrix, the nightmare fantasy of vegetarian males everywhere. With her two demon steeds, "Cat Pig" and "Deviled Ham", she sews a unique brand of emo-laced burlesque/goth/ballerina Halloween mayhem in costume parties around the season's hipster parties throughout all the trendy neighborhoods.

I have no idea where this came from, honestly. It was just going to be a silly picture exercise and I started liking it more and more so it evolved into a full project. The original image was made at 72 dpi and about 2000 pixels tall so it will likely never see print but oh well. The pet pigs really make it for me I think. It is the contrast they have from her lanky frame probably. Anyhoo, as I said, no punchline or pun, or anything like that this week, just me goofing around with the joy of sketching a silly idea.

Second Prototype

I guess I have a thing about the "right to privacy" that we're supposedly guaranteed in this country. Whenever the technology we have for transmitting personal data is penetrated by yet another government domestic spying program, I envision it as rather "personal". So today's news about an Australian company hawking a spying technology that would allow ISPs to inspect the transmissions of all communication on their network (even encrypted data they claim) was not a nice way to end the day. It doesn't matter HOW they try to justify this or even implement it, it is nothing more than institutionalized datamining. George Orwell might have had less of a sense of humor about it than I do but we both imagine no good coming from a government taking up the power to monitor its citizens' remotely all the time.

Totally hot debate

What can I say, the folks at SNL have it nailed when it comes to Sarah Palin in many regards... ...she's either completely muzzled by her handlers or she actually doesn't know what to do with a direct question, particularly ones having to do with international politics. She may be a great leader but it doesn't come across that way when everything she says is just a generic colloquialism.

Biden's no better but there's no male equivalent Tina Fey to make fun of him with. Biden's a career politician who has been a voting member of the national machine which has brought us these trials. What was his vote on the Patriot Act? What was his vote on the No Child Left Behind Act? What was his vote on going into Iraq? What was his vote on the banker bailout package? To put it bluntly, he is as opposite of the promises of the Obama campaign as you can get. I really kinda get the idea that the reduction of these debates where voters SHOULD be getting to know the kinds of policies that the candidates support from informative or at least combative into wishy-washy sound-bite strings is only going to result in them being judged by how entertained people were by them in the first place. I bet if you took a survey of Twitter, Digg, Fark, and other aggregators that are based on user contribution for their content, you'd notice that folks basically don't care if the candidates actually say anything real, they just care whether their candidate came out more popular than the other one.

Even though I know he couldn't be impartial if he wanted to, I'd prefer the next Presidential Debate be moderated by Jon Stewart.

First cold of the season

Okay. It is no fun getting sick and staying home from work. I wish I could say that taking 2 days off because of a head-cold was fun and relaxing but it is hard to enjoy it with this throbbing numb greyness clouding all my thoughts, with my sinuses filled to capacity (and often above capacity) with phlegm, and with the utter inability to breath through my useless nose. I was supposed to do a strip about Biden selling out for his political career but really, I couldn't pull that off the way I was feeling this week. So you get this self-portrait. OOH! It's in color though!

After speaking with my wife about the strip earlier this week, it became apparent that the direction we were going to take it may have been funny in conversation with Chris and myself but didn't express any truth specific to the subject of the strip. If we're going to do topical humor, we may need to understand our topic a little better. Either way, I'm completely stuffed up and my body is telling me that it is time to go to bed and sleep through another fitful night attempting to get rest.

Saving the Hest for Last

It turns out that this WHOLE THING started out because of my fascination with the Bard class in Dungeons & Dragons. I'm also criminally obsessed with puns so thus we now have Cherry Hested, the barded lady. Solomon's not really all that into playing RPGs but he's got a subversive streak a mile wide. Cherry is supposed to be incredibly charismatic... ...so much so that you don't even notice the beard.

Bring it On III: The Drow Chick

And the self-indulgence continues. You have to understand, this is hilarious fun while we're coming up with it but in looking at it as a strip one can miss half the stuff we were laughing about. For example, we thought it would be hilarious to have a character in this MMORPG based on American Pie that was the cheerleader character but gothy and emo like her creator, Judith. After laughing about the possibilities, I decided to go on to Google and see if "drow cheerleader" returned any hits. As it turns out, we're not that original.

Any way you slice it, the Maddie Webbers out there are going to out-do us in terms of character development but at least we've got a ditzy rogue in go-go boots. Now you see why "flexibilty" was an attribute on the Beefwind character sheet...

Flop Secret

I love putting in silly movie references and in this thread of comics about the explosion in the MMO market, I'm going to be sneaking in a bunch. In this one, if you pay attention to the heraldric symbol on Beefwind's chest armor, you may notice something odd about the cow, something that reminds you a little of an old Val Kilmer movie perhaps...

Anyhoo, this is the series in which we force you to watch us have fun with character creation in a completely fabricated RPG which is essentially an unholy union between Dungeons and Dragons and American Pie (with a lot of other crap tossed in the parody salad). Bear with us as we delve deeper into that hidden realm of nerdity: the RPG Character Sheet...

Try a Little Renderness

So we're definitely not the first folks to comment on the issue of over-rendered anatomy with a limited polygon budget but that doesn't stop it from being funny. The fact that Gamebryo is currently being used as the engine for Warhammer Online doesn't mean that some truly ancient build out there wouldn't be licensed for a lower-budget MMO.

If you're not into the whole Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game genre, the more generic MMO (minus the RPG) concept is being deployed on a massive scale across intellectual properties that don't necessarily warrant it. Hello Kitty has one for Heaven's sake. Once Blizzard proved you can basically take a built-in audience and print money with a subscription model and regular updates to an elaborate chat program, well I guess everyone figured it was time to jump on that digital bandwagon. God help us all if the makers of American Pie actually tried this...

Mariah Carey-oke

It happens to the best of us. We think we've got a little bit of privacy in our workplace, in our homes, in our cars, but inevitably we find that privacy shattered at the worst time possible... ...while singing "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey.

Man, this comic honestly took the longest of any of them so far because I'm introducing 2 new characters and trying to decide best how their interaction will dictate the way that their characters are presented. I am of course putting WAY too much pressure on a single strip but I wanted to get the tone of it just right. It is now 1 am and my ability to rationalize this issue is weakening rapidly so I might as well post what I've got and call it a night. I know it is a week late but I hope to do better next time. We'll get back to the dirty jokes soon enough, don't you worry.

~Russell

No Comic This Week

Wow. how mopey can I get? I had an idea for a strip for this week (several, actually) but when I sat down to draw it, two nights in a row, I found I had crap for motivation and crappier crap for output. I let it slip this week because I figured I could get away with having my cake and eating it too on Wednesday with some Frolf but I got home at 9pm and by then, I was in "coast to bed" mode. I find myself in similar straits tonight without the benefit of something to build off of from yesterday.

This means that you, both of you, the loyal readers are now screwed out of a whole week's worth of pent-up anticipation. And for that I am deeply sorry. To both of you. Support system or not, I need to be able to make a strip happen without getting distracted. That didn't happen this week. See you next week.

I can has hygiene?

I swear this is the last "lolcats" picture I make. Really. Okay so let's just admit that it is a dirty little secret of mine that I enjoy Icanhascheezburger.com for reasons I can't explain. Let's just say that bad grammar and cute pictures of kittens doing mundane things somehow appeal to me. It makes me wonder sometimes whether that means years of watching cable television (especially recently) has lowered my taste in humor and entertainment enough to make such a genre even palatable in the first place.

As my cohort can confirm though, I am easily amused. Perhaps a little TOO easily amused. Combine this with a fear of letting my cat anywhere near my bathroom lest it abuse my dental maintenance tools in any way, and well, this strip has way WAY too much of myself in it...

Mono-x-treme

So last week was a bit of a departure from the style that is developing for this strip and what I realized afterwards was that it greatly distracts from the "comic strip" feel we were working on, I think to the detriment of our efforts.

This week we're back not only to the strip format and simple line-art style but also the "punchline" writing and character introductions. That's right, Occam is a platypus and a new character in the strip. His namesake is actually "Occam's Razor", the philosophical notion that the simplest answer is often the correct one. As a platypus he embodies a kind of genetic question that utterly lacks any simple answers.

Rock Hero rhymes with...

Don't get us wrong, we love us some Rock Band. We love us some Guitar Hero. We're very excited about all the new features headed towards us from both. What we fear is the over-commercialization of some of the best rock-and-roll ever recorded for the sake of selling a game and keeping the genre fresh after we've all had our billionth Guitar Hero or Rock Band party.

Keep in mind please that this post and comic are the product of two men who conspired to include Rock Band at a wedding reception. The result was more rad than wedding receptions are normally allowed to be. We'd still love the genre to grow and for the game companies to be as innovative as their business managers allow, but whatever you do, please leave the song mashups to the likes of DJ Dangermouse and not John Riccitiello from EA. Please.

I'm only wearing a sock while writing this.

Here at FoF headquarters, we are both rhythm game junkies. In our spare time between extreme drawing sessions, we like to throw down in GH/RB.

This strip actually went through a few permutations before accidentally landing on the 9-lb hammer that lays before you. We were originally going to poke fun at the growing, ganglionic tendrils of the Rock Band accessory system. Imagine a device that tossed bras at you whenever you hit a max bonus, or as an alternative to star power: "cocaine power."

We also wanted to make fun of GH: Aerosmith. There's nothing wrong with Aerosmith, but there are only so many big name acts that can warrant their own game. Fear the day when GH: Winger is released.

...we'd probably play it anyway...

iPhoney Balogna

So alot of you are probably reading this fully aware of the Cult of Mac (not just the eponymous blog, but the actual cult). Who am I kidding, there aren't alot of you reading this in the first place. But if anyone out there actually DOES read this, you'll be likely aware of the iPhone launch itself. Chris and I decided to mock the hype and the fanboyism that is associated with the launch of virtually every new product from Apple Inc. We might, perhaps, maybe a little bit suffer from what you might exaggeratedly call "jealousy." It is possible, but I admit nothing, that we actually both desperately want a 3G iPhone.

Making fun of movies we've not yet seen...

Well, now we've done it. We've delved into the realm of mocking movies we haven't seen yet. As if that wasn't enough, we're now adding frightening new phrases to our modern lexicon. For this crime, we should at least be treated to a showing of WALL-E, Pixar's newest offering, so that we may learn the error in our judgment; I'm pretty sure the lesson would be strongest if that showing were offered for free. Yeah.

Like usual, the normal apologies are in order for desecrating the hallowed icons of Sci-Fi robotics. But hey, at least I got the strip up early, so there is that.

George Carlin: Dead and @$%*ing Gone.

George Carlin was known for many things. Those of us in the Bill -n- Ted's Excellent Adventure generation likely are unaware of his fight with censorship. But like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, he was among the pioneers of using profanity in his comedy act. Unlike his other contemporaries, he was philosophical about it, ultimately coming up with his routine, "7 words you can't say on television."

As a form of tribute to the humor and philosophy of George Carlin, we've chosen to memorialize the "...words you can't say..." routine one last time. We'll miss you, George.

Bulwer-Lyttony of puns

So I'm clearly very attracted to terrible puns. I wouldn't call it an "unhealthy" preoccupation because I'm not so sure there is the counterpart "healthy" preoccupation. This contest, in case you've never heard of it, is all about writing the most awful opening sentence to an imaginary novel.

Here's the website.

One of the things I like best about their judging of the contest is their habit of splitting the entries into categories such as "Purple Prose", "Romance", "Westerns", "Sci-Fi", and "Vile Puns", just to name a few. This helps me locate the entries most likely to make me laugh embarrassingly out loud.


In completely different news, you may notice that this strip has a gmail address associated with it that is different from this blogger account's address. Well, you've stumbled across the not-so-secret project I'm working on: a WEBCOMIC! Yes, that's right, I'm making a first attempt into building a webcomic. I'm hoping to have a good amount of strips prepared before actually launching the site. I haven't even bought a domain or hosting yet. These are all things I hope to do soon though and for now you'll just have to speculate as to the rest of the details. As I experiment with things like font-size, art styles, and line quality, I'll post the comics here for your viewing pleasure.

Characters, plotlines, artwork and other information should be coming soon, especially once I have the site up and the blog moved to that site from here. I'll maintain this as a sketch-blog for materials that don't really work well with the comic (at least according to my plan anyway). Check back at least every week for updates!

Pandoramoneum

So it turns out that our friends at Pandora.com are under the capricious and trembling thumb of the RIAA forcing them to gimp the user experience of an "on-demand" radio channel. Maybe it helps them sleep at night knowing that while they can't STOP people from using the internet to listen to the music they actually want (nor should they), they can at least force the inconvenience of unwanted music upon the hapless internet radio listener.

The dumb thing is nobody with an internet connection and half a brain is at all a captive audience. The last thing a media provider should do is make it difficult for people to access the products they want. But in the RIAA's twisted logic, they're not technically giving the music away for free if they can exercise at least some modicum of control over the pipe. Skip those tracks too many times and uh oh, you can no longer click the button.

Listen, RIAA, just because you work with and perhaps pay a salary to Satan, doesn't mean he isn't out to destroy your happiness too.

It just boggles my mind how a decision to produce this crappy user experience came about...