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TheBench.org: Community Cartooning 104

Posted by Hemos from the have-fun-with-the-pen dept.
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? "
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TheBench.org: Community Cartooning More

TheBench.org: Community Cartooning

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  • New O'Reilly book just released (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Creating Cartoons with Kid, Squirrel and Bench

    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 [penny-arcade.com]

  • What about Pathetic Geek Stories [theavclub.com] on The Onion [theonion.com]?

    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 [jerkcity.com]
  • Theodore Sturgeon.
  • For one site where this doesn't seem to be the case, check out hatelife.org [hatelife.org]. A lot of the journals are an entertaining read- most people's lives are so comically tragic, you can't help but chuckle at their woes.

    I check it pretty regularly now, just for people like chickenfinger [hatelife.org] and frippy [hatelife.org]. It's funny. (better than a lame-ass user-made comic strip, anyway.. you should see what people send THE AUTHORS [yellow5.com] 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. [penny-arcade.com] 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. [penny-arcade.com] But I think the comic before [penny-arcade.com] it is my favorite ever. "You can't uninstall evil."

  • Fun (Score:1)

    by jds2001 ( 31493 )
    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.

  • <shameless self-promotion>

    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 [mouken.com] web site: Add-on Stories. They can either be based on one of my Doodles [mouken.com], or based on the writer's own idea [mouken.com]. 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>

  • 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 [38.32.115.99] (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.

    ================================================ ========
  • 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.

    ================================================ ========
  • LOLROTL!!!!!

    check this one [thebench.org]

    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?
  • This reminds me a lot of It's A Dysfunctional Life [spinnwebe.com] and the late, lamented Dysfuntional Family Circus off of SpinnWebe [spinnwebe.com].

    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 [thebench.org]
  • I think TheBench.org [htpp] is a great idea. I always have notions of "I wish I could do that", but normally can't, so I sit there bummed. With TheBench.org [htpp], I can accually do that which I want to! Well, at least one of the things I want to.

    I was initially drawn into TheBench.org [htpp] 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/ [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 [htpp] and Penny-Arcade.com [htpp] 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 [thebench.org]. 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.)

  • I see this as a good thing, actually. Remember, cartoon strips didn't actually start out as talking head strips. Look at the original strips of Krazy Kat [angelfire.com] or Little Nemo [gographics.com] -- the pictures are vibrant and expressive, and full of lush background detail.

    What happened? The bottom line, of course. Profit-minded newspaper publishers realized they could draw in more readers if they shrunk the funnies and offer more comics on a single page, but in doing so they made it almost impossible for strip artists to justify the beautiful details of the past, leading to talking-heads strips such as the infamous Dilbert. (When Bill Watterson came back from his sabbatical, he made a stipulation that any newspaper that carried his Sunday Calvin and Hobbes had to give it an entire half-page, so that he could stretch his artistic muscles at least once a week.)

    As you say, Junks, computer graphics are making it trivial to include talking-heads graphics for a gag cartoon. The end result could be a good thing -- if we're inundated by online strips like that, people could start offering more visually arresting cartoons to stand out from the crowd. (And I personally don't care how those cartoons are generated, as long as they're good.)

    Francis Hwang

  • Just thought I'd Point out that all the Bench Cartoons suck.
  • Somehow, I knew some troll would have to say that.
    ------
    -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.
    ------
    -Everything has a cause
    -Nothing can cause itself
    -You cannot have an infinite string of causes
  • yee haw more funny stuff
    ------------------------------------------- -----------
  • I'll be damned, never got a confirmation from them so I figured they didn't want it. :-) Thx!

    -pf

  • I just submitted this one, [bellsouth.net] but I doubt it'll get past their approval. :-)

    -pf

  • 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

  • why is this a zero? i love this one and i read slashdot everyday. jeez, can't you guys laugh at yourselves just a little?

    -------

  • Doh!

    -------

  • 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
    -------------------------
    Your Ad Here!
    -------------------------
  • 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.
  • 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?)
  • I saw that. I did think it was funny. I assumed it was from before this story since it was way back in the order.
  • wow, they have good turnaround time. I submitted one today, and it's already on the site.

    let me know what you think [thebench.org]

    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.

  • Actually that kind of worries me, as I'm about to build a big site using MySQL and PHP3. The MySQL crash-me page shows both MySQL 3.23.8-beta and 3.22.29 as having a 101 connection limit, which seems rather low. Surprisingly, it shows Oracle 8.0.5.0.0 allowing only 40 simul connects.

    That is why I innovated connection pooling.

    Stupid gringo!

  • Hellz yeah! On a bad day *my* comics are funnier than most of Illiad's recent work. Gabe and Tycho simply kick all ass. It's that simple.
  • 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 [penny-arcade.com].
  • 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 [penny-arcade.com]. 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.

    Cool. &nbsp Never heard of that one! &nbsp :-)

    (Hasn't UNISYS stopped chasing .gif users because of the bad publicity and the impending patent expiration?)

    I would expect that it would be in their best interest to quit... &nbsp I haven't heard anything recently on the issue... &nbsp although you would think that in a similar case, Amazon.com would quit with their patent issue... &nbsp Besides, it's an impossible task to try to hunt down every gif user... &nbsp sortof like those who have been trying to hunt down every DeCSS linker... &nbsp ;-)

  • Interesting concept. &nbsp 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)? &nbsp Southpark II anyone? (no slam on Southpark fans) &nbsp ;-)

  • 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.

    But wasn't there a big hullaboo about .gifs and a Unisys patent (ie., Unisys demanding that web sites using .gifs pay a fee)... &nbsp and folks like ESR got involved? &nbsp 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. &nbsp Not sure how well a .png would improve the quality but .jpegs can be pretty decent.

  • PNGs are generally the same quality as GIFs, and often smaller. Try gif2png and see for yourself.

    Cool... &nbsp Thanks for the info. &nbsp I have gif2png but never got around to trying it, probably because I like jpegs (though they're always so huge). &nbsp I did sortof agree with move to go to pngs, so maybe I will!

  • Spiff is absolutely right. I've read every one of those strips in the last couple of days and some of them I really like. But there are some quite stupid ones in there too. A simple moderation system could work nicely.

    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.

    ==

  • Actually, the size limit on cartoons is 80k, not 50. And if you wanna check out how lax their rules are, go here [thebench.org].

    Since I'm already typing this, I may as well say that I rather like this site. Some of the strips are rather stupid, granted, but so are some of the posts here on /. Even my strip [thebench.org] may be in that category, but I don't care. That's just what you get when you have a community contributing.

    ==

  • 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.

    ==
  • This is cool!
  • This is just too cool. Most Net Cartoonists will post any fan art sent in to them, but this is so much more amussing. The net has been nothing but good for cartoons in general, and if you don't belive it try Big Panda [bigpanda.net] for some sugestions.
    Well, back to The Bench I can't wait to get started!

    -Earthman

  • 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 [thebench.org]). 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.
  • ... don't forget the Dysfunctional Family Circus [spinnwebe.com] (Which seems to be gone now...? wtf? lawsuit?) and the Red Meat Construction Set [frii.com]

    ---

  • dude, that was awesome. you made my day. long live pants!!
  • Well hgalhagahlghgalhgghlaghahgh, I'll be dipped. It certainly is down, isn't it? Here [vegaslounge.com]'s a mirror.
  • No mention of collaborative cartooning would be complete without Slow Wave [nondairy.com], 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.
  • 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!
    ________________________________
  • Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com] is where this originally came from. One of my favorites would have to be this one about Linux [penny-arcade.com] or maybe this one. [penny-arcade.com]
  • Well, those who follow jerkcity [jerkcity.com] will recognize this one [thebench.org].
  • make sure that your cartoon is cooler than User Friendly, or at least state it in every cell.
  • Their Slashdot slam [penny-arcade.com] was amusing, but my all-time favorite is the Valentine's day special [penny-arcade.com]. I've had plenty of SO's that can commiserate with Gabu-san's GF in that strip. ^_^

  • <sarcasm> And of course the pictures don't matter. Obviously someone should make a web site where you just write the jokes, and they are all attached as captions to the same picture of a potato, so they don't have to mess around with the pictures at all. </sarcasm>
    --
  • <rant>
    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 [thebench.org].

  • 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.)
  • Actually....it's right here. [thebench.org]

  • Apparently thebench.org has tasted the slashdot effect, as I received these errors when I tried to connect:
    Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in php_header.php3 on line 10 Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in /web/sites/www.thebench.org/htdocs/index.php3 on line 81

    Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in /web/sites/www.thebench.org/htdocs/index.php3 on line 81
    Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in /web/sites/www.thebench.org/htdocs/index.php3 on line 88
    Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in /web/sites/www.thebench.org/htdocs/index.php3 on line 88
    Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in /web/sites/www.thebench.org/htdocs/index.php3 on line 93
    Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in /web/sites/www.thebench.org/htdocs/index.php3 on line 93
    Actually that kind of worries me, as I'm about to build a big site using MySQL and PHP3. The MySQL crash-me page [mysql.com] shows both MySQL 3.23.8-beta and 3.22.29 as having a 101 connection limit, which seems rather low. Surprisingly, it shows Oracle 8.0.5.0.0 allowing only 40 simul connects.

    With persistent connections enabled these limits don't seem too difficult to reach. Ugh.

    javier

  • If TheBench.org is ever going to live, it needs a voting/moderation system. Honestly, those strips either really suck or are really funny. I don't think it would be too hard to have a simple funny/not funny poll on each page.

    If The Bench is going to become a daily spot for me like Real Life [loonygames.com], PvP [mpog.com], or its father [penny-arcade.com], 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.

  • Funny Penny Arcade Strips (Score:3)

    by pavo ( 70713 ) on Saturday March 04, 2000 @10:59AM (#1225874) Homepage
    Making fun of tomb raider [penny-arcade.com]
    Tasteless zombie humor [penny-arcade.com]
    Holy Quake3 Batman [penny-arcade.com]
    Diakatana [penny-arcade.com]
    id software is watching you [penny-arcade.com]
    Fun for the kiddies [penny-arcade.com]
    Best Geek Girlfriend [penny-arcade.com]
    I feel the need for speed [penny-arcade.com]
    And finally....
    Making fun of slashdot [penny-arcade.com]

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