mrshl | blog

But you will be afraid.

someecards.com: It’s Married to the Sea meets Hallmark.

Hat tip: my facebook pal, Ivy Grey

I can’t even tell you what I was searching for when I found this…

Thanks, ChickFistMagnet.com!

I’d be really surprised if most people who read this aren’t also regular readers of xkcd.com. But in case you aren’t familiar, the above is one of the best ones I’ve seen in a while.

By the way, xkcd gets extra points with me because they publish a full RSS feed, so that you don’t have to visit their site to read the comic every day. It just shows up in your feed reader. Compare that with a (former) favorite of mine, Toothpastefordinner.com. I stopped reading because that guy, talented and funny as he is, doesn’t even HAVE an RSS feed for his comic. He’s actually hostile to RSS (he claimed that it didn’t have enough readership for him to bother making it).

Achewood is another offender, but at least Achewood has a truncated feed that notifies you when new strips go up. Besides, Achewood is good enough that I couldn’t stop reading if I wanted to.

So I’m pretty sure everyone has seen this ad for Halo 3:

But I bet most of you haven’t seen the virtual fly through of the entire diorama!
Halo 3 “Fly Through”

Check out all of this “making of” stuff, the ad campaign they interview all the survivors and veterans of this war that takes place in the future, it’s pretty amazing.
Halo 3 “War Stories”

Interview with the creators of the commercial (and diorama):
Halo 3 “Making Of”

An excerpt from one of the interviews:
“Tell me about New Deal, Stan Winston and MJZ director Rupert Sanders’ work on the diorama.

SD: You have to understand that for the diorama, it turned into becoming the focus point for this campaign. We wanted there to be a museum where the diorama would just be a part of the museum. Rupert Sanders orchestrated this whole thing. The vision for us was to make this story come to life with real figurines on a real set and a massive diorama. It was time and cost-prohibitive to say the least, but Rupert just wouldn’t take no for an answer. He teamed up with Stan Winston and New Deal Studios in making this thing come to life completely—30 feet x 40 feet, 900 figurines or something like that and every weapon and vehicle.

MH: Those figurines are based on scans of real people.”

Strip Generator is a site that lets you create your own Web comics. You use their pre-defined humanoids, objects, and text bubbles, edit them however you wish, and presto. You’re a web comic genius. I put together the strip above in about 5 minutes. Someone with a bit more talent, but not a lot of time or know-how, could probably do much better:

There are other “do your own comic strip” sites out there. But they’re mostly not very good. Certainly, Strip Generator has them beat on several fronts:

• Strips actually look like web comics.
• The flash editor is superb. The tools aren’t complicated, but they’re generous. You can do just about anything you want with the simple text/graphic editor and the library of humans, beings, and objects.
• You don’t have to register, but if you do, you can save your strips to a running blog. All strips are embeddable and readers can comment.
• The site design and copy. I wouldn’t ordinarily single out a Web site like this for its general savoir-faire, but everything about Strip Generator suggests a love for Web comics, and an understanding of the medium. They truly want you to enjoy creating a pro-style comic. It’s just really well done.

Anyway, try it out. It’s fun.

Last week, the Onion interviewed Chris Onstead, creator of the objectively awesome Achewood. They asked whether he followed any other web comics:

I follow The Perry Bible Fellowship, which is weekly, so it’s not too hard to follow. That is probably the best comic online or anywhere right now. It’s absolutely brilliant. And I think he’s probably well on his way to being discovered. He’s actually got a book in the works.

I read that last week, but it’s only this morning that I’ve had an opportunity to check it out. Well, it’s an hour later, and I can tell you PBF is absolutely brilliant. It takes a while to get through them, but not too long because they only come out once a week. I already wish there were more.

Click through to see the full strip.

indexed: Pick your main verb carefully.