If you have ever played with Madlibs as a kid, you'll find the concept behind Madnews familiar.

If not, the idea is simple.  Pick a title, provide some random words and out pops a (hopefully) humorous news story.

Madnews generates a PDF file that your browser should open or download.

If you try out Madnews, please come back to this post and let me know what you think.

Sometime in 1998 I started creating a simple comic strip about two emoticons living in cyberspace called Punc & Mark (as they were made from punctuation marks).  It wasn't anything elaborate.  I didn't actually "draw" it, but used an old image editor from Microsoft.

I was basically just messing around, but I posted it to my "home page" and told my friend Joe Mezzina about it.  He dug it immediately, and made all sorts of suggestions.  I created more episodes and, after a while, he and I were collaborating on everyone one.  So I gave him a byline.

For all its graphic simplicity, it actually took off.  I created a new site, byteus.com, and submitted the comic strip to all the comic strip ranking sites I could find.  We received a lot of praise and awards--even got one from the Museum of Technology in San Jose--and we had a solid reader base.

Then I decided to get more creative.  I started a new comic strip called Grey Matters.  I did ten episodes and suddenly between it and Punc & Mark, I got burned out.  I decided it was too much to keep up a regular strip, let alone two, so I retired from the comic strip "biz".

I sold the byteus.com domain a while back, so don't go there looking for any more comics. :)

description

A strange tale of a poor sap who sees strange things.

excerpt

My old bedroom I haven't visited in several years. I walk past it on my way to the kitchen with rarely a thought. Last time I looked in there, the Mass had grown to occupy a third of the room, engulfing most of my old bed. When I was a kid it had been a small, irremovable, black dust bunny that only I could see. Now it was a three-dimensional obsidian inkblot the size of several refrigerators.

Cereal and juice while coffee brews. Slim is there as always. His gray-skinned, lanky body is dressed in faded jeans and a crisp white tee. He sits on the floor in the breakfast nook, back up against the wall. Slim doesn't speak much, which is fine by me as I stopped interacting with sprites, for the most part, six years ago after my mother passed. Instead, he enjoys his eternal cigarette and the smoke—which I thankfully cannot smell—circles lazily around his bald, narrow head.

After what I've just revealed it may not be necessary to admit this, but I am a very lonely man.

info

6,000 words

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, yes it's been a year since my last post.  I decided to start posting again.  Not that anybody is actually reading this.  :\ OK, now that that's out of the way....

I friggin' hate 3D movies and videos.  Yes, amidst the biggest draw for a 3D movie in history--what up, James Cameron--I am saying that this is the worst move in entertainment technology that we could be making.  Allow me to demonstrate. 3D is an old technology!  3D movies have been around for 50 years and coming up on 60!  And although the technology has been improved somewhat, those improvements are not worthy of five decades of upgrades.  This is the year 2010!  We should be out near Jupiter haggling with HAL about how to save the Discovery but no we're stuck in terrestrial movie theaters awed by hot pokers coming out at us from the big screen.

Which brings me to my next point.  3D movies are typically--can't speak for Avatar yet because I haven't seen it--lame as the scripts are written to provide as many gimmicks as possible, thereby all but ensuring the story is shit.

And now 3D television?!  Talk about impractical.  Are all our guests for the big game or movie night going to have to bring their own glasses?  Do manufacturers and content providers expect us to don glasses whenever we watch TV?  WTF is going on here?

Speaking of glasses, can there be a less attractive and more nerdy facial accessory than a pair of 3D glasses?  And what of our visually impaired friends and family?  I can't believe wearing 3D glasses on top of prescription glasses is at all comfortable.

No, my friends, we truly missed the entertainment boat when it was decided to chase 3D tech over holographic.  That's where we should be: in theaters watching holographic movies with our bare eyes!  I say we boycott this trend now before it's too late and my wife has to purchase tiny 3D glasses so the damn dog can watch AFV in 3D!

Howard Stern may have put it best: "Don't we see in 3D all the time already?  I wanna see 2D." Well, maybe not the best, but it works.

OK, can we please, as a nation, as a self-proclaimed civilized society, stop thanking God for Fridays? I'm not knocking the religious aspect of it, but I do have three specific arguments against this practice:

#1. Friday's are inevitable. Yes, they will logically and regularly follow Thursdays. And if you are going to thank the big man for seeing to it you survived until Friday, shouldn't you thank him for Saturdays? Even Mondays? There are better things to thank God for. Seriously. Your health, your family, the fact that you were not born as a skunk.

#2. It's played. Yes, it's old. People have been saying TGIF since the 60's, or maybe even before, I don't know.

#3. Just look at the picture... The phrase was made famous by a disco movie, OK?  Enough said.

Let it go, people, let it go.