Oh my friends, I have wonderful links for you!
Via Slumbering Lungfish, blog of the deeply hilarious Lore Sjoberg, I was directed to Garkov. Garkov is a site that takes old Garfield strips and cranks the dialogue through a Markov Chain, a stochastic substitution/shuffling process that has been used in chatbots like ELIZA (although not in the code for Eliza specifically, as far as I’m aware). The results are often gleefully insane.
But Garkov also has a treasure trove of Garfield-related links on its main page, ranging from the Garfield Variations to the Garfield Randomizer, to Nothingfield (which seems to have been directed by Ingmar Bergen). My personal favorite? Barfield: the one with the fart jokes.
Also well worth seeing: a Garfield/President Garfield mashup from the frozen north. The artist doesn’t seem to have links that lead to individual comics, but you’ll find it if you scroll down the page.
Mark on Mon, 30th Jun 2008 7:00 pm
I couldn’t access this site at work…the web filter blocked this as category “sex.”
WTF?
stokes on Mon, 30th Jun 2008 7:31 pm
I don’t see how Garkov would possibly do that. Barfield… I could understand.
stokes on Mon, 30th Jun 2008 7:38 pm
Actually, I should warn everyone that if you keep reading Barfield through to the end, you will come across some rather extreme gross-out jokes, and generally the humor value goes down as the gross-out factor goes up. (When I first posted this, I hadn’t read all the way through the site. Mark’s post raised a red flag.) I still think the strips that I linked to are priceless, though.
fenzel on Mon, 30th Jun 2008 8:59 pm
Wow, Barfield gets _very_ dark.
I wasn’t expecting that.
mlawski on Tue, 1st Jul 2008 12:52 pm
By the way, the NYTimes has hopped on the “ha, Garfield on the Internet is funny” bandwagon with this June article about Garfield Minus Garfield. Apparently Jim Davis loves it, calling it “fascinating” (OMG he’s Spock). He also said that it makes a compelling argument that Garfield is better without the cat. Should we expect better, more existential real Garfield comics in the future?
Here’s the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/business/media/02garfield.html?_r=1&scp=36&sq=void&st=nyt&oref=slogin
Mark on Tue, 1st Jul 2008 11:13 pm
Sorry, meant to specify that the Garkov site was blocked at work. God forbid that OTI would be blocked by Big Bro.
fenzel on Wed, 2nd Jul 2008 11:48 am
Yeah, havnig my four-page long post about Dungeons & Dragons be blocked in the name of “sex” would paralyze me with irony.
Josh Millard on Wed, 30th Jul 2008 9:47 am
For reasons beyond my ken, Websense thinks my whole blog is dirty sexy sex dirt. Which is weird enough on its own, but Garkov in particular rarely stumbles past light petting at its combinatoric naughtiest.
Sorry about that.