A few months back, I mentioned my excitement -- nay, my child-like glee -- at the web toy, Infinite Monkey Comics. Now shortened to simply
Infinite Comic, all you do is type in a word and the algorithm grabs a relevant flickr image and twitter post to generate you a personal comic. I played with this for longer than anyone rightly should and I discovered the secret words that yield the best comics. The key is to choose a word that's charged - a lot of people might have tweets with the word "groceries" but "i need to go buy groceries now" isn't fodder for great comics. Profanity works decently well, so do emoting verbs and intensifiers. But the real secret to getting the best out of the site is to choose words that also require context. "Hate" might give you some interesting tweets, but images tagged with "hate" are going to be fairly homogenous. So which words did I have the most luck with:
bleed,
fucking, but most especially:
god.
Well, now I have a confession to make. I have a bookmark on my toolbar specifically set for Infinite Comic to make me a "god" comic and I've been clicking it one to twenty times a day. Thrilling. Sometimes it fails, but sometimes you get to peer right through people's secrets into something transcendental. And sometimes it's merely hilarious.
Below is a collection of my favorites. I'll note again that I didn't create these. I just typed the word "god" (and occasionally "omg" or "goddess) into the generator. I'm the curator of this exhibit.
http://www.infinitecomic.com
Randall Munroe maps character interactions in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, 12 Angry Men (check it out at full size).
After seeing it mentioned on The Beat, I wanted to spend the afternoon watching The Maxx, the animated adaptation of Sam Kieth's bizarre and magnificent hallucinatory, superhero comic from the 90s. But mtv.com inserts a commercial between every scene and it was driving me mad. Someday when I have more patience I'll sit down and enjoy.
(via The Beat)
Infinite Monkey Comics might just be the pinnacle of human achievement. All you do is pick a keyword or two and from the seething, primordial chaos of twitter and flickr, the randomizer makes you a comic (in the vein of ASW). Go on, try it. I expect to be old and gray by the time it ceases to astonish and delight me.
I realize this is parody, but it breaks my heart by becoming the thing it seeks to mock.
Shrodinger is the source of entirely too much humor. Click the link for the alternate endings. I recommend you check out the rest of Steve Wolfhard's lj as well.
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