I just had a thought. I was going to say 'brilliant thought', then I realized that was a little biased.

So here's my bri... my thought.

I was checking out The Well message boards a while back and one of the boards I spent a while checking out was the one devoted to cooking.

They had a little game they played where someone would come up with some ingredient, and people would need to make a three or four course meal, each course containing the particular ingredient. Then everyone would send votes to a moderator and they'd pick a winner.

Come to think of it there's a game show on the cooking channel that's even more relevant to my idea. Two audience members go out and buy food costing under a set amount then bring the stuff back to two chefs who battle it out trying to create the best meal.

So here's where my idea comes in.

Someone starts off by choosing a few comic components. Say one particular background, one or two characters and a prop. You might have other constraints, like the comic has to include a given word or phrase. Something like that.

Then everyone who wants to play makes a comic following the constraints set out by the leader. People would get a few days to work on their comics. When the time was up everyone would get a chance to vote on their favorite. Whoever won gets to pick the next week's components.

So...

Thoughts?

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

That's your "brilliant" idea?

Actually, I don't like competition, because when I compete at things, I always win and it gets boring. Plus, people get jealous and then I feel bad, because there's nothing I can do to help people get over their inferiority to me. This is a horrible burden that I must bear...

All of the above is true, except for most of it. OK, none of it is true. The truth is I'm a big fat baby who can't stand to lose...

To sum up, I think it's a swell idea, Gabe...

---
"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

Rock. I'm in.

We've been doing something similar already with the "all your base" phrase, and seeing how good all of those strips have been, I'm excited to see how this turns out.

It's weird... the whole art of making comics with this thing is in seeing how well you can work within certain limitations, and now we're narrowing those limitations.

For the sake of everyone's sanity, we might want to require that the titles of all entries start with the words "Comic Contest ##" or something like that, much as we've already been doing with the recurring storylines. That would also make it easier for people to read all the current entries -- they could just sort the comic list by title. But you should still have to declare your entry on this message board for it to count.

Should one person be allowed to enter more than one strip per contest? Should the leader be allowed to enter?

---
The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

I'm in. This should be as much fun as the "All your base" and "Remaking a classic" strips (even if I haven't contributed to the "Base" storyline.)

---
"Oh, look, a joke! How original! Thank you, but if I wanted my emotions stimulated pleasurably, I'd get a whore." - Donald B. Jones III

me too! Me too!

But then, you knew that.

---
This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

Yeah, we all knew that. So far that's interest from wirthling, evil_d, Big Evil Dan and Dexx. And me. That's a pretty good chunk of the people that waste way too much time here.

First off I think the idea of standard titles is a good one. That'll make the comics easier to find in the lists. If you're itching to put in a title, you could always add it afterwards... 'Comic Contest 1 (Gabe's Trashy Ass Comic)'.

As for the other points brought up... Restricting entries to one per person makes more sense to me. I'm sure that all of us, given a day or two could crank out half a dozen comics with no problem. That'd just make things messy. So let's say one a piece.

And I think it'd be best if the 'moderator' for each round didn't get to make a comic. That way it's sure to be rotated.

I was just trying to think of general constraints (i.e. x number of characters, backgrounds, etc.) when I realized it'd be more interesting if each new moderator decided on his/her own. So if you felt like being a minimalist freak, you could say this: "Use only diablo3_1 and the rocket. No background; limit of 20 words for the entire comic."

There's enough creativity floating around here to make things really interesting.

As for time periods, I'm not sure what's fair. I know we all have different schedules and varying degrees of busy-ness. How about 2/3 days to come up with the comic and 24/48 hrs to vote on it afterwards?

Here's a rough outline of the ways things might go:
2/7 7:00pm EST - comic constraints are published to the message board. Players have 48 hours to make a comic based on the rules laid out by the moderator. All comic titles should begin with 'Comic Contest #x'. You can create them whenever you want, but don't post them to the message board. Anyone can jump in at any time as long as they get their comic in by the due date.

2/9 around 7:00pm EST - The moderator will post all the entries in the message board so they're all in one convenient spot for people to see. At that point people start to vote. (See notes below on voting.)

2/11 7:00pm EST - Voting is declared closed. Votes are tallied and someone is declared the winner. Anyone can vote, not just people who entered the contest. The winner can take a little time to come up with the new rules and the whole process can start again.

I'm not sure how to deal with the voting. We could just do it on the message board, and say that Anonymous votes don't count, just so there's no cheating. Or if people didn't to know who voted for who people could email votes to the moderator.

Which do y'all think is best? And what do we do in case of a tie?

That's all I've come up with. Let me know what you think.

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Votes cast by anonymous users definitely shouldn't count. E-mailing votes means the moderator has to post his/her e-mail address, which some people might not be cool with. But then, some people might not be cool with voting publicly, since a vote for one person is a vote against everyone else. It'd suck for people to abstain for that reason.

I could whip up a little CGI script that could record votes, but that would be another password for everyone to remember, and server I could put it on is a bit less reliable than I'd like it to be. We could petition Johnny to put up a script on Lowpass, but even so it might still be too involved.

We could abandon the voting idea and have the moderator be judge as well, since s/he's not entering the contest anyway. This would be less democratic and would mean that people would start tailoring their strips according to what the judge finds funny, not what people in general find funny (of course, it's a fair bet that if you've gotten to be judge, at least one other person likes your sense of humor). On the other hand, it would eliminate the possibility of ties (a very real possibility when we have as few people voting as we will at first) and the worry that you might hurt people's feelings by not voting for them, and would drastically decrease the down time that we'd have to endure while waiting for everyone to get their votes in and the next moderator to be chosen.

In the event of a tie, we could have a run-off vote where everyone can only vote for those concerned, but that means even more downtime. Or we could have each of the winners contribute one parameter to the rules for the following contest. Maybe once some people start to win multiple times, they might choose to defer the victory to a less decorated co-victor.

---
The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

I run polls from time to tim eon my website and they way I decide ties to not vote unless there is a tie. SO we could work it so that when there is a tie that's when the moderator votes. That way there will never be a tie. The Moderator can't vote unless there is one.

I know EZ-Boards has a built in voting script. I'm surprised that UBB doesn't. I thought it did but I could be wrong. In any event it would be better if we had some sort of voting script here as opposed to e-mailing the votes in to someone. So if it isn't possible to get it up on UBB or on the main website, would it be possible to get some sort of voting script on a seperate user page just for the contese? That would be pretty silly tho. If the makers of this site are interested in teh contest enough then it shouldn't be too much a pain to get a voting script up on the site.

Just my opinions, thought.

Oh and I am interested in entering into the contest as well. and Hi I'm new and stuff. And I have a few comics as well :)

Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/), formerly eGroups, also has a voting system. It allows anonymous votes and ensures that only registered members can vote, and only once. Of course, if we wanted to set up a group for this contest, there'd still be the question of hierarchy -- someone would have to be the group owner.

---
The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

How's about this? Of all the people who've expressed interest so far, does anyone have a problem with emailing votes?

I personally don't, either sending or receiving.

If anyone does, speak up and we can think up something else. I would suspect that most people wouldn't care, and if you did there are a wealth of free email sites out there.

But whatever.

Thoughts?

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Would it be possible to modify the voting software already implimented to do this?

ANyhow I have no issue with e-mailing votes. Perhaps it could be integrated into it to make it easier?

quote:

---

there are a wealth of free email sites out there.

---

I like the idea of having a mailing list for this. I am a member of several eGroups (now owned by Yahoo!) lists, and they are great. As was pointed out, they have a simple poll setup for members of the mailing list.

This would mean we could communicate more quickly, using email instead of this message board, and the board would not get clogged up with our long voting and discussion threads.

If anyone is unhappy about the fact that someone has to be the owner, there is a simple solution - make EVERYONE the owner.

---
This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

I'm okay with pretty much any of the things that have been suggested so far. I'm in favor of things that are simple and that won't fall apart if a key person goes on vacation or something.

---
The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

Unless Johnny implements something fancier for this contest idea on the web site, put me down as a vote for having the moderator pick the winner. Less fuss, less muss. If I have no chance of winning anything cool like a "Three Reasons" t-shirt or a blowjob, then I'd rather not have to spend too much time on this thing beyond submitting my own entry, reading other entries, or possibly being a moderator if I should "win" one of these contests...

---
"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

Ok. So we don't beat the horse to death trying to figure out what to do, let's put the proverbial foot down. (Unless you'd all like to vote on which voting method to use? But then we'd have to decide on how to vote on _that_.)

We'll try it with the moderator picking the winner. I'd prefer a good voting method rather than this, but until one comes up I suppose this is the best we can do.

If there are no objections I'll come up with the first set of constraints since the whole silly thing was my idea in the first place.

Gimme a little while and I'll post them.

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Yikes. I just pulled up the clock on my PC to see how far ahead of me Dexx is. He's already at tomorrow! That messed with my head.

Anyhoo, here's the first Comic Contest. Let's hope this isn't stupid and doesn't fade into obscurity in a week like Vanilla Ice.

1. Remember to start your title with 'Comic Contest #1' followed by anything else you'd like. Everyone's smart enough to know not to include the single quotes, right? I thought so.

2. In your comic you may use... a) any pose of the exploding dog bug b) any pose of Phillip from Goats c) ONE(1) instance of the ghost or skeleton from kofightclub. No other characters/props. In addition you MUST use the graveyard background for all 3 frames.

3. Anything not specifically ruled against is fair game.

4. Don't forget the title.

Right now it's 10am EST on Friday, February 9th. I'm gonna say that you've got until 12 noon EST on Sunday, February 11th to make a comic and post it. I'm going to try and restrain myself and not read any of them until then.

If you've got any questions feel free to post them here or email them to me at gabe@woodenbadger.com I'll probably get those a little more quickly, but I'll be checking back here periodically.

I guess another good thing about having the moderator decided the winner is that we don't have to wait another couple days to start a new contest... Just a few minutes.

I hope I didn't forget anything, and I hope this is fun.

Let the games begin! Or the comicing. Or whatever the hell you call it.

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

You might have noticed that I made an entry myself. I don't intend on voting on my own comic, I just didn't want to be left out. (We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't like making comics, would we?)

And the more comics we have, the better chance we have of snagging more people into the contest.

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Should we start a new thread for this or something? THere's no way I'm gonna be able to see the entries in the contest considering the warp speed rate that new (cruddy (not you guys)) comics pop up on the list.

Everybody's comic title should start with 'Comic Contest #1', followed by the real title if you want to add one.

That way they'll all be listed together in the comic list, as long as you sort it by name. I checked the one I made and I think it's on page 7.

That's considering you want to go peek at the competition ahead of time. If you'd like to wait and see them all at once, I'll go get all the numbers of all the comics on Sunday afternoon and post them all in the message boards so that people can look at them all together.

I might start a new thread at that time so we don't have to wade through a page or two of old notes to get to them.

Does that answer your question?

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Just a reminder... One comic per person. And no cheating by making a new login and using that. We'll check your comics and if you only have one we'll send a pack of rabid wolverines to your house to gnaw your legs off.

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

I cheated!!!!!

I misread the rules, and my strip has two instances each of the kofightclub skeleton and ghost. :(

I just realised how to fix it, and probably make the strip better, too - have a single "Trick or treat" coming from the left on an invisible height prop, then have the second panel with... hmmm, but I would still be using two... *sigh* Oh well, at least I wasn't alone in buggering it up.

---
This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

Oh, you wacky Australians.

Too bad. Now you're banned for entering for life. And we're sending a pack of wolverines to your house to eat your socks. And the vintage TV you said I couldn't steal.

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Where it says "(1) instance of the skeleton or ghost from kofightclub", does that mean only one instance of either, or one each. Because I put one of each. Not that I'm going to win either, because a the title of my entry says, "I've lost already".

---
http://wally.pgbco.com

I meant just one. But don't beat yourself up over it. It's kinda hard to lay down rules like this without spending hours wording it and sounding like a fool. I don't think anyone will have an overly big advantage because they had one extra ghost.

So, no big whoop.

Gabe

---
100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.