Comments on: Garkov -- Garfield + Markov chains

Garkov -- Garfield + Markov chains

cortex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:20:59 -0800

Garkov is a comic strip generator that uses Markov chains to synthesize new Garfield strips based on transcripts of several hundred existing strips. The output varies nicely from plausible to surreal to downright incoherent.

The output is a probabilistic remix of original Garfield dialogue, divorced of its original context and plopped into blanked-out speech bubbles in (currently a bit less than a dozen of) Davis' original 3-panel daily strips.

The generation work is being done in Perl, and the final images are rendered using CSS positioning and a hand-cut garfield comic <img> font. Unfortunately, that means the raw images can't be saved as such, but screenshotting is totally kosher and the site allows users to save strips they particularly like to permalinks, as well.

This is really a proof-of-concept -- nothing in the code is Garfield-specific, so adapting the codebase to other comics is in principle totally doable. But I needed to start with something, and Garfield was that something, and so: Garkov.

It's also almost certainly buggy, and yes, there are some weird yet-to-be-fixed typos in the transcripts.

By: rtha

rtha — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:47:12 -0800

Fantastic. Current favorite. I will hit reload when I wipe the coffee off my keyboard.

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:41:43 -0800

It is my fondest wish to see these printed out and pinned up in cubicles to baffle unsuspecting coworkers.

By: rtha

rtha — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:01:55 -0800

I'll get right on that.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:13:41 -0800

I'd like to nominate "I've lost the feeling in my meatloaf" as an all-purpose expression of the existential angst that surrounds us all.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:48:08 -0800

cortex, it looks like the "Hall of Fame" as well as the "save this strip" scripts are currently borked.

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:15:34 -0800

Yeah, woof. Looking into it.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:23:44 -0800

It is my fondest wish to see these printed out and pinned up in cubicles to baffle unsuspecting coworkers.

Done and done. The most visible part of my cubicle wall, too.

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:24:48 -0800

Ha. Awesome, Plutor.

By: The Great Big Mulp

The Great Big Mulp — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:15:30 -0800

Help! Chair! Help! Chair!
This is amazing.

By: Greg Nog

Greg Nog — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:16:09 -0800

HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:17:08 -0800

I've got some db problems, so I've flushed the archives. Hopefully I won't have to do that many more times. Yay for launch day!

By: cowbellemoo

cowbellemoo — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:14:37 -0800

This is wonderful.

By: The Straightener

The Straightener — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:20:48 -0800

It's like, Garfield: the Dusted Years.

By: desjardins

desjardins — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:46:22 -0800

The Websense category "Sex" is filtered.

I don't think I want to know what your Garfield & Jon are up to.

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:29:41 -0800

You had me at "Garkov."

By: Sailormom

Sailormom — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:59:28 -0800

awesome.

By: never used baby shoes

never used baby shoes — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:55:13 -0800

This is brillant. I don't know if it is possible, but it would be even more surreal if you used a Markov dump of Metafilter comments.

By: damn dirty ape

damn dirty ape — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:23:08 -0800

Did you hand transcribe hundreds of strips? If so are you completely insane at this point?

By: cortex

cortex — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:38:22 -0800

Yes, and left as an exercise to the reader. Transcribing isn't so bad; there's some like Czech guy who set up an archive index by month and year that just displays images fed straight from (as far as I can tell) the syndicate server, and using that I found that I can plow through a month of strips in 10-15 minutes. A typical transcribed strip ends up looking like this:

J KNOW WHY I'M WEARING A SUIT, GARFIELD?
G ALL YOUR OTHER CLOTHES ARE DIRTY?
J I'M GOING OUT!
G TO BUY ANOTHER SUIT?

Then I have a little perl script that parses a file of transcriptions into separate per-character files for stocking character-specific markov tables at runtime.

So I'd estimate I put like 5 hours so far into transcribing. It'd be awesome to have a more significant chunk of them done up -- more variety in the text, more strange Markovian branching in general -- so I'll probably keep doing an hour here or there every once in a while. To do the whole 30 year run would probably be about 80 hours of work, all told, which is a lot of typing.

By: cortex

cortex — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:22:39 -0800

Stank-ass no-account Perl DBM back-end out. Shiny, hopefully extremely well-behaved mysql back-end in. Saving and hall of fame work again, and I managed to salvage the old saved strips as well.

By: nanojath

nanojath — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:02:17 -0800

Perhaps your best yet. Yet still I bitterly lament for the the abandonment of Bunt Cake.

I have to say, all these Garfield postmodernizations have convinced me that the strip is, in fact, a work of unutterable genius.

By: felix

felix — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:55:56 -0800

http://joshmillard.com/garkov/showstrip.cgi?strip=49671

...there's just no way

By: thewalrusispaul

thewalrusispaul — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:41:58 -0800

http://joshmillard.com/garkov/savestrip.cgi?strip=190885

Possibly...