The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'patrick farley'
2010/1/2
Patrick Farley (the author of brilliant web comics like Delta Thrives and Spiders) has posted a list of his surplus story ideas from 2009, free for the taking:
Fake TV News Channel is created, catering to Conservative demographic. Similar to Fox News except the "news stories" presented are 100% fictitious: for example, after Kansas bans the teaching of evolution, there are giant fruits and vegetables growing on the farms, and cows are growing to the size of elephants. ("This bounty is clearly God's reward to the Great State of Kansas!") Much like "Wag the Dog," the question is how far this swindle can be taken before it collapses -- or will it ever?
Teenage gaming nerd is transported to fantasy realm, decides the Fair Folk are fascists and sides with the Orcs. (Alternate: a modern African American youth is transported to a Tolkienesque Euro-Fantasy realm, confronts the inherent racism of the genre.)
Take any "classic" story (Romeo & Juliet, Casablanca, Pulp Fiction) and re-stage it in a post-Greenhouse "Drowned World." The fun is in seeing how many conventional narrative tropes break down and how many new ones emerge.
2008/11/2
Patrick Farley (of Electric Sheep Comix) has a new work up: Don't Look Back, a gorgeously illustrated and witty slice of neon-lit 1970s prog-rock sci-fi futurism. It's a combination of distinctly retrofuturistic zeitgeists (prog rock/art, stories of spaceships, the freaks-vs.-straights dichotomy), gloriously rendered, and could be described as being like Illuminatus! meets the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with artwork by Roger Dean. It's a work in progress (only two parts are up so far), though keep checking back.
2005/9/10
An excellent rant from Patrick Farley (of E-Sheep web-comics fame) about the present state of affairs:
I'm sick of being told that catastrophe is victory.
I'm sick of being told that mythology is science, and vice-versa.
I'm sick of millionaire drug-addicts instructing me on how to live a virtuous life.
I'm sick of being told that Petroleum is the Lifeblood of Civilization.
I'm sick of being told in late 2005 that "It's all Clinton's fault."
I'm sick of Working Class Heroes who can be depended on to swallow any shit, so long as it's wrapped in a flag and served on a Bible.
I'm sick of "Christian" ministers who show up at funerals carrying signs which read "YOUR FAG SON BURNS IN HELL!"
I'm sick of being told that questioning authority makes me a traitor.
I'm sick of being told I must fear God.
I'm sick of being told that the worship of force is the highest of human virtues.Someone should put this to music.
2004/9/30
Former Young Republican turned maker of really cool web comics Patrick Farley has posted in his LiveJournal a Garrison Keillor essay on what's wrong with the Republican Party:
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.
2003/8/11
The latest instalment of Patrick Farley's mega-doovy webcomic Spiders is up. It's set in the parallel universe where a forward-looking, technologically savvy Gore administration (!) wages war against terrorists with open-source distributed robots and Ecstasy bombs -- only it gets weirder than that. The visuals are amazing, making full use of the web, and referencing everything from Illuminatus! to Fight Club to rave culture (though mostly in the visual style). And it doesn't use one jot of Flash -- it's all inline images. Don't miss it.
2002/8/23
The latest webcomic from e-sheep, the creators of the excellent The Man Guy I Almost Was and Delta Thrives:
The Spiders, set in an alternate universe where the dot-com golden age never ended, and a humanist west under an idealised Al Gore fights the Taliban with open-source robots, benevolent AIs and Ecstasy-laced marshmallow drops. It's a sort of cyberhumanist utopian war on terrorism, diametrically opposed to Bush's secret government and ideology of Biblical Fascism and "total information awareness".
It may not be particularly plausible (for one, I doubt that machine-man Gore would have possibly been anywhere near that cool), but it looks pretty doovy. (via 1.0)
2002/6/24
An absolutely gorgeous 3D-rendered webcomic speculating on what blogs will be like in the distant future. Though in some ways it has that early-90s cyberculture/teledildonics vibe, back when technology was going to bring the singularity and disembodied virtual sex was supposed to be the new LSD or something. Still, for us in the year 2002, living under the threats of Al-Qaeda dirty bombs, home-grown totalitarianism and war without end, and the prospect of a locked-down, censored, end-to-end rights-managed Internet being more a tool of corporate control than personal liberation, it's a nice bit of utopian retrofuturism, a vision of a future from a different timeline. (via rebecca's pocket)