I accidentally watched all of The Number 23 a couple of days ago. I non-accidentally live tweeted it in order to share my confusion and pain with as many human beings as possible. I was made aware of the movie’s horrific curse early on, but still I persevered. SPOILERS: It was truly a massive turd. It was a turd pie. It was a pie made entirely NOT of delicious pie filling and crust, but of turd.
One Tweeter pointed out my Twitter user # is 12,331,382, and 1+2+3+3+1+3+8+2=23. I refuse to check his facts or his math because that was a perfect bookend to an abismal movie-watching experience.
I’m trying out a new, simplified art style for the LoFi comics in hopes that I can bring them back as a regular feature on HE. The goal for the Lofi’s was always to be a supplemental strip that I could bang out in an hour or so vs. the 4-6 hours it takes to make a regular comic. In the end the only difference in complexity was that they were black and white, which honestly took longer than my normal coloring because I couldn’t use the standard color pallet I was used to.
With the new engine driving the backend of the site (thanks Phil!) I should be able to post LoFi’s whenever I want. Even if it’s on the same day as the regular comic. I’m working on having a permanent URL for the most recent Lofi comic (something like hijinksensue.com/lofi). Lofi’s do not show up in the regular archive. You can see a list of all of them HERE. They’ll show up in the regular RSS feed because the idea of multiple feeds seems dumb to me. It’s all funny pictures with funny words. Shouldn’t matter to the reader if the hard was easy or hard on the artist as long as the material is solid.
I’m also hoping to use the Lofi’s as a way to react to something in the world of Geekdom quickly and timely if I’m in the middle of a mini-storyline. Here’s hoping it all works out the way I want.
You should really snap up jinksensue.com so you could have hi.jinksensue.com and lo.jinksensue.com
hah!
That's good marketing right there.
Love the style! They are like little HE puppets! It makes me want to stick my hand inside them and make them say stuff! Not that way…(ok, that way)
Lo-fijinks are pretty awesome, I've always thought they let you be at your purest as a comedic writer because it's all about the joke. Also, I like to think that Jim Carrey made a butt ton* of money making his ass talk and no longer has to work if he doesn't want to, which is why we don't see him around much any more.
*what I did there, you see it
I believe you have correctly assessed* the situation.
*boom.
I like the simplified style generally, but the hands (or lack thereof) are not my favourite.
Jim Carrey? You mean Jim Number right?
Jim 23!
I think it would be a nice idea to give them thumbs, so you can give us a better idea of their gestures (which way the hand is pointing). Other than that I like the simple style.
It's a great idea to use them as a way to chime in with topical humor without having to wrap up a story first.
LOLz. I whole heartedly approve of more jinks, whether lo or hi.
#23 to post!!!!!!!1!!11!!23!!!!!
I would have been far more impressed with the concept behind 23 if not for the fact that geeks have been doing it with "42" for DECADES. Because, and here's the interesting thing about math, you can take any damned number you like, and if you do enough things to it, you can "magically" turn it into any other number, which, and this is also very important, means nothing at all. ><
I enjoyed it far more as a movie about a guy sinking into this massive, obvious delusion (which as I recall, they kind of hinted at at the end, not like I care enough to ever sit trhough it again and check though so feel free to argue with impugnity lol) rather than there actually being anything special or magical about 23 or any other number out there.
Numbers are symbols that make it easier to manipulate concrete objects and concepts with a high degree of precision without involving massive amounts of gear. Like, thanks to math, I don't have to actually go and build a full-scale model of an aquaduct and fiddle around with different angles and stuff in order to be able to figure out which angles get the most appropriate flow rate. And I don't have to shoot a bajillion-miles-long tape measure out into space in order to figure out interstellar (or even intra-stellar) distances because, hey, math works.
But the number 13, say, doesn't have any kind of actual statistical significance; it's only meaning (beyond "that whole number that is one larger than twelve") is that which we as superstitious humans assign to it. And yes, you could take ANY OTHER sequence of numbers and come up with it. Or any other number. The question is simply where you stop, right?
So from that standpoint, the concept of "OMG THIS NUMBER REALLY *IS* EVERYWHERE DUN DUN DUN!!" that movie blew horribly. It was just awful, and I hate movies like that because they discourage rational thinking and examining a premise logically from all sides. But as I said, as a movie about a guy who comes across some meaningless bit of trivia and fixates on it until it's this grand delusion that is tearing apart his family– that's kind of cool.
Shame that doesn't really seem to be the movie they made though, eh?