Health & Safety

Not a great cartoon but significant in its way. Yesterday, I changed the way the algorithms work in my 'Gag Machine'. I added some flexibility about the way I can produce the results. I also added a different kind of data and took out a few fields which weren't contributing to the finished product. I also took a slightly different approach to my data. Before the changes, the majority of the results were pretty unusable. I already knew that two word combinations worked the best but only when I input certain data. After the changes, I was getting more joke material from the longer gag suggestions. A page of 30 results gave me about eight or ten good ideas for cartoons. That doesn't sound much but, previously, I might get one good joke ever one or two pages. The trick, I think, is to find a good balance between detail and the generality. A suggestion such as: 'two zombies greedily devouring peanuts in a red circus tent' is not going to be as helpful as 'two zombies eating'.

Anyway, late last night, I finished programming and I took the first page of 'long gag results' and printed them out. One caught my eye and sparked an idea and I wrote down 'Hitler dealing with the Health and Safety Nazis'. The point of  using the 'long gag' outputs is that they don't tend to produce the kind of crazy, unpublishable cartoons I've been drawing in the past week. I didn't want to draw a cartoon that was too surreal. The result was the above cartoon. I was a bit tired when drawing it but it's okay. It feels more mainstream but, personally, I think it feels less exciting. Today I intend to spend entering more data. The beauty of permutations is that the more data you can add, the number of possible outputs rises very quickly. When I have enough data to produce tens of millions of jokes, I might not feel quite so bad sharing my app with the world. Then there might even be enough jokes for everybody.

A Bonfire Night Cartoon

‘Remember, remember the fifth of November; the Gunpowder treason and plot…’

I often wonder how many people actually remember why we have bonfire night or realise that it’s effectively a prolongation of the anti-Catholicism of sixteenth and seventeenth century England. In Lewes, they actually burn an effigy of Pope Paul V, or at least, I assume they still do.

Not that I’m for banning Bonfire Night on the grounds of religious intolerance. 99.999% of people lighting a banger tonight won’t be screaming ‘papist’ or shaking their hot dogs towards a burning cardigan and slacks topped with a Jimmy Savile wig. Bonfire night has become the one night of the year when the health and safety police are forced to cower behind their sofas as the rest of us express our personal freedom to stick a couple of sparklers down our underpants and wear a Catherine wheel as a hat. Not that I advocate sticking a couple of sparklers down your underpants or wearing a Catherine wheel as a hat. In fact, I’d probably recommend that you don’t do either. Leave that to the experts, as they say, or at least the guy who lives at the end of your road and has a glass eye due to a previous year’s larking about with incendiaries. As for myself, I’ll be indoors. I’ve not actually bought fireworks since I was a kid. ‘A fool and their money are easily parted,’ is a phrase I associate with November the fifth. All through my formative years I’d hear it muttered every time a particularly loud explosion shook the house.

I suppose the only reason we should ban Bonfire night is because of the injuries caused to innocent victims by local yokel types suddenly excited to rediscover fire. Tomorrow the news will no doubt have the usual reports. ‘Somebody thought it funny to set off a roman candle in a phone box but it took out the entire street…’ ‘He threw petrol on the bonfire but it set his trousers alight…’ ‘They tired bangers to the dog but it ran in the house and ignited the curtains…’

However, here’s a cartoon I drew last night whilst rewatching ‘God Bless America’ but with the commentary track enabled (highly recommended). If I’d had time today, I might have redrawn the kid and the parent but I don’t have the time.
I’m going to be on the 12.25 into Manchester where I intend to buy some new spokes for my bike and enjoy a coffee in a hopefully quiet and banger-free Waterstones.It's just started to rain so I'm stuck at my desk editing video.