Fish-Flavored Baseball Bat

It's a John Cleese reference.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Randomness Rules...

Another fun idea posted over at Random Panels (I don't know whether this is a full-blown meme yet, but I'll do my best to make it one): Taking the HeroMachine generator (an on-line tool that lets you create your own heroes by mixing-and-matching assorted features, costume parts, and even animal sidekicks! Brandon's epiphany: It's a lot more fun to just hit the "random" button and see the character that results from that.

While you can click the "Randomize All" button to spontaneously generate your new character, I found it more enjoyable to build them up one random element at a time.

Here are the characters that resulted from my experiments. (Sorry the first one's cropped too close to show her feet; I made that one before adjusting my screen resolution so that the full character showed up when I hit PrintScreen. And as you can see, it wasn't until the third try that I decided to use the "background" feature.)


As if that isn't wacky enough, now comes the fun part...coming up with names and/or backstories for your new characters. Or possibly having a cerebral meltdown trying to make sense of them. And this was Brandon's true stroke of genius: He let his readers offer their own suggestions. So, I'll follow suit.

Do you have any ideas who these people (and I use the term "people" loosely) are and how they came to be?

3 Comments:

At 6:20 AM, Blogger Brandon Bragg said...

That second guy's known only as The Composite Weirdo. He's a zombie from the 256th century who's made up of parts from DC's greatest second-rate heroes.

He's got Guy Gardner's ring, Oberon's legs, Firestorm's hair,and Beast Boy's skin. His sidekick is the product of an unholy union between Gleep from the Herculoids and an Ewok.

That next to last guy with the sickle and hammer is Baron Barren. As a small boy he was forced to live with his grandmother and her 78 cats. His mission in life is to spay or neuter any animal unlucky enough to cross his path.

 
At 6:25 PM, Blogger Erich said...

"Baron Barren"...heh.

Interestingly enough, the theatre company I work with has done a series of "improvised soap operas," one season of which took place in a fantasy-realm setting. The villain of that world was an evil sorcerer named Baron Uterrus (with umlauts over each "u"), pronounced "You-TEAR-us."

Another thought about my creations: #5 looks like she could almost work as a real character. (Almost, but not quite.) The coolest part about her creation was that, when I randomly generated the colors for her companion, the program selected black-on-black, making it a featureless void of a wolf. I don't care if it was an accident, that is one cool visual.

Now that I've considered it a little, I hereby christen #5...EARTHTONE!

 
At 4:01 PM, Blogger Brandon Bragg said...

Hero #3- "What if Nick Fury had been born a mutant and raised on a hippie commune?"

 

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