it has only a vague personal sense of connection to me

August 11, 2016 8:22 AM

Pharmaduke: bot combining Marmaduke comics + Erowid trip reports at random. (Previously, Previously)
posted by griphus (11 comments total)

*cries with joy*
posted by lalochezia at 8:24 AM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Have you ever hit follow on an account before you actually saw the content? I have now.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:29 AM on August 11, 2016 [12 favorites]

i will never get tired of these mashups
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:35 AM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been in sales too long when I see "trip report" and don't automatically think psychedelics.

Someone, uh, pass me some of those mushrooms, wouldja?
posted by pianoblack at 8:39 AM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Have we hit critical mass of classic comic alterations/mashups?

Because yea I mean some of these are cute, but in most of them the beauty's in the quote and the Marmaduke panel fails to relate; it's totally extraneous.
posted by TheProfessor at 9:10 AM on August 11, 2016

The papers here never had Marmaduke, I guess that's why I prefer Nietzsche Family Circus.
posted by FallowKing at 9:15 AM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Meh. There is no Markov mashup here, right? Just a Markov generator trained on erowid trip reports. Or maybe just exact quotes from trip reports. Or maybe do they tweak the generator based on the original comic's text?

It's kinda hard to top Erowid Recruiter honestly, but that one appears manually curated. Interesting efforts at Awesome Funny Markov Chains.

There should really be a website that lets you do this by selecting amongst numerous bodies of text. You can torrent most fantasy and sci-fi authors collected works in machine readable formats like epub or even text. And users could curate the databases for other topics. I'd try trip reports plus Lovecraft myself. lol
posted by jeffburdges at 9:17 AM on August 11, 2016

I always forget that the central gag of Marmaduke is "the dog is big. not titanic like clifford, just realistically big. very big dog"

It used to be "very big dog full of everlasting hate" but I guess that's "problematic" in this era of Politically Correct echo chambers.
posted by griphus at 9:18 AM on August 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

Another idea for producing curated output might be to select or type a subphrases of the desired output and complete it to numerous full phrases by running the Markov chain forward from the end and backwards from the beginning.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:26 AM on August 11, 2016

I always forget that the central gag of Marmaduke is "the dog is big. not titanic like clifford, just realistically big. very big dog"

I remember when Bil Keene put a stop to (or asked the Spinnwebe guy to put a stop to) the Dysfunctional Family Circus over at Spinnwebe so he replaced it with a similar site where he just posted Marmaduke strips and everyone submitted captions that were just variations of "What a big fucking dog!"
posted by bondcliff at 9:48 AM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Now I can't stop giggling imagining Marmaduke assembling IKEA furniture.
posted by chavenet at 9:56 AM on August 11, 2016