 July is upon us!
That'll learn ya! The Illiad for a Day contest was a hit! I received over 110 entries (most of them near the deadline of course); what was particularly interesting was the comments I received with them. Quite a few of you discovered that putting together a strip isn't "all that easy" -- which is thinking that I will continue to encourage, since it means less competition and more job security. ;)
There were six runners-up, cartoons that made me chuckle or screw up my face thinking Oh God, I'm about to be shown up! I wanted to only pick two, but you guys made it pretty hard. What's worse, there were a bunch of really-close-to-winning submissions that had to be pruned out from the runner-up level. That was painstaking! Anyway, the six runners-up were:
- By Silver Adept. I love twisty ad parodies.
- By MCSquaredEqually. Silly joke reminiscent of the early days of UF. Like last week.
- By Theresa Ford. A tribute to my love for including hidden references. At least, that's what I'm telling myself.
- By RypperDoc. Very cute reference to recent material! Panel sizing and lettering were off, but the content did it for me.
- By Tuxette. Love is in the air. You people really dig that butter joke don't you.
- By Capt. X. Sure, break down the fourth wall almost as often as I do! Mock me why don't you! Oh. You did.
All of the people above, please drop me a line (click on the image tagged to this post to go to my diary for my e-mail address) with your snail mail address and your choice of a strip from the archives, and I'll get a signed print of it on archival-quality stock headed your way! If you want me to scrawl something on it other than my moniker, lemme know that too.
Last but not least, the winner of the first Illiad for a Day contest, for staying so very close to the heart of UF in both theme and character: Warfreak's Winning Entry. Warfreak, you get your choice of two prints from the archive, as well as a signed copy of any of the four UF books on the market!
Congratulations to the winners, and my thanks to all who participated! Many of the ones who didn't make it to the winner's circle were nonetheless creative and smile-laugh inducing. Well done, and best of luck in the next contest!
Google IS the Web! This in from Roberto Jung Drebes:
I am a master's student in dependable systems, and just got back from the
international conference on dependable systems and networks, in San
Francisco, USA. This is the conference on dependability, promoted by
IEEE and IFIP.
The keynote speaker was Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow, from Google Corp. His
presentation was about how Google attends high availability.
Well, why am I telling you this? Because during his presentation, he
showed a User Friendly strip! That one about "Google is the web and is the
web in flames? So Google *must* be up." The reaction of the crowd was
quite good. :)
Good heavens. I think I'm going to pass out from all the air going to my head. YEAH!
There'll be a Backfeed update in the next week. I have a bunch more to write!
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