David Morgan-Mar
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| David Morgan-Mar | |
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| Occupation | Optical engineer |
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| Website http://www.dangermouse.net/ |
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David Morgan-Mar (aka DangerMouse) is a Ph.D. graduate from the University of Sydney, Australia, best known online for three webcomics, Irregular Webcomic!, Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, and Darths & Droids, and for creating several humorous esoteric programming languages. He is also the author of several GURPS roleplaying sourcebooks for Steve Jackson Games, as well as a regular contributor to Pyramid magazine. He works as an optical engineer at Canon.
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[edit] Esoterica
Morgan-Mar has created a number of esoteric programing languages or algorithms some of which have achieved a degree of popularity. Some of them are full Turing-complete languages while others are simple jokes, often based upon the idea of how a given group (e.g. chefs, orangutans or necromancers) would be expected to program.[1]
It is a mark of Morgan-Mar's humor that his algorithms often reflect the practices or misconceptions of or about the computing industry, for instance `LenPEG', an image-compression algorithm is designed such that if it is given the standard Lenna image it produces an output file of 1 byte, otherwise implementing a standard JPEG, GIF or PNG compression, therefore beating these in benchmark tests. His intelligent sort algorithm (a parody of intelligent design), which suggests that any sufficiently complicated list is already sorted according to the whims of a sorter implying any further sorting is unnecessary, was referenced in the `feedback' section of New Scientists issue of the 12 May 2007. [2]
Programming Languages:
- BIT in which treats all data like C treats strings.
- Chef, where the programs are written to resemble recipes.
- Haifu, based upon the Haiku, Eastern philosophy and artistic values.
- HQ9++, an extension of HQ9+ (in which every command produces one of the standard programing tasks - printing Hello World, Quines, generating the lyrics to 99 Bottles of Beer and incrementing the accumulator by 1) to the object-oriented paradigm.
- Ook!, an implementation of Brainfuck designed for orangutans (see The Librarian (Discworld)).
- Piet, a graphics based design where the programs are works of modern art
- Whenever, a language which considers its lines of code to be to-do lists, and will arbitrarily choose which task to process next.
- ZOMBIE, designed for evil necromancers.
[edit] Infinity on 30 Credits a Day
Infinity on 30 Credits a Day is an idea that was developed by David Morgan-Mar in response to a poll he conducted, asking the fans of his webcomic, Irregular Webcomic!, whether or not they would create a webcomic, given the ability to do so. It is a webcomic created entirely through collaboration between the 500 or so fans that signed up to help. Much excitement has been generated on the Irregular Webcomic! forums and the newly created Infinity On Thirty Credits A Day forums about this project because it puts the power into the hands of those that signed up to create it. Essentially, the creation of each comic is a collaborative effort by several people, chosen due to their skills. This process will result in not only new ideas for each individual comic, but a widely varying look and feel for each one as well.
[edit] Creative Process
So far, Infinity on 30 Credits a Day has gone through the following steps:
- Sign-up by interested fans
- A poll to determine the genre
- A poll for the title
- A poll for the three main characters
- A poll for the general design of the characters and one character's pet
- A poll on the name of the group of contributors (the winning name, the Infinite Monkeys, was a late addition)
- Polls on the selection of the first three pages (art, colouring and dialogue)
- Dialogue for pages 4 and 5
- Artwork for page 6
- A poll for the three main antagonists
The intent is that the webcomic will settle into the following cycle:
- Different scripts will be written, and then voted on to decide which way the story goes.
- Strips will be drawn and voted on to decide which one is used.
- Dialogue will be written, and presumably voted on. (sometimes steps 2 and 3 will be reversed)
- Lettering and Colouring will then be added.
Creators will be chosen based on the order they signed up, or added the appropriate abilities to their profile.
[edit] References
- ^ [1] Morgan-Mar's Esoteric Programming, accessed 12th May.
- ^ [2] New Scientist Feedback, 12th May 2007, accessed 12th May.
This page was originally based on an entry from Comixpedia at Infinity on 30 Credits a Day and is used under the GNU Free Documentation License.
