terence n. tijuana Office Cubicles in Space

I remember my dad’s old Nokia 3210 with the pre-installed Snake game, which was pretty hilarious at that time. I’m sure most people are familiar with that game. A ’snake’ consisting of a row of pixels zips around the screen rapidly and you have to navigate it in order to ‘eat’ the fruit, which was a pixel that appeared at random spots on the screen. With each meal, the snake would grow longer. The tricky part was to avoid hitting the sides of the screen or the snake’s body itself, which became increasingly difficult as the snake grew.

Later versions of the game did away with the ‘walls’ defined by the screen’s boundaries, and this made it harder to avoid the snake running into its own body. Still later, they programmed the game speed to increase with each increment in length.

This comic was in part inspired by a partially-dead pixel on my monitor at work. I say partially, because only the red portion of the pixel is functioning. Thank god this problem isn’t on my home PC!

Oh, and you might have noticed the “Blank It” poster on the wall in the 1st panel! Blank It is a wildly cool webcomic, which you should totally check out here.

It’s smart and wacky and the archives aren’t too huge, so start at the beginning and you should be through in 30 minutes. Why do I love it? Well, it’s about 2 guys who suddenly find themselves on an empty landscape, with no inkling of their past and no sign of what lies ahead. Seeing these 2 characters explore their physics-bending environment is both voyeuristic and humourous. So give it a try!

Drawn with: Flash
Coloured with: Photoshop
Misc: I managed to stumble upon new settings for Photoshop brushes to achieve that paint-like effect from this site. Waaay awesome.