Why must a blog comment be text? Why could it not be… a drawing?1
I started hacking about and playing with a few ideas and now, on selected posts including this one, you can draw me a comment instead of typing one.
I opened the feature, experimentally (in a post available only to RSS subscribers2) the other week, but now you get a go! Also, I’ve open-sourced the whole thing, in case you want to pick it apart.
What are you waiting for: scroll down, and draw me a comment!
Footnotes
1 I totally know the reasons that a blog comment shouldn’t be a drawing; I’m not completely oblivious. Firstly, it’s less-expressive: words are versatile and you can do a lot with them. Secondly, it’s higher-bandwidth: images take up more space, take longer to transmit, and that effect compounds when – like me – you’re tracking animation data too. But the single biggest reason, and I can’t stress this enough, is… the penises. If you invite people to draw pictures on your blog, you’re gonna see a lot of penises. Short penises, long penises, fat penises, thin penises. Penises of every shape and size. Some erect and some flacid. Some intact and some circumcised. Some with hairy balls and some shaved. Many of them urinating or ejaculating. Maybe even a few with smiley faces. And short of some kind of image-categorisation AI thing, you can’t realistically run an anti-spam tool to detect hand-drawn penises.
2 I’ve copied a few of my favourites of their drawings below. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want early access to any weird shit I make.
Wowza, that’s some incredible artwork!
Update: Oh, no, disaster! I was still lazing in bed this morning when I saw your picture, and typed my reply above using Jetpack. I’m guessing there’s some bug (combined with the sheer size and complexity of the image), because that seems to have resulted in the last couple of dozen instructions being truncated off the picture. Worse yet, even the backup it created about the same time suffers from the same problem. So probably I’m the only person who ever got to see this picture complete and intact before it got partially-scrambled.Really sorry, Tyoma!Update2: Ah!
VaultPressJetpack Backup backed up a copy before the problem occurred; hurrah! This most-awesome picture is restored. Note-to-self: (1) don’t use Jetpack mobile app to approve or respond to large picture comments, (2) hurrah for backups.I did nazi that coming.