Monday, November 21, 2005

Charbucks further

On my site I have a flash version of one chapter of my Charbucks saga. It ends proclaiming that more will soon follow. However, the wonderful online source of the voices has been removed. Formerly rhetorical.com had an amazing free feature where you could type in dialog lines and get a specific voice saying it back. Their Valley girl voice was exceptionally good, and they also had a variety of foreign and American voices to choose from. They didn't have the usual Radio Shack answering machine voice quality.

However, the site is gone because it was sold to a bigger fish, I learned recently. It made it so easy to create the voice tracks to animate, and you could just drop the voices right into flash and go.

The Charbucks saga was a multi-chapter adventure I wrote and illustrated with animated gifs around 1997, just when Starbucks were starting to appear all over the place, including some pretty odd places. The story was pretty amusing but the artwork began to look awfully rough as the Flash look came to dominate internet animation.

Anyway, not that anyone's asked me, but just thought I'd report on it.