Warranty Now Void is a weird thing, I would say. We’ve been “working on it” in one form or another since we were 16 years old, and frankly, I think it shows. 14 years of dumb doodles, weird semi-coherent articles, and occasional fever dream videos piled into an ever more precarious scaffold of dead websites and SQL database backups that have been stripped and jury-rigged to fit into other, newer dead websites and SQL database backups. It’s like 20 burned out cars stacked up in a junkyard with a brand new Honda Civic on top.
The most recent iteration has taken on a slightly different flavor than previous versions. In the early days, we’d use any and every tool we could get our pale, spidery hands on to orchestrate our shitposting. Sometimes that meant spending our own painfully real money to buy a program, and sometimes it meant pissing away critical school or work time to use resources there. More often than we’d like to admit, it meant straight up pirating a suite of tools (and subsequently spending some time as members of a Chinese botnet. Shout out to #BotSquad by the way; miss you guys.) Nu-WNV ain’t about that though. We’ve gone out of our way to exclusively use readily available, open source tools, legally acquired, royalty-free assets, and low- or no-cost hosting solutions.
Why bother, you ask? Now that we’re adults, surely we can foot the bill better than we could as lonely comp sci nerds in high school! Firstly, ehh… not really. Secondly, we’re so fuckin’ sick of content aggregation platforms like Reddit, and Instagram leeching off of, replacing, and outright smothering the websites that actually generate the content. People flocked to the corporation-owned sub-internets like Facebook to complain about how SOPA and PIPA were dangerous to the free exchange of information and ideas, and if that isn’t the definition of irony, it’s only because Zuckerberg owns the dictionary now. We pine for the days when you could share your dumb fart joke without signing complete, persistent, transferable, enforceable legal ownership of it over to a machine learning-driven, targeted marketing firm. Any fuckin’ schmuck with an internet connection can get ahold of the tools we use and shit out a WNV of their own. And we encourage you to! It’s important! Join us in the dying light of the internet wildlands. Bezos may come for our skins at dawn, but tonight we dance in the shadows of a freer time.
Websites Are So Easy Now
The internet of 2006 was a wildly different place. So were our brains. We like to pretend that we’re older and wiser now, and in 2034 we’ll undoubtedly be laughing together in our holo-chatrooms about the absolutely childish ideas we had in the tender year of 2019. But one thing we can say for sure is that it’s never been easier to just will a website into existence. WNV has experienced life as everything from a WordPress blog to various large, custom piles of engineering, but today it’s almost upsetting how basic it is.
This very site is just a bunch of plain old, static html. It’s not being compiled in real-time on every request by some php scripts, and neither is it a living web app waiting to respond to your various queries. We use what is essentially a fancy template tool called Jekyll to generate a bunch of html pages, which we dump into a plain old webserver. And that’s the end of that. What could be faster and easier to navigate for every user in the world than the OG internet material? We add a few bells and whistles on top of that to make our lives a little easier (auto-generate thumbnails, make some fancy colors, etc), but we’re not straying far from the basics.
And, as is fitting with our new mission, all of this is completely free and open for you to poke around and learn from (or, hell, just copy/paste into your own site named Blarranty Blow Bloid for all we care): it’s all on our Code page. We really, actually, truly want you to use as much of this as you can to bring your own ideas into existence. It’s our stated goal to make the world an overall more ridiculous place, so help us spread this goofy-ass virus.
Collaborate With Your Friends
It’s 2019, if you don’t have a free Google Docs account, I really don’t know what to tell you.
If you don’t have any friends, well, I also don’t know what to tell you. If you find out how to fix this, please email us immediately.
Make Some Real Art
Images
I’ve tried, just, so many drawing apps. Artrage, Inkscape, Flash/Fireworks MX, Autodesk Sketchbook, Manga Studio, Photoshop CS 2-6, Paint.net, Firealpaca, and a dozen other programs have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. It turns out that I’m extremely picky in this one specific way. Image editors feel bad to draw lines or do fills in, but digital painters are laid out all artsy and don’t make any goddamn intuitive sense to me.
Don’t worry though, I solved it. Krita is the best one, it’s available on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it’s totally free. It’s the rare app that has a robust set of brushes that feel good, but cropping a goddamn image isn’t the most esoteric bullshit on earth. There’s just a button for it.
Go get Krita.
Videos
Step one for video is to generate the video. This is a pretty wide open field, and it depends entirely on whatever the hell you’re doing. Cell phones have 4k camera now, so if you can get yourself some kind of selfie stick mount to a tripod or something to help stabilize, you’re basically already kitted out for high end media production. If you wanna capture video from your PC to make video game content, Windows 10 just comes with that now. And it’s good! Game Bar is actually one of the better suites of capture software I’ve used, and it comes pre-loaded in your OS.
As for what to do with it? That’s gonna be Shotcut. Video editing software is tricky, heavy-weight, and universally inclined toward sudden crashes. Of the open source editors I’ve used, there seem to be two schools of thought. On one side, there’s the tools with a slick interface that try to look like iMovie - these ones do not work. Then there’s the weirdo ones that don’t make sense at all. They have every feature ever developed, but they’re all hidden under some third tier submenu labeled “extrapolators” or some shit. That’s where Shotcut lives. The documentation and support are great though–like with most open source communities, there’s thousands of others trying to figure out the same thing you are at any given juncture. Keep a tutorials page tab open, save your project often, and Shotcut can take you almost anywhere you need to go.
Crack a Joke or Two Hundred
In much the same way that fear is the mind-killer, overthinking your dumb fart joke idea is the content-killer. That seed of an idea that you have bouncing around inside your skull like the DVD logo screensaver will never get any better or complete by leaving it alone to rattle around forever. Plant the damn thing in a doc and I guarantee that just the act of translating it into real, human words will force your brain into gear. Before you even realize, you’ll be expanding on it, editing it, improving it, and turning it into some primo content to share with the rest of the world. You’ll never think of that pun that you only catch when saying your punchline out loud, or find out just how funny your character’s ass actually looks until you put it to (digital) paper. And even better yet, until you share it with someone else to join in a team riffing. Not everything you produce is going to be a gem, but it’s damn near impossible to sift through all the turds in your own brain.
You’re Back On Your Bullshit, Now Share It
Tell us about your dumbass site for idiots and we’ll start an old fashioned 1996-style webring.
We are not joking.