Texts from Superheroes Q&A

Texts from Superheroes Q&A Thanks so much for being our patrons and sending in your questions for our first Q&A. Your support and interest means the world and Texts from Superheroes couldn’t exist without awesome fans like you. Enough about our gratitude, on with the questions! Question (from Charlie): So, here's a "stand up comedy" question. I'm creating a routine where I "explain" nerdy jokes from the internet. Simple example... "It was last call at the bar and the bartender asks René Descartes if he'd like another. He says... 'I think not." and POOF, he disappears." I then explain about Descartes and 'I think, therefore I am.'" So, my question is, knowing only a little about plagiarism in stand-up (The South Park "Fish Sticks" episode, mostly), is this going to get me in trouble? Thanks. Andrew: Hey Charlie, Thanks for the question. Short answer, go for it, you shouldn't get in any trouble. What you're doing is basically citing a joke and creating your own joke in the deconstruction of it. If you start just getting laughs for another person’s joke, then it's a problem. But what your describing is citing the joke and you're going to then, presumably, find new humour in your perspective by breaking down the individual aspects and having some kind of commentary. As long as your injecting you own voice and have a new or original take, everything is game. Thanks for the question, and thanks for being our Patreon. Best of luck with your stand up set. Crush it buddy. Question (from Dominic): What template do you use to create the texts? Thanks. Diana: We don’t use any template really, at least nothing that comes included with any image software. We create the texts in GIMP (a free version of Photoshop) off of a template we built from scratch. There are a number of websites that will generate fake text messages, such as http://ifaketext.com/, but none of them allow profile pictures to be included or to manipulate the size of the text box, so we had to make our own fillable template as the text and text box sizes often have to be changed so the entire image of the text is as short as possible. If we let the images get too long vertically they’re hard to share on social media so we try to keep them as short as possible. We built an empty text to use as a basis by copying all the parts of a text message from image generators, with each part as another layer of the image. Every time we create a new text we just change the profile pictures, insert the new dialogue and resize the text boxes. To give you some idea we’ve attached a screenshot of what an empty text looks like when we remove all dialogue. Question: Why haven't the superheroes updated their phones to iOS7 (or 8)? We get asked this quite frequently and we’re not going to be updating the look of the texts any time soon. 1. We don’t feel the jokes are any less funny in an old version of iOS. 2. We’d have to redo our template and already have over 200 old version images that make it super easy for us to work with right now. 3. Have you seen iOS7? Neon green and blue text bubbles with white font? Kind of an eyesore. We’d rather not put you all through that. Thanks for your questions and being awesome folks. Until next time, Diana and Andrew