Cowboy Zydeco's Signature

A Retrospective

Jaimie also runs an international spy ring in her spare time. Jaimie's Spy Club is an organization dedicated to fighting evil wherever it rears it's ugly head. Or something like that. Basically, if you send her a bribe, she'll make you a member. She'll give you a nifty secret spy name and announce it in the weeklies. It always reminded me of those old TV shows, where you send in three Post Toasties box tops, and they send you a membership card and secret decoder ring. Okay, Jaimie doesn't send you anything. But you get a cool spy name, and a job in the Spy Club.

During December of 2001, I decided I absolutely must become a member of Jaimie's Spy Club. So, that Christmas, I sent Miz Pickle a suitable bribe of exotic Texas kitsch, and she granted me my Spy Club name. From that day forward, I would be known as Cowboy Zydeco, he who drives the tank! And with all due respect to Meltdown Maggie, Professor Zim, Mr. Beard, and the rest, I definitely have the coolest Spy Name. I now use it as my pseudonym on the DerFleeganForum, as well as a couple of other places. If you ever see a Cowboy Zydeco or a CowboyZ around anywhere, chances are it will be me. The Spy Club seems to have gone by the wayside, lately, but I still wear my nome de guerre with pride.

Like most forums, DerFleeganForum has an option to create a signature. Eventually, I learned how to embed an image to the signature file. The pictures shown below are samples of the graphics I created for the purpose. I'm actually kind of proud of them. I'll add to this list as more are produced, mostly just to stroke my own ego. (Which is, of course, the primary approved use for a personal webpage.)

	The Cowboy Zydeco Profile Image This is where it all started. The image to the left is a scan of the last page of the graphic novel The Cowboy Wally Show by Kyle Baker. The silhouette of a fat man in a ten-gallon hat riding off into the sunset seemed to fit the pseudonym perfectly. So I used this image in my user profile.
Yee haw! Insert witticism here.	The Basic Cowboy Zydeco This is the default graphic that I use in my regular signatures, when there isn't a recently made special purpose graphic. I just change out the quote at the top and/or bottom. Below is a replica of the alpha version of the signature, using the first, and smallest, version of the miniature Cowboy Zydeco. I eventually dropped the left-justified version with the huge Cowboy Zydeco text in favor of a smaller, more streamlined centered version, like the one shown at the left. The name was dropped soon after. Cowboy Zydeco Made from genuine plastic! So don't settle for imitations. I originally wanted to include pithy quotations, instead of the oversized Cowboy Zydeco. However, I was (and still am) limited to the reduced formatting commands available from the forum editor. (These commands can be embedded in the signature lines, too; a significant discovery early on in my sig making efforts.) There was simply no way to do it with the tools at hand. So the signature above, and later the one on the left, were a compromise. But a fortunate one, as this format lends more flexibility for things like the bi-color signatures below.
Ya know, it does look more like a bunny sitting in a chair on a slope. -I.B. Magoo	Cowboy Bunny Soon after the debut of the Cowboy silhouette, another forum member (Ikky Boo Magoo) made the observation quoted to the left. Obviously, he was stoned. I had to make this, for comparison, just to prove my point. It didn't work.
Ya know, it does look more like a bunny sitting in a chair on a slope. -I.B. Magoo	Cowboy Bunny, Take Two And soon after that, I was again inspired. It took me forever to find clip art of a good "mudflap woman" to use as my model. But, from there, it was just a matter of transplanting the bunny ears over. And voila, instant Bunny in a chair on a slope, as approved by Hugh Hefner.
Ya know, it does look more like a bunny sitting in a chair on a slope. -I.B. Magoo	Cowboy Bunny, Take Three And then there was an animated slideshow version. This one wasn't used for long, because some people are reduced to a frothing rage by animaged GIFs.
Ooo's a widdle fweegan? Cowboy's a widdle fweegan!	Cowboy Fleegan The fleegan is the mascot of the entire fleegan.com domain. It's kind of a cross between an anthropomorphic Easter bunny and Kenny from South Park. It started out as an inside joke by the Gadsden, Alabama contingent of derfleeganforum, and spread to the 'Net. It's the local epitome of overwhelming cuteness, normally a distinction reserved for newborn babies and small puppies. (See The One About oooos a fweegan? for more details.) Laura made the original fleegan (it was even a T-shirt, for a short time). When the fleegan grapic came up in the forum again, I happened to be at the intersection of boredom and inspiration, and made the cowboy fleegan. Nauseating, isn't it?
I learned everything I know about posting to electronic forums from the noble chihuahua. Just yapping around the fringes...	The Chihuahua This was a relatively short-lived signature graphic (due to the annoying animated text). It was a reference to an earlier joke I had made, regarding the quality of my responses over a span of several days. I was pretty busy at the time, so most of my posts took the form of short, inconsequential posts to several different threads. Most of them were ignored. At the time, it gave me the mental image of a small, annoying yap-dog, running madly around people's feet and barking madly. Irritating, pointless, and for the most part just ignored. I found the image amusing, so a commemorated it with the chihuahua graphic.
Beware of geeks bearing GIFs. Fear the power of SUBLIMINAL FLEEGAN! Beware of geeks bearing GIFs. Fear the power of SUBLIMINAL FLEEGAN! Beware of geeks bearing GIFs. Fear the power of SUBLIMINAL FLEEGAN!	Subliminal Fleegan The forum uses a two-color scheme to aid the reader in seperating one post from the next. The odd numbered posts in a thread use black text on a white background, while the even numbered posts use black text on an orange background. Ikky Boo Magoo made a signature line that apparently changed "moods" depending on the background color of the post. When on a white background, it would say "S C R E W Y O U G U Y S !" But, when it was on an orange background, it would say " I L O V E Y O U G U Y S!" He did this by carefully interlacing the two messages, like so: SIC RLEOWV EY OYUO UG UGYUSY!S! SIC RLEOWV EY OYUO UG UGYUSY!S! SIC RLEOWV EY OYUO UG UGYUSY!S! So, the same text could show two different (and slightly oddly spaced) messages in the same space, because half of the text would be invisible at any given time. Pretty clever! I was able to take this idea a step further, by applying the principle to yet another signature graphic. Take a look at the three samples to the left. The white background version shows another version of the fleegan. The orange version shows a simple CZ, in Star Wars font. (Not that there's enough of a sample to tell, but it is.) I originally wanted to use the fat cowboy graphic, but it proved to be too detailed for adaptation. Run your cursor over the basic CZ logo for a detailed view (if you have Javascript enabled). It's not actually just black-and-white. The edges are dithered with several shades of grey, to smooth out what would be jagged edges, and to keep as much apparent detail as possible. (You can also see how much detail was lost, when compared to the original scan.) Each of the two images had to be reduced to a 1-bit palette. The fat cowboy was rendered nearly unrecognizable by this treatment, even if the height was increased somewhat. So, I settled for the simpler fleegan image. If you place your cursor over the top image on the left, you can see the checkerboard pattern used for each of the color fills. This is another reason why the fat cowboy couldn't be used. The narrow lines were obliterated by the loss of alternating pixels. As it is, I had to make some compromises for the fleegan's face. The checkerboard pattern removed too much detail for the face to be identifiable. Instead, I compromised in the areas where the mouth and eyes crossed the lower portion of the CZ. In the overlapping bits, I used a color that was midway between orange and white. I ended up just averaging the RGB color values, and getting a light tan. If your eyes are very good, you might be able to pick out the off-color pixels in the zoom view. And if you look close, you can see the Cheshire cat suggestion of a face in the CZ on the orange background. I was going to fix this, but I decided I liked the effect. It lent itself to the whole "subliminal fleegan" gag. This one took a ridiculously long time to make. The original art went quickly, although it did take some fiddly pixel-by-pixel retooling in some areas. However, the really frustrating part was dealing with the GIF palettes. For some reason, Corel Photo Paint kept snapping the orange to another shade. (Thank you, Photo Paint, for deciding what color I really wanted.) I finally had to manually strip the palette down to four colors (black, white, orange, and tan), then edit the RGB value of the orange, using GIF Construction Set. I believe I could do it much more quickly now that I've figured out the trick. This is fortunate, since the forum admins have threatened to change the color scheme just to mess with Ikky's and my signatures.
Pull the corn cob out... Let the monkey shout! Pull the corn cob out... Let the monkey shout! Pull the corn cob out... Let the monkey shout!	Monkey and Corn This is the second color-change signature. Like the one above, it uses carefully matched color palettes and an interlaced checkerboard fill pattern. After figuring out the process in the signature above, this one went much faster. I was also able to use more detailed pictures in this case, since the images were wider than they were tall. I have been trying to limit myself to an arbitrary maximum height of 50 pixels, in order to avoid taking up an unseemly amount of vertical space with my already oversized signatures. The width is comparatively unimportant, as long as the images are narrow enough to fit in a conventional browser window, and small enough to avoid bogging down a dial-up connection when loading. The signature above was more limited by the height constraint, as the fleegan is taller than it is wide, and therefore had to be shrunk by a larger amount in order to fit. However, in case to the left, both images used are wider than tall, and could therefore be relatively larger without breaking the height limits. In this case, it's an ear of corn and a monkey. The subject matter comes from a particularly good rant by occasional poster Dante Manglehorn. Briefly, he and I were having a discussion about firearms. We discovered we had similar interests, and quickly slipped into the abstruse shorthand typical of any hobbyist in their bailiwick. A couple of the female members (notably Liz) commented on the unique sociological opportunity to observe "a manly conversation between two manly men." As Liz commented, "We can see all the heavy verbage and minimal modifiers that make up the male sentence structure. We can watch as technical jargon and random numbers fly back and forth, are processed by their receivers, ascribed meaning, and responded to in kind." Looking back on my posts, I conceded that yes, my writing style had changed. I thought that was interesting, as I hadn't realized I was doing it. Dante didn't take quite so well to being placed under the semiotic microscope. He responded, I think at least partly in jest, with the following: ...sigh...sometimes i just wish i could live in a world where every friggin thing i say and do doesn't have to have the hair analyzed off of it. Analyzed...that a funny word. Begins with "anal"...of, pertaining to, or near the anus. Yzed...doesn't mean crap. So analyzes mean an anus with no crap, or basically... constipation. So, my analysis tells me that to analyze something is to mentally cork it up. I say "Pull the corn cob out....Let the monkey shout". It seemed worth commemorating with a signature line.
	Cowboy's Tribute to the Monkey The monkey and corn sig lasted a couple of weeks before I switched back to the basic CZ signature. I didn't have anything clever to say for a while, so I eventually dropped back to the basic silhouette, sans text. Soon, Faithful Atheist, another forum member, started sporting a single-image signature file. As I understand it, the evil monkey is a minor recurring character from the Family Guy. Apparently, it lives in Chris's closet and torments him occasionally. After a few weeks of this, a new variation of the monkey signature appeared. The monkey on horseback was my response.
	Cowboy's Tribute to the Monkey, Take Two After a week or so, a different variation came to me. To the left, you can see the the Cowboy, this time decked out in the monkey's green suit. Note the purple tie around the horse's neck. I think I'll have to file this under "good idea, poorly implemented." I'm still not terrifically satisfied with this one. But, after about an hour of changing the picture one pixel at a time, I gave up. It gets the idea across, anyway, at least when presented right next to the monkey. This one lasted less than 48 hours, due to a comment from forum member Ikky Boo Magoo. "Why is the horse in the picture wearing a uhmmm....'strap on' around it's neck? And that fat guy looks like he's having a little too much fun with that horse..." When people mistake a neck tie for a giant purple dong, it's time to move on.
	Cowboy the Destroyer But such comments cannot go unpunished. The day after removing the signature above, I created the image to the left. The creature's head is taken from Ikky's own signature logo, as shown below.
Ahhh! Chainsaw! The great communicator!	Texas Chainsaw Massacre This one was my tribute to the amazing DOOM Comic. It was pretty much a non-sequiter in the forum, but I liked the comic. So, Cowboy with chainsaw.

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