Remember when you used to. Fucking. Be able to do shit on Facebook? Like, games and apps and shit? Back before it was just a never-ending scroll of advertisements and "suggested" pages designed to funnel your dumbest relatives into becoming even more loudly anti-Semitic? Which is to say: y'all remember fucking BITSTIPS?
For you poor sad fucks that missed out: Bitstrips was a Facebook application (not ORIGINALLY a Facebook application - I think Facebook bought the company that made it, because I remember encountering a beefier version of the comic editor for a children's anti-drug comic contest years before it was a Facebook thing) where you could make a 2D avatar of yourself, and then you & everyone you were friends with who'd also made an avatar could make comics of your avatars together doing things.
For a 2D comic editor it was extraordinarily robust: you were limited to a single panel, with a maximum of two characters (one of whom had to be your avatar), two word bubbles, and an optional caption at the bottom. However, the avatars could be turned to be facing in (I think) 8 different directions, and could be fully articulated at every joint. There were a dizzying number of stock settings to choose from, and while you couldn't ADD props to a scene, you COULD manipulate a lot of the existing props. They also added new settings regularly, rotating them out based on seasons and holidays and events etc. It fucking ruled. It was fun as hell. I made dozens of these things, becoming a minor celebrity among my friend group, with multiple people actually requesting that I use their avatars for a comic (or several, as above).
Because Facebook is a product that is dedicated to becoming the purest possible incarnation of Shit & Misery in existence, the service was shut down in 2016, and they even went so far as to completely delete the Facebook photo album containing all of your extant Bitstrips so unless you downloaded them they'd be gone forever. Bitstrips technically lives on in Bitmoji, which sucks.
Anyways. I'm gonna post some of my favorite Bitstrips that I made. Also if someone wants to make a Bitstrips ripoff program I will absolutely pay the price of a new triple-A video game for it.
Here's all the single-shots I saved, with Director's Commentary.
Internet friendships being what they are, a lot of these were made about friends I'd never met in person, and I liked to play with that sometimes (Caitlin was not, in fact, Extremely Italian. She was from Texas. She did, however, come out as bisexual a few years after this was published, so at least I had that going for me.) I'm pretty proud of the way I managed to circumvent the "only two speech bubbles allowed" rule in this one.
More below the cut!
I had a friend who was pretty big in Vancouver's then-booming burlesque scene, so I decided to launch into an in-depth exploration of that industry. Please enjoy my hard-hitting exposé below the cut.
I'm going to pull all the blood from Mark Zuckerburg's vessels as grim penance for robbing me of my ability to craft my Art
I think Kirsten's dialogue is some of the rawest shit I've ever written
I just want you all to appreciate what an unimaginable trial it must have been to be my girlfriend at this time of my life
And that does it! That's literally all of the Bitstrips I have saved! Like I said, I made dozens more, but now their ashes have been mixed with all the other fun little toys Facebook strangled and threw in the furnace. Once again, please god someone make a Bitstrips-like, I need it so very badly
