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UPDATE: Deadline removed. You can now order again.

Pid’Jin brings you an exclusive, one of a kind jewelry collection.

Your evil advisors, conveniently placed close to your ears.
(Fredo on the right ear, and Pid’jin on the left. 3×2.5 cm)
35 RON/pair

We know you like your men in chains, and Fredo is willing to indulge.
(3×2.5 cm; adjustable length chain)
35 RON/one

Get some atom power to your heart. Don’t worry, it’s safe. Have the Pidjins guard them boobies for extra safety.
(approx. 2 cm radius, or 3.5×3 cm)

20 RON/one

Lovingly strangled is your preferred mode of death? Nice! Just choose your skillful strangler. (3.5×3 cm, adjustible length chain)
35 RON/one

DISCOUNT!
Get a set of Earrings+Bracelet+Necklace, for only 90 RON.
(instead of 105 RON).

“ZOMG these are so cool i’m totally tweeting this!!!”

HOW TO BUY

These marvelous jewels can only be delivered in Romania.

Head over to TricksBox, where you can order them via e-mail.

Lots of thanks to our friend Oana from TricksBox, our one and only official Pidjin® merchandise licensee.

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Great news from The Pidjin overlords! Pidjin.net has grown more pimp-awesome than ever. We have new stuff on it:

1. The Archive

Behold the greatness!!! Gaze upon the splendor of our 200+ episodes, all nicely gathered in one place. An adorable collection of love stories, dick jokes, depravation and profanity.

2. Topics
Do you secretly stalk Monique? Great news, it just got a lot easier!(pervert). There’s now a list of all episodes tagged “Monique”. Also, as it turns out, “food” and “abuse” are popular tags.

3. Search
Remember that episode when pidjin said “holy cow”? You can now find an episode just searching for the stuff that happens in it, or by the vulgarities spoken.

4. The whole damn thing is better
The Wordpress Gurus at Blogu.lu have rebuilt pidjin.net from the ground up, forging us a new website made out of pure awesome. We had no idea how radically a wordpress-based site can be customized and improved until now. I was gonna title this post “God made the new Pidjin site” but then i remembered that God likes to take his Sundays off, while these guys were more helpful than that. Read: we recommend them with our whole evil hearts.

Now go forth and spread the word. Yes, you may also multiply if you think it helps.

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Thanks, everyone, for reviewing us. The most reviewed episode has been Ribbed For Pleasure. With this we know more about our readers, and our innocence will never be restored.

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THE LIVE-EVIL PRIZES!

We promised a Tshirt to the first 30 participants.
SURPRISE!!! We’re giving one to every participant! (50x)
Stay tuned, you’ll be contacted via the email address you used.

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AND NOW, DEAR MORTALS, THE JURY AWARDS!

The third and second place are getting a pidjin magnet of their choice from Joytricks!

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The winners are:
3rd place: Rondelli Gabriel
and
2nd place: Madalin Cojocaru

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TIME FOR THE GRAND PRIZE!
a fridge magnet and a unique design hand-painted Tshirt!

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and the Grand Prize goes to Magda Mihaila!

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A Special Prize from Eugen&Tudor: We award Maria Suciu a magnificent print, signed by us, for her funny review.

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We’d like to thank the Jury: Iren, Exarhu and eCostin, and our friends from Treeworks (no, we’re not giving Zelist back) and Joytricks.

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Thank you all. Come back next week when we end the world. Really.

Official press release.

As we celebrate four glorious years, we’re giving you a magnificent contest!!!
The grand prize: a one-of-a-kind, hand painted Pid’Jin T-shirt.

DEADLINE CLARIFICATION: IT’S OVER.

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UPDATE: More prizes!!!

Joytricks are giving the best three reviewers a choice of a Fredo/Pidjin/Monique Fridge Magnet each! (Ranking will be decided by the same Jury).

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Our contest is simple. All you have to do is:

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1. Write about one of our episodes on your blog.
Review it, praise it, or totally destroy it.
Linking to us is optional, but appreciated.

Deadline: this Friday, May 29th. (23:59)

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2. Mail us the link to your post, as soon as possible.
mail to: richard.pidjin AT gmail.com

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More prizes!!! Without a jury this time:)

The first 30 people to send in their review will get a LiveEvil Series T-shirt. Just that simple.

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Sing three “Ave Maria” and one “Happy Birthday Oh Lords” and come back soon for the results!

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The World Enders would like to thank The Jury, and Treeworks.

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FINEPRINT:
The T-shirts will be handed to the winners in person. We’ll be meeting in Bucharest.

We reserve the right to disqualify reviews if we think they’re cheating (such as blank posts).

One hand-painted Pid’jin tshirt is going on auction this Friday, May 15th, at the Inocenti Charity Night. The proceeds will go to the Romanian Child Relief Fund. The entrance fee to this benefit is RON 300, so if you happen to be one of our obscenely rich readers (hi!), park your private jet(s) now, and grab this opportunity. We expect the bids to be in Rolls-Royces. Good luck! More details here.

About the tshirt: We’ve only made a handful of these, for our closest friends, because they’re very hard to paint, and take a lot of time. The paint is a special extra-volume acrylic, with glow-in-the-dark accents. More about handpainting pidjin tshirts in this tutorial we made in 2005.

The second wave of Pid’Jin magnets is fresh out of the oven. Spectacular handcrafted beauties, each with an unique serial number stenciled on the back.

Made by our friend Oana from JoyTricks.

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Our previous series sold out in 2 days, so it’s a good idea to order soon! We have 30 pieces of each character.

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The new series brings you two new Fredo & Pid’Jin magnets to rob guard your fridge.

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And the grand Lady of the house of Pid’Jin makes her debut.

We’re introducing Freezer Princess Monique.

Each magnet costs 39 RON, and can be ordered here.

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Head over to the handcrafting citadel of JoyTricks and make that wallet squeel like a frustrated little piggy!

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Tuesday Feb 18th, MTV had us over for a chat. Watch the interview here.

Zelist has just listed PIDJIN.NET as the #9 most influential Romanian blog of 2008. So if you’ve been doing evil things all last year, that would be our influence. You’re welcome.

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Zelist ranks sites according to their incoming links, so we’d like to thank everyone for linking to us. Your role in spreading the seed of evil is vital. We could never end the world without you guys.

The Pid’jin magnets of Series One have sold. The Pid’Jins would like to thank you, and promise to donate part of the money to a nuclear weapons research lab. Stay tuned for the next one, as we hear the Series Two might be around the corner

And, for the long-time fans, here’s a rundown of our previous Xmas Specials:

2007 – when we sang

2006 – when Fredo wrote a letter to Santa

2006 – when Pid’Jin met Santa a few days later

2005 – when the graphics were a lil’ weird

The Pid’Jin Fridge Magnets are finally available! It took us over 3 years, but we’re finally selling Pid’Jin stuff! And this is not some common website merchandise.

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We’re bringing you hand-made Fredo & Pid’Jin refrigerator magnets, in a limited edition. Designed by us. Hand crafted by Oana from Tricksbox.ro. Signed. Numbered. Evil.
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You can choose between:

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The Fridge Guardian Fredo:

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and the Pid’Jiptian.

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Each magnet costs 39 RON, and can be ordered here.

Now go make us rich! Merry Xmas everyone!

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UPDATE: The first edition’s sold out. (in 2 days!!! DAMN this is sweet, guys!!!) We’ll be pimping a new edition soon. We’d like to thank everyone for supporting evil. If you want to be among the first to grab the new ones, subscribe to our RSS feed or e-mail updates.

This Wednesday, December 3rd, we’ll give a talk at NetCamp. Lots of thanks to Manafu for having us, and we hope to see many of you there!

UPDATE: pictures here, and some coverage here.

[Video]

The guys at Votezi.ro have asked us to say a few words in their video, along with other bloggers. The idea is based on the very popular 5Friends viral, and was shot by Catalin, with Carter Film, over at Ciprian’s studio. Full credits and more details here.

We’re the guy in red [Eugen] and the guy in blue with long sleeves [Tudor]. Video link is in Romanian.

We’re back from NYC (pictures here) and Tudor got hired by Adobe as an XD.

Tudor: Hi guys. XD is short for User Experience Designer. Adobe Romania is doing research and development, that means i get to be involved with top programmers, who are working on new cutting edge technology. To me this feels like going to Disneyland, and getting paid for it.

While architecture will have to take a break, don’t worry about Fredo & Pidjin. Those tough birds can’t be stopped.

June 20th – July 4th, we’ll be in NYC. This means 2 things:

1. If you’re a reader from NY and want to meet us, mail us at richard.pidjin AT gmail.com. (Ok, so Tudor has started partying a little earlier with Vivi, but Eugen swears he will catch up!)

2. There will be a pause – no episodes for 2 weeks. (on the bright side, we’ll be partying an shopping, if that helps)

See you all soon.

This weekend the Pid’Jins visited Street Delivery on Arthur Verona Street. Met Clandestino, Hardcomics, 115, Ciubi and other cool cats, and sponsored a contest with some Evil t-shirts. A very fun weekend, which we look forward to repeating next year. Cheers from Bucharest (Eugen) and NYC (Tudor).

Saturday night, April 19th, at 21:50 we’ll be drawing Fredo and Pid’Jin live, on stage at the Filter Design Party. The party starts at 19:00, at Fabrica. More info here [link in ro]

We’ll be at the RoBlogFest party this Friday, at Fabrica, and hope to meet and chat with you guys. So make sure you show up – you need to sign up for the party on this list, preferably before it fills up. So RSVP now!

Today my 3D animation “Optical Illusions” has exceeded 1 million views on YouTube. Yay for that, and yay for offtopic news!

It’s been 5 years since i made that film, and i must confess i miss hitting the ‘render’ button again. So maybe 2008.

Your fate lies in the hands of the Evil Pigeons! We shall be in the RoBlogFest jury. Go register your blog now! (ofc, that means we won’t be in the competition this year)

One of our favorite webcomics, Savage Chickens, turns out to have been around for 3 years! He’s giving away coffee mugs, so waste no more time and go leave him a word. Post-it companies should really reward this dude for making their product stand for more than work and/or amnesia.

Many happy returns, Doug!

Happy new 2008 everyone! As you’ve probably guessed by now, we’re too lazy to bring you a new episode on this fine Monday morning, on your long-awaited return to working all day and waking up earlier than your liver can take.

So, let our weaseling begin! Today we present 2007’s most popular episodes of Fredo&Pid’Jin, according to our stats, and personal preference. In reverse order, let the drums roll, aaaaand…

10. Stuck Alone (made in 2006, but still kicking)
09. Catch Me If I Can
08. One Night In Paris
07. Pimp My President (yet another oldie goldie)
06. I Mean WOW
05. Sky Is The Limit
04. The Feather Of Ideas
03. I Sea Q (my all-time favorite, graphics-wise)
02. Dark Sabbath
01. Head To Head

And, of course, here are some of our 2007 personal favorites:

Eugen:
Under The Missile Toe
Put Your Head On My Schnauzer

Tudor:
They called him The Wild Rose • Food For The Soul • Fredo’s Day Off • iPorn • Candy And De Flower • Ball-istics • Pimp My Groupie! • Fate No More • Für Her • Nihil Sine Deo • Sex Inflation • Evil In A Blue Dress • Face Off

Our friends from Adobe Romania have invited us over for their 25th anniversary party. We had a great time and selectively drank their most expensive booze – this resulting in some hysterical fun (and later in some obvious continuity issues in this Monday’s episode, skillfully detected by evil Mr. Fry.)

Thanks for having us, guys, it was a marvelous party!

The Evil Pigeons are now on Wikipedia. Characters and evolution are presented in amazing detail! Thanks Stash!

Romania Libera’s supplement “High Tech” features an article about the Romanian Blogosphere, including an appearance of Tudor and me, and the Evil Pigeons. Thanks, Cristian Curus.

Link to the article.(PDF).

We’ve been to Netcamp, which is a conference about internet stuff.
Hugh Macleod, the famous cartoonist had a cool presentation.

I learned about social objects. And also that every successful websites contains some. Now that I think of it turns out that even music and a football game are social objects.

Anything that gives people something to talk about is a social object apparently, all it has to do is have some kind of meaning to the ones involved. Now we’ll only buy granules with social object extract for the pidjins to eat.

There were other interesting presentations, of all the people I liked Mihai Crasneanu from Grey Juice Lab. I got one big truth from him. The fact that the zillion connections you got in your address book should have some flavor, some nuance, to distinguish how close and in what particular way you are connected to a person. This is exactly what i hope for the net in a few years. I’d love to see this in a robust and powerful application in the future. Something like LinkedInFlavours.

We chatted with Hugh, Eugen followed him around a little to steal his wisdom, Hugh was happy, not feeling stalked at all but for some strange reason took the next plane home.

Tudor, Eugen and Hugh (pic via Zoso)

We hanged out with our friends from Adobe Romania. You should all buy Adobe stock now because they shall rule the world supreme, for a while. Shortly after that the Pidjins will destroy it.

We met Crocodilu form Trilulilu, and told him we’d kill Pinky and The Brain for nesting in his servers, and causing him grief. Also we had a fun chat with Eirik Solheim about TV & stuff.

All in all we met nice people, chatted, and Eugen got brainwashed by words like scalability and such. For some obscure reason he wants Pidjin.net to be scalable. And he doesn’t mean servers or traffic. But he feels very inspired, all those presentations touched him deep inside. He might even amaze all of us someday. He talks about scalable design and user experience. I hope it will go away with a few aspirins

Hi to all of the nice people, bigup to the organizers Evensis and Dragos, and most of all to the people i am sure to forget to mention.

Pictures here, via zoso. More detailed coverage on Metropotam and Myadobe.

Tudor

Most fun blogger party ever, period. Congratulations to Costin and Sorin Tudor for putting this event together. It was a great idea, and it was wonderfully implemented.

For those who don’t know, the guys mentioned above invited the bloggers to a karaoke night in Coyote Cafe, and the result was a megaton of [seriously needed] fun. Although our blogger voices were made for typing, the show was cool. And yeah there were some rare cases of great music skills.

Pictures here, via Zoso.

Videos of everyone here.

Here’s the pid’jins&friends, performing live for your pleasure:

Eugen

Eugen, Tudor, Dana, and Radu

Tudor and Radu

We had a lotta fun and it was great to meet all ya guys. Looking forward to the next one!

Ionut, aka Mr. NoExcuses gets to go to NetCamp on Dec 5th. Congratulations!

Today we have reached 1000+ RSS subscribers! A world ender’s dream! Peace!

You can win an invitation to NetCamp, and meet one of the coolest bloggers of this planet, mr. Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid. He’s the guy who makes cartoons on the back of business cards, and if you read blogs, you’ve probably seen a lot of his stuff. He’s always been an inspiration to us here.

All you have to do is enter the comic contest made by Cristi Manafu. No drawing skills are necessary, it’s all about the fun of it. The Pid’Jins have been chosen to judge your entries and choose one lucky winner. Deadline: Dec 2nd.

If you are not yet familiar with Hugh Macleod’s stuff here is a good place to start. Also here.

Enjoy & good luck!

Eugen & Tudor

Fredo and Pid’Jin shall return in two weeks.

Peace,
Eugen

Cristian Manafu has launched the Best Blog Design Competition, a web design contest open to all blogs who think they look good. Submit your own blog design, in either one of the 2 categories: original or modified themes.

I’ll be in the jury, being evil.

Good luck,

Eugen

You can now subscribe to our comic via e-mail. You will get the new episodes every Monday. If you have already subscribed to us by RSS, this is not necessary. This email service is powered by FeedBurner. We expect it to be working fine, but will be BETA till the end of this week, so if you encounter any kinks, please let us know at richard.pidjin AT gmail.com. Thx to Bobby for the idea.

Good news, everyone! Tudor gave me the best news of the millenium today:
Futurama is coming back on DVD, (apparently not TV – not like that’d make any difference really) so get your amazon accounts ready to kiss some shiny metal DVD!

TreeWorks just launched ZeList, a chart of the most linked-to blogs in Romania. It’s kinda like Technorati meets Google PR: the blogs are ranked by their number of incoming links, but each link has a different weight, determined by its own number of incoming links, and so on.

We’re happy to sit on a cozy #4 (wow!) in the list this week, in such nice company. The chart is to be updated every week.

Kudos to mr. NoExcuses for the supercool design, and to mr. Catastif for this project.

The low contrast pixel molester is onto us! [link]

Today my film Optical Illusions has surpassed 500.000 views on YouTube. This is a little bit off-topic but I just had to mark this moment somewhere. Besides, it’s wonderful news: i bet you thought the most popular romanian video on YouTube would be the ‘romanian redneck in spain’ or some manelian masterpiece. (bwaahahahaa)

See ya at one mil’!

Cheers,

Eugen

Must-see of the week. I was gonna post a few comics from around the web, but then nothing made me laugh more than this. If you’re a graphic designer, you’re in for a treat, though if you’re Romanian, it’ll be a bitter laugh. If this turns out not to be a WIP or a joke, then it really is time to move on to the torches and pitchforks. Via Kit.

Later edit: it IS a WIP. (yaaaay?) Feedback is supposed to be welcome, so don’t be shy. Give it.

Fry’s blog Lifesux is now 2 years old! Fry was among our first supporters, during the veeery early Pidjin Era and deserves credit for much of our success with Fredo and Pid’Jin. I doubt we would’ve gotten here without you, and probably we’d still be using random fonts and crappy handwriting if it weren’t for your [annoying?] advices. Also we wouldn’t be the karaoke gurus we are today.

Keep up the wonderful writing! (and bring some more concerts too!!!)

You can now rate our episodes! We’re testing this new feature for now, and it looks wonderful so far. It allows everyone to show their joy/disgust/envy/love/hate/passion/desire etc. AAAND it allows us to make a chart of our most popular episodes.

We invite you to join us on a quest: 111 episodes await your rating. If you have an all time favorite, go give it many many stars.

When we released nice episodes such as this, this or this we didn’t have any rating system, and we wanna give our old episodes an equal chance in the fight for supremacy.

Enjoy the new toy.

We answered a few questions for Cotidianul. Here is the full article. Thanks to Cosmin Popan for inviting us.

It’s 10 pm, pitch dark, we’re on the beach, around some coals from a fire we made to cook some potatoes and cheese. Posting this via cellphone, we promise we’ll find a way to deliver tomorrow’s episode-so check back

Oh no’s! Monday Morning again and no episode?  We been busy all weekend building nukes, so the episode gonna be a lil’ late.

Till then enjoy some of the best comics we’ve seen these days. (i.e. “here’s other people’s hard work”)

Savage Chickens get ecological

Savage Chickens – one of their best yet

Explosm – the cop

Wulffmorgenthaler, the following:

Snow White

Judas

Activist 

Sinfest – an instant classic

Enjoy, we’ll be back a bit later!

Gather round people! We have some awesome news. The evil house of Pidjin has stolen the heraldic symbols of Adobe, as you shall see on our header. Our mighty friends from Adobe Romania seem very thrilled by our plans to bring utter destruction to everyone and everything – plant flowers.

We have ambassadors also contacting the Vatican, and the Jedi High Council. With such powerful allies you can almost see the looming shadow of doom above your pathetic world.

Enjoy the infernal days to come. Also consider quitting breeding. Neuter your pets. Good bye.

Until then worshipping continues as scheduled.

Attention all readers! Ready to party like there’s no tomorrow? Next week, Wednesday July 4th we’re throwing The Pid’Jin Party! We expect you to be there, at Baraka Bar, in Herastrau, at 20:00.

Together with our friends from Adobe we’ll be givin’ out some free beer. Please confirm you’re coming to richard.pidjin at gmail.com. (we need to know how many seats to book)

We’ll be giving out the awards to our winners!

So come, meet us, meet our winners (maybe steal their t-shirts?) coz we sure wanna meet you!

Tudor and Eugen,
humble scribe and portraitist of the Pidjins

Drawing Dilbert Cartoons

As I say everytime the subject comes up, my favorite blog of all time is Scott Adam’s The Dilbert Blog. Actually, from time to time I feel that it’s got better material than the comic itself, but then things swing back to normality after a cool episode pops up.

I already knew a lot about his daily routine, but this time Scott’s showing us the whole process, step by step – and with pictures. If you’re into cartooning, some of the hints there – though basic – might prove pretty useful.

There are many tools out there for making digital strips, his choice is Photoshop + Wacom Cintiq. Not bad – but heavily expensive if you really stick to that hardware. I’ve never tested one of those, but I wonder how much better it can be than my new Intuos3, which costs less than a tenth of Cintiq’s price.

At some point we may reveal some tricks of our own here.

Cheers,
Eugen

These days (Saturday & Sunday) we’ll choose our winners. Here’s a round-up of how we’ll do this.

For the Big Prize, Tudor and I will spend most of the weekend arguing over who drew the very best entry. I must say this is very very hard for us, since so many of you have sent us some gorgeous work, and some of you have sent more than one entry. However, only one entry can be the best, and we’ll nail that bitch down and put a Wacom Tablet and Adobe CS3 right on top of it. Thanks Adobe for making this possible, we really owe you one for making this contest so motivating.

For the T-Shirt+Thong combo, we’ll go to an online random number generator (maybe this one) and get a winning number, that we’ll match with our list. The trackbacks have been manually added to the original post now, so we’ll use that list for reference. (Thanks !Ri!)

And then there’s the “T-Shirt for a comment”. Since some of you have left more than one comment (which is okay, we wanted you to), we’ll temporarily disable the duplicates, in order to give everyone an equal chance. Then, when there’s only one comment per participant, we’ll choose a random number (as explained above), match it with a comment number, and have a winner! Some day next week we’ll restore all the comments, for the sake of posterity – and for their inherent cuteness.

This contest has made a big difference for us. We knew it could work, we did expect it to make a little noise, but all our expectations were exceeded, some exponentially. There’s something so tingling right when people say things like “I’ve been reading you since day one, and this is my first comment – hi!”. And there’s something about seeing almost a hundred blogs writing about the Pidjins. And finally, there’s something about getting about 70 entries for the drawing contest, from 38 people. This one really knocked us out! How cool is this! We’re gonna make a special page for it and keep it available at all times.

Monday morning we get to announce 3 winners. It breaks our evil hearts to only reward 3 of you. We love you all. No exceptions when the world ending day comes, though.

You know you’re foul, you will all be destroyed ! Amen !

If you want to link to our contest page, also leave a comment! This way you can qualify for TWO prizes, and you give us a chance to see that you linked to us – some non-Wordpress blogs do not notify us automatically.

If you have made a post about our contest and you can’t see it in the Trackbacks section, please let us know at richard.pidjin at gmail.com, and we’ll add it manually.

Update: Here is the list of all the posts that have linked to us so far:

If you have linked to us, and you are not on the list, please let us know at the email address above.

Tudor and I have been at the Street Delivery, which turned out to be a very cool thing, way beyond our expectations, kudos to the organizers!

While Tudor was busy giving out free hugs (don’t trust this guy btw) I grabbed some brushes and abused a wall, which shall from this day forth be known as the Point Of Pid’Jin Pilgrimage. Thanks to everyone who helped, and to the Almighty who kept my clothes unstained – a true miracle.

I had a lot of fun painting my first wall ever.

(the guy in the picture is Ciubi, known for his Club 106.)

And yeah, Cosmin, I agree, we should have stuff like this more often!

Cheers all,
Eugen

Yesterday we had a Free Hugs event in Bucharest. It was part of a bigger event Street Delivery by Oricum.
I teamed up again with Nihasa for the free hugs, it’s the second free hugs where we work as a team, and our professionalism and hugability was unsurpassed. If you took pictures with us hard at work send them to richard.pidjin at gmail.com

Another highlight was making Fredo and Pidjin out of clay, while i was waiting in line at the pottery wheel. (Two hours later after all the damned kids finished making their damned ashtrays i had learned the craft of pottery)
Tudor – humble biographer of Pidjins

Cristina has a brand new address where you can find her very inspired drawings. You may know her as the super gal who drew this episode of Fredo and Pid’Jin, or as the author of Bizzaro Casting. Maybe you know her stuff or maybe it’s time to go check it out now!

FeedBurner and Google! Cool!

We switched to FeedBurner about a year ago, and it was a very good idea: our feed was now independent from our URL, so when we changed the site’s address to the current Pidjin.net, our readers didn’t have to move a finger in order to update their RSS. We decided then that FB was nice.

So we’re all curious to see where this will go, what FeedBurner elements are gonna marry which Google features.

Via Publishing20.

I leave you with a comic that made my day. (again, a rather long read for a comic, but worth the trip)

Today’s episode’s gonna be a little late.
Until we do it, enjoy some of the latest goodies out there.
[1], [2], [3] and a longer one, [4]

Vote for Fredo and Pid’Jin as The World’s Best Humor Blog!

See? You’re already laughing. GO!

UPDATE: direct link to the episode.

Tony Millionaire and Eric Kaplan have made a pilot for a show called “The Drinky Crow Show”, based on a comic strip “Maakies”, and animated in Romania.

AdultSwim.com have put it online, as a pilot, with voting. The pilot which gets the most votes will get the green light, so go vote!

So go there and vote for The Drinky Crow Show now!

I had the pleasure to meet Eric about two years ago, while he was scouting for 3d artists. He’s a very talented writer, and has worked on The Letterman show, Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons and Futurama. (Yes, i met a guy who worked on Futurama, worship me!) He wrote such episodes as Hell Is Other Robots, I Dated a Robot or – one of my personal favorites of all times – Parasites Lost.

I can’t wait to see this new show hit the screens, so go vote. NOW!!!

We at Pidjin believe that cuteness is very important, and this next story is a good reason why:
Yahoo has launched a new set of remastered emoticons, with the release of it’s new web messenger. They have also added a new Pirate Emoticon – :ar!

This new move highlights the importance Yahoo gives to it’s emoticons, in it’s fight to dominate the instant messenger market.

You must be familiar with the pain and shame of talking to someone from an external messenger app, with “compatible” emoticons. Translating to ugly / clumsy, just non standard (Yahoo standard ).

It’s hard to imagine the person you’re talking to receiving a cute smiley, when you’re looking at some modest imitation in your based app.

Relying on the emotional dependency we develop for the Yahoo emoticons might be a big factor in the success of Yahoo Messenger. The proof that Yahoo takes this serious lies in the fact that it has played the emoticon card well and often.

• There are the hidden emoticons.
• Adding new emoticons from time to time.
• The huge contest for new emoticons last year or so.
• And now with the brand new web messenger come remastered yahoo emoticons, and our new star, the pirate: Arr !

Obviously emoticons are a big part of the Yahoo instant messenger strategy. Even if they represent a just small percentage of the 80 B$ Yahoo might be worth, that small percentage is still some damned serious money.

Emoticons have obviously been an issue for all contenders. Google tried to be inventive, adding a little animation that rotated the : ) smiley to an upright position. Creative, some geek appeal maybe (i liked it) but it’s Yahoo’s cuteness that takes the crown.

Yet, again and again, it’s the story of who manages to be first and do it right. Yahoo managed to make the emoticons cute enough and also fast enough for mass adoption.

Holy cow.

My 2003 animation, Optical Illusions just went thru the roof on YouTube! It used to just sit there unnoticed, for about a year or so. And then just 2 months ago, something happened. It went from a couple of views a day to over a thousand. And now it’s getting somewhere around 10k views a day! That’s even better than the traffic we get over here!

Today, the psychological threshold of 100.000 views was shattered away. Looking forward for the million mark now, when I’ll return with yet another non-pidjin-related, shameless plug!

Wheee!
Eugen

Ta-daaa!

For a long time, Questionable Content has been the poster-gal for the concept “tease the audience forever”. Or to put it in different words, the boy never gets the girl. Literally, in in this case.

Now it’s been a while since I’ve read QC, so today when I just thought I’d check out their latest strip, I run into this jewel (the link above). I gather that Marten finally gets laid! Granted, that girl ain’t Faye. So the Big Step hasn’t been taken. But still, there *was* a teasing thing going between Marten and Dora as well, even from the first episodes. And as far as I could tell, his balls were getting as blue as a blueberry in a blue bottle of blue ink. Big breakthru.

I read 300 episodes of QC, hoping the two guys will get together. I lasted 2400+ episodes of Sinfest (and counting!) hoping the same for Slick and ‘Nique. Now, suddenly, QC gains a nice edge, because the relationships are getting a bit more complicated between the characters, and I realize I have a lot to catch up with.

It’s funny how we care about the emotional ups and downs in the world of comics. Maybe it’s because comic characters tend to be cute. Lots of people ask us “when will Pid’Jin get laid?”. It’s not something we can predict. We honestly – and we mean honestly – couldn’t tell. But when it happens, we’ll be happy to report it in a strip. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe not. Much like in real life, you can never be sure.

Peace,
Eugen

Funny like hell this one, many shall relate! Of course, I couldn’t pass the opportunity to advertise Scott Adam’s blog some more, yesterday his post on that newly discovered planet made my day.

Scott Adam’s The Dilbert Blog has been my very favorite blog since day one, and certainly the only blog I’ve read fully. Never missed a post, only regretted reading a couple of them, which made references to stuff I didn’t know. Since he almost posts daily, that’d be a great ratio.

Cheers all, enjoy your May 1st.
Eugen

You know you’re doing the right thing when people use your work as a means of tormenting innocent people.

Razna has sent us 2 pictures that prove he’s a worthy reader and pimp of The Cause.

Long story short, Razna and his gang got drunk (on Easter night, so they get bonus points there) and one of them passed out. They proceeded to abuse his skin with nice evil pidjin drawings. Full story here.

Thx guyz, you made my day with this one! (sorry for the delay in posting it, it’s been a busy busy time around here)

Cheers all and Happy Easter!

It’s been a great week in Switzerland, I’m very very happy Cristina covered for me and drew our episode, in her very own great style, yet perfectly compatible with what’s been goin’ on here so far. I’m almost scared – i might have to brush up my own drawing to keep up!

We finally managed to pull an Easter Special out at the very last minute, the same day i landed back here. Hence Pid’Jin’s haste. It’s become pretty much of an addiction: as soon as i was back home, Tudor & I were already on the phone trying to figure out how the episode was gonna go. Glad no one argued with our choice of words, on such a holy celebration

Anyhow Explosm.net pushed the envelope this year and did this lil’ series: 1 2 3 4 and my favorite, nr. 5 and then 6.

Actually laughed so hard at these, it was pretty much the biggest reason i wrote this post, so make sure you check them out.

Spread the love.

Physically.

Tonight we meet again on RadioLynx, at midnight (gmt+2). It’s been one busy week, so I’ve gathered some nice recommendations for you to read and enjoy your beginning of the end of the week.

Savage Chickens

WulffMorgenthaler

Explosm

XKCD (this is a new one in or watch list, gonna write about it some time.

I almost forgot to show you guys this Wulffmorgenthaler comic. IMHO, one of their best.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler are two danish cartoonists who publish a comic every day – now boasting over 1500 pieces. Their style is really cool and recognizable, although they show some serious Gary Larson influences.

To sum up their manifesto, I’d say they find things we take for granted and change something. The result is usually hillarious, as you’ll see. I especially recommend that you start your Wulffmorgenthaler experience by checking out their top 10 page, which updates very often, because of their very active episode voting system. If you are a fan, here’s more info about the strip and its creators.

Oh, and then there’s this rather old but great episode, thx Kit for reminding me of it.

It’s Friday, you’re alive, you’ve earned it. Enjoy.

Here is the episode we made this time last year, just after RoBlogFest 2006. And here is our current episode, which, of course, we published just after RoBlogFest 2007.

Lotsa cheers and kudos to Spadez and Cristina who were so sharp to notice.

I love these moments when things seem to come together, even in an irrelevant and purely coincidental way. In a world of random, it’s god’s way of saying “yeah you’re doing the right thing”. Or maybe not, but I still like the feeling of it.

cheers all,
Eugen

Brilliant episode.
May not hook you if you haven’t read enough Sinfest comics, but still I’m pushing this one forward this week. I like how it sums up many of the ideas in their overall story.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking some time daily to catch up on Sinfest, starting with their episode one, which was published in January 2000. So far I’ve read just over 1000 episodes. Yes, wow. It’s THAT good. Worth every click and every second spent.

They have this trick up their sleeve, some leitmotif episode types, such as the japanese caligraphy one above. I’ll pimp their other types in further posts. Meanwhile enjoy yourself with Slick and Monique. (And, no, when we named our squirrel Monique, we didn’t have this one on mind. Luckily, at that point we hadn’t discovered Sinfest, otherwise who knows if we’d have had the nerve to start a comic).

Lately I’ve discovered they published some printed books, that are available on amazon. I wonder how they’re doing with that.

We are Roblogfest finalists! We got three 2nd places. As luck would have it we walked home with a lot of Adobe software.

We thank the nice guys at Adobe Romania, and i don’t know about Eugen, but I’m considering naming my first born after the company, if not giving it to them alltogether.

Partying was real nice and we thank Dragos, the organizer – congrats, dude! Only criticism we got: next time make the nametags more legible, so we don’t have to squint at women’s chests for minutes. (several sexual harassment lawsuits are probably waiting around the corner).

After the party we heard that people recognized us – we would have loved to get your feedback or criticism live. Kudos to all the guys&gals we met!

Anyway if you got any thoughts, suggestions or anything please use this email: richard.pidjin at gmail.com

Today’s strip from Pearls kicks ass.

It’s not so often i laugh so hard at a Pearls strip, but this one strikes with simplicity. Usually Pearls strips tend to overuse self references and gratuitious puns, like “my girl is a little hoarse” and then a little HORSE shows up. I mean come on. Usually when the abuse is too obvious, the rat will try to fix things by showing up on the cartoonist’s drawing board and handing him a gun, like “go on, shoot yourself”, or something on a more subtle note, like “it’s for your own good”.

Among most syndicated strips, Pearls are still in my top 5, though. When I look at many of the others, I really don’t get it how they made it into the big papers. But this is a topic for another time – until then here’s some samples [1] [2] [3] [4]. Most of these are no match for Sinfest or Diesel Sweeties, and yet are far more popular with the newspapers. Again, we’ll deal with that some other time.

Enjoy today’s pick, see you at the party tonight!

Our reader Ujjwal Dey has been so cool and created a wikipedia page for Fredo and Pid’Jin. Lots of thanks for that, we invite anyone who has stuff to add to just go ahead and play with the page.

This weekend we’ll sit down and edit the page with all the necessary details. We would have done this way back, but Wikipedia’s etiquette prevents people from creating articles about themselves or their own work. However it’s perfectly ok to edit an article created by someone else, so here we come.

In other news, voting at RoBlogFest has just closed, results are to be announced tomorrow night.

Lotsa cheers and see you all on Friday at the party,
Eugen

Today’s pick is an oldie from Sinfest.

This is the first of a hopefully long list of recommendations. Since we only produce one episode every Monday, we thought it would be a good idea to share some of our favorite strips during the week, thus keeping this place spicy.

Whenever we have time we’ll also review some comics, so if you happen to have one, and want a push, send us the link and we’ll write what we think about it. You’ll probably regret this move though, we’re very evil.

Enjoy.
Eugen

Radio Lynx have invited me over for a chat tonight (Friday) at the Blogger’s Night. The show starts at 0:00 GMT+2 (yeah i know, late). Cheers, Eugen.

‘Adevarul’ has published an article on Fredo and Pid’Jin, featuring a Tudor&Eugen interview. You can pick up a copy, or read the article here.

Fredo And Pid’Jin – video powered by Metacafe

Eugen:
I never thought i could hold my breath for 3 days straight, and not utter a single word in response to all the comments we got from you guys this weekend. Time to exhale:

Friday we said goodbye to www.eugen.ro/pidjin. Today we unveil www.pidjin.net and a brand new empire.

Tudor:
I for one never wanted to hold my breath, and i’ve been crying in shame under my pillow ever since Eugen came up with this cruel trick.

Anyway i will let Eugen continue, i have asked him to make this announcement using a Steve Jobs tone, like he was doing the iPhone keynote. Mocking Apple is always fun.

Eugen:
What we are unveiling here is a marvel of technology, it’s got gloss, it’s got 2.0, it got CSS under the hood and it runs on blood elves’ tears! (it does, check “view source”)

Also we can finally give you the kinky Pid’Jin T-shirts and thongs, via our CafePress shop, Evil Gear, comic books from amazon.com, news, reviews and kick ass navigation. There’s a lot of juice powering this baby, and more features to come, my supergirl !Ri isn’t yet done with it, though I must say I love what she’s done so far! The new beast is hosted by our friends at TreeWorks.

This is not a mere facelift, the site was rebuilt from the ground up, so you may experience a few bugs these days. So far it works best on Firefox, but in a matter of days it will look perfect in any browser. We could have delayed the launch for a few days and get it all fixed… but after the reactions we got on Friday, we just didn’t have the heart.

Tudor:
He means “guts”.

Eugen:
We sincerely hope that Friday’s announcement hurt ya all deeply, because that means you love the comic. And, as you know by now, we’re evil. We couldn’t have tricked you without the help of Boo, Fry and Catastif, our evil accomplices. (no, you three won’t be spared when The Day comes). Also thanks for writing about this: Piticu, Elena, Netics, Florin/Hi-Q, Netboy, MNZ and our-picks.com

Starting tomorrow, we return to our weekly episodes. You don’t need to update your RSS feed.

If you link to us in your blog, now is a good time to change that URL to http://www.pidjin.net.

UPDATE: Cristina aka Schitzuici has posted a breath-taking Pid’Jin drawing. Go see!!!

We’re here. Now go spread the word!

If you can read this, then there are still some bugs and glitches in some browsers. This site works best in Firefox. Fixes for IE and Opera are on the way.