About the Barney Fun Page

October 14, 1995 was the first-year anniversary of this valuable service. In the first year, Barney was "hit" over 3,000,000 times, accounting for over 10,000,000,000 bytes of traffic! There are a whole lot of angry people out there. If you like, you can see what some of them have said about the Barney Fun Page.

I know there are better Barney images available out there, but I chose this one because of its small size (the original is 1603 bytes, which grows gradually as Barney accumulates more injuries.) It takes a while for the blood to show up. You have to be patient (but persistent) with Barney.

Something I'd like to do eventually is to have an option to create and download an MPEG movie of your jihad with Barney.

Something else I'd like to do eventually is figure out if the spot you clicked was inside Barney, and if you somehow manage to miss, output an error message to that effect. Also, whenever you hit Barney you should be presented with feedback on his deteriorating condition, i.e.:

You have given Barney:

Something else I'd like to do eventually is figure out a way to make the game more challenging. Currently it is not exactly hard to hit Barney (which isn't all bad), but it would be nice to give Barney some motion. Maybe introduce a Heisenberg Uncertainty Barney or something.

Something else I'd like to do eventually is add the ability to supply the URL for an image you'd like to beat up on when you tire of killing Barney (not that that is likely to happen), then the server would fetch the image and allow you to use the same set of weapons on it. This would let people ``cross-examine'' their thesis advisors, etc.

This interface uses Tom Boutell's gd graphics library for fast on-the-fly GIF creation. gd was developed at the Quest Protein Database Center, Cold Spring Harbor Labs.


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