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About me
Web developer at Big Fish. Bassist, sandwich enthusiast. Excessively tall.
Still really rating Swindle, who I’m definitely going to keep a keen ear open for in 2012. Butterz are hopefully going to release a whole load of new music relatively soon, but Swindle himself put up a bunch of new tunes for eager listeners:
If you like the sound of any of that then check out these Youtubes…
Insane Clown Posse only really popped up on my radar after their song “Miracles” gained some Internet fame, mostly because of the wonderful lyric “fucking magnets, how do they work?”.
For a lot of people though ICP fandom represents a whole lifestyle. They call themselves Juggalos. Juggaloism can best be described as what happens when a white rap/metal crossover band accidentally creates a religion and acquires tens of thousands of devout followers around America. They have a reputation for being loud, drunk, obnoxious, and generally a bit trailer-trash. As easy as it is to categorise people in such a way, it seems too broad a generalisation to apply to so many people. After all, if this is a genuine culture then there must be many different facets to it – you can’t judge a whole population of people by the actions of a few.
I saw a lot of people tweeting about Internet Explorer 9 on the browser’s day of release in March 2011. One particular tweet, from @mathias, stood out, linking to the website getie9.com:
Greatly amused by a prank from James Chapman of Twitter. For some reason he was on the official website for Scouting for Girls (inexplicably popular teen band who have songs like “She’s so Lovely”. The chorus to that one goes “She’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, yeah”) when he noticed that the Twitter widget on the homepage was connected to an “official” account. The only problem was that this account didn’t actually exist…
“The financial stability of the entire world has for a long time been based on a curious salad of hypothetical bits of paper, made up words, things that don’t exist, guesswork, and the fragile confidence of fiscal tricksters. In essence, the whole unappetizing package of world economics is just an intermittently lucrative modern day form of witchcraft, only with more cackling, limousines instead of broomsticks, and the tacit approval of the Church.”
- Andy Zaltzman
My favourite side project at the moment is the Greggs Adventure. Long story short, it’s a blog in which I attempt to eat and review everything sold at Greggs.
When I started the blog in late 2010 I just put the posts up on my regular blog – the site you’re reading at the moment. After a while, as I realised that Greggs actually sell quite a lot of products, I moved it onto its own WordPress installation and domain name. I updated it regularly, posted links on my Facebook, eventually created a little Facebook Page for it, and it ticked along happily with a few regular readers – mostly people I knew personally.
On Sunday 13 March 2011 I posted a link and brief description on B3ta’s Links board, flagging it as “I made this!” so people would know that it’s original content. I posted this mostly because I was idly browsing B3ta and figured it’s the kind of thing the people there might be interested in hearing about. I was expecting a little rise in traffic, a couple of dozen hits maybe, but what happened next has been a crash course in how things get picked up and spread around on the Web.
It should go without saying that you want your web pages to display properly, no matter what system your site’s visitor is using. Problem is, PCs and Macs have a nasty habit of rendering things like spacing, line-heights, and typography differently.
First things first: I absolutely love my Kindle. I first got one for Christmas last year and I can honestly say not a day has passed since where I haven’t used it. Now, the Kindle itself is fantastic, but it’s just my nature to want to poke around with it to see what else the user can do.
It wasn’t long before I found the MobileRead Wiki article on jailbreaking your Kindle to enable you to add your own screensaver images. Being a long-time Internaut, despite myself, I love Rage comics. You know, the MS Paint comics made by anonymous oddballs to express frustration over everyday hassles. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could get hold of a range of Rage comic characters and prepare them nicely for the Kindle?
After watching the amazing third Family Guy Star Wars special “It’s a Trap” I was reminded of a strange theory about Star Wars history. I must have read it once years ago but some parts of it stuck in my mind. After a heap of Googling I found that the original article at http://www.morningstar.nildram.co.uk/A_New_Sith.html is no longer online. Via the Internet Wayback Machine I was able to resurrect the original text.
It is preserved here in case anybody wants to read it in future.
It’s not exactly a secret that when an otherwise ordinary Internet user decides to leave a comment on a YouTube video their IQ drops by a factor of 12. Every now and then however I stumble across something so incoherent, so nonsensical, and above all so utterly incomprehensible that I have to take a moment to have a sit down and a little think.