SWINDLE by swindleuk

If you like the sound of any of that then check out these Youtubes… He and Roska’s refit of Swindle’s Spend Is Dough:

And Daredevil, with one of the funkiest basslines I’ve ever heard in electronic music:

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.

Documentary maker Sean Dunne went to the Gathering of the Juggalos, an annual festival and get-together for the fans, and produced this rather intimate and revealing film. Entitled American Juggalo, the film explores some of the faces of the culture without taking a judgemental point of view; the subjects speak for themselves about whatever topic they choose.

American Juggalo is a look at the often mocked and misunderstood subculture of Juggalos, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fans who meet once a year for four days at The Gathering of the Juggalos.

We went to The Gathering of the Juggalos and let the Juggalos speak their minds.

Personal highlights for me were:

• The guys using car spray-paint to decorate their faces (a real facepalm moment if ever I saw one)
• The girl who barely blinks for two minutes while talking about how she’s “not on drugs at all”
• The guy who has a normal office job but once a year goes crazy at the annual Gathering
• The family who drove all the way across the country to be with other Juggalos
• The “we’ve got alcohol and we’ve got explosives – let me show you how great we are” guy

I need to take the blame for this one. Back in September 2010 Microsoft started a partnership (of sorts) with reddit. As well as running a few ads on the site, Microsoft invited reddit users to have a look at the first public beta of IE9. It was pretty cool actually. People asked a bunch of questions and they answered a few of them in a special post.I was even enthused enough about the situation to crack open the ol’ blog and write a little piece about how I think Internet Explorer is a waste of everyone’s time.

A few weeks later the IE9 development team did an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”). It seemed like a pretty cool idea, and the community generally responded positively. I shalln’t go over the full story of the backlash that happened soon after as that would be slightly off-topic.

I knew that if you typed http://getfirefox.com into your browser then you get taken to the Mozilla Firefox download page. I also knew that if you went to http://getgooglechrome.com then you (used to) get taken to the Google Chrome download page. Curious, I checked http://getie9.com and to my surprise it wasn’t already taken. Granted, my sense of humour may be a little strange, and I think most people who know me would say I don’t know when a joke is inappropriate, but I had to snap it up. As soon as the DNS changes went through I pointed the domain at the Chrome download page. Har har. Job done.

Anyway, the domain was bought and set up. I proceeded to get on with my life and managed to completely forget about it. I certainly didn’t have the foresight to buy domain protection to hide my domain registrant details.

I woke up on release day to an inbox full of fire from Internet Explorer and Microsoft fans. I am, apparently, a shill for Google, a scammer who holds onto domains for profit, and, of course, an Apple fanboy. I’m none of these things. I’m just a guy with an odd sense of humour and £6 to spare. I must confess that it took me a few minutes to remember my little “joke” several months earlier.

One email stood out, from Martin, one of Microsoft’s “Developer Evangelists”. The guy was very polite, saying that he saw I was a web developer and that they know Internet Explorer isn’t exactly well regarded within the web dev community. He actually said “somewhere along the road IE let every web developer down”. A conversation ensued in which he suggested he get in touch with the marketing department with a view to passing the domain on. I made it clear in the exchange that I was not looking for money – all they needed to do was get in touch and cover any admin costs.

They never got back to us. The conversation with Microsoft ended with an implied understanding that I would keep the domain.

As far as I know, nobody at Google knew about the existence of this domain. I also know for a fact that nobody at Microsoft did; after all, wouldn’t they have got in touch? Who do you think is at fault here? Me, for daring to buy a domain name, or Microsoft, who should have had the wherewithal to look this stuff up before releasing a product into the wild? It’s not exactly a stretch of the imagination to check that the domain works. After all, @mathias did it, and he doesn’t even work for Microsoft.

Here’s the fallout. Well, some of it. The “conversation” has been going on for quite a while now but there’s no way I’m going through all that mess.

I tweeted Mathias to say thanks for the link. I was grateful that he’d told the punchline to a joke I hadn’t written yet.

When I first registered the domain people advised me to put ads online to try and make some money. This may sound massively hypocritical when you bear in mind what I’ve actually done here, but that idea sounds cheap and against what I think the Internet is about. I think there’s a fine line between a bit of fun and plain exploitation for financial gain, so there’s nothing on the site except a redirect.

My only regret is that I never put any Analytics code on there, because I have no idea how many people visited.

TL;DR: I accidentally trolled Microsoft after they shot themselves in the foot.

So he took it! @SFGofficial is now live.

He’s put it to good use too – adding cartoon penises to the heads of each of the band members in the profile image, and sending out nonsense like “just off to the toilet. One of us is going for a wee – the other 2 are going poo-poos. See if you can guess who!”

For this, Mr Chapman deserves an award. A ranking. Or at least some kind of honour. Chappers, for your services to trolling, and for winding up teenagers, I crown you Prince of the Trolls:

I tried to snap up @ScoutingForGirls but it was just one character over Twitter’s username limit. Curses.

“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

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.

At this point it’s worth pointing out that I did do a small amount of self-promotion beforehand. I was posting the occasional link to my reviews on reddit, in the United Kingdom section of the site. The site got a bit of traffic, and the reviews were generally met warmly, but I felt a bit guilty constantly posting links to my own content on a regular basis. The reddit community means a lot to me and I didn’t want to develop a reputation as a spammer, especially as I’d recently decided to create and use a new reddit account under my real name.

After the Facebook Page was created, Greggs’ PR agency got in touch with me. They mostly wanted to know about my future plans for the blog. They also wanted to know if I would like Greggs themselves to get involved with the Adventure, saying that while the blog had been discussed internally they respected that I would probably prefer to work on it independently. Euro RSCG were really polite about the whole thing and arranged for me to receive £25 in Greggs vouchers. I had no further contact with them, but made sure they knew how to get in touch if they needed to discuss anything. Also, who knew Greggs gave away vouchers?

After the initial B3ta link was posted on Sunday night (and after I denied being a viral marketeer for Greggs, despite my seedy coupon bribe) somebody (I can’t find who!) posted a link on Twitter. The curveball nature of the blog, together with a simple description (“Eat and review everything in Greggs”), ensured it was Retweeted dozens of times. I spent an embarrassingly long time looking at the site stats for Monday and was simply overwhelmed by the response; the blog started getting comments (from people I didn’t know personally!) and the Facebook page started getting a bit more popular.

I got an email from the producer at BBC Newcastle’s breakfast show, asking if I’d be willing to go on the air and do a telephone interview with the hosts. I was completely stunned, but the invitation to talk about sandwiches on the radio in the home of Greggs was too funny to turn down. I was on the air just before the news on Thursday 17th March. I’ve cut out the interview from their Listen Again stream – you can give it a listen here.

After this, things settled down for a while. Site traffic slowed down to 305 visitors on Thursday 17th and I assumed that would be the end of it. I’d carry on doing reviews, people who’d subscribed to the RSS feed, Liked the Facebook Page, or Followed the Twitter stream would read them, and that would be that.

Of course, I’d forgotten about the B3ta newsletter, a weekly roundup of the best content from the B3ta boards. The blog was included in the “What B3ta people have been making this week”, their summary of original content posted to the Links board. I was shocked to see that my little blog was counted among the best things seen on B3ta that week. In fact, it was right next to a secret party recorded on video and a giant Kit Kat Chunky bar (both of which are fantastic, by the way). Traffic to the Greggs blog went crazy – on Friday 18th I received 5484 visitors and served up just over 15,000 page views.

If you’ve read this far then you may be thinking something along the lines of “these numbers are quite small – how can you consider this ‘viral’?” It’s a good point, but there’s more to consider. I’m writing a blog here. I’m not sharing photos, I’m not running a webcomic, and I’m not uploading one-minute video clips. As pretentious as it sounds, a blog of food reviews like mine requires a degree of patience and stick-to-it-ness to appreciate. On top of that, this is a blog with a very narrow target audience. A humourous blog about Greggs the Bakers is not going to be very interesting to somebody reading in America, where most viral features really take off. So while I had a very receptive audience in the B3ta crowd, other traditional methods of promotion (on American-centric websites such as reddit or, shudder, Digg) just weren’t open to me. For this reason I still believe my relatively humble visitor statistics are impressive.

Searching Twitter for “greggsadventure” revealed that hundreds of people were now linking to my site – mentioning their friends in the process in order to spread the word. It was a pretty tall order to not let the praise – “Genius”, “Best use of blog software so far”, “Inspired”, “Fantastic writing style”, “Genuinely funny” – get to my head. Nethertheless, my curiosity got the better of me and I made contact with a few followers.

It’s now April 5th – just under three weeks since the B3ta newsletter came out, and about a month since site traffic became notable. We’re back at a regular pace of around two hundred visitors per day, which is still absolutely fantastic. I’ve started engaging my readers using Twitter and Facebook, and I even got to do a little something for April Fools. People are getting in touch with recommendations for the next reviews and I’m listening!

I started this blog not to make money and not to get traffic. It was just a bit of fun that could also be a cool creative writing exercise. The brief burst of trendy popularity has now subsided but I’d carry on with my little Adventure even if nobody was reading at all. Although it’s not much fun when you don’t have hundreds of anonymous fans referring to you as a “genius”.

The Greggs Adventure is available to read here. You can also follow the Twitter account here, and Like the Facebook page here for regular updates.

I used to have a crude and hackish way of inserting custom CSS via JavaScript if the user was using a Mac. Today I took some time to reassess the problem and refine the solution a bit. The end result? One (ish) line of JavaScript that I like to call macfix:

<script type="text/javascript">var OSName;if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac")!=-1){document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].className+='mac';};</script>

It’s a very simple function, as you can see – it just adds the class “mac” to your page’s body element if your user is using a Mac. After this, you’re on your own – you’ll have to look at your page on a Mac, see how it renders, and then work out what else needs to be done using the body.mac CSS rule.

Check it out for yourself – I’ve put up a simple demo here.

If this simple script has helped you, or you have suggestions or improvements, please get in touch by email or using the comments below!

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?

The result is Rage faces for Kindle – 18 scaled and cropped images optimised for the Kindle.

I was lucky enough to find a collection of SVG versions of the original Rage faces, courtesy of redditor paradox460. I was also very impressed to find an SVG-to-PNG convertor that reproduces your SVGs as images ready for download.

From there it was just a case of scaling everything down to the right proportions and cropping each image to give what I believe are the ideal dimensions. I’d like to think that each character has its own personality, and that this is reflected in how the images are displayed.

So if you’re fortunate enough to have a Kindle, jailbreak it when you can, and download these unique high quality screensavers.

It is preserved here in case anybody wants to read it in future.

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

Consider: at the end of RotS, Bail Organan orders 3PO’s memory wiped but not R2′s. He wouldn’t make the distinction casually. Both droids know that Yoda and Obi-Wan are alive and are plotting sedition with the Senator from Alderaan. They know that Amidala survived long enough to have twins and could easily deduce where they went. However, R2 must make an impassioned speech to the effect that he is far more use to them with his mind intact: he has observed Palpatine and Anakin at close quarters for many years, knows much that is useful and is one of the galaxy’s top experts at hacking into other people’s systems. Also he can lie through his teeth with a straight face. Organa, in immediate need of espionage resources, agrees.

For the next 20 years, as far as 3PO knows, he is the property of Captain Antilles, doing protocol duties on a diplomatic transport. He is vaguely aware of the existence of the princess but doesn’t know much about her. Wherever 3PO goes, being as loud and obvious as he always is, his unobtrusive little counterpart goes with him. 3PO is R2′s front man. Wherever they land, R2 is passing messages between rebel sympathisers and sizing up governments as potential rebel recruits – both by personal contact and by hacking into their networks. He passes his recommendations on to Organa.

Yoda is out of the picture by this stage, using the Force-infused swamps of Dagobah to hide himself from Vader and the Emperor. Or something. He is meditating on the future and keeping in touch with Obi-Wan via the ghost of Qui-Gon Jin, which as comm systems go has the virtue of being untappable. Obi-Wan, on Tattoine, keeps in touch with Bail Organa and the other Rebel leaders by courier, of which more later.

As Star Wars opens, R2 is rushing the Death Star plans to the Rebellion. R2, not Leia. The plans are always in R2. What Leia puts into him in the early scene is only her own holographic message to Kenobi. Leia’s own mission, as she says in the holographic message, is to pick up Obi-Wan and take him to Alderaan – or so she thinks. Actually, her father just wants her to meet Kenobi, which up to this point she never has. There’s a reason for that.

Obi-Wan has spent the last 20 years in the Tattoine desert, keeping watch over Luke Skywalker and trying to decide on one of the three available options:
A) If Luke shows no significant access to the Force, then leave him alone in obscurity
B) If Luke shows real Force ability, then consider recruiting him as a Jedi. The rebellion needs Jedi. Now.
But, if Luke shows any signs of turning out like his father, then C) sneak into his house one fine night and chop his head off. With great regret but it’ll save a lot of trouble later on.
Knowing this to be the case, Bail Organa (perhaps at the insistence of his wife) has found excuses not to send Leia to Ben for assessment of Jedi potential, largely for fear of option C.

To be fair to all concerned, Leia has shown no overt signs of a link to the Force. Luke on the other hand has. In his home-built hotrod aircraft, with no formal fighter pilot training and no decent instrumentation, Luke can regularly score centre-hits on 2-metre targets in complicated zero-altitude maneouvres. Until he attends the briefing on Yavin, Luke has no way of knowing that hardened combat pilots would consider that nearly impossible. To him it’s easy. Obi-Wan, who saw Anakin’s performance in the Pod Race, is nervous.

Much of Obi-Wan’s behaviour in this film, and Yoda’s in the next, can best be understood if they are frankly scared to death of what Luke might become. (Ben is also scared that he himself will make all the same mistakes he made with Anakin.)

Now, with the existence of the rebellion at stake, Bail Organa has finally told Leia to go see Obi-Wan and has sent her along with R2. The original plan would then be for Obi-Wan (with optional Luke and/or Leia in tow) to leave his exile and take the Death Star plans to Yavin, where they can be put to use. R2 (with Leia if Ben doesn’t want to take her) would then carry on to Alderaan to maintain the cover story. The original plan does not survive contact with a large Imperial Star Destroyer.

R2 and 3PO bail out in an escape pod, landing in vaguely the right area of Tattoine, where R2′s first priority is transport. He arranges to be captured by a group of Jawas and, once on board their transport, he makes a deal with them (possibly using emergency funds stored about his person) to take him where he wants to go. The Jawas refuse to go directly to Kenobi for fear of marauding Sandpeople but they agree to R2′s second request : transport to the Skywalker farm. They even get to keep the purchase price if they can sell R2 and 3PO there. The Jawas shake on it and go through with the plan.

Seeing 3PO fail to recognise the farm where he worked for 10 years gives r2 a moment’s amusement but, as soon as possible, he gets away and heads for Kenobi. Luke and 3PO follow, which may or may not have been part of the plan.

On first seeing R2, Obi-Wan has a twinkle in his eye and calls him “my little friend”. Well, he is. However, when Luke wakes up and says that R2 claimed to be owned by an Obi-Wan Kenobi, he blandly says “I don’t seem to remember ever owning a droid.” Ben has in fact owned several but the remark is aimed at R2 and translates as “You keep quiet. I’m not about to tell him everything just yet.” Obi-Wan thinks fast and tells Luke a version of his past that does not involve a father who became a dark lord of the Sith. He wants to examine Luke a lot more closely before he risks telling him the real truth.

Although the Death Star plans need to get to Yavin as soon as possible, Obi-Wan needs to make one more diversion first. If the Empire knows that Leia is a Rebel leader, then they also know about her father and the whole Organa family may need immediate evacuation. Fortunately, before coming to Tattoine, R2 had already arranged transport, which is waiting at Mos Eisley, under the command of the Rebellion’s other chief field agent and espionage asset. Chewbacca.

20 years earlier, Chewbacca was second in command of the defence of his planet. He’s there in the tactical conferences and there on the front lines and is a personal friend of Yoda’s. When he needed reliable people to join the embryonic Alliance, who else would Yoda turn to but his old friend from Kashykk? Given his background, there is no way that Chewie would spend the crucial years of the rebellion as the second-in-command to (sorry Han) a low-level smuggler. Unless it’s his cover. In fact, Chewie is a top-line spy and flies what is in many ways the Rebellion’s best ship.

The Millenium Falcon may look like a beat-up old freighter but it can outrun any Imperial ship in normal space or hyperspace, hang in a firefight with a Star Destroyer or outmaneouvre a dozen top-of-the-line TIE fighters. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering and must have cost a colossal fortune to build. How does Han come to own a ship like that? He only thinks he does, actually it’s Chewie’s. Half-way through RotS, we see the Falcon landing at the Senate building on Coruscant. If it’s the same ship (which of course it is) then it was the personal transport of one of the senatorial delegations – a much more likely source to commission its design. That delegatino must have later joined the Rebellion and given it the use of the Falcon. In fact, if the delegation is the one from Kashykk, then the ship may have belonged to Chewbacca as early as RotS.

Han is Chewie’s front man. It’s much better, and safer for him, if he doesn’t know what’s really going on. Chewie used to work with Lando Calrissian in a similar way but Lando wanted to settle down, so Chewie arranged for him to lose the Falcon in a card game to Han Solo, an even better choice as partner. Han and Chewie’s working method is pretty much what we see in the cantina scene: Chewie make the contacts and sets up the deals, then turns them over to Han who haggles over the price and gives the final yea or nay. This lets Chewie wander the seamy underside of the galaxy pretty much at will, making contacts, gathering and passing information with no-one was the wiser, especially not Han.

Chewie persuaded Han to do business with Jabba the Hutt so he could make regular runs to Tattoine, where Chewie could pass messages between Kenobi and Organa. When R2′s urgent message came through only days before, the only way for Chewie to get back to Tattoine in time was to make the “mistake” that forced Han to dump his cargo to avoid capture. As a down side, this led to Solo’s getting a death mark out on him from Jabba the Hutt. Chewie was a bit upset about the need for that but figured they weren’t going to be dealing with Tattoine for much longer.

En route to Alderaan, R2 and Chewie play stop-motion chess. This is the latest in a series of games they’ve played over the year in the back rooms of space stations and cantinas across the galaxy, but this is the first time they’ve done it in front of their respective straight men, so they put on a big show.

Then it all goes wrong again. Alderaan is gone and the Falcon is caught and brought aboard the Death Star. Only Han, Luke and 3PO don’t know just how much trouble they’re in but Obi-Wan has a plan and seems confident (but Jedi always do). Soon afterwards, R2 finds Leia in the detention cells and shouts that they have to rescue her, to which Chewie can only agree. If Vader learns he has a daughter, then they’re all in deep trouble, so Chewie does his bit to persuade Han to go along with Luke’s plan.

Then, on the verge of escape, Vader himself turns up only yards from both of his children, one of whom is leaking Force all over the place. Obi-Wan stages a distraction by letting himself die and go into the Force while the others escape. At this point, Chewie suddenly realises that he’s been left in charge, not only of the Death Star Plans and the survival of the Rebellion but of the secret son and daughter of Darth Vader. With the Organas and Kenobi all dead, only Chewie, R2 and Yoda know who Luke and Leia are. And only Ob-Wan knew where Yoda has been hiding. Chewie is stressed out by the responsibility and R2 (who keeps making crude jokes about the whole affair) is being no help at all.

Chewie’s first problem is what is happening between Luke and Leia. With a psychic link they can feel but don’t understand, thrown together in a life-or-death escape, they are looking at each other with a sparky intensity that Chewie gradually recognises as Romantic Tension. He’s no expert on human relationships but Chewie is fairly sure that that’s Wrong, so he does the only thing he can under the circumstances – he throws Han at her. Han is at first not interested but after a while starts to warm to the idea with an intensity that gives Chewie new worries.

When they reach Yavin, Han decides to take the money and run and Chewie decides to go with him. Looked at in cold light, it’s for the good of the Rebellion. Even if Yavin is destroyed, there’ll be one agent who knows what’s going on who can try and put something back together, but he doesn’t feel good about it. When Han decides to turn around and join the attack, Chewie is all for it.

Han and Luke get medals but Chewie doesn’t. Actually, Leia offers him one but Chewie turns it down. He got one of those things from Yoda about 20 years ago, but there’s no way he can tell her that.

As the film ends, the three founders of the Rebellion are all gone. Bail Organa is dead, Yoda is out of contact and Obi-Wan’s ghost can only talk to other Jedi. (So that would be Yoda then.) Thus, the field leadership of the rebellion has just been turned over to the daughter of Darth Vader. Chewie is really hoping that someone with an official rank greater than hers will get here real soon before he has to think really seriously about option C.

© Keith Martin 2005