Anyway, I’ve been watching the BBC4/Channel4 hybrid that is “You have been watching” and I’m moderately annoyed, if not surprised to see that Charlie Brooker’s sarcastic style of TV has been stolen by some nob at Channel 4 who has then superimposed a better suited to face of the channel quiz format onto the normal straightforwardness of his critique.  Injecting 3 minor celebs more used to appearing on cable to this and you have a show.  Albeit a shit one.

I muchly enjoyed the critique, and some of the banter was good, but the guests were mostly comedians who don’t get enough exposure, and one token shitforbrains.

Basically put, Channel 4, don’t take a good presenter/writer and make them do shit.  And Richard Herring, you comment “This is the slowest quick fire round I’ve ever been in…” was only made possible by the sheer amount of quizzes you appear on whilst trying to build popularity for yourself between fringe festivals, so shut the fuck up yeah?

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The thing that has caught me (again) at the moment, is needing ID for various things to do with having moved house.  I have no passport, and obviously it would take a long time to get one (I’ve started the process, fear not, but it will take some time to  say the least).  I’m medically not allowed to drive, so the Provisional Driver’s Licence I have cannot even be updated to have a correct address on it.  I’m not an employee of a government agency or anything like that, and so I’m entirely devoid of ID that most places will take.  I have an out of date Driver’s Licence and a Student Card with 1 month left to live, and no one takes it anyway.

In my circumstances, an official government-issued ID card would be useful, not to carry everywhere, and not to be forced to present to a police officer or anything, but to take to the bank when I need to, and to the doctors when I need.  A card with similar security to a driver’s licence and my photo, address and date of birth for about £25 would be ideal (that’s what my drivers learner thing cost, roughly, in 1998).

Anyone else think this could be useful for people who can’t drive for whatever reason?

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They have a support forum, but I can’t just post there, oh no, to avoid spam I have to request an account (ignoring that a spammer could just request an account, and that they could use a captcha instead.  So their forum is full of people asking for help with no one bothering to sign up to answer them ‘cause it’s such a long and drawn out process.

Bleh.

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Firstly I’ve been busy with Bigbluespoon, soon to be Bigbluespoon.com, which is our new online t-shirt store.  It all started about 2 and a half years ago when I was making some random t-shirts for myself.  I still do this, and if you know me, they’re the ones branded “Homemade”.  I have to point this out because a few people have actually asked where I got them, and it’s hard to break to them that I made them out of Burtons black tee shirts (£3) and WHSmith Inkjet transfer papers (£7 for 5)…

Bigbluespoon was originally a load of really quite purile designs aimed at students, but since then we’ve stopped being students ourselves, and stopped finding them amusing, and the market has moved on to a more intellectual geekery humour that you can find now in our t-shirts.  I went to a terrible university called Anglia Ruskin, and for anyone else who went to one of these digusting cattle market type Universities we have made the official “University of Clearing” T-shirts, in the same style as those YALE or Cambridge University tops that you see.  We’ve also got some logic jokes, and some that are just funny.

http://www.zazzle.com/bigbluespoon

And on to webcomics…

Every indie kid in the world has made a webcomic, they shove together some drawings of some vaguely amusing banter between some characters and achieve any level of success from becoming the next XKCD to dying on their arse.  In nearly every case the deciding factor is how much they stick with it.  It doesn’t seem to be one of these things where there’s a lot of chance involved.  This is the net, and if there’s an audience for midget porn, there must be an audience for John’s super webcomic.

So the other day, doodling away I found that I had drawn a picture of a fat stick figure, and some distance away, a thin stick figure, and I’d titled it “Nobody likes you because you are fat.”.  A comment on society if you like.  Either way, with the drawing too, it’s funny, and so I spent some time doing the rest of it.  2 days of design and coding later, and I’ve made the world’s first content management system explicitly for running a webcomic.

If I make a webcomic, I’m doing it my way, dammit, and if I get fed up, I’ll still have made a piece of software that makes it easier for everyone who wants to to publish theirs.  It’s nice.  It supports themes, and comments on each comic and a voting system to allow you to rank your comics in a top 10 kind of thing.  I’m just in the process of writing a bit for ‘random comic’ to show any random issue, and a thing for browsing the top 10 most viewed and stuff.  Twill be awesome.

Anyway, night world, another day of work calls tomorrow.  Sleep well now.

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Maybe they ain’t so bad.

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I’ve just moved to Swansea, it’s majorly cool.  Despite being an area more affected by poverty than most in Britain, it’s a largely cheerful and almost entirely beautiful area, overlooking what is unjustly called the Bristol Channel.

Yes, it’s a channel that leads to Bristol, but it’s mainly set between the south coast of Wales and the North coast of Devon, and technically it’s possible to swim from Swansea to Ilfracombe, something I’d really love to do.

Swansea is the product of lifetimes of thacter-destroy industries with poor provision for the remaining workforce, and a vast injection of EU funding to build a new Swansea on the side.  Once Maggie had fucked off and left the welsh miners and industries alone, it eventually dawned on a government to try to rejuvenate the area, and in Swansea it’s beginning to work.  The town centre is a mix-mash of Scunthorpe on a bad day and Newquay on a good one.

Best bit about it, it’s cheap as.  I’m staying with Dave and Kerry atm, but even if I were to get a nice, new, flat in town, that would only cost 400-500 quid at most.  Amazing.

Here’s to Wales, land of my fathers, or at least of my Father’s fathers.

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