Archive for the ‘General’ Category

General

Social…ism

I’ve just activated a plug-in on the site that adds those little share/like/+1 buttons to the bottom of the posts. Chances are all the people wandering through my site looking for PVC goat costume porn probably won’t use them all that much but if they help me spread my sickness …ahem, uh, message further, all the better.

If you’re not bothered about that kind of thing, just get your ignore on. I won’t hold it against you… unless you’re wearing a PVC goat costume, of course.

General

Uncle Victor on Trees

When presented with the eternal riddle ‘If a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, then does it make a sound?‘, my Uncle would explain that yes, not only does it make a sound but seeing as there is no-one around to hear it, the average tree – typically a shy plant, will do impressions as it falls.

Naturally, these tend to be noises it’s heard during it’s lifetime. On the most part animal calls, but trees that have encountered humans will often mimic random phrases they’ve heard in the past as they fall; such as ‘Cecil, I’m fairly sure the spotted ones are poisonous!‘, ‘Of course there’s no bears in these woods,‘ or ‘Ohgodohgodohgod! We’re lost, aren’t we?!‘.

General

Uncle Victor and the Overdose

Upon reading in the newspaper that a young woman had been rushed to hospital after taking over 30 paracetamol, my Uncle phoned himself an ambulance in a panic. Three hours later, the kindly paramedics returned Victor to us, explaining at length that it’s really only harmful if you ingest the pills in one sitting, and not over the course of several decades.

GamingGeneral

Skoardy GBC

Skoardy GBCI can’t believe I’ve never added a page to the site about the homebrew Gameboy Color ‘Skoardy’ rom I created. I goes a long way to explaining why the hell the site is called what it is! On top of that, it’d keep my lonely ‘About‘ page company in the Stuff section of the sidebar there.

Given I even posted an article about a Skoardy screenshot sighting in the wild back in 2008 on the site, I’m even more shocked.

Anyway, all that is rectified now with the addition of the Skoardy GBC page in the sidebar, where you’ll find all the explanations you never wanted, along with some more screenshots of my simplistic little game and even a GBC rom download if you’re one of those weird retro fetish freaks (or just plain, old nosey). Enjoy!

General

Uncle Victor vs. the Isle of Wight

Sometime during the late eighties, my Uncle developed a grudge against the Isle of Wight. He believed it was getting closer.

Obviously, he reasoned, it was readying for attack and it was simply a matter of time before the south of England was overrun by Wightian forces. He decided it fell to him to do something about it. Naming it ‘Operation Atlantis’, his plan was to take the ferry (he doesn’t believe in hovercrafts) over one afternoon and sink the island.

Having decided upon a plan, he’d come to the conclusion that once the island had sunk, his biggest obstacle would be the journey back to England as he’d never learnt how to swim. Not wanting to tip-off the enemy by paying for visits to the local pool, he began training in earnest in the back garden. Under the cover of darkness, he would pace from one end of the garden to the other, performing the breast-stroke. The actual trip would be much the same, he reasoned, except wetter and without the need to turn around once you reached the neighbour’s privet.

In June of 1987, Victor began ‘Operation Atlantis’. After reaching the island, he purchased a spade “on site”, made his way to one of the many small beaches that speckle the coastline and proceeded to dig a series of extremely large holes. These holes, he’d explained, would then fill with water once the tide came in and cause the island to submerge.

Unfortunately, the entire plan came to an abrupt end when Victor was arrested after a disagreement with a holidaying couple and their child about their placement of a sandcastle and its relation to the salvation of England. Although deported back to the mainline before completing his task, he still insists that his efforts with a spade on that sandy shore lowered the island by at least a centimetre and a half. He will proudly assert that the only thing holding back the Wightian invasion is the knowledge that every Englishman in the country holds the key to the nefarious island’s demise within his tool shed.

General

Uncle Victor on Flies

My Uncle Victor used to claim that all flies genetically inherit the ability to see into the future.

He would put forward that explanation as the reason for why they were so good at avoiding a fatal swat from a rolled-up newspaper. When pressed with the evidence to the contrary – the occasional successful bludgeoning, he’d merely add that those flies were quite obviously suicidal.

GamingGeneralMMOMovies

Link review

As my sidebar widget of links has pretty much sat unchanged since I first started this WordPress iteration of Skoardy.com, I thought it was about time that I reviewed and updated the list. Time to add some of the other sites I frequent (and tentatively recommend), and bin any that have fallen from favour (perhaps their design aesthetics have become a lumbering mess of interface-related tortures – I’m looking at you, Kotaku).

Without further ado, here we go.


Kotaku – as mentioned above, it’s gone. The reason being is that the web design for this site seems to be going backwards in terms of usability. It’s like the Benjamin Button of the internet. Reports of its visitor drop-off since the change do not surprise me in the least. There’s a thousand and one websites on the internet all clambering to supply people with gaming news. You do not ensure you’re the site they choose by making yours almost painful to use.


MMO Champion – Yes, I want the latest information about World of Warcraft. No, I don’t want pages and pages of filler articles in the shape of editorials and fluff, solely designed to wring out a few more advertising page-views. And that’s where MMO Champion comes in – it’s basically just a stream of pure information, quotes from Blizzard and images of new content. None of those pesky ‘contributors’ waffling on about whatever happens to cross their mind.


Wowpedia – Now, if you visit this site, you may get a little bit of déjà vu – in that it looks a whole lot like WoWWiki.  In fact, you may even marvel at how an awful lot of the content looks much the same, if not identical. Well, that’s because it basically is. Back at the end of last year, some people didn’t particularly like moving to Wikia and so split off to create WoWpedia. I was planning on losing WoWWiki from my list and replacing it with Wowpedia but even though there’s very little difference to the two sites (as they’re basically cataloguing the same information about the same game), from time to time you might find that one site holds a little snippet that the other has overlooked. So, might as well keep both links handy just in case.


GameFAQs – I don’t know why this site didn’t make the cut the first time I rebooted the site as I’ve been using it almost since I took my first steps on the internet. Ploughed thirty to forty quid into a game and you’ve been stumped on the first level for over a month? Maybe it’s time to crack open GameFAQs and find out what you’re missing. Only got 99 collectables out of a 100 despite circling the game map dozens and dozens of times? Chances are GameFAQs has a map with all the items marked on it. It’s a great site, even if it does look extremely dated.


Twitter – As you can see from the bunches of white strips between the ‘proper’ articles, I’m a sporadic twitteree. Big fan of it. Apart from your friends spouting stuff they’d consider too short or fleeting to bung you in an email and all the voyeuristic celeb-life watching, Twitter has shown itself to be a real social movement in world events. Being informed has never been so immediate. Of course, I’m hunkering down as @skoardy on Twitter so if you want my random thoughts seeking you out in a more direct fashion, feel free to follow me (or any of the people I follow – a lot of them are very entertaining indeed).


As to the sites that have survived the shuffle…

  • FirstShowing.net – still my first port of call for general movie news and trailers. I just find its design a lot less offensive to the eyes than a lot of the more flashier sites. If there’s one thing I would change, it’s the head honcho’s need to add his own emphasis almost seemingly indiscriminately to nearly every damn sentence he writes, even quotes. Kinda does my head in.
  • Gametrailers.com – only reviews I particularly pay any attention to these days. Apart from seeing the actual game in action, they don’t focus on how they felt while writing the review or ramble on about some unrelated guff they were doing the previous week, unlike most of the other tits that call themselves games reviewers on the net these days.
  • Joystiq – compared to Kotaku, a nice and clean presentation keeps this gaming news site in the list.
  • Penny Arcade – this webcomic still makes me chuckle. Yes, it’s still occasionally filthy.
  • VG Cats – updates are few and far between (follow his twitter instead, to save you checking the site every so often) but still a very funny strip.
  • Wowhead – come on, it’s the go-to site for WoW in-game information. A huge database of items, spells and more, all haphazardly commented on by people playing the game right now.
  • WoWWiki – as mentioned above, I decided to keep this to have an alternative on hand on the off chance the other site doesn’t quite cut it. You never know.

And that’s your lot. Maybe it’ll be another couple of years before I update the links list again. Get ready!

 

General

Skoardy v4.0

TwitterYou might have noticed that something is slightly different about the site today. That is, if you’ve ever visited it before. If not, you’re probably wondering “What the hell kind of self-indulgent crap is this guy waffling on about and where is that goat-bondage porn Google promised me?!”. Wait. I’m losing my train of thought here… That’s it, change! All change.

I’ve just remade the Skoardy.com WordPress theme and it’s the ricketiest incarnation yet! A little while back, I wanted to integrate my twitterings into my site feed and even had all the tools to do it. Unfortunately, the theme I’d built before just wasn’t really up to the task and it turned into a bit of a mess. This time is different. It’ll still be a mess but now, it’s intentional! Part of the redesign was to place tweets into their own little post design – one that didn’t follow the regular layout and so, didn’t take up as much space.

They’ve also got their own category so if you feel the need to indulge in a bit of inanity overdosing, you can flick through a whole bunch of them in one sitting. The sidebar menu that contains a list of the last few posts has been tweaked to ignore tweets so that only features ‘real posts’ (much the same bullshit content of a tweet, just a lot longer).

As with all my hack/slash jobs, the remains  of the theme I butchered are in a sorry state. If the site collapses on you, you have my humble apologies. If it doesn’t work on your browser, again, sorry.

One problem the switch-over has highlighted is that I tend to tweet quite a bit more than I make website posts. Don’t be surprised to see the front page (and maybe a few pages after that) awash with nothing but tweets. Hopefully it’ll encourage me to post something a little more ‘meaty’ from time to time but then again, I wouldn’t count on it. We’ll see how it goes.

In summation, enjoy the new site design, it’s very, very orange.

GeneralRant

How’s the cheese?

“You’re through to customer relations, how can…”

“How’s the cheese?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re the factory that makes the Asda branded ‘8 Cheese & Garlic Slices’, yeah?”

“Ah, yes. That’s one of the items we produce here.”

“So, how’s the cheese?”

“Erm, er, right. Well, on that particular product, it’s a blend of Cheddar and Mozzarella cheese, locally sourc…”

“Is it bubbling?”

“…”

“Is. The. Cheese. Bubbling?”

“I’m not sure I’m quite following you here, sir.”

“In the cooking instructions, it says to heat the slices in the oven ‘until the the crust turns brown and the cheese bubbles’. Since there’s no sodding cheese on my god-damned slices, I can only surmise it’s still in the bloody factory with you tossers!”

*click*

General

Dusting off

WordPressIt’s been quite a while since I last posted an update to the site so I thought I’d best raise my head above the parapet. Work has been a slog recently with nary a minute to think about doing much else, much less actually get round to doing it.

Today though, I found myself with some time to spare and of course thought of you guys – my imaginary visitors, going so long without word from your beloved… um, blogger? Anyway, here I am again and one of the first things I did was update the back-end from 2.91 to 3.01 of WordPress. The big selling point for the update (apart from the usual wodgy mountain of bug fixes, general enhancements and tidy-ups) is the new default theme, Twenty Ten.

Hmmm, instead of trying to explain what has changed, I should just take the lazy route and embed…

If you’ve got hosting that can handle a WordPress set-up (and most should, to be honest), you could do a lot worse than running a site with it. So versatile and easy to customise that even a chump like me can handle it. And if the thought of modifying a theme sends shivers down your spine, there are a multitude of free themes already created by an ever expanding community with one guaranteed to suit your mood.

Don’t have hosting? Sign up for a free blog on WordPress.com, and get waffling.