» Failed Projects

Meat
When I was a wee(er) lad of 20 I used to work for a design agency doing websites, animations and other interwebs geekery.

I had a great boss who used to give me the odd £20 whenever I was going out, I got to play with interwebs stuff like Pee-Heitch-Pee and I got to work with some awesome clients.

Ok, I was earning fuck all and a sizable chunk of that went to Northern-Cunting-Rail just to get to work every day, but it was still a great job.

However, about 3 months before I left things took on a sour note.

My boss had recently gotten divorced from his screamey ham-beast wife and as a result we were going on work nights out a lot more.

One night, whilst having a cigarette outside some godawful Weatherspoons, we bump into the Joker. I swear Heath Ledger must have met this man and based his Joker on him; he looked like him (minus the makeup and scars), talked like him and he even had the same giggle.

The Joker rambled on and fucking on about how he's going to get rich, revealing that he was a pornographer and had been looking for people to make him a website for ages but no one would; "Everyones such a fucking prude, I've got no shortage of meat but fucking techies!?". Lovely guy.

Eventually, after all the promises of obscene amounts of cash and more exploited single mums than a man could pork in a lifetime, my boss's eyes glaze over and he agrees to work for him. Most of the people left quite early that night; probably to give themselves plenty of time to cry themselves to sleep.

The Joker turned out to be an even more lovely person in meetings than in the ratshit-infested toilet known as Weatherspoons. He turned up to meetings so drunk that he could barely stand up, you would hear loud snorting noises emminating from the toilet whenever he went and everything he said just made my skin crawl.

His big idea was to make a standard webcam porn site, only with a ton of extra stuff like topless roulette. There was also a lot of talk about the "meat" being able to just log in to the site and start performing straight away. There were a ton of technical problems but there were also legal problems.

Because of various gambling laws and tax laws it turns out its actually quite important as to where you base your porn/gambling empire. However the Joker wouldn't hire a solicitor to deal with those... no it fell down to muggins here. So I ended up spending the next week reading horrible legal speak that I couldn't understand no matter how much I tried.

Eventually, we somehow settled on the Isle of Man, as the Joker's dad lived there and the taxes were really cheap. He was going to start the business in his dad's name. I assumed this wasn't so much because he lived on the Isle of Man and more an insurance policy; if something did go horribly wrong the police go after him first and give the Joker ample time to flee the country.

So, vague plan of action defined, it was time to get cracking. Despite having literally zero motivation, I eventually managed to knock together a demo using Flash and a couple of webcams and he LOVED it. So much so that he actively started trying to headhunt me. Lucky. Fucking. Me.

This made my last few weeks at work just AWFUL. I was finding it hard enough to work as it was (I was counting down the days until I left at this point), but I also had the Joker actively stalking me. Whereever I went he would be sat outside the nearest pub or amusements with a pint in hand slurring job offers at me. This carried on until I finally left.



I saw Joker the last time a few days before I left. It turns out, that was also the last time anyone else saw him. As a result the project collapsed, we didn't get anywhere near finishing it and we didn't get paid...

..But oh wait! Turns out my Boss wisely made him pay a deposit of £5k before we'd even agree to work with him!

Naturally, I got a kickass leaving present! I got a fantastic USB Guitar and Bass Amp! I think everyone here agrees that is totally worth the deep-seated psychological scars! :D
(Thu 3rd Dec 2009, 20:33, More)

» Pet Peeves

Lossless Music Files
It's not so much the files, but the people who actually give a shit about them that bug the fuck out of me.

Bit of background for the less terminally geeky; when you store music or video on your computer it is generally compressed to buggery. This is because binary isn't an especially wonderful way to store sound so you get stupidly big files as a result. Even when these are compressed you are left with slightly less stupidly big files.

So one solution is to compress them in such a way that a bit of information is lost, (lossy compression) it's more or less the same but at a much smaller size. You'll honestly not notice the difference unless you compress it to a stupidly small size or start compressing it over and over again. (You lose information every time it's compressed)

Yet I am forever plagued by smug pricks going "Oh I can't listen to mp3s, they're nowhere near as good as flac" or more commonly "I can't listen to mp3s that are less than X kb/s". (Where X is usually a number around 300)

Over about 128 kb/s for most songs it makes no difference. There are exceptions admittedly, not everything compresses well and some programs do a better job than others, but these people seriously need to stop being so damn picky about this crap. Most of them probably download it for free anyway.

Sorry for the excess nerdiness and swearing there. If it helps I now feel oddly relaxed for getting that off my chest.
(Fri 2nd May 2008, 13:16, More)

» Accidental animal cruelty

Squirrels are well 'ard
My stepdad's dad has still got scars from tangling with these evil little bastards. He was just out doing his gardening when one flew out of nowhere and latched itself onto his neck.

After considerable effort removing it, he proceeded to hit it with a shovel. Hard. This did not have the desired effect of making it dead, and just seemed to make it growl a lot and try and make my stepdad's dad bleed more.

Eventually he hit it so hard that it hacked the furry sod in half. He swears it was still clawing at him, growling until it finally died.

Don't mess with squirrels!
(Tue 11th Dec 2007, 14:25, More)