Archive for December, 2004

Designing advert creatives is quite fun. Recently it occured to me what
a shift there has been away from traditional banners to large
advertisements, most notably leaderboards. Even as I type this GameSpot
has a leaderboard ad at the top of the page for Java.com.

Looking at my own main ad server on Worfolk Online, it doesn’t even
have a traditional banner section. The only things on it are
leaderboards, skyscrapers and a few other select ads which are a weird
size designed for specific sites. Which reminds me I should add
something new to Frinks.

My time at the moment is split between a few things though. Two of the
main ones being Gamer Forge which I am trying to keep up with writing
new content for and a new project that I have underway named Blair
Space. Ya know, I am going to start posting this on both my blogs, it
is long enough.

Anyway I spent some time this morning developing new advert creatives.
I finally got round to doing a leaderboard ad for Gamer Forge though
that was simple. My real work today was doing leaderboards for Judging
Amy .info and Resident Evil Now. Image blending and such always looks
good.

Wow, today was not what I was expecting. I headed into town to have a little look round and ended up coming home with my soon to be Christmas present in the back of the car. The aforementioned item being an electric guitar.

I have wanted one for a while (like 10 years though never enough to actually buy one) until now that it is, so in preparation for the holiday season which is quickly approaching, I settled on getting this Frontman pack thing from Music Ground.

The pack (which was £200 in total which is pretty good for store retail prices) comes with a Fender Squire guitar, 15 Watt amp (or so I think), strap, wires and some book and CD to teach you how to play. I also got an automatic tuner and soft carry case on top of that.

Now begins the random order spreeing for accessories. I ordered Guitar for Dummy’s from Amazon which was pretty cheap although I couldn’t get super saver deliver and I also ordered some rubber plectrums of eBay as they are superior apparently. Bah, looks like my shopping addiction is back.

By the way, the title of the post refers to another incident of todays town visit. While shopping for my mum, I went to get this bracelet. Which they had lost all copies of. So after an extensive search they took the one out of the display cabinet. Now began the search for a box for it. The best laid plans hu?

Oh yes! It has been months. It was May / June when the great server fell leaving many sites including Audio Senate without their databases. For months (literally 6 months) I tried to get them restored. Long story short it didn’t happen. But I did manage to get hold of the Audio Senate and the lyrics ones manually.

So after a few hours last night and a few more this morning I finally managed to fix the main Audio Senate one. There is still more database restoring to do but this is a great step forward. Because I can sit back and tazer people if they fail to return.

Of course how Audio Senate will go remains a mystery. Chances are it is going to take a lot of work to get it going again although it already has 255 members so being the biggest forum on the Worfolk Online network (Buffy Talk is catching up though) it is good for making up numbers.

Speaking of stats and numbers, this changes the top 10 forums list. It pushes Gamer Forge off the list meaning that the bottom of the top 10 has over 10 members. Buffy Talk is now second and Fallen Nation is third. I need to publish a report about this.

Ok, even I didn’t know where I was going with this title. But there is an important point here. Ya see, even the most shallow low brow humour cartoons these days seem to have a deeper layer. I mean in Family Guy series 3 alone there are references to American Beauty and the Breakfast Club – how many kids are going to have seen those?

Another example is from the Simpsons, where Homer goes to buy illegal fireworks and tries to act cool (in the episode where he is staying that Ned Flander’s beach house). That quote is actually a reference.

"Let me have one of those porno magazines… large box of condoms… a bottle of Old Harper… a couple of those panty shields… and some illegal fireworks, and one of those disposable enemas. Eh, make it two."

The quote is a reference to American Graffiti which was releaded in 1973 (again how many kids are going to have seen that) directed by George Lucas – it was really his breakthrough movie, winning him his first Golden Globe. Anyway to compare quotes, the one from Toad in American Graffiti:

"ok yeah, let me have err, a Three Musketer’s and a ball point pen, one of those combs there, bottle of Old Harper, a couple of flashlight batteries and beef jerky."