I couldn’t bring myself to write some crap about “woo yay kittens” just to get some people on the internet to like it so I thought I’d try and write something true about our own cat Rocky. He’s extremely violet and a mixed blessing. Generally people go “aww Rocky” stroke him for a minute and then he brutally savages them and that’s that.

The video contains a shot of what is known locally as Suicide Bridge – a legendary bridge in Archway which people occasionally throw themselves off – I popped up there to get the shot on the pretence of buying lunch. My father grew up nearby and claims to have witnessed a girl jump off in the 50s but he does like a story.

The video was recorded by walking around my flat with a stills camera and a copy of the lyrics – I photographed anything relevant then edited it together. My little rule I set myself was that I couldn’t leave the house and everything had to be shot via my camera. So for lines I was stuck for visuals I photographed some websites.

During the production I drew a number of animated gifs to serve as end level things – basically to increase the references to internet culture within the game. Thought I’d post them up here because I’m sort of proud of how crap they are.

Numa Numa

Rick Astley

Chocolate Rain

Keyboard Cat

KHAAAN!!!

Leave Britney Alone!

Leek spin (not meat spin)

MR T eats balls

O RLY?

I Can Has Cheezburger?

Anyway. Play the game.

Another I Spot produced for E4 with David Stevenson – actually probably my favourite of the lot – I remember writing the first draft in a frantic two hours of typing – ranting about all the geeks I knew. Jilly Cooper, in her book Class, wrote some great stuff about how the layers of social class are like the stripes on rugby shirt that’s been in the wash. Where the colours bleed into each other there’s the most friction. I’m like that with nerd culture, I’m screaming “I’m not as geeky as THESE people” when I very nearly am.

Anyway – we produced it nearly 18 months ago and it’s only gone live now, so if there’s no references to iPads then you’ll know why.

http://www.e4.com/wtf/fanboys/index.html

My penis brings all the girls to the yard
Woke up one Sunday morning with this in my head. Not that you’ll want to think of me with a morning glory as that would turn your stomach. So I nicked some comedy cock gifs off the b3ta board to make it into a tribute to b3ta and not an icky celebration of my love torpedo. BTW: It’s on vimeo because youtube booted it. The spoilsports.

You Are a Spamming Cunt
Produced to post on the b3ta links board when we get spammed.

I feel awkward when blokes talk sport
I was walking the kids to school and thinking about how I can’t drive and started writing some lyrics about the subject. Thought about how cars are a classic male conversation which lead me onto the ultimate bloke conversation I never feel part of: football. Lucy drew the characters for the video.

A song / video produced for JibJab by me and Dave. This is the second version (they hated the first version), and I thought up the rough idea for the video in Old Street tube station 1hr before the first Sickipedia night. I was waving my fingers around going, “it could be like this!”. For the actual production Dave drew some lovely kittens, we stuck them to his hands and I tried to keep the camera still so I’d be able to edit it together. BTW: My favourite line in this is “Happy Birthday, it’s catty purrday!” which comes from a joke I have with my 4 year old son about giving our cat Rocky a birthday.

Watch ‘Birthday Cats’

Alien at the Bottom of the Garden

To support a Channel 4 TV program Generation XXL – about overweight children – C4 asked me to produce a tamagotchi style game on didn’t mock the subject matter. A pretty difficult brief for me so I dragged in Matt Round and it was his brilliant insight that making the main character an alien would solve many of the problems. Well done Matt!

Play ‘Alien at the Bottom of the Garden’

Ego press – not sure why but there was a tiny flurry of mentions of B3ta and myself in the press at the end of 2009.

• B3ta listed in The Guardian’s 100 essential websites. They’re pretty accurate in their write-up too: “B3TA Beyond classification; its forum has spawned many memes … and more than its fair share of trolls.”
• 5 British web celebs more important than Stephen Fry – according to The Mirror, this includes me. My wife took the piss out of this so long, and so hard that she actually made me some mockery crockery to deflate a potentially engorged ego.
• Revolution Magazine’s Future 50 – thanks to the inspirational Rory Sutherland I get a mention in this list of “marketers, authors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers who will shape the digital industry of tomorrow.” Ego overload! BTW: Rory – best known as the Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy – did a great talk at TED called Life Lessons from an Adman, you should watch it.

Poor old Floyd died an hour before transmission, which alarmed me as I briefly wondered if he’d got into such a rage over my slightly piss-takey titles that he’d keeled over and it was all my fault. But no, the producer assures me that Floyd watched a preview DVD a week before and had given it the thumbs up.

For background research I read David Pritchard’s Shooting the Cook – which in a happy bit of luck was laying on my desk after a visit to an old school friend who works for the publisher “I think you’ll enjoy this Rob.” I did.

I Spot Credit Crunch

Another I Spot book produced by me and Dave Stevenson for E4. We enjoyed writing the jokes for this – hope you like it.

Read it on the E4 site.

I’ve produced a lot of games for E4 this year, the following seven links are for them, developed with different and dreadfully clever people I’ve found from running B3ta.

Janey Thomson’s Marathon – A joke about those waggle games from the 80s – developed by the brilliant Matt Round.

Captcha Invaders – As above, developed by Matt Round.

Rather Difficult Game, another developed by Matt Round.

Name That Copyright Free Tune – developed by NTC INC. Who is actually a bloke who doesn’t like using his name online.

Do Yo Knowz Yo Showz – as above.

Ready Meals Quiz – developed by Monkeon.

Taglinr – devleoped by ME and Mike Trinder. Woo hoo

And finally…

What I missed about meat – written for The Guardian. Was the 3rd most read item for 7 days for the foody section. It’s lonely at the top.

Recently did a video for a charity and amongst the footage we shot (we meaning and my wife) there was me pretending to pee on a neighbours car. Simple enough to do – just a water bottle and holding the camera at the right angle.

Today I’m meant to be working on something else, but procrastination is a dreadful thing and I found myself making a donk about weeing on cars. Sorry, it won’t happen again.

EDIT: Ooh, there’s been requests for MP3s. Firstly someone wants it as a ringtone, and secondly someone else asked for an acapella for remixing. How exciting.

UPDATE: Spam Master Dave writes, “I made a remix. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as i enjoyed producing it”. And here it is.

Huzzah – we’ve produced another book for E4. This one on the bestest ever computer game characters. I personally love Manic Miner so this is the cover I proposed, Jody the chappy who commissioned the work prefers Street Fighter so that’s the version on the E4 site.

I hope you like the little jokes we wrote at the bottom of each page.

http://www.e4.com/wtf/iconic-game-characters/

http://www.e4.com/wtf/school/index.html

People I went to school with might possibly recognise a few references. Sorry!