Tag: mandatory sex party

#oneaday Day 522: Addressing the Audience’s Demands

So in an attempt to better understand my audience, such as you are, I’ve been delving once again into the top search terms for my blog. I’m going to take the top ten search terms from the last year and address each and every one of them individually so that hopefully if you’ve been in attendance on this page at some point in the past and found it to be wanting for further information on the topic you searched for, you’ll feel better and more satisfied in your choice of Google links that you clicked on.

Divine Divinity (303 hits)

Divine Divinity is an action-RPG from Larian Studios which bears more than a passing resemblance to Blizzard’s Diablo series. The difference is that the world is not randomly generated and there is a more robust quest and interaction system more akin to something like the Baldur’s Gate series. The entire world is available to explore from the get-go and aside from some appalling voice acting of the very worst kind, it’s a great game. Pity its sequels aren’t up to much. You can grab it from Good Old Games.

I’m Not Doctor Who (81 hits)

That’s the name of this site, because my name is Peter Davison, though I usually go by “Pete” because I prefer it. Peter Davison, as you may know, was the stage name for Peter Moffett, who played the Doctor in Doctor Who between 1982 and 1984. I am not him, therefore I am not Doctor Who.

Offensive GIFs (73 hits)

Here’s one.

Teaching Sucks (65 hits)

Teaching does indeed suck. I’ve worked as a classroom teacher on two separate occasions in my life and on both occasions it nearly killed me. In the first instance, I stuck it out for three years in the secondary school music classroom — my first year in a run-down school half a million quid in the red where I was threatened with being knifed on a regular basis, and my second in an ostensibly “nicer” area but which still reduced me to a literally gibbering wreck by the end of my time there.

The reasons why it sucks? Poor behaviour and teachers’ lack of power to do anything about it. Ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy. The fact that one person is expected to do what, in any other job, a team of at least four or five people would take on between them.

If you can stick it out, fair play to you. It’s not for me.

“Mandatory Sex Party” (35 hits)

This was a term coined by Allie Brosh, who at one point wasn’t sure whether or not it was an actual thing that happened. I’m still not sure, but there’s certainly a lot more than one Google hit for it now.

Persona 4 (35 hits)

Persona 4 is one of my favourite games of all time. Featuring a hugely lengthy quest, genuinely loveable characters, a gripping (if crazy) plot and a love-it-or-hate-it catchy soundtrack, Persona 4 is one of the greatest JRPGs of all time and I will fight you if you disagree.

Fatal Labyrinth (34 hits)

Fatal Labyrinth is a graphical roguelike for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. You can play it as part of the Sega Mega Drive Collection on the Xbox 360 and PS3, but I bet you haven’t.

“Get Rich or Die Gaming” (27 hits)

Get Rich or Die Gaming is an absolutely terrible Xbox Live Indie Game with artwork that looks like it was put together in Microsoft Paint, voice acting that would make a school play’s director blush and designs on being a point-and-click adventure. Fair play to them for actually releasing it, but it really is not very good.

NSFW GIFs (26 hits)

Here’s one.

Memes GIF (25 hits)

(Click to embiggen. Some NSFW. Some NSF anybody. Apparently this character is called “optimized GIF dude” and is something of a meme. I’d never heard of him, actually.)

So there we are. I hope you feel suitably satisfied now. If not, go and have a sandwich and a wank.

#oneaday, Day 112: Hyperbole Squared

Sometimes you come across something – or someone – so utterly wonderful you want to share it – or them – with everyone. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will already know what – or who (okay, I wish I hadn’t started this now, it’s getting tiresome) – I’m talking about. Those of you who have been confused as to why I keep shouting “BAP!” at semi-regular intervals – well, consider yourself prepared for an education.

If you’re wondering who the girl on the right is, this is Allie Brosh. Allie, a self-confessed “sexy lion”, is 24, lives in Montana and has a Boyfriend with a capital B. She also has ADHD, a copy of Paintbrush and a gift for writing things so utterly charming that you can’t help but want to follow the chaotic saga that is her life. Her blog, Hyperbole and a Half, ping-pongs around between heartfelt lucidity, infectious childlike enthusiasm and some of the funniest, most surreal imaginings you’ll ever come across in your travels around the Internet. She also invented the term “mandatory sex party”, which went from being a three-word Googlewhack (so not a true Googlewhack, but I’m not picky) to having 28,800 pages mentioning it in the space of a year. And she apologises for saying fuck a lot.

I have no idea how I found Allie in the first place. I was looking in my Bookmarks Bar in Google Chrome and saw that mysterious » symbol mocking me at the end as if to say “ORGANISE YOUR BOOKMARKS, YOU TOOL!” I clicked on it just to see what forgotten secrets it was hiding and saw a peculiar-looking entry in the pop-up menu that appeared.

“Hyperbole and a Half,” it said. “Come and look. That’s an intriguing title, isn’t it?”

It didn’t actually speak. That would be weird. But anyway, I clicked on the entry to see what it was and was confronted with this post. It made me laugh. A lot. Particularly because of the drawings. Well-done bad MS Paint drawings are always amusing, but Allie has a real talent for drawing hugely expressive faces with the simplest of shapes. This, coupled with the prose, made me know immediately that this was something I wanted to keep reading. So I checked out the featured posts she had in her sidebar.

After reading the first paragraph of this post and looking at the picture, I was literally crying with laughter for a good five minutes. That’s not an exaggeration. Any time I look at the “BAP!” picture (in fact, any time I even imagine the picture) I start giggling uncontrollably. It was perfect – even more so because I know that I’ve done something similar before. The word “COCK!” became a useful, if moderately offensive, shortcut to fill dead air in a conversation for my friends and I some years back, and even as I creep closer to 30 I don’t see that situation changing any time soon. (I’m in touch with my inner child. Sue me. I am rubber, you are glue and all that.)

Also, this.

Once the giggles had subsided, I decided to delve back into Allie’s archives and read her posts from the beginning, which turned out to be the middle of last year. Her blog has evidently changed a lot over time, with it starting out as an opportunity for her to get the things that are seemingly racing around her head out onto a page and shared with the world as quickly as possible. She writes like I imagine her talking – quickly, enthusiastically, jumping from one subject to another and often getting distracted by something, veering off onto a complete tangent and oh look a squirrel that’s nice isn’t it? And she writes about everyday things people get excited about. Destroying snow. Getting drunk and going down a slide, only to find yourself giggling on the floor for a good few minutes afterwards. Grammar pedantry. Imagining monsters in the ice.

Okay, so some of the things she writes about aren’t exactly “everyday” things. But at times, there’s a beautiful, childlike innocence to the way she writes and at others, there’s a wonderful sense of heartfelt sincerity and honesty. There’ll be at least one story she tells on the pages of her blog that everyone can relate to, whether it’s the description of her shower being incapable of anything except “lava water” or “liquid ice”, the tales of her weird neighbour who always collars her for “therapy-time” or her account of the mission she went on to hijack someone’s Wi-Fi just so she could post.

Peppered throughout the blog are more of her hugely expressive MS Paint creations, always there to support one of her stories in a hilariously visual manner. I haven’t yet caught up with the “present day”, but I guess (judging from the recent posts) at some point she started to move more towards the “humour” angle and further away from the “personal stories” angle. In some ways, this is a shame, as the stories she tells about herself are always incredibly entertaining, but fortunately she has a wonderful sense of comedy, too.

So if you’re at a loose end, looking for something to read or want cheering up in a hurry, I strongly encourage you to go and check out Hyperbole and a Half. Be warned, though, once that sexy lion has her claws into you you won’t want to let her go!