Sdtrk: ‘Welcome to the circus’ by Susumu Hirasawa

This occurred while I was at work, but ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’ received its 100,000th visitor yesterday! Who are these people? Actually, the thing is is that a lot of the hits aren’t garnered from actual humans; they’re from Google image search results, so that hardly counts. So perhaps it’s better to say that ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’ received its 100,000th symbolic visitor yesterday. N.B.: that’s not necessarily a more accurate thing to say, just better. Yeah.

I don’t really understand that either, but it’s late and my sinuses are testing my patience. Nevertheless, Thanks to all of you for stopping round!
*toots horn, stumbles off to bed*

Sdtrk: something from the Otogi sdtrk

In looking over a recent set of stats for visitors to ‘Shouting etc etc’, I’d spotted the efforts of some poor misguided tosser’s search:

Gods, how I laughed. A ‘cure’ for robot fetishism?? What good could possibly become of that?? Their silly question aside, that individual couldn’t have been looking in a more inappropriate place…

In light of that, Sweetie’s got another couple of videos uploaded o’er on her Dailymotion page for your perusal, the link being nestled atop this site beneath the title banner, as per usual. Yes, you have to register in order to see them, as all of the clips are considered ‘explicit content’ — despite the fact that ‘explicit’ apparently means ‘look out: bOObies‘, and most of the clips don’t even feature that — but at least it’s not YouTube.* Happy 23rd!

*Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that if you consistently read YouTube comments, you can actually feel yourself losing IQ points? Not since the heyday of AOL have I seen a larger confluence of misspellings and general shitwickery. And that’s saying a lot

Sdtrk: ‘Whitetail woods’ by Oakeater

*mops brow* Looks like we’re back up for now. In case you’ve not noticed, ‘Shouting etc etc’ has been up and down for the past day and a half. My ISP hosts are supposedly right now making their fell sacrifices to whatever dark and eldritch gods in order to suss everything once and for all. Hey — I don’t ask questions when it comes to that sort of thing, I just let ’em do what they have to do.

Access may be sporadic, but in the interim until the next dazzling post, go… err.. go look at Outpost Gallifrey or something. It’s twelve minutes past my bedtime, and I got nothin’

Sdtrk: ‘Waterman’ by Hearts of soul

Casual readers of this blogue might well drop in and wonder what the living hell I’m crapping on about, having been assaulted with a new and unfamiliar lexicon of ‘Sidore’ this and ‘Gynoid’ that, and the like. Enter… Ubernyms. Thanks to having seen them in action over on the Duck, I’m totally abusing them. Merely hover that so-called mouse pointer of yours over a word with dashed lines beneath it, and check out the brief explanation that pops up! Short of distilling ‘Shouting etc etc’ into liquid form and injecting it straight into your frontal lobes, what could be simpler? Besides, doing that is unfortunately more time-consuming and less cost-effective than it sounds. But it sure is fun.

Kudos to Huddled Masses, for doing coding work that I’d never in a million years be arsed to do myself!
More ubernyms to follow shortly, of course

Sdtrk: ‘Panic’ by the Smiths

Hallo there! So d’ye like what I’ve done with the place?

You are looking at the sum total of a week’s worth of work, give or take a couple of days. Many, many thanks are due to MontiLee, aka Penda of the Diner, for helping me set up my WordPress account and getting me well on my way to true Mania. She’s been working with (and sometimes struggling against) WordPress for a number of years now, so she knows what she’s doing. Or, at the very least, gives an air of knowing what she’s doing. I owe you a dinner, babe!

So! Allow me to take a moment to point out the sassy new features of ‘Shouting etc etc Mk II’:

+ Note the picture behind the header at the top of the site? Jamming repeatedly on your keyboard’s F5 button will swap out the pic with various other Davecat-related pics. Synthetiks? Tiny Sixties Euromobiles? Err… Synthetiks? Test your luck with the Magickal Incredible F5 button!

+ CATEGORIES, baby; sexy categories. Makes looking for posts on assorted topics oh so much easier. Each category, if you’re perplexed, has descriptions that pop up if you hover your pointer over them. And if you absolutely can’t find what you’re looking for, there’s a Search function just below them. And unlike the search engine in this blog’s previous incarnation, this one actually works

+ A larger typeface, cos the micro-style one of the previous blog was getting on my wick

+ Century Gothic! Cos unfortunately, most people don’t have the font ‘Futura T’ installed on their computers

+ (Slightly) Larger pictures

+ (Ab)use of the ‘Open link in new window’ function. Now see, personally, since I’m clever enough to use Firefox, I just open a lot of links in separate tabs for later inspection, cos that’s much better than having a herd of windows fighting for space on your desktop. We’ll see if I continue to use that or not…

Also, I’m no longer with YouTube! Well, I’m no longer hosting videos there, as they’re afraid of artificial humans, apparently. So my lovely Synthetik partner Shi-chan is taking the reins, and hosting the clips over at Dailymotion.com. As they’re based out of Europe, they don’t have any problems with seeing bOObs at all, so you can now view what got YouTube into an apoplectic fit by clicking on the ‘Synthetiks videos’ button just beneath the header. Easy peasy!
The move to WordPress still has some bugs to be ironed out, however:

+ So far, I can’t get all your lovely HaloScan comments to import. I’ve got them saved, thankfully, but so far, I’m at a loss Finally done with that particular task, praise “Bob”

+ As far as the links, I still have to indent them properly and place them in the order that I desire

+ Really, everything in that sidebar needs to be indented

+ I require clever little icons for each category, cos I’m anal particular like that

+ Getting descriptive text next to each link in the Synthetik companion types category, just like in ‘Shouting etc etc Mk I’

+ Gravatars need to be implemented again. Of course, it would help greatly if Gravatar’s servers didn’t crash if you merely thought of them. For fuck’s sake, people; really.

So if anyone out there has any formidable WordPress skillz, do let me know, cos I’d greatly appreciate the help, as those Codexes can be intimidating sometimes. In the meantime, ‘Shouting etc etc Mk II’ will be a work in progress. Hopefully that path of progress won’t be too lengthy, but won’t you take my hand, so we can walk it… together?

Sdtrk: ‘Oh gosh’ by Sandie Shaw

zOMG WHERE IS ‘KITTEN WITH A WHIP!’??
If you currently tune in to ‘KWAW!‘, right now it’s kinda gone. What this means is that The Great Movening is finally nigh. Hoorej! This past Saturday, Steph and I started back on work on Shi-chan’s long-neglected site; specifically, regarding transfering ISPs. So right now it’s down, but cross fingers, it should be running once again round the week-end. And then the big changes will begin to occur shortly after that, for both ‘Kitten with a Whip!’ as well as ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’. Neat!

Here’s a spoiler: Things will happen

Sdtrk: ‘Manha de Carnaval’ by Claudine Longet

Have you seen adverts for that VisitorVille thing? It looks kinda engrossing. More engrossing than it probably needs to be.

VisitorVille takes a revolutionary visual approach to web analytics. VisitorVille makes data mining simple and accurate, easily performing tasks that are impossible to accomplish using traditional (and dreadfully boring) web analytics solutions.

What makes VisitorVille unique is immediately clear: VisitorVille does not represent website visitors simply as numbers or graphs, but as real people in a real environment. You can monitor your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city.

Visually it’s like the Sims, wherein you have wee people representing your site’s visitors, walking round in cities that represent your site, inside buildings that represent your site’s pages. Sometimes you’ll see buses representing search engines transporting said visitors hither and yon. I gotta say, it’s pretty innovative, but for a site stat junkie like myself, it’s such a bad idea.

I used to have a copy of the first Sims game on my old computer; I had two families, the Goths, which, if I’m not mistaken, was a default name for a couple of the character archetypes, and the Montags, who I’d actually made into Goths — well, as much as the first Sims game would allow. Over the course of my playing career, I’d discovered the cheat for making as much Simoleons as you wanted, so both families had these giant ostentatious homes that had all mod cons, needless to say.
When I realised I was wasting far too much time micromanaging their lives, one day I had the Montags, who were a couple, invite the Goths, who were a couple with a preteen daughter, round for a party, or whatever Sims do. I assembled them in a room to the size of a bedroom, and removed all the doors. Then I replaced most of the walls with floor-to-ceiling windows, and on the remaining wall space, I hung that lovely clown painting that Sims tend to find unsettling. I then added a hi-fi system, which I had constantly blaring country music at an elevated volume. Eventually my Sims wanted to listen to something different, so one would occasionally walk over and change the station. After observing the Goth’s daughter change it several times, I decided to set up a fence round the stereo.

As the subjugation party continued, more and more piles of rubbish started accumulating, which made my Sims more and more unhappy, and after three Sim hours, every member of the group had soiled themselves at least once, as I’d built no bathroom. Also, since they were falling asleep standing up, I’d graciously put a coffee maker in the room to keep them awake (what, the country music wasn’t doing that by itself?), which naturally caused more ‘accidents’.

As you can well imagine, everyone’s moods were well into the red, and I began to feel sorry for them, as I realised they hadn’t eaten in several hours. So I graciously gave them a gas grill, and selected the person least capable of cooking to make barbeque for the party. Ruh-roh!
It only took two minutes for the first of the fires to start, if memory serves me right. The entire house went up in flames, but thankfully, everyone in the room burned to death long before that happened. The party, from pleasant start to immolated finish, took about three hours of my time; after which, I uninstalled the game, and haven’t played it since.

A quick whirl on Google shows I wasn’t the only sadist, which isn’t too surprising. Now I need to find those screenshots I took..

So yeah, VisitorVille! I’m quite sure it’s pyromaniac-proof, but… wouldn’t it be a tragedy if it weren’t?