Gingerbread houses have a fine pedigree in the world of internet comedy. From Laura Redclouds Gingerbread Barad Dur, to… erm…

Well, never mind then.

But neither lack of comedy value, it being almost exactly the middle of the year, therefore being thoroughly unseasonal, nor even the fact that no male over the age of 12 without his own kids should make a gingerbread house stopped me, when one day my girlfriend said “Why have you got a gingerbread house kit on your fridge?” After which she said “Lets make it!”

Fearing for my poor testicles, already trying to retreat down my trouser legs, and angling for something funny to write about later, I suggested a jellybaby Torture Garden, an idea which got half-heartedly pounced upon. Much as I’d like to talk you through how we made it, its a gingerbread house. Its not a complicated concept. Besides, WordPress doesn’t seem to believe in letting you format your posts, for some ungodly reason. So lets let the captions have a go.

Nothing too exciting, just a brief overview of the house. Also, some teapots

A top-down view. The house is leaking icing sugar based blood, shock horror.

Is it a crucifix? No, its some sugar shaped like a mutated child. Only decapitated and stuck to a wall.

The... *sigh* front lawn. Also shown is what was supposed to be a pathway of severed heads, but just became what looks like us Brits on a Spanish beach in summer.

Two jelly babies sacrifing a third jelly baby on some dark altar made of dolly mix. I think we overdid the blood a bit.

Do you know how hard it is to represent a jelly baby being burned alive when you've only got dolly mix and smarties?

A lone jellyman being hung. Nothing too exciting, I'm afraid. Also, I spent years trying to put captions like these on my old sites pictures.

And from this fine afternoon, I learned an important thing: WordPress sucks monkey balls. Here’s what happened with a rolling pin later.

Hello, two men and a dog who read this on a regular basis! Every now and then, I like to imagine people listen to what I say, and my advice might benefit people. Thus far, this advice has resulted in three deaths, fifteen maimings, and a presidential coup in the Eastern Bloc. But I’ll get it right one day. And until then, we’ll go for something nice, like a quiet afternoon round of Halo with your dearly beloved.

• Always be courteuos, make sure she’s comfortable, gets the nice chair, the controller of her choice, etc.
• Give her first call on whether you play co-op or deathmatch.
• When she’s trying to find her bearings, and how the controls work, don’t just shoot her as she’s looking up and down. Remember how you were when you picked up a game for the first time? Exactly. Be nice.
• Don’t go strafing round her shooting her as she’s shooting you. That’s cheating! She wouldn’t do it to you!
• If you’re playing co-op, don’t accidently shoot her. You’re on the same team, you need to be working together to take out a greater enemy. Never mind the time she shot you “just because it was funny”, that was funny!
• If she’s reloading, don’t shoot her. She can’t fire while she’re reloading, so its not fair on her.
• if she’s finding a different weapon, don’t shoot her.
• If she’s shooting you, don’t shoot her.
• If you’re winning, don’t shoot her.
• If you’re losing, don’t shoot her.
• In fact, just go and have a cup of tea while she pops caps in your arse for fifteen minutes.
• If you break any of the above, curl up in the fetal position as the abuse reigns down on you.

Next week, join us for A Guide To Playing Monopoly With Your Girlfriend (a short summery: DO ANYTHING ELSE ON THE PLANET).

Sometimes I do wonder how I avoid being single. Magic and cuddles, I think.

Now, despite the fact that nobody who reads this will be anyone I actually know in real life, telling you about what I’ve been up to is a very pointless idea. Especially considering that anyone I know in real life who knows about this site will simply ask “so when are you doing that comic with the skulls again”, thus prompting me to write more bad jokes about webcomics and dead cats in MS Paint. But damnit, if I don’t enjoy blogging more than some kid on his LJ who just got dumped. Only I don’t write bad poetry about it. And I haven’t been dumped. And I’m not a giant emo faggot. So not that far from the course then.

Anyway, here’s to my life story, and unordered lists!

• Like I said, training to be a web designer, with a home learning course that suits my “do nothing all day, and worry I’m wasting my life at night” lifestyle. Its going quite well, I’m racing through it, and hopefully I’ll be ready to get an entry level web design job by the end of the summer. This is banjaxed somewhat by being with the slowest training company in christendom. AQ project I was supposed to be given two weeks ago has yet to even appear on their site, emails can be timed, not with a watch like you’d expect, but with a calendar. And the assessment I’ve just done for XML took ages to get back. And failed by two marks. And failed by two marks the other four times I sent it in, changing what I assumed were wrong answers, mainly because they hadn’t covered half the stuff in the assessment, and Google is wonderfully unhelpful. Grr.
• I think I’ve already ranted about temping agencies, but I’ll recap in short: they don’t call me enough, because I work too hard. Or more importantly, too fast. Which is a shame, because data entry and database admin are wonderfully piss easy jobs that everyone hates doing. And occasionly pay well.
• Therefore, I’m too skint to do prety much anything. So at 22, I’m still stuck at home. I’m none too happy about that. Sooner I move out, the better for everyone. I’m turning into the sort of basement dwelling vegetable not usually seen outside of 4chan.
• Ah, driving lessons. The lessons go fine, the two tests I’ve done… I failed one for being in one lane of a dual carriageway, I failed the other for being in the other lane. And now I’ve got to wait until September to take it again. Wonderful.
• Well, at least my love lifes going well. She’s coming down tomorrow to stay for the summer. I’d say more, but if she ever reads this, I want to keep a few surprises hidden.
• I’ve spent all this time painting Warhammer models, and I’ve nobody to play against, and nowhere to do it anyway. Might have to build a gaming board and hide it under my bed. And play… hmm… myself. In my room.

And that’s about it, I think. Join us again soon where I try to recapture the long lost sense of hilarity that once pervaded this webspace.

You what? OK, credit to the man for passing without a single fault, but I failed my second driving test last week for not changing into the correct lane. And they expect us to believe he passed after another car pranged him? Fuck that.

Like many despondent basement dwellers too impoverished and socially majadjusted to move out, I have a room full of crap. Let me just take a minute first to turn off my Whining Self Pity Mode, so I’m actually funny.

So yeah, room full of crap. Last time it got even loosely tidied out, I ended up finding things that shouldn’t even exist anymore. A rubber from when I was in the Beaver Scouts, in 92. A rubber older than my little brother, who can now thoroughly kick my arse at Guitar Hero, and may well end up nerdier than I am. Also, coursework from Year Seven (no idea what that is in American, probably “Burgers”). And a bottle of beer that’s been growing some nice mould since before I went to uni. Yummy.

But since, unlike most basement dwellers, I actually have a girlfriend, and said girlfriend is spending the summer with me, fifteen years of crap had to be shunted into better organised places. Bank statements were organised by date on the statement, not date shoved into the big plastic folder. CDs and DVDs were arranged on shelves instead of piled on them. Shoeboxes were filled with manuals, little plastic men were ranked up, and beer bottles were recycled, and duct-taped up in the case of the aforementioned four year old bottle.

Naturally, this means that there’s some things I’ve found that may have made sense, if someone else brought them into my room and hid them to confuse me. So for want of some actual good ideas, here’s a selection of useless crap.

A coconut:
You all know what a coconut looks like, its like a giant straw-covered testicle. If testicles were made of wood, hollow, and filled with “milk” and stringy stuff that tastes like eating wood shavings. So, as the ancient pun goes, not really like a giant straw-covered testicle then. I think I know where this one came from, actually, I took it upstairs for an event which also featured a condom, a potato, and some ear medicene. Tragically, I’m not joking.

However, this does begat the question: why was there a coconut downstairs in the first place? Because someone bought a coconut. Dur.

Ear mufflers:
You know clay pidgeon shooting, I guess. Basically just firing clay frisbees into the air, then blowing them apart with shotguns. I’m guessing it was invented by the English aristocracy, who, having ron out of pheasents and other birds to shoot one evening, decided to give the local potter some work and shoot more things. Not the potter, mind.

At any rate, since shotguns, designed primarily to turn a man in front of you into a thin red mist and some lumpy bits, are very loud, one typically wears big padded ear muff things when shooting. And for some reason, I own a pair.

Annoyingly enough, I also know where these came from, seeing as one of my housemates in Hull used to do clay pigeon shooting. And since for some reason five tonnes of everyones crap ended up in my bag for no reason, this also explains the shotgun cartridge, and the Tom and Jerry SNES game that rests on my decidedly SNES-free shelves.

An African Blowpipe
It came from France, just in case there was any lingering sense of the “I don’t know where this stuff came from!” idea. For some reason, there’s lots of African stuff in French markets, and since I’m in France once a year on holiday, it seems inevitable.

Although it looks quite cool, I think the bamboo started splintering three seconds after I bought it, and its so long and loose you can’t launch a dart out of it anyway. Not a great use of money, but neither was the djembe I bought, and later sold on eBay. And neither was the bigger djembe, which is now wearing a St Patricks Day hat.

One model cloven hoof
Which would be much more useful if I knew where the other was.

…this would have been much funnier if there was a bit more inexplicable stuff. Ah well, come back in six months when I have to clear out the crap again, and find a stuffed zebra, or something. Cheerio!

Yeah, so I’ve started that whole blogging thing again, as you’ve obviously noticed. So what brought that about, and how many days can you expect me to be a-blogging before I give up again?

Well, the answer to the second one is “who the fuck knows”, but the first ones a bit more straightforward. I’ve been making websites for years now. From a crappy one about Tamagotchis ten years ago, to sites for the family business, and of course the garbage on this humble domain.

About three months ago, I actually realised this, and how much fun it actually is. I then coupled this with the more pressing concern: “I’m 22 and still living with my parents, I need a fucking job that pays”. And while temping is fun, and many lessons have been learned from Yahtzee about the joys of data entry, they just don’t call me often enough. Apparently, the concept of sending out someone who types really fast and efficiently is anathema when the agency only gets paid twice the amount you get paid per hour. So I barely get paid enough to keep me in plastic models and failed driving tests, let alone renting somewhere to live.

…seem to have got a bit lost there, let me backtrack.

So seeing as how web design is fun, and IT peoples get paid fuckloads, I thought it would be a good idea. So I shelled out for proper web design lessons (or so far, two weeks of in-depth Microsoft Office work, and two point five months of my tutor not emailing me back), and then the economy decided to play crashy crashy.

So somewhere in all this, I realised I have a domain name, lots of free time, and nothing really interesting to write about. So a blog it is then.

I imagine that once I’m back in my Less Is More mindset, you may well get what used to go up here, only it’ll actually be well written. But also other random crap might end up here. For example, once I learn how to use Flash, expect this site to be hosting my coursework. And when I film some new videos, they’ll be here as well. And I may do some actual blogging at some point, too, so expect lots of posts about “Yeop, quiet here”.

And since everyone is just going to ask “Do we get Henry Skull back? I liked Henry Skull”, he’ll be back once I find some way of running a comic script alongside a WordPress blog instead of replacing one with the other. I may just start again, because that last story was going nowhere.

Nice to be back, everyone.