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I love Charlie Brooker, he’s a bullshit free journalist who works for both the BBC and The Guardian. His television work includes Screenwipe and Newswipe, both of which are highly regarded on BBC Four and are usually top of the BBC iPlayer soon after they’re aired. Charlie doesn’t patronise the viewer or act as conspiracy theorist about why the news and television media are such bastards; he just tells you like it is and he’s jolly funny and good at it to.
Anyway, the reason why I bring him up is because for AS Level Media Studies we have to create a news report; as soon as this project was given to us I instantly thought of the perfect example of a generic news report. In episode two of season two of Newswipe, Charlie did a bit on how a news report is put together by reconstructing one himself while he was explaining it; it’s now startlingly apparent how copy and paste news reports seem to be now-a-days.
So below you’ll find the video in question; it’s brilliant, he’s brilliant, enjoy.
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Steven, Administrator.
Published on March 12th 2010 / Filed under Internet, Media
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Yeah, my brain is currently sitting like a blob in the middle of my head bobbing around in clever juice. I’m on about 6th Form of course, a lot has happened since I last wrote about it, (so long ago in fact I can’t find the post). Just to remind you, I’m currently taking English Language, Information Technology, Media and Psychology.
They’re all going alright; I handed in the first half of my Media coursework last week, I handed in my English Language coursework about a month ago. However I still have to complete two units of Information Technology and the second half of my Media coursework for before the Easter half term, so that shall be a test of my abilities.
Today I got results back for my first Psychology exam and first Information Technology exam; in the former I got a C, (which is apparently good for A Level), and for the latter I got a D. Now although a D sounds bad, students do worse in the exam because that’s the nature of exams and it’s 1/3 of my overall AS grade so I need to get 55/70 on my next two units to secure myself a good grade B which I think is do-able.
I also went to parents evening today; all subjects are happy with me so I think I’m on the right track, just need to finish lots of work before the Easter half term.
Anyway, not a really interesting update so not much else to say.
Steven, Administrator.
Published on March 11th 2010 / Filed under Education
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I’ve written a lot of posts a long the lines of “theme update” because I love designing and developing new themes for my blog. With this latest theme I’ve added a couple more design features that I feel have improved the feel of this website a lot.
Here’s what I’ve done in this new theme:
- Employed a very clean theme with lots of padding and spacing.
- I’ve used subtle textured backgrounds for the background and headers.
- I’m using sIFR for my headings, this means I can use custom fonts.
- The colours and themes are similar to Clear:Both for a universal house style.
- I’ve emphases the comments section inside of posts.
- The number of comments for a post is displayed on the homepage.
- I’m now using page numbers for navigation through this blog.
That’s all well and good, however the design is not perfect. Older posts that were designed when I used wide content areas which have large pictures/videos embedded into them may look out of place and may push the sidebar down, so those posts need to be edited.
That’s about it for the web developing side of my life; I’ve been really busy lately so I’ve been unable, (and unmotivated), to post on my blog so I apologise for that however I may be posting a blessay within the next week because a lot has happened lately.
Update 11th March 2010
I’ve got a few things fixed since yesterday; I’ve fixed the latest posts that were set to work with the old wider theme so now nothing should be pushed off the edge of the page. I’ve also now made the theme compatible with Internet Explorer 6 so that’s all sorted. I’ve fixed an issue that caused page numbers to appear on single posts and pages.
Oh and I’ve also changed the headings to gracefully download for visitors who don’t have Flash, (which isn’t many, but it effects iPhones). Speaking of iPhones I’ve activated this wonderful plugin that makes my blog beautiful and specifically made for the iPhone Safari browser which uses AJAX to make it work brilliantly.
Even though I have fixed a lot of errors, there may still be some bugs around that I have missed, (most likely ones connected to Internet Explorer 6), so if you don’t find any bugs then please do post a comment and I’ll get it fixed as soon as I can.
Hopefully see you soon, Steven; Administrator.
Published on March 9th 2010 / Filed under Website News
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My favourite radio show/podcast/audiobook The Ricky Gervais Show has been turned into an animated feature series consisting of 13 episodes, (from series one of the podcast version of the show), by HBO. If you’ve never heard of this show before, (which is unlikley if you use iTunes seeing as its the best selling audiobook series for years now), then I’ll tell you: it’s just three men talking nonsense.
That’s all there is to it, the three men are of course Ricky Gervais who is accompanied by Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. In the early days, the show was broadcasted on a local radio station called XFM which ran from 2001 to 2004 consisting of about 90 episodes, each an hour in length. Karl Pilkington was working as a producer on XFM and was told her had to work on Saturdays, so he was lumbered with Ricky and Stephen. Slowly and surely they began to unravel the gift that keeps on giving, the gift in question is of course the round-headed manc twat Karl who whinges, moans and complains all the time.
However, his childhood stories about horses in houses, adulthood stories about washing up with no thumbs, insane stories about monkeys acting as last-minute firemen and shadows in Boston pushing people of their bikes make him the funniest person in the world. He is quintessentially the perfect round headed mong.
The latest version of trios audio work comes on the form of The Ricky Gervais Guide To… where the three discuss big topics ranging from medicine, philosophy and the future. However it’s currently nearing the end of the second series and it’s uncertain what the future will bring, hopefully more audiobooks.
Anyway, back to the HBO series I started talking about. Before I show you a video clip of the animated show, I’m going to show you a video of the three of them just having a chat to promote the animated show itself.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
In case you’re still interested in the animated version of the show, then here’s one of the many preview clips that have been provided by HBO. If you live within the United States, then you can legally download the first full episode of the animated series through the HBO RSS feed.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
So, that’s Karl Pilkington. Do you like him? Well, you should. If you want to hear audio clips of him on the original XFM show or the podcasts, then YouTube “Karl Pilkington” and you’ll get a lot of results to listen to. Then, if you really, really like him; head over to this topic on Pilkipedia to download all 101 episodes, (some are pre-Karl from 1998 with just Ricky and Stephen), which contains over 100 hours of material. Best of all it’s legal and free, but I’m afraid if you want to download the 5 series of podcasts and the 2 series of the Guide To’s, then you’ll have to pay for them on either iTunes or Audiable.
If you fancy having the rounded headed twat, (I say that with all the love in the world), as your desktop wallpaper then please click here to be taken to a larger version of the picture you see below; which by the way I made on Photoshop after taking a screen grab of the original preview.
I don’t think I can put into words just how much these three people mean to me, I know that’s an odd thing to say seeing as I’ve never even met them and they do not know of my existence, but their collaboration on the this show that has lasted 10 years in various formats has kept me entertained and happy when I needed them most. Whenever I’m upset or just want a laugh, I know I can just set iTunes to random and let it cycle through hundreds of hours of the worlds greatest audio show.
I’ve mentioned a lot of websites in this blog post so here’s a list of them.
The Ricky Gervais Show starts on February the 19th on HBO.
Steven, Administrator.
Published on February 17th 2010 / Filed under Media
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Not a major blog post, but I haven’t done anything in a while. I half considered writing something about Valentines Day but I didn’t want to give it the time of day, and because it would depress me too much. So instead I thought I’d share a little something with you that made me laugh yesterday.
This is probably the most offensive song to be featured in Family Guy since the infamous AIDS song sung by a barber shop choir in season four, (which I would link you to, but YouTube is 100% fake when it comes to Family Guy for some reason). Chris opens up to Stewie about his interest in a girl at school; however he is surprised to find out that the girl has got downs syndrome, when Chris begins to threat about a date that they’re about to go on together, Stewie decides to get him ready in a musical fashion.
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Not featured in that clip but something that is in the episode is tasteful joke about how that down syndrome girl is the daughter of Sarah Palin, lets see if she complains about it considering she now works for FOX.
Family Guy is on every Sunday 9/8c on FOX. Steven, Administrator.
Published on February 15th 2010 / Filed under Media
