Do you love owning STUFF?

A huge fan of stuff? That’s great! So are we, here at Boring Internet!

And that’s why you can now find a bunch of new stuff in our Boring Internet store! From today, you can pick up a whole host of new items; we’ve launched 4 new products in the store and re-released a product that was in the store around April this year.

What’s more, as we’ve launched a shitload of awesome new stuff, everything’s available for special low prices until October 15th to celebrate!

So what’s available, and for how much?

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THE NEW STUFF

Journal: DIARY OF AN EMO – Fan of Misunderstood’s Diary of an Emo series here on Boring Internet? Well now you can snag your very own Diary of an Emo journal, complete with a cover design by Misunderstood himself! 160 pages, with page formats you can pick from (blank, lined, dot grid or task journal), the journal is available now for the price of $9.99. (From October 16th onwards, this item will be priced at $10.99)

Calendar Print: X-CON – Did you buy a copy of the X-Con novel? Or just a fan of the fantastic logo I put together for the front cover of the book? Whichever it is, you can now snag a 2009 calendar print of the logo. It’s available now for the price of $4.49. (From October 16th onwards, this item will be priced at $4.99)*

Wall Clock: DISPLACING BLAME – Here’s advice you can use, on a handy wall clock! You can now check out some of the best advice in the world, pasted on a fantastic wall clock. It’s available now for the price of $11.74. (From October 16th onwards, this item will be priced at $12.49)

Mini Button: DISPLACING BLAME – Here’s advice you can use, on a fancy mini button! Now you can flash this off with your mini button collection, showing the best advice in the world to anyone admiring your collection. It’s available now for the price of $1.59. (From October 16th onwards, this item will be priced at $1.74)

Mini Poster: DISPLACING BLAME – Here advice you can use, on a great mini wall poster print! Now you can stick the world’s best advice on any one of your walls for your viewing pleasure! It’s available now for the price of $5.49. (From October 16th onwards, this item will be priced at $5.99)

THE OLD STUFF

Tile Coaster: SEAGULL – The world’s happiest seagull will hold your drink without ever faltering its grin. To celebrate the release of these great new products, you can snag these tile coasters for the newly reduced price of $4.79. (From October 16th onwards, this item will return to the price of $4.99)

Throw Cushion: THE QUEEN IS AN ALIEN – Show everyone you know the Queen’s greatest secret with this comfortable throw cushion. To celebrate the release of these great new products, you can snag this throw cushion for the newly reduced price of $16.79. (From October 16th onwards, this item will return to the price of $17.49)

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So if you want some kickass stuff, head over to the store now and grab these items while they’re all funky reduced prices!

* The 2009 X-Con Calendar Print will be available for a limited time only and will likely be replaced around late November – early December 2008. This item is the first in a limited line of X-Con logo products and these will not be re-released in the future.

Exercise bike

After about 14 weeks of exercise bike fun, my one finally decided to give up. Or, that is, I decided to retire the bastard because it’s fucked up as hell.

About 6 weeks ago, something made a horrible clunking noise inside the case of the bike. After that, the computer stopped working; unable to then count how many miles I’d done and for how long, I decided instead to make do and simply time myself for an hour and 40 minutes. Simple enough.

A week later, something snapped inside the case. All sense of tension control was gone. Again, I made do, despite things being significantly fucking easier.

This week, it’s been creaking a shitload, and whatever holds the pedals in place was shifting around a lot. So today, after 20 minutes on the damn thing, I got so pissed off I decided to unscrew the case and see just what the problem was.

Turns out, all my cycling has effectively destroyed the bike. I’ve managed to wear right through a massively thick bit of leather, which was in charge of counting distance on the computer clock. That explains the computer clock not working. Whatever broke causing the tension control to stop working, I don’t know, because I couldn’t find it.

But the main thing was the pedals. I found out the creaking and pedal movement is because I’ve actually used the bike so much, the metal holding it together has broken fully apart in one place, and a hole has been ripped in another that is gradually spiralling outwards.

I’m packing the thing up tomorrow and taking it back to Argos. Apparently, they’ll either repair it (unlikely, as it’s fucked), replace it (more likely) or give me a refund (not very likely but I hope I can get one – I’m done with cycling every day for now).

If I do get a replacement, you may see it on eBay. If you do, please pretend that I haven’t made this post about how destroyed it ended up getting after so much use. Pretend, instead, that I wrote a really happy positive review, and was so pleased I bought two exercise bikes, then realised my mistake and wanted to sell one. Then buy it.

Why are you here …

… when you should be here?

Info dump

Here’s more information you may or may not care about! This time, it regards our brand new comic series, The Biased (which hasn’t been as successful yet as our Halo-themed Boring Comics, but it’s early days yet). For more information about the site not related to The Biased, scroll down a ways.

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Anyone who’s reading The Biased will notice that it comes in a wonderful chaptered format. You may, then, be wondering just how many chapters, and/or how many pages per chapter there will be in the story that I’m aiming to tell in The Biased.

I don’t know exact numbers yet because I haven’t written ahead far enough to be sure, but at the moment I’m estimating between 6 and 8 chapters to the story. It may be more and it may be less, but that’s the ballpark figure you can expect. Pages per chapter-wise, I can’t tell you; that’s going to vary on a chapter-by-chapter basis unfortunately. Originally I had expected chapter 1 would be 10 pages, but so far it looks like it will be more than that. So it’s anyone’s guess for now.

What that does mean it that, given the current update schedule, unless I ramp up or slow down production on The Biased, the storyline will likely take around 8 months to a year to tell. That’s a long time, even with regular updates, but I don’t see a change in the rate of production, especially while I’ve got a job. If the website gets profitable, and then gets profitable enough for me to be earning over £15k a year from it, sure, I’ll drop the job and work solely on the site. At the moment though, it’s still in the red (or black, whichever it is when you’ve spent more than you’ve earnt).

Anyone that does take note of site features, though, will notice there’s been a tendency of late for longer-term projects; Twist’s release run won’t be finished until around February 2009, the A-Z of Why the Internet is Shit won’t end until early 2009, the Boring Comics storyline has been going since July now and won’t finish until sometime in October probably (or later). Hm…

For anyone wondering if I’ll do a machinima based around The Biased, the answer is a vague ’stay tuned’.

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Concerning the rest of the site, there are some new things coming in October which I might have held off to the Winter update, but compiling a list of things I want to add, I’ll be snowed under when December comes. Expect a new section of articles (probably), a mailing list and possibly RSS feeds – though the feeds will probably be held until December to be released with the CSS version of the site.

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Real life-wise, nothing much new to post. I’m selling another Amazon voucher, so if you want that, head over to here to stand a chance at grabbing it. The voucher’s value is £10 but it’s going for £9.50 at the moment with two bids, so you’re making a 5% saving by buying it. Auction has 1 day left!

The onset of Autumn

I’ve now got a job, which I’ve been working since Monday, and so you’re not really seeing a massive amount of blogposts anymore. The reason being is that I am exceptionally busy; so busy, in fact, with work and structuring my daily exercise, that I get up at 6am and don’t finish everything typically until almost 7pm. As such, as of last weekend I’m now working on all site content a week in advance, and so as of writing this, all the written content for next week has been sorted and finalised, and hopefully more visual content will be sorted out today and over the weekend.

September’s hits, so far, have been … fucking atrocious. Seriously. At the rate September is going, it’ll be lucky to hit 4,000 hits. Which is a bit weird really, considering we’ve now got meta tags everywhere so more people are likely to randomly stumble across us, but oh well, c’est la vie. I’ll be working on advertising and such when I can be fucked. Woo for a weird reader-base that seems to come and go!

I haven’t yet looked at anything for doing a CSS-based website, but plan to this weekend. I may even put up test pages at some point which some viewers will be able to see via some means. I won’t go into that in too much detail yet, as it’s all preliminary plans for a new feature coming before the Winter update (which I will begin to elaborate on in October), but if you’re interested you will be able to see mock-ups of the new site – which will undoubtedly be redesigned due to the wealth of new features I will have.

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Autumn is here, and walking home from work I’m starting to see leaves everywhere. There aren’t a whole lot yet; the coverage is less of a blanket than a light peppering, but it’s nice to see and the Autumn days with reasonable weather are something I’m looking forward to. The smell of the air is nice too – now I’m in the downstairs bedroom, I’ve got the backdoor open to smell it. It’s awesome! But also mildly chilly, and as I know from doing my jogging at 6am, it’s cold this time of year and getting colder.

The onset of Autumn also means the upcoming onset on Winter, and that means Christmas, which is a fucking awesome time of year even if you discount the presents and just think about the atmosphere, the decorations, the lights and all the fantastic plasticky fake fir trees and such you see everywhere.

Presents are nice too, obviously, though.

The Update is Upon Us

Or, it is if you’re not reading this between when it’s posted and I upload the new stuff. So, if you’ve happened upon the blog and there’s nothing on the site to say the Fall update is here (you’ll know when because the index and recent updates pages will have big bold messages), go away for now and come back later.

The last part of the Fall update process took a bit of slogging through, as I had to work on a bunch of content for the new sections – Not-So-Nice Nursery Rhymes, and The Biased (though The Biased has been up since mid-last week for feedback from HBO users). As such, a few features I’d hoped to include in the Fall update – a better way to browse Media entries, and a contact form to replace the current e-mail option – haven’t shown up yet. The Media browse page should hopefully come at some point this month as a staggered part of the update, and a contact form will become part of the upcoming Winter update – which will ideally be mainly focussed on re-releasing the website in CSS format.

For anyone interested on that front, I’m hoping to rebuild the website once a year, around Winter, in more and more advanced levels of code. Currently we’re sitting in comfortable old HTML, though a CSS version of the website is coming in December with any luck, and hopefully something higher level next year. Similarly, next year I hope to release a version of the website designed specifically for mobiles and other such handheld devices. More news on that in early 2009 though.

Concerning back-end things; meta tags are now in place on most of the webpages to improve finding the site on search engines, though it’s not true for all yet; chapters of novels still need to be updated to include tags, as I left this today as there’s fucking millions of the things.

The Fall Update

The Fall update, which has been spoken about at your uncaring eyes and ears, will be released on Monday in its fantastic entirety. That’s the 8th of September; for all those unaware of dates and how the progression of time functions.

Because I’m so nice, here’s a quick list of changes coming in the update, in bullet-point format to avoid elaboration:

• New update schedule
• New comic ‘The Biased’ set in Halo universe
• New integrated chat
• New section in fiction ‘Not-So-Nice Nursery Rhymes’
• Fixed header and ads on Pixelated Anne pages
• Discontinued Reviews section

All these wonderful changes will be fully detailed in a page telling you just what’s come to the site in the form of this hideous and yet wonderful update.

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X-Con, for those of you interested in getting it, is not actually here. Apparently it’s coming out tomorrow. If any of you are disappointed at this news, let me know and I’ll inform you of Stuart’s e-mail address and you can lynch him via electronic mail.

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I’m currently running some auctions on eBay; 2 for my mum, 1 for me. So, if you’re at all interested in Lladro ornaments of girls or swans, look no further than my mum’s auctions, linked back there. If, however, you want to score a £30 Amazon voucher for less than £30 (currently you’ll have to bid £29 on it), click here.

August stats

So the August stats are in, and the month beat out July with another massive increase in readership, this time clocking in 7,916 hits – an average of 255.35 visitors a day. I was only thinking we’d hit 6,000, but that estimate was smashed by almost 2,000 hits, so I am suitably pleased. My estimates for September were sitting at around 8,000 but I may revise these to 10,000 given the increase. I’ll let you know.

That’s it for this post, but I’ll update you more soon on life things and the impending updates I’m hoping to release upon you next week.