So I’ve had a lot of e-mails about this since June, and I should apologise for not doing anything about it since then… but sod it. Apparently the old podcast episodes weren’t online after the server switch. They are now, so bask in their glory! Enjoy.

Where has this year gone?

Seems like my attempt at publishing some more T-Shirts has been thwarted twofold by Zazzle. Aside from their base costs, which I could overlook really because let’s face it they are a US based company and us over here in Blighty are used to paying well over the odds for .. well .. everything. It’s their rating policy that’s screwed me though. I discovered this whilst trying to categorise my latest “Domestic Abuse: For When She Just Won’t Listen” design, and there simply isn’t anywhere I can put it where it’ll be accepted on their service.

So does anyone know a good, preferably UK based, on demand T-Shirt printer in the same vein as Zazzle? One without morals?

Sod it. Ah well, in other news, I’m still flogging this dead horse. The Fish has become a bit like a neglected step-child, or one of those awful sitcoms that jumps the shark and keeps going. We’ve peaked, but hey, fuck it, you’re still reading this right? So I should make an effort to post something. After all, I’m fast approaching 30 and it’s good therapy to avoid a mid-life crisis.

Incidentally, I’m trying to find photographic evidence to support my ‘two chicken shop’ theory. It’s where you can judge the social standing of an area not based on official statistics, but on how many fried chicken shops it has. If it has two right next to each other, run! But grab a photo first and send it to me.

Anyway… it’s the weekend. Time to go out and get fucked up.

… or just another half baked idea?

So I’ve decided to bring back the t-shirt store. Well, in a fashion anyway. I’ve been spending some serious time lately looking for amusing and tasteless t-shirt designs, like the ones we used to sell here back in ’04, but haven’t really found what I’m looking for. There’s one or two absolutely cracking sites out there which I’ve ordered some stuff from, but some designs and ideas simply don’t exist any more. So I’ve decided to open a store via zazzle through which I’ll slowly bring back some of our old designs (if I can find them) and maybe even design some new ones.

Check it out here.

Well I renewed the domain for another year, so the Fish is safe for now. Not really sure what I’m doing with it though at the moment. The podcast is on an indefinite hiatus for a number of reasons but may be back later in the year. Everyone’s wandered off really!
Then there’s this whole swine flu pandemic that threatens to wipe us all out.. good job it’s not fish flu really. Although can fish catch the flu?

Time for a quick plug, whilst I’m posting. Whilst I’ve let this site fall into a state of disrepair again, I haven’t been just sitting around licking my balls. Instead I’ve been concentrating on work with my new band, Snide. If you’re into up-beat high energy punk in the same vein as The Offspring, Green Day, etc, or just fancy pointing and laughing for a while at my bald head bouncing around on stage, we’ve got some gigs booked around the UK during the summer months. Come check us out, and if you say to me you found out about it on the Fish, there’s a pint in it for ya!

So for those of you that know me, you’ve probably gathered I’m something of a fan of gaming. I’ve owned consoles and computers as far back as the original Atari 2600 and Amstrad CPC’s of the 80′s, and played games on pretty much all of them. So I’ve seen buggy games.
But the big ones have usually been restricted to the PC. This makes sense, because it’s harder to put together a bit of software that needs to run across a huge variety of hardware, rather than spend time fine tuning it to work on one specific platform – as with the consoles. That, and Windows has a nasty habit of crashing out for no good reason as well, so you’re never quite sure if it’s the game or the operating system that’s pissing you about.

So after paying out for a string of bug ridden games on the PC that culminated in what I fondly refer to as, “The Bioshock Incident”, I decided never to buy a game for my PC again and concentrate on getting them for my console instead. After all, despite all the bad press surrounding the XBox 360 hardware faults, it seems to me to be a fairly solid console*.

And that’s what I did. And things went swimmingly. That is until I parted with 40 pounds of hard earned cash on Saints Row 2.

It beggars belief how this got past quality control, it really does. When I first started trying to play it, it was on my old 360, which kept freezing in the game and eventually died with the three red lights. I could be forgiven for thinking that the problems were down to my old console, even though nothing else really broke (it used to eat my Fallout 3 disc, but that’s another story). So the console was sent off and replaced, and the game is just as bad on the replacement.

Doing some googling shows it’s not just me getting these problems, and it’s not just the 360 either. I’ve read numerous complaints about the game freezing at random on the PS3 and PC as well, which says to me that the code is flawed somewhere.

So fix it fuckers! Fix it soon. 40 pounds is a lot of notes to waste these days. That’s quite a few beers, a few miles worth of petrol or even a mediocre hooker. Poor show on Volition Inc & THQ for rushing this out and you’ve had months to fix it, yet all I hear is that they’re now concentrating on the next sequel in the series. That’s one I won’t currently be wasting my money on, and I urge you all not to buy this game if you haven’t already.

// Rant over. For your viewing pleasure, a quick gameplay video showing the psychedelic flicker effect and eventual crash:

* 1 Incident of the RROD in three years. Console replaced within a week and a half. Not too bad.

So we’ve had to move servers. Couldn’t have happened at a worse time… Everything’s gone a bit tits up as they say. At the moment, the podcast part of the site is a bit unstable, so if you’re here for that it may or may not work.

Speaking of the podcast, we also had episode 8 in the can and ready to roll, then Windows Vista came along and fucked it all up. At some point in the near future we’ll be recording a new episode 8… I just need to give the PC a thorough kicking first.

Oh, and happy belated new year to everyone. May 2009 be a prosperous year for you, and may your yeast infections not itch quite as much….

To the young man that hit my car last night,
Thank you so much for reversing your Audi A4 into the front of my car last night at great speed and subsequently causing enough damage to write it off. Regular readers of my website and listeners to our podcast will no doubt be aware of my great admiration of the true cunts that exist in our society, and I am always truly honoured to meet one face to face. So I just wanted to say thanks for the damage, thanks for the false details, thanks to your arse of a friend that drove off whilst I got your false details, and thank you from legging it away and leaving my girlfriend standing around like a plum whilst I moved my now wrecked vehicle out of further harms way. It was truly an enlightening experience to meet such a couple of cunts as yourselves, and rest assured you shall now be the benchmark against which I measure all idiots, arseholes, morons and fucktards against in future. We must do it again sometime, possibly with my foot on your throat.

All the best,
Markus M.

P.S I did get your number plate. Let’s hope for your sake that my instincts are correct and you don’t actually own the car.