Orchestrated Muppetry: A whole new ball game... and just in time for the World Cup, too

The transition period is over… Retro Yakking’s back, in the form of Orchestrated Muppetry.

I decided I liked the name of the previous post so much I’d give it a whole blog to itself. I suppose it’s more of a fitting name to be honest with you, Retro Yakking wasn’t always entirely accurate – whilst it did have some stuff  dealing with older subjects, it wasn’t really the sole focus.

Orchestrated Muppetry is the natural evolution from RY, with all the usual stuff you’d expect from Harry Yack plus a new freedom of expression not possible at Today.com. Hey, you know how it is when you’re employed to do a job.

So is Retro Yakking dead? Not completely. You can still visit an archived version over at Blogdog, and by all means do. Don’t expect any more updates, though, because the times they are a-changing, and so is Harry Yack.

Thanks for feigning interest once more.

Ferreting around some of my older designs for the Illarterate website, I was reminded of how much I like the white-and-blue-on-black scheme I had going a few years back. You could say I’ve got more than my fair share of mileage out of it up to this point considering it’s been employed both on a previous incarnation of this blog and a tweaked blogger theme in the past couple of years.

I’ve come to realise that this ‘classic’ scheme is one I’d prefer people to recognise as the Illarterate trademark. As we speak I’m still working on it: the header is still not quite to my tastes, there are loads more pages to be created/copied across to the WordPress format yet and there are a few less images than I would like.

Nevertheless, I did feel confident enough to go ahead and create the redirect from illarterate.co.uk to the blog. My original plan was to completely overhaul the main site in preparation for a mega-ultra cataloguing of all the projects I’ve worked on since the dawn of time, but as you can imagine that would be quite complicated and time-consuming. Alas, time is not on my hands at the present time, what with real world commitments and such like.

Don’t get me wrong – I liked the Carrington theme, but it didn’t quite have the level of customisation I would have liked. Sure, I could have gone mucking around with the css and php files, but why bother when there’s a simpler and more durable template in the form of Mandigo (which has been implemented at Jesus Was A Wiganer pretty much since its inception)? As it turned out, I still had to do a bit of fiddling.

By the way, I thoroughly recommend both themes, but especially the latter, which I consider to be the ‘classic’ blog layout. It’s a lot like WordPress Classic but with a load more options and potential for bloggers.

The upshot of it all is that I’m effectively using WordPress as a website building program. Don’t tell anyone though, they’ll think I’ve become lazy…

Bcbkye urges you to visit Illogicopedia!

I’m a bit wary of promising anything here on the Illarterate blog as the vast majority of half completed projects I announce never get finished off. Sorry to build your expectations like that, if you were hoping to see, for example, the feature length animation Kid Gang or even Metal Gear Salford.

For this reason I’ve been trying to record completed projects such as those recent video game vlogs instead of partially worked stuff I never get the chance/motivation to finish. Rest assured, in my absence from this blog, stuff is going on behind the scenes, albeit in a more curtailed fashion than previous.

To this end, there may be a revival for the once-popular small time internet weblog Retro Yakking – certainly I’ve got a few posts lined up in the immediate future. Since Christmas I’ve had plans in place for RY to become more ‘bloggy’, with a more natural and less rigid style than the staple news parodies of 2009. Speaking of news parodies… YNN is on hiatus until further notice (which may be much longer than I originally thought).

Why Retro Yakking and not YNN? Well, the former has an established audience, even if most of its followers deserted it in New Year when I decided to take a break. Plus, I get the feeling things are less pressured there, allowing me to free up my writing style — which you’ll probably have noticed by now is punctuated by comma splicing, dry and matter of fact commentary with the odd non-sequitur. If you’ve ever seen my Illogicopedia stuff you’ll know what I mean.

Jesus Was A Wiganer and Illogiblog fans will notice I’ve never actually been away, though there are relatively few of them out there so it hardly matters. Boo!

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After numerous incarnations, I think this site has settled upon its most suited format – documenting stuff the Illarterate team get up to. Well, when I say the Illarterate team, I actually mean just me.

Brace yourself for a barrage of ideas, influences, project retrospectives and the like, all in one handy little blog. You may never need visit another website again! Well, except maybe to check your bank balance. But be sure to bookmark Illarterate or the monsters that live under your bed will bite.