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 You can still visit an archived version over at Blogdog, and by all means do.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.

This weekend sees the unofficial launch of my new project, Harry Yack’s News Network.

Said blog will contain the usual news stories and opinion pieces you see over at Retro Yakking only in an ad-free and more aesthetically pleasing manner. I’ve got some big ideas for YNN, which is effectively just a parody of generic news outlets including BBC News and especially The Daily Mail. The name is a play on CNN, the American news channel, and also that news programme off Family Guy. You know the one I’m talking about.

Content-wise, it won’t be too much different from the stuff going on at Retro Yakking – the only difference is that news will be brought to you live from a new home on the interwebs. Well, kind of new, because it’ll be hosted at the same server as Illarterate until further notice, but I hope it’ll grow large enough to move to yaknews.co.uk or something similar. We’ll see what happens with that.

It’s all a bit ramshackle at the moment, with only one or two stories to tide you over for now. Hopefully things will begin to pad out sooner or later, though, and I won’t keep abandoning it like I do with certain other projects. But what can you do, eh? You try and get motivated enough to update four blogs all the time.

Anyhow, I plan to start sharing my time between RY and YNN and take a more loose approach to the former. Perhaps.

Go to YNN now!

I am aware there are numerous people who have, for various reasons, become disgruntled with blogging host Today.com.

Some time ago, the company laid off a rather large section of its most popular and active writers, leading to numerous speculations over their ultimate motives. Well, I am here, at the risk of being lambasted or even losing my Today.com account, to put the record straight and say to these people — in the nicest possible way — what the heck did you expect?

Now, I am quite fortunate (?!) to have been screwed over in the past by certain web hosts by virtue of neglecting to read the small print, blundering blindly forward without a care in the world, and am not one of the said bloggers laid off by Today. At least not yet. I’d like to think, however, that my (bad) experiences have given me a little bit of insight about how the business works – you scratch my back, I scratch yours; you get nothing for nothing and any other such cliche you could care to mention.

When you sign up to Today.com, you enter into an agreement that basically means you represent Today.com by the very fact your blog is hosted under their name on their server. If you violate the Terms of Service, you can expect to be notified and perhaps even warned, just like in the real life workplace.

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Just a quick word for a blog I started up months ago but never gave the time it deserved. Up until now, I’ve been posting glitched up stuff on the Illarterate blog, but I’ve decided to give Autoglitcher another chance, at least for a while. I’ll look to retrospectively post some of my glitch art excursions from the past few months if I can get round to it this weekend.

As the title suggests, this site’s all about interesting glitches in television, video games and general media. The idea of autoglitching relates to those glitches you seemingly stumble across or have little input in, especially those created completely by accident.

A must for all fans of glitch art, even if I do say so myself.