The Year in Blogs: 2015

2015 can seriously take a step back and literally f*ck its own face.

First there was the unexpected sudden need to move house when our landlady decided they wanted to sell the house we were in regardless of whether we were in it or not. We moved into a flat that looked nice at first glance but turns out that it lacks any kind of sound insulation (seriously, Flat 7, what the flying f*ck are you doing up there?), has dodgy plumbing and suffers from a permanent draught in winter due to nice-looking but ultimately stupidly designed windows. One of my pet parakeets died unexpectedly, possibly due to the aforementioned draught (blog linked below). My favourite author finally succumbed to his illness (blog also linked below). My marriage proposal was almost rained off (guess what? Blog linked below!). Some bastard decided to smash the back-quarter window on my car to burglarise it (there was nothing worth stealing) despite the fact that we supposedly live in a nice street according to practically every person who’s seen my address.

In between all of my first-world problems I did some blogging, apparently.

Let’s Start the Year (Again) Part 1: New Year, New Moustache, New Digs, Same Old Goals – 16/02

In which I decide to tackle 2015 head on with a big dose of optimism after moving to a flat. I don’t think I’ll bother doing that again.

Let’s Start the Year (Again) Part 2: Do Androids Dream of Electric Blue Willows (RIP Willow) – 18/02

In which, having declared my optimism, one of my beloved pets dies. In response I gush over Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was a story I was overdosing on at the time.

Let’s Start the Year (Again) Part 3: Eleven Year Old Me Would Be Upset by This – 27/02

In which I take photographs of old Metal Gear Solid figure boxes, or something? I think I was just flailing in the wind because I like routine and 2015 tossed that right out the window.

Let’s Start the Year (Again) Part 4: An Image Dump of the Wasteland of My Desktop – 05/03

A random collection of funny images I thought were worth sharing (and to be honest, some of them really are).

Ode to a Beautiful Wordsmith: RIP Sir Terry Pratchett – 14/03

Sir Terry Pratchett, one of the greatest authors to ever have walked the Earth, finally succumbed to the Alzheimer’s eating away at his brain. Out of courtesy I gushed paragraphs of gratitude in his memory.

Manchild at Play: LEGO Batman Batwing and Joker Steamroller – 21/03

In which I take numerous photographs of one of my Christmas presents, some Batman LEGO.

Manchild at Play: LEGO Detective’s Office – 29/03

In which I take even more photographs of LEGO. In this case, a set that invokes one of my other favourite authors, Raymond Chandler.

Manchild at Play: Arkham City Clayface – 04/04

In which I take photographs of a different toy (I’m beginning to see a pattern here…).

Random Guesswork: Batman v Superman Is the Film We Need but Not the One We Deserve – 18/04

Zack Snyder has always had a massive hard-on for the comic book The Dark Knight Returns, so the opportunity to make a film featuring Batman appears to be a dream come true for him. The question I pose is whether his passion for a very specific iteration of the Batman character is the one that film-going audiences want to see?

Bookmark Hoarding Is a Serious Condition – Let Me Help You with That! – 10/05

I have a serious problem with hoarding bookmarks, and it got to the point this year where I decided to do something about the metric tonne of bookmarks clogging my browser. What I in fact did was build a system to organise them (because deleting any was just out of the question, obviously).

On Parsing Text and HTML with PHP – 15/05 (Work/Portfolio)

Following on from creating the Bookmark Sorter, I wrote a bit about how fiddly it can be to parse text using PHP.

James Bond Isn’t a Timelord – 23/05

I took umbrage at a random web article that posited that James Bond is a timelord based on that damned Aston Martin from Goldfinger appearing in Skyfall. To try and nail James Bond continuity once and for all, I turned to the Bond video games for an alternative answer…

Manchild at Play: LEGO Batmobile and Riddler Racer (Featuring the Flash, Because Why Not?) – 13/06

Wow, I really did buy and photograph a lot of LEGO this year, huh? I guess I was using LEGO to cope with all the first-world problems I was obsessing over at the time. Anyway, here’s some more Batman LEGO.

Random Guesswork: E3 2015 – 20/06

E3 was pretty bloody good this year, so I took to my keyboard to highlight my favourites from the show.

Ten Years in the Making – the Mediocre Origins of Detulux Incorporated (Part 1) – 25/06

2015 was the year I palmed off art duties on my webcomic Detulux Incorporated on to my other half. Truth be told, Sam taking over the art was one of the best things to come out of this year. Inspired by her taking up the role, and realising that my first comic page was uploaded to the web on 25/06/05, we sat down and discussed my earlier (often awful) attempts on the comic.

Creating a New YouTube Subscription Feed (or How to Replace Your YouTube Subscription Feed Now Google Has Ditched It) – 03/07 (Work/Portfolio)

I don’t watch TV, however I do watch a lot of YouTube. I also use RSS exclusively to keep tabs on websites, so when Google decided to ditch their convenient YouTube subscription feed I was at a loose end. However, I decided to take it on the chin and attempt to create my own to replace it (spoilers: it was more complicated than I thought it would be).

Die Another Day Is the Darkest James Bond Film of All – 25/07

Walking to the pub one balmy summer evening, I was talking to Sam about the “alternate universe” Bond theory (see the post on 23/05 above) and struck on a very dark interpretation of one of the all-time worst James Bond films that suddenly made it seem a lot more bearable (and it would make a lot more sense too).

Redeveloping PAYNEful.co.uk (or How I Got CodeIgniter and WordPress to Play Nice Together) – 01/08 (Work/Portfolio)

At the tail end of 2014 I decided to overhaul this website and had the crazy idea to rebuild it in CodeIgniter but integrate it with not one but three WordPress blogs. This article gave an overview on how exactly I accomplished that.

Manchild at Play: LEGO Cinema – 08/08

In the final needless LEGO purchase this year, I managed to convince Sam that we needed a cinema next door to the Detective’s office. Pictures were taken, fun was had.

How to Recover Your Data and Files after Refreshing Windows 10 (Because Your Start Menu Broke) – 05/09 (Work/Portfolio)

September for me began with Windows 10 forgetting what the Start menu is. I got it back, but not without losing a bunch of data. This post details how I recovered it.

What I Did on My Summer Holidays (Spoiler: I Got Engaged) – 22/11

In an epic blog post that took the best part of three months to write, I detail the week of summer fun where I finally rewarded Sam for putting up with me for ten years.

Ten Years in the Making – the Mediocre Origins of Detulux Incorporated (Part 2) – 21/12

In the second part of the Detulux comic retrospective, we begin tackling the Resident Evil 4 parody that took several years to complete.

Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | January 1, 2016 at 12:00 am | The Year in Blogs | No comment

Tags: Batman, Detulux Incorporated, engagement, First world problems, James Bond, LEGO, Seriously Flat 7 go get bent