Sometimes virals give you hives. Digital herpies if you will. Sometimes virals make you surprised, anything with a wild animal/domestic pet doing something it shouldn’t, skateboarding etc. Sometimes virals feature people locked in their bedrooms with only the interweb for company resulting in the filming of oneself pretending to be Darth Maul or dancing to a medley of tunes from whence tunes began.

Sometimes they make your world rock.

Wario Land - Shake It! is so simple it must be the perfect viral. The product features prominently and then, well… check it out for yourself.

I don’t have a Wii, but my North Korean friends do and it saved their marriage, ‘Wii fit together’ they said. I nearly puked, but they got a kid so I’m pleased they could work out their problems by virtually hula hooping.

Posted in Viral Marketing | 1 Comment »      

When you know you’re going to be read by more people than have read you before, you feel compelled to be funnier.

You also start referring to yourself in the third person, thus casting yourself as a fictional character in your own semi-demi-fat-fiction or as my history teacher Mr Rumblelow once said, ‘Adam, you’re in danger of becoming a caricature of your own self’.

How he would chortle if he knew the new Fat Man site had made FWA Site of The Day and that I featured prominently on said site as a mad man wrenching out his own teeth with pliers.

I had a caricature done once, at the Epcot Centre - Disney World, when I was 13, by a computer. It was very ‘technically advanced’. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Appvertising, Design Porn | 1 Comment »      

It’s Friday, previously a day celebrated with funny videos (see below) and now joining the videotronic hilarity is a new blog post category ‘Me’.

Like most people, who would if they could, I have set up Google Alerts to inform me of how my good name is being used and abused on the web. Vanity dictates that I must read what other Adam Martin’s are writing about and compare it to my own tech media musings.

For sometime I have been aware of my namesake who writes for Wrestling News Live - For The Fans, By The Fans. He partners with the fictional sounding Trey Dawg to write about well oiled men making rude gestures to one another. Trey and Adam are sometimes joined by Kurt Angle. It warms my heart that Adam does not feel he needs to change his name to something more wrestle friendly like Angry Adam. He does the name proud, though I do have issues with the fact that the site does not report live making it’s title something of a misnomer.

Next up is foodie Adam who writes for Menu Pages. He says things like:

‘If it weren’t for that pesky financial crash, this Chinese food safety thing would be really big news.’

and this classic:

‘So, um, remember that Swiss Chef we reported on, who was playing with the idea of using human milk in his restaurant dishes?’

Damn the melting financial markets! I will now never know what I clearly need to know about how to safely consume a spring roll and when will I get to drink human milk in a Swiss chalet?

I think we Adam Martin’s can be proud of our virtual literary heritage and if you’re listening Wrestle Adam or Human Milk Adam, please do leave a comment. If you’re not, well I’ll continue to monitor your work like some weird virtual stalker and share it with our 10,000 other readers.

Posted in Me | 3 Comments »      

Last night my 3 year old daughter informed me that she was ‘dropping Tina off at Barbara Cartland’s house.’

Tina is a cabbage patch doll with it’s face coloured blue and Barbara Cartland is a dead ‘…successful English author, known for her numerous romance novels. She also became one of the United Kingdom’s most popular media personalities, appearing often at public events and on television, dressed in her trademark pink and discoursing on love, health and social issues.’ So says Wikipedia.

If she were alive today I’m sure she’d be presenting a show on sexually transmitted disease on BBC3.

My wife and I were amused and perplexed as to how our daughter had come into contact with Barbara. Perhaps her Flemish speaking pal from Antwerp whose hair length is directly related to her constant running and getting lost in museums (according to my daughter), had told her about the dead pop romantic wordsmith? Unlikely, but then sometimes things just happen for no good reason at all.

Much like the death of my Macbook last week. Like Barbara it often appeared at public events and enjoyed discoursing on love, health and social issues. Like Barbara it is dead.

Given my trade in webology, I should have backed up. I even had the Time Machine hooked up and ready to go until a sharp ‘ping’ sound emanated from the Macbook prompting me to re-boot it and leaving me with nothing but a flashing grey folder with a question mark on it.

Nada. Nothing. Gone. Photos, invoices, pitches, proposals, ideas, business plans, the carefully disguised document with all my passwords carefully disguised within it for all my carefully disguised applications, banking and general logon-ness.

Apple Genius Bar were efficient and replaced the hard drive within 24 hours. Somehow being in their store lusting after an ‘I will break it’ Macbook Air made the news that all was lost easier to take.

Days later and now Time Machined up, the new Macbook feels like a new start, sort of digital slash and burn to promote new growth.

It may even make me a better person. I haven’t lost days sifting through my RSS reader or mourning all my lost feeds. I’ve even avoided looking at Techcrunch for 4 weeks, in part due to my wife supplying a son to accompany the daughter and in part due to my dearly departed Macbook. I’d been meaning to delete my Boing Boing feed and my Digg feed for sometime, there’s only so much total crapola you can sift through. I have vowed to treat the web and my reader with more respect.

You will see a new Adam emerge post-ping. My property porn addiction has gone the way of the financial institutions. No more private browsing. I will read only blogs and view only sites I would be proud to introduce to Dame Barbara Cartland, if she were alive and if she were my Gran or something.

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Uncategorized | No Comments »      

Being obese, making crude jokes at our own expense and battering the Fat metaphor until it can be battered no more is fun. It keeps us off the streets where people point and stare. People can be so cruel like that.

But sometimes being unable to wipe your own arse has it’s benefits, notably when your new site gets talked and talked about all over the blogosphere.

Even when you appear in an olde fashioned bookie like Taschen (as in the soft porn coffee table books) who feature Fat Man in their new Guidelines for Online Success.

So it’s a regurgitated thank you to the bloggers and people who have emailed to say how wonderous our new site is, particuarly those people who have enquired about internships and wanting to learn from the team. We love to teach and to preach and I like the smell of peach (in a bathroom).

Revelation of revelations, we’ll shortly be sharing our magic with the world and enabling anyone to have a site that looks kinda like ours. I used the phrase ‘the easyjet of web design’ last night in an internal meeting, which I think gave some fatistas cause for concern, but you get the idea!

Posted in Design Porn, Web Apps | No Comments »      

I’ve been silent for too long, but for good reason, my breeding partner gave birth to a son who we named after a fictional order of intergalactic warriors made famous by George Lucas and the founder of Springfield, the everytown in The Simpsons. Our reasoning certainly stumped the grandparents and to a lesser degree ourselves. But alcohol hand rub, sleeping in hospital chairs and hot plate fry-ups from the canteen can do strange things to the mind.

I’m back so stay tuned, I have 8048 articles to read in my RSS reader, one business plan to write, several lunches to eat and talk webotronics over and world domination to plot.

So what’s on the agenda? Read the rest of this entry »

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