My friend Preston needed some, as he put it, therapy in between his exams and so drew a picture of some classic Morphine Nation characters. Because I like pictures, I am posting the picture for us all to gawk at like gawking gawkers.

Currently I am operating on under four hours of sleep. I had to get up early because I needed to get a coach ticket printed and be at the coach stop by 11am. Only problem is, we have six printers in our house not one of them fucking works. Yesterday I attempted to make three of the bastards print. The first one pretended the black ink cartridge was empty no matter how many times I installed the fresh bloody cartridge. The second one printed only in vague lines and the third one, well that was awesome. It printed every single colour.... except black.

So, having to give up eventually, I resolved to get up early in the morning so at the very least I could go out to the library or, as my housemate had suggested, go to Learn Direct and use their printers. After waking up at 8:30am on the couple hours sleep I had, I asked my landlord, aka The Admiral, if he could help. He might have been able to help with the one that won't print black, but it meant leaving the ink cartridge in distilled water for several hours.  He did that anyway, but I didn't have hours, so he gave me yet another printer to use. This printer was designed for use with, let's see.... Windows 95? Yeah.... I didn't even have the right cables for that shit.

With the only other two printers missing a power lead and ink seperately, I was left with but the option of going into town. Maybe the library could help, or as I say, Learn Direct....

Yeaaaah...

The library was closed for renovation until Autumn... and Learn Direct looked abandoned.

I've recently been rewatching Blackadder, and those who were ever fans of the series may recognise the title of this blog entry as a quote from Captain Blackadder in the fourth series, Blackadder Goes Forth. Set in World War I, it was the final series in a show that saw various Edmund Blackadders across history, a genius period sitcom that truly deserves the word fine as an adjective.

Having rewatched almost the entire run, I did of course inevitably come to the final episode, "Goodbyeeeee", set in the final moments of Capt. Blackadder's life, as he and his retinue of idiots are faced with the reality of going "over the top", charging across No Man's Land and into heavy machine gun fire.

As a poignant and harsh truth, this episode has been talked about many, many times over the years and there is nothing more I can add, but I must write about it, for as hackneyed as it is to declare that episode a triumph, it is also very much correct. That last episode, while full of hilarious moments, is not funny perse, it is grim, it is sad and it is so very relevant. Not only does it highlight the insanity of the First World War, the unbearable incompetance of trench warfare and the senseless waste of life that was "going over the top", but also it throws light upon the futility of war in and of itself, more than any "serious" piece of art has done, in my mind.

Here we have Blackadder, Darling, George and Baldrick, a group of characters we've gotten to know over the course of the series, gotten to like, for Blackadder's caustic wit and the naive idiocy of George and Baldrick, and because of a pointless war, everything that made them great was cut to pieces by machine gun fire. In the closing few seconds of the show, the nasty, ill tempered Blackadder who often wished death on his comrades said with a sobering and fearful voice, "Good luck everyone". The way Rowan Atkinson delivered that final line was just... chilling. No more bravado, no more quips, just a final wish of luck.

And the message of the episode is incredibly true. Baldrick innocently asks "Why does there have to be a war? Why can't we all just stop?" George, who is in love with the war, can't answer him. Blackadder, who sarcastically responds to every stupid thing Baldrick says, just sits in silence, the look on his face saying it all. One can't just stop a war, but there is no reason why one shouldn't be able to.

Anyway, just had to get that out of my system. I don't know if any comedy show has ever approached the power of that single, amazing half hour of entertainment. I don't know if there ever will. I do but hope I can utilise humour half as expertly as Richard Curtis did to get across a message.

Now go watch Blackadder you ignorant cunts.

- Jim.

Once there was this kid who got into an accident and couldn't come to school, but when he finally came back his hair and turned from black into bright white. He said that it was from when the cars smashed him so hard.

Yeah, so I've got that fucking song stuck in my head, and it's driving me mad. The lyrics are piss-poor, as evidenced above, the singer's voice is beyond silly, even the title is beyond stupid. But I really like it. I don't know why. Maybe I'm a fucking idiot.

Leo informs me he found a digital camera that can record three whole cunting minutes of video footage. Look forward to videos coming at you soon... that last three minutes... if we can be fucked. Actually, us getting fucked might make a good video. We could stick it on Pornotube Dot Com and revel in it. Fucking revel.

That's it. Nobody's going to read this anyway. Shut up.

I don't really have anything interesting to say here, I just get cheap kicks from posting in this blog. Although seeing as I am here, I should probably shill something. Sign up for the MN forums, and participate in Political Hot or Not- the best judging of political sexiness on the entire Internetweb.

 

Scorpion was the best one from Mortal Kombat.

 

-Luke

Aaaah, there's nothing like progress, my friends.

As one of, if not the only websites in the comedy genre that is able to update almost daily without ever watering down the content quality, it's not surprising that the website's core readership keeps our hits nicely ticking every day. Simply rule - make sure there is always something new and people will always come back if they like what they see.

However, the level of success we've had, while surely not enough to impress the great luminaries of the internet writer elite - yet - is rather amazing for a website that's still small potatoes. In the past three month's, Morphine Nation's traffic ranking on Alexa went up 300%. We scaled 1.8Million rank positions in that time period. To put it another way - a three month period saw Morphine Nation become more popular than 1.8 million other sites. I'm a humble guy, really, but I do take pride in that, just a little.

And this is even before we've started to proactively promote the website, something I still need to find the time to do. The Myspace account was a fantastic idea (had by my lovely other half), but there's always more to do. Still, the very fact that we climbed this high completely through the sheer quality of the website speaks volumes, I feel.

Juuuust thought I'd blow my own horn for a bit. Myspace - It's like fishfood for your ego.

- Jim.

Hola muchachos, snowflakes, it's your friendly neighbourhood Morphine Jim here, absolutely bored out of his skull and with no girlfriend or interesting people about to occupy me, so I might as well waste all our time by writing here like a cock. Oh and with simply SO much to write about. Ha.

Last night we recorded Station Nation, the first official one since the move. Personally I'm not too sure how well it went. There was some real hilarity in there, but most of the discussion was about dead wrestlers. Ah well, only twelve people listen to the show, so who gives a fuck, eh?

I knew we wouldn't be able to permanantly host Station Nation on the new servers until I had the moolah to get more space, but fortunately I know lots of people with webspace, and Mike Maloney from The Oratory offered us a place to host shows. It has to be said, the irony of The Oratory hosting stuff for The Nation is... well. I'd probably have to tell you many private reasons why that is hilarious. But it's fun stuff.

Things are going so excellently for the website now it's simply amazing. Extreme tracker shows more hits than ever, and while Extreme tracker can't be trusted, the fact the numbers have increased is still an excellent sign regardless. We appear to have lost absolutely nothing with the downtime and the resulting server switch - in fact we seem only to have gained. The mainpage material has been regarded as highly as ever, with Skeletors never being more successful and Luke pulling out all the stops with some quality work. The return of Cane/Hat Man has also proven to show that Morphine Nation is entering the new era on top form.

Furthermore, I must express my extreme pleasure in the success of The Morphorums 2.0. Seems my plan of rebuilding from scratch on a new server worked perfectly and The Phorums are exactly how I want them. My frustration at the direction the community had taken was well known to everyone, and hopefully my pride and satisfaction on what has been an excellent fresh start isn't lost either. Once again I look forward to visiting the board, rather than dread whatever fresh annoyances might be left while I was gone.

Since we're now on a board joined purely for Morphine Nation (predominantly), and since it took people the effort of tracking us down and signing up again, we're now left with all the people who actually gave a shit and care about the board, and it's nice to see the place flourish. The amount of people who joined in such a short time makes me smile, too.

Anyway, I now have both my girlfriend AND interesting people to occupy me, so I leave you like a whore in the night. Have fun kids, and remember - we're really quite good.

- Jim.

Hello, hello, this isn't Jim speaking. I knocked him out with a wooden orang-utan, and hid him in my fridge. He better not drink all of my milk. To the point…

Do you ever have one of those days where you have an urge to post something just because you need the attention? I need the attention. Feed me the golden meaty chunks of attention, lest I starve to death like an Ethiopian who doesn't get any attention...

Anyway, the Nu Morphine Nation forums have been up for a good few days now, and loads of the former regulars have signed up again. The posts are flowing like red wine. Expensive wine, too, not the £5.99 stuff from Sainsbury's. One of the great new things about the newer forums is that we're now absolutely totally free of any censorship that we don't choose for ourselves, which I personally think is the most important feature of our unwritten constitution. I imagine that some people are naturally going to choose to be offended, but that's a problem they're going to have to deal with themselves. They can take it out on their kids.

But I digress. I suppose that I've always seen the uncensored nature of Morphine Nation and the Morphorums not as an attempt to insult and offend everyone in the world (although that's a nice by-product), but as an expression of complete freedom of speech. Well, there are quite a lot of people we did mean to insult and offend, but they're all losers anyway. Go us!

But if MN has taught me anything, it's taught me this; if you're prejudiced towards everyone in the world, then nobody can claim that they're being victimised.

Go forth and spread the message.

Right, I'm feeling less insecure now. I'm off to the Bitchfest forum. The real one.

-Luke

 

Things are still being set up and configured, but officially, there are now Morphine Forums in the land once more. All are welcome to come by and check them out. There are still some bugs and kinks to get fixed, but we wanted everyone to know that we do have a "home" now.

Go here to give them a look-see.