Team FishBlog - The weblog of British original comedy website Team Fishcake

A New Website

2009-11-12T08:44:00.006Z

On Saturday 14th November, teamfishcake will have a new website and a few new articles for you to read. It won't be the first overhaul performed on our website in it's filthy sordid history...

The website started in 1996, back when the internet was a primordial soup of obscurity - it was basically only used by people with beards who liked to stare at weather map images. Our website consisted of static html pages, which made the site a nightmare to update everytime we had something new to publish. Also, the more content you had stored, the more work it would become each time you wanted to update the site. As much time was spent maintaining the website as was spent on producing actual articles.

Scripting languages like PHP began to really take off in the early 2000's. PHP allows you to perform various tricks that, basically, make running and maintaining a website much easier and much more automatic. Since I was involved in a couple of voluntary/hobby organisations, I started to pick up bits of PHP from the people who ran websites for those organisations.

Despite getting our own www.teamfishcake.co.uk address in 2000, we still had a static HTML based website and we were producing quite a lot of content. In 2002, we released our first video onto the internet (3 years before the advent of YouTube). We continued to battle through 2003, until finally....

Our first PHP coded website went live in mid-2004 - although it seems like decades ago. The website and messageboard were integrated and this caused a surge in interest in our forums. Quite a lot of original content and some silly games like truth or dare were played out with our readers. The forums have died down since then because people prefer to hang out on Facebook, which is too bad.

In 2006, we changed the website around a bit. We improved the way it worked a little, and we tried to make it look better. Overall, I think the design is better, but I think the site became less intuitive and harder to navigate.

This Saturday, the new design should be somewhere inbetween. We hope it looks good, but we also want people to be able to find their way around more easily. Other things we hope people will like are the integration of social networking sites and a blog/editorial area that we can update more regularly. It can be frustrating to write silly stuff that perhaps wouldn't justify an entire article, but now we have a spot where we can put it. This is the biggest overhaul of the website since 2004, and hopefully it should last us for a while.

Speaking of articles, we have a few bits and pieces that we have lined up for release over the next few weeks. We hope to get our latest video "Baby Sham" released before Christmas. And don't worry, as you can see from the thumbnail preview of the new site, it will still have lots of blue colour to it ;)

The new site should be live by 10am on Saturday 14th November.

Strange Sound In Stockport Area At Night

2009-10-08T09:00:00.002+01:00

Hello.
It's been ages since anyone has written on here. Sorry about that.

You know, it was about this time last year that Mr Mike Thorpe of teamfishcake went trawling through the list of statistics that we get from our lovely website. As most people know, it's possible to find out how people came across your website. Everytime a new (or regular!) reader searches for something on Google and they then click through to our website, we can see what they searched for.

This is useful to find out how people find our website. It's also useful to find out ways that people aren't finding out website, so we know we need to change something.

It's also quite entertaining because you get to see people searching for some really very strange things indeed. I've dredged up a few examples I found from the thousands that have been recorded over the last year, which I have split into sections.

Unnatural Things

asparagus kettle
winged gay wolf
czech family says they've got a rabbit with three knobs
Inside out gay lizards
genuine moon cheese

Searches in the form of a question/Research/People Looking For help

what is the strange sound in stockport area at night
my rover 416 won't start
how to open a packet of crisps upside down
i want to make sentences with the word crust grunt
trees that are psychologically good [as opposed to ones that are psychotically bad?]
there's a horse in my bathroom - help
do formula 1 drivers go for a wee in their cars
how difficult is medicine, chat rooms [maybe this was Hugh Laurie researching?]
why is my toy car is moving on its own even though the battery is dead
is spock half nun?

Bum related - There's always lots of these

anatomy of a fart
trousers down animation
daniel bum hole
how to breathe with eggy farts
fart noises around the world

Medical Complaints - Or things that sound like they should be

fridge cu*ting
her bladder in fear
what happens if I ate too many apricots
noisy diarrhoea

The Sexual - Tons of these, but most are too depraved

just let me touch it with the tip
girls whipping horses
bergerac strippoker
piss fucking
masturbating into his shoes
flashing knickers in church
superman fucks into sky [There are loads related to superman doing odd things - including one searching for 'superman credit card fraud']

Wardrobe Related - Someone was constantly searching for stuff about wardrobes, so it gets its own category

inside wardrobes
people inside warbrobes
i climbed inside my wardrobe
what are wardrobes made out of
wardrobe hitler jug

People who found our site in an unlikely manner

pedigree chum coupons
toy cars that turns flat down & goes up itself [Is this the worst possible way to explain Transformers?]
buy some knickers with musical notes on
shed plinths

The surreal - I don't even know what these people wanted

my other brick is...
lady with two jugs on the path
leek humour
humour parcel
children eat spider goat died
funny writings in knickers

People trying to start a conversation with Google

can I call you back?
how is david?
hello?

The psychologically unhinged

you don't know how much I have been through I nearly died
how to control murderous thoughts
aids fishcake
daddy i am your bitch

See you next year!

Non Specific Love Song

2009-04-05T20:24:00.001+01:00

Phil has done a singy-music-audio-song about a woman he's never met, but would probably like to. It's lovely.

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Non_Specific_Love_Song

Immigration Antipathy

2009-03-08T22:57:00.002Z

Immigration Antipathy is the latest article by Stu Hall

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Immigration_Antipathy

"People are neurotic with the fear that "The British Identity" is being lost, but the loss of identity is always put at the door of immigrants "coming here, speaking their own languages, taking our jobs and refusing to adapt to our way of life". Well surely to Christ it's more of a loss to "British Identity" each time a British person emigrates?"

See it here:
http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Immigration_Antipathy

Why I don't date

2009-02-10T17:52:00.001Z

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Why_I_Dont_Date

"I'm quite a pragmatic person. Some would say cynical. Actually, so would I. I'm quite a cynical person. I haven't always been that way. Well, I have. But I'm trying to introduce a story in an amusing fashion, and by God if I have to tell lies, then so be it."

By the way, we got over 25,000 unique visits to our Deliberately Inaccurate Calendar. RESULT!

Deliberately Inaccurate 2009 Calendar

2009-01-04T10:18:00.004Z

Here's the latest one:

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Deliberately_Inaccurate_2009_Calendar

It's basically a calendar that we've made several deliberate mistakes on. It appears normal, and it starts off accurate, but slowly it gets more and more wrong. I'd be interested to find out how long it manages to stay in peoples' offices for :D

The first calendar I did was the 2001 "Animals and Swearing" calendar and we've done a few more as well. There have been a couple of times where I've wanted to do a repeat of them, but to be honest, that sort of thing is all over the place now, so I thought I'd try something different. The second Team Fishcake feature in a row that's got child-friendly humour in it! It was tempting to fill the 2009 calendar up with vulgarity, but I thought "Nah - let's just keep it nice and clean, it's more of a challenge".

Don't worry though - we've still got a puerile sense of humour, and that will probably show itself off again very soon.

Shitty arses.

Mike

TV Tray Love Song

2008-11-27T12:04:00.002Z

"You know that I love you, my TV Tray..."

This is a brilliant song created by Phil. We filmed the video in Phil's house in Trowbridge, and Reddish Vale in Stockport. There were a few scenes that we actually removed from the video, as they were a bit rude, and we thought seeing as the song lyrics were completely clean, it would spoil the feel of the video if they were thrown in.

Anyway, it's here, have a look and listen and let us know what you think.

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/TV_Tray_Love_Song

Connect Radio 4

2008-11-24T10:47:00.001Z

What are you doing with those AXES?? Anyway. Another great show featuring a whole gumph-load of gusset sweating stuff, although mostly it's just about video games. And it's all made up.

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Connect_Radio_Show_Four

Dangerous Times

2008-11-14T13:37:00.005Z

wOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

We have done a new little video for you to enjoy.

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Dangerous_Times

Watch the video, then read on.

This was created a few years ago when Stu was still in the UK, but we've only just got round to releasing it now. It was recorded in a Travelodge in Stockport (although it could be a Travelodge anywhere really, couldn't it?).

The thing I remember most about this was that we'd all been for a massive meal earlier on that day, and just as John was getting in the bath fully clothed, I got a massive pain in my stomach and had to evacuate my bowels, there and then.

John couldn't get out of the bath with his clothes on, because he would have wet the floor. He couldn't have taken them off, because it's nigh on impossible to put on wet clothes, so he had to sit in the bath whilst I did poo-poos. That was truly disturbing for both of us.

The Day Mr John Died

2008-11-06T15:49:00.002Z

In a follow up to 'The Days I Nearly Died', Mr John writes about the times he too came perilously close to death.

Read The Day Mr John Died, which tells the tale of the THREE, count them, THREE times Mr John has almost been assainated by his special "friend".

"Did I mention Gaz gets bored easily? You know short-attention spans? His is cosmic. He could lose interest in the middle of a car crash in which he might be involved"

The Days I Nearly Died: Part 2

2008-10-29T23:14:00.003Z

Part Two of The Days I Nearly Died is now up on the teamfishcake.co.uk website. That's T-E-A-M - F-I-S-H-C-A-K-E.

"You don't want to argue with a Boeing 747 traveling at 500mph. Not when you're flying around in something which offers as much protection against a jetliner as you'd get from a sheet of crepe paper"

I nearly died! If you're any kind of a human being, you'll be interested in reading it. Do so here:
http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/The_Days_I_Nearly_Died_Part_2

The Days I Nearly Died

2008-10-21T03:24:00.003+01:00

I've just published a new article on the teamfishcake website called The Days I Nearly Died. This is part one. Part two will be online next week.

Part One is about a trip I took to Scotland and a failed attempt to climb Ben Nevis. Just go and read it!

The Days I nearly DIED.

Part Two will be about a ride around in a light aircraft which I took, where things went a bit wrong.

A quick test favour

2008-10-11T16:55:00.001+01:00

We've made a new front page (it's not the actual proper front page yet), but when we were testing it, we had a few issues with browsers not responding, and page content being spread all over the place. We think we've fixed it now, but can you do us a favour and click on the page to see if it looks fine and plays ok?

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/index-intro.php

Let us know what operating system and browser you're using.

Cheers
Mike & Phil

University of Shite

2008-10-07T14:25:00.003+01:00

Bwaaaarp! Bwaaaarp! It's another new article from Mr Phil Fishcake - A prospectus for the University of Shite. It made me laugh anyway!

Cheers

Mike

Diana Mayonaise's list of lists THREE

2008-10-02T15:53:00.003+01:00

I do love creating these. Stu, Phil and I created this one, this time, and some of what those whores came up with really did make me piddle myself.

So, without further ado, have a look at our silly collection of lists and that.

Mike

Egyptian Man Who Died From Farting

2008-10-01T11:42:00.002+01:00

Yes. "Egyptian Man Who Died From Farting".

One of the phrases that someone searched for to end up at teamfishcake.co.uk.

One of the great (but geeky) things about analysing web stats is the collection of truly, truly bizarre, bizarre keywords and other things people use to get to the site. Somewhere on our site there are pages with certain combinations of words. They don't have to be in the correct order, but in this case, Louise's "World O' Guff" article contains the word "Egypt", "Man", "Farting" and "died". Although they're not in the same sentence, they do all appear on the same page.

So, here's a collection of my "favourite" phrases people have used to find our site in the last 6 weeks:

"hemmorhoids" (95 visits!)
"fucking competition" (13 visits)
"megabladder supping" (7 visits. Yuk.)
"santa catapult" (2 visits)
"if both your ears were on the same side of " (...I don't know if the stats program just cut that off)
"pig buggery"
"aquarius washing machines are shite"
"billy connolly manhole cover"
"bum party"
"dream about a door that doesn't close what does it mean"
"finger of fudge actor"
"geoff capes divorce"
"painful lump in my anus"
"pissing water out of my arse"
"quicksand tennis"
"scary christmas bum bum"
"surreal typewriter"

There are hundreds, hundreds more.

People scare me.

Follow up to teamfishcake on RevverLive

2008-09-14T04:13:00.002+01:00

Our video "(Heavy Metal) Otters" was featured on revver.com's daily live webcast on Friday. The show is broadcast from Hollywood everyday at 9pm UK time. They show the days most talked about videos and viewers can take part in live debate via the channels chatroom.

We appeared towards the end of the show - we were the last video to be seen, in fact. At the end of the show the host and the chat room participants chose their favourite(s) from thos shown. We had the fortunate psychological advantage of being shown last and thus being fresh in the memory.

The video was generally well received. Apparently someone in the chatroom didn't like it, but Mike Fishcake Thorpe (who was representing us there) was busy confusing everyone present by talking gibberish. A few people said Otters was their favourite video.

You can watch an archive of the show by visiting: http://www.livevideo.com/liveshow/Revverlive
The archives are listed below the video box, and you're looking for the show from 12/09/2008.

teamfishcake on RevverLive

2008-09-12T15:46:00.002+01:00

We recently received notification from Revver.com, a video sharing community, that they would be featuring us on their daily live webcast. Tonight at 9pm UK time, you can watch our Otters video right here:
http://www.livevideo.com/liveshow/Revverlive

There will also be discussion amongst viewers. You can take part at the same URL (registration required). So tune in at 9pm tonight (Friday 12th) and big us up!

Take A Tour

2008-09-09T14:10:00.002+01:00

Hello. I thought that I would write a little something here about how I came to teamfishcake and then a little bit about some of my favourite articles on the teamfishcake website. I'll try to keep it short and snappy. I know text can be hard on the eyes and that you'd rather be watching a cartoon of two fighting dwarfs throwing planets at one another.

I started to contribute to teamfishcake sometime in the middle of the year 2000, but before then I was a big fan of the website. I'd been following the updates to the site for about three years. Back then I only had semi-regular access to the internet, so I often had to read the site in my local library. This had the disadvantage that I had to try to stifle my laughter away from the stern ladies glowering at me from over the top of their spectacles.

Since those early days, the site has been more regularly updated with content and one or two people have come and gone. There have been some good, productive times and there have been some not-so-good, quiet times. In the early 2000's, we were doing some fairly unique things as far as websites go. We started to upload videos back when it was quite a novelty.

These days, there are millions of websites that are screaming for the attention of a society of surfers who are less willing to put in the effort to find content and certainly less willing to spend the time reading plain text when they'd rather be watching content in video form. It's hard for an amateur outfit with no financial backing to compete with media outfits able to spend money on publicity campaigns through organisations who know how to manipulate search engines, blogs and social networking websites like facebook. If we were to attempt to compete with that, we'd be spending far too much time not producing actual content.

Having said all of that, we do manage to stick our heads above the rabble from time-to-time. Most recently with our Otters video. Social networking websites and link sharing websites like StumbleUpon help because genuine and original content is able to spread by word-of-mouth. Both are susceptible to marketing ploys, and StumbleUpon is already a target of fake marketing accounts who spam the websites of their clients.

Whatever happens, hopefully we can continue to enjoy being creative and make people laugh. That's all we really want to do. That's why, incidentally, we'd love it if you could tell your friends about us. Word-of-mouth is the best way that we can hope to reach new people.

The thing with the teamfishcake site is... it's more than 10 years old. Despite a few cullings, the content has accrewed. Hopefully everything on the site has something going for it, but inevitably some stuff is better than others and that stuff can be tough to find. The real gems can easily be forgotten about. Of course what constitutes a gem is subjective. Finally getting to the point, here are some of the pieces, in no particular order, that I consider to be gems.

Too Dark To See

This video took cocking ages to put together. From conception through planning, writing, scripting, actually filming it and producing it, we literally put in hundreds of hours. It's the most ambitious project that we have completed to date. It's less accessible than other videos we've put together and requires some patience to watch. It was pretty well received by people who run websites similar to ours, which was quite satisfying. Of course there's people on youtube who will always call it shit.

Go Drive Yourself

Another video which was a large undertaking with hours and hours of work. I've tried to list the creations of the other guys from teamfishcake rather than my own, but couldn't resist listing this video in which I play a driving instructor. It was great fun to film, and I think featured one of the most productive filming sessions we've had.

The Seman

Although this isn't one of my TOP, TOP favourites, I'm listing it because it's the most popular creations on the website. From the head of Mike and featuring the singing of Louise, this became extremely viral. This video has had more 'hits' than everything else on the website combined.

Radio Mr John | Part 3 | 2006 Special

If teamfishcake had their own radio station then this kind of head-fuckery would probably be on most of the time. There were three installments of Radio Mr John and a one-off 2006 special.

Generic Sad Song From A Movie

One of Dan's best songs, in my opinion. Greatly under-rated. If it wasn't so much work, I'd love to take a few clips from films to go along with this song to make a youtube video!

My Grandad (Is A Prostitute)

One of Dan's most popular tracks. It became extraordinarily viral and is really rather funny and accessible.

Chi-Ki-Kok!

Mr John banged out a number of "Short Attention Span Cartoons". Cartoons that last just a few seconds, of which this insane creation is my favourite.

Fdyhsfre!

Old-skool teamfishcake. This photostory makes me laugh time and time again, even though it dates from sometime in the 90's

Mark Palmer's Sanitation / Nailbomb

Mark has drifted away from teamfishcake, which is a shame. His socio-political commentary is often scathing and his observations often hilarious.
There's a good few articles by Mark. Here is just one of them.

Psychologically Unsound Guides

The guides were around from the beginning and they remain some of the most unhinged articles on the site.

Dr Volvohead

Insane cartoon with little or no overall point, which makes it all the more funny. My favourite cartoon on the site.

Lastly, some "Honourable Mentions"

What's Going On?! - Video quality isn't very good else I'd have mentioned it above. This is my favourite sketch video because it's just so insane and all over the place.

Michael Buerks Christmas Rampage - Bizarre cut-out-and-keep board game featuring BBC News presenters. You choose a character who has to stop Michael Beurk in his tracks. Each presenter has special X-Men style powers of absolutely no consequence.

Droitwich Rock City - Funny song, great video. An anti-tourist video of Droitwich-Spa, a fairly irrelevant town (sorry) in middle-England. The comments on youtube about this video are just full of arguments.

Note: We are still giving away free teamfishcake stickers to people that join our fan page on facebook. Read under "Information" to find out how to claim your stickers.

Free TeamFishStickers

2008-09-09T09:03:00.002+01:00

Hello babies.

You can get Free TeamFishStickers from our facebook fan page if you sign up. Woo!

Welcome to the teamfishblog

2008-09-08T14:40:00.002+01:00

SHUT UP, YOU.

This is the Team Fishcake blog where we announce new articles and talk a bit about them. Yes.