Or rather, due to the constraints of the workings of the modern blogging system, drawing a line over it all:

The end. We couldn’t even close the site properly. You’ve had the riotous encore, now please exit the venue :(

It’s time. Or rather, it was time about three years ago and we have only just got around to making it formal.

I’m going out. Might be some time. Save me a few of those Sonic The Hedgehog pasta shapes, if they haven’t gone rotten inside the tin. Thanks for everything, everyone. It’s been character defining.

…we shall be moving HEAVEN AND EARTH (trying to find a VGA cable) and maybe actually playing Sonic The Hedgehog 4 today.

But only maybe. It’s been a long time since we last held a video game controller, and it may trigger unsettling flashbacks.

Sorry. Still no “Blue Sky in Games” t-shirts as the moment’s kind of passed and it’d just be embarrassing bringing them “to market” after all this time.

Instead… BUSINESSMEN. Sorry. Again.

These aren’t really meant for you. But we do need to sell 40 of them to break even, so they’re getting spammed across the whole [makes hands into fists] “network”. We got 100 made. It was a big infrastructure investment.

If they don’t sell from this, we’ll set up a stall selling them at the next farmer’s market (LOCAL JOKE).

They’re £8.99 each plus a bit extra for the envelope and stamp. You know how that works. That’s less than you spend on childrens’ toys in a week.

We have put on date jokes. The first few months are good, then it kind of tales off as you have hopefully come to expect.

They’re being sold through PayPal, so scroll down if you want one or, preferably, all 100 so we can sleep easily tonight without checking for email sales confirmations through the night.

These are PROPER NOT JOKE items, printed on A4 glossy photo paper by these people. Their testimonials page will convince you of the quality.

WHY BUY THESE?

– They have been made and it would be a shame to see them binned in 18 months.

– As an ironic gift for your ironic tosser friend who wears ironic t-shirts that, ironically, aren’t really even that ironic.

– As a gay thing.

– To waste everyone’s time.

– It’ll be nice getting something in the post.

BUY ONE NOW:

UPDATE:
They have now, amazingly and unbelievably, all sold out. And sorry to the person who got the one we scribbled all over. It got mixed up with the proper ones.

How does this affect UKR?

It doesn’t. Hooray! There now follows a dull but factually correct account of the UKR/Shiny Media period, for those of you who like paying attention to the press releases. Don’t worry, this isn’t today’s proper update. You do not have to read it.

THE SHINY MEDIA STORY
By Gary J. Cutlack

In June of 2007, high on venture money, Shiny Media bought ukresistance.co.uk and IdiotToys.com off me for a large-ish, but not life-changing, sum of money. This made me go like this:

:)

Two-thirds of the cash was paid on completion of the deal – on the day I started working for them full time – with the final third payable after I’d been at the company for one year, just in case I went mad and run off as soon as they paid me.

Everything was good for a bit. I worked from home four days a week, went berserk on Xboxer to the delight of hardly anyone, and enjoyed pretending to know about gadgets on Tech Digest – while actually being paid to update Idiot Toys and UKR. Happy days were there.

After nearly a year, in April of 2008, it became clear that Shiny was having financial problems as it chopped freelance budgets for the second or third time since I’d started, closed sites and dumped many good people, so I offered them the olive branch of giving me UKR.co.uk back in return for me waiving the final third of the payment.

They agreed. Which again made me go like this:

:)

It was doubly great, as UKR was 48 hours away from being switched to the utterly horrendous Shiny Media template of terror with an “outsourced Romanian web developer” (YES, REALLY!) apparently in charge of putting the UKR content onto the Shiny content management system.

Thank Christ that never happened, eh?

And that was that. I got to work from home, called a cunt on YouTube 10,000 times, while Shiny got pretty much nothing and is now apparently dead in its current form.

The end.

Has anyone who is interested in this sort of thing got any questions?

Dan Bull, who did that song about games we did a thing about a while ago, and who may be a #1 in the charts at this very moment thanks to an aggressive internet marketing campaign for all we know about modern music, has recorded a Dreamcast verse for that ‘Generation Gaming‘ rap of his.

And he used the lyrics we wrote. You should’ve said, Dan, and we’d have put a bit more effort into making them rhyme and made it the same length as the other verses so it fitted in better.

Here’s Dan doing our Dreamcast verse.

Thanks, Dan! We’re off to Facebook to become a fan of Dan Bull WITHOUT even having to be asked. How do you like THAT, Richard?

DIRECT DOWNLOAD
If the embedded player doesn’t work or if you want to have a copy of it for when the embedded player inevitably stops working for no apparent reason, the file’s here. We are assuming we are allowed to do this seeing as we’re co-writers on this.

WHAT NEXT FOR THE UKR LYRICS TEAM?
We’re going to pitch a few songs for Kylie’s next album. Even if she says no they might get picked up by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

You now have to register a custom UKR user name in order to leave a comment calling people you don’t know child-eating cunts.

Then, when you call someone a child-eating cunt, you can be easily and painlessly deleted from history as if you never even existed and all the little children will come back to life. Look! They’re playing by the swings and are all happy! It was just a dream. You’d never consciously do something that bad after all.

It will therefore be nicer around here ‘going forward’. This is because more people read the internet nowadays and we have to be more careful. Blame Stephen Fry.

So that’s how it has to be from now on, thanks to the efforts of a small number of collaborators who were spreading evil propaganda on behalf of the enemy.

ABOUT THE MINOR CHANGES

The site’s now “powered” by WordPress.

It took ages to do. Many combat hours were wasted on this pointless administrative task.

You can now bagsie your own UKR username FOR EVER.

So don’t rush into it. Think it through. You may well want to be called “Tails4Eva” now, but will you still want to be called “Tails4Eva” 15 years from now when you are married and a senior IT technician working for British Telecom?

You probably won’t. We regret being “Commander Zorg” and that’s nothing like as bad as “Tails4Eva”.

Have fun.

Business will, as ever, proceed until one of us dies.

The RSS thing is probably broken again.