Today, March 11th 2006, is the first birthday of Two Sided Rubber Ducky. This day one year ago the website’s first article was posted, along with the very first Steve Higginson’s Top Ten, and gooey, creamy history was made. While you all may now be recovering from the massive party yesterday that was Chuck Norris’ birthday, you can sit back and relax because we’re not really going to do anything special for the website’s birthday (besides, it’ll be another seventeen years before Two Sided Rubber Ducky can legally buy any alcohol, so it would have been a dry party anyway). Instead of partying like it’s the Willennium, we’re just going to take a look back at some of the more delicious moments of Two Sided Rubber Ducky’s first year on this world.
March 11th, 2005
The first article is posted, entitled “How Are You Gentleman?” in reference to that mightily rousing flash movie All Your Base. The body of the article itself contains but 46 words, reflecting on how much of a lazy bastard I was back then. I’ve since learned that longer articles spread out over several weeks make it look like I do more work. On this day Steve Higginson’s Top Ten Fruit was also posted, marking the first of many, many (well, three) lists that I have compiled. There’s more coming… I swear – why would I lie?
April 22nd, 2005
CuteNews v1.3.6 installed to make updating and editing of the website, to quote, “a hell of a lot easier.” The previous articles were all edited into the CuteNews database and their dates adjusted so that nobody would know what the fuck. Comments were also implanted at this time, but were removed several months later due to being overwhelmed significantly by hordes of poker bots. I trained some special zebras to defend the website, but the bots overpowered them and feasted upon their chewy nougat centres.
May 11th, 2005
Two Sided Rubber Ducky wins Netsoc’s website of the year competition against virtually no competition. The prize is a Nintendo DS. Surprisingly after winning the prize the frequency of articles drops from one per day to one every several days, then to very large gaps in the rest of the summer months that may have been caused by severe heat melting my keyboard – or possibly by high amounts of work and many nights out. Either way, it took the inspiration of Chuck Norris to break a dry spell of nearly two months.
September 28th, 2005
The Latest Features sidebar is created so that those shitty little updates at the bottom of articles never have to pop up again and so those damned features that I put so much time and effort into don’t disappear off the radar when I post a new article. It takes a further SIX of those features to knock one of the top. Also, the much needed and ugly-coded tabling is added. I hate ugly code. I once woke up after a night of heavy drinking to find twelve pages of C on the bed next to me, improperly formatted, breaks and gotos everywhere. Luckily fire solved that problem, as it does most of my problems.
October 3rd, 2005
The Two Sided Rubber Ducky online store is created, with dozens of items to choose from including beautiful and informative t-shirts, hats, bags, postcards, posters and even a frickin’ fridge magnet! So far a grand total of two t-shirts have been sold. One, Steve Higginson’s Yellow T-Shirt, has a hilarious (and deliberate) misspelling on the back. Instead of saying “The Hospital Will Be Underwater” it says “The Hosptial Will Be Underwater”. See? Hilarious, I think you’ll agree.
October 11th, 2005
The Two Sided Rubber Ducky forums are launched and gain several members – nearly a dozen in fact. They quickly become disused and sit in the navigation column, hanging between the Archives and the Shop. No good forums, why won’t you go out and get a goddamn job like the rest of us!
December 23rd, 2005
The world’s first and only actual Two Sided Rubber Ducky is created and presented to me as a Festivus gift. It took only mere hours for it to become lost forever. I cried. Then Jones cried. Then Maggie laughed, she’s such a little trooper!
February 10th, 2006
The infamous debate of “What would you be more afraid of, giant Chocolate Digestives taking over the world or giant BNs doing likewise?” is posted along with the views of several Tokyo citizens. So far, only two people have voted for Chocolate Digestives, but they generally have poor opinions, so we know why.
Those were the major highlights of the first year of this website. Who knows what the future holds for us here. I, for one, am looking for more lasers. LASERS, LASERS, LASERS! But I guess that is all for now so a Happy Christmas to all and to all a goodnight!