penbryn

April Fools Day

April Fools Day has always been an oppertunity for me to get back at the ineffective dickheads that are the management of Penbryn Hall at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. This year was no exception. Building upon the success of my last big prank, Penbryn-Hall.co.uk, a spoof ‘official’ site which almost got me expelled from the hall, this year I worked with Kit, Bryn and Claire in order to cause yet more chaos.

We had a plan in mind already, but when Penbryn sent out the following message on the internal e-mail system, we couldn’t help but pounce on an oppertunity:

From: Eiryls Evans <eee@aber.ac.uk>
Date: 28/03/2003 13:46
To: hall-penb-4@aber.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Maintenance Checks

Dear Student

On Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd April, Mark and I will be doing a maintenance inspection in student rooms.

This will involve checking for repairs and lights which are not working.
We will be starting in Block 1 at 10.30 am

If you have any problems e.g. desk lamp not working and would like a new bulb, please call at Reception.

Margaret Woodliff
Deputy Manager

A few things immediatley stand out in this e-mail. One is that the name at the bottom is not the same name as the person it appears to come from. A second is that it is not provided in Welsh, and is therefore in contravention of the University’s billingual policy…

…the third, and stupidest of the lot, is that they arranged to do room inspections on the first of April.

So, we thought… all we have to do is spread some more convincing (not difficult, considering) counter-publicity, stating that this e-mail was actually a student prank, and that there will not be any room inspections after all. We could even go so far as to state that we suspect that this e-mail may be the prelude to an attempt to gain unauthorised access to student’s study bedrooms. Mayhem in the making.

We came up with a poster that expressed pretty much this, and stuck copies up all over the hall. And it worked! People were absolutely convinced that our posters were real and the real e-mail was the hoax. In the end, the management had to spend their Sunday walking round from room-to-room knocking on student’s doors and assuring them that the e-mail was the genuine article. Oh; how I laughed.

The poster is available to download as an Adobe Acrobat file, below.

Download The Poster
Adobe Acrobat (PDF); 22KB.
The actual poster which was put up around Penbryn Hall for April Fools Day 2003.

Scatman’s World

[this page was originally posted to AvAngel.com but is archived here; the links have been adapted to improve usability]

Introduction

After playing around for some time with Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Premiere, I decided it was time to make a cool music video that quite blatantly took the piss out of Bagpuss, a friend of mine with whom I used to share lodgings at University. I believe that when he saw it, his exact words were “I’m going to kill him.”

Well, not content with having made a fool out of him, my next project was to make a fool out of myself (what do you mean, I do that all the time anyway!)… and so my next video project was…

Scatman’s World

After my nickname among many folks in Aberystwyth, Scatman Dan (a reference, of course, to the late Scatman John), I made this music video, which made it’s big-screen premiere at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre Cinema on Saturday 4th May 2002 (after a two-week delay caused by numerous technical problems). And now, for your viewing pleasure, it’s available to download here (it’s a DixX-encoded file, so you’ll need an appropriate player). Being, as it is, filled from top to bottom with in-jokes, it’s probably not even remotely funny if you don’t know who I am.

Download The Video

Warning : This file is just under 30MB in size, and will take a considerable amount of time to download, even on a fast connection. You have been warned.

Warning : Owing to explicit content, this video is not suitable for viewing by anybody under the age of 18 years, without parental consent and supervision.

Note : It is recommended that you attempt to save this file to your hard disk, rather than attempting to play it directly from the site, as this corrects a lot of potential download problems with this file. In most browsers, this can be achieved by right-clicking on the link and selecting “Save File As…” or “Save Target As…”.

[the download is no longer hosted here, but you can view the video on YouTube]

AvAngel.com Censorship Lifted

After a bit of a battle between Information Services at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and I, resulting in the semipermanent blocking of the Unversity’s right to see www.penbryn-hall.co.uk, and the temporary blocking of AvAngel.com (Woohoo! I’m officially censored by the University), access to the site from the University’s network is now re-opened. Thanks to everybody who gave me the support I needed to go and tell them where to shove it…