If you’ve been listening to Villainy INC for a while now, you know that for some odd reason summers are murder on this show. We usually go on hiatus, audio quality takes a massive hit, and I resort to drinking to dull the pain.

Well worry not our faithful listeners because it looks like the worst is behind us. I’ve just recorded a couple episodes with M and I’m going to try and schedule recordings with WK and SM (I’m far too lazy to type the full names) soon. I’ve also got my mixing board and microphone here, so I don’t have to use the “ghetto” setup of having a crappy logitech mic and turning the sensitivity up all the way.

Also the booze finally ran out so I’m finally sober enough to edit.

I don’t want to give a definant date, but they’ll most likly start airing next Friday. If not, the next Friday.

While finding a job and getting my paperwork in order really contributed to our absence, listed here are the real culprits behind the massive delay in episodes:

1. Super Mario Galaxy 2
2. Final Fantasy XIII
3. Mass Effect 2
4. Team Fortress 2
5. Transformers: War for Cybertron
6. Sin and Punishment: Star Succusor
7. Resident Evil 4

Shame on you vidja games! Especially you Final Fantasy XIII! You took me 2 months to beat. That could have been 2 months of editing podcasts!

I don’t want to unintentionally scare anyone but Villainy INC’s future might not look so hot. Every year the podcast and website loss money as I pay hosting, equipment, and miscellaneous fees. I’ve never minded this because I love making the podcast. However this year I’m graduating college and I’ll have to worry about jobs and money. I’ve always hoped our ad boxes would help the site break even, but as you can see from the ads we usually get it’s people only bidding a cent (or less).

However if we could get traffic up on the site, the value of the ad boxes would go up and the site would break even. If we could get the price of just one ad box up to 30 cents, it would cover hosting fees and other costs for the entire year.

The best way I’ve found to do this stumbleupon.com. In case you didn’t know, Stumbleupon is a website where you randomly visit sites that match your interests. It’s great (I use it often) and Villainy INC is listed in their directory. However because we don’t have any reviews or thumbs up yet we don’t get stumbled. That’s where you all come in.

PLEASE WRITE OUR WEBSITE A REVIEW AND GIVE US A THUMBS UP ON STUMBLEUPON. All you have to do is click the thumbs up button in your browser when you visit our site. It’s that easy. Also it wouldn’t even need to be a long review. You could just type the word “great” or “derp” and it would help us! If you’ve enjoyed the work we’ve put into making this show week after week, then please help us out by giving us a thumbs up in Stumbleupon. Here’s the link to our Stumbleupon page: http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.villainyinc.com/

If there was ever I time we need your guy’s help it’s now. I’m doing behind the scenes stuff to help raise traffic, but we still need your help. I’d also like to add that if the total price of our add boxes reached 60 cents, we could have another video game giveway and still have enough left over to do something else for you guys. Just throwing that out there.

A couple months ago the podcast player started acting strangely. It stayed out late, came home smelling of booze, got belligerent you asked where it was. Eventually it would start throwing things at your head and then break down in tears 30 minutes later. We were sad to see the Podcast Player lose its mind, that is until Ojii rehabilitated it. (Technically Ojii is the player’s father. Wait why didnt’ I just use that analogy?)

The glitch where it displayed every episode is now fixed, you can now pause the episodes again, and he even added an option where you can now download the episodes to your computer. What a swell guy!

Hey guys I just added some new features to the site to improve happy fun time enjoyment.

Firstly I fixed the glitch where the the page layout went nuts if you accessed the comments section while not logged in. Still not sure what caused the bug in the first place, however after moving some files and code around it’s fixed.

Secondly I made it so an account is no longer required to leave comments on the site. I figured this was pretty inconvenient to casual listeners of the podcast, so I made it so you no longer need one. Existing account members can now log in using the handy box in the right hand sidebar.

I also added a feature that makes it so people who don’t have avatars can easily get one from Gravatar. I’m not sure if this one works yet, but supposedly if you don’t have an avatar the next time you post a comment it will give you the option of getting one with a little check box. Let me know if this one’s working.

And last but not least I’ve added some subscription buttons so you can subscribe to the podcast in your music player of choice. There’s iTunes (which I’d recommend), Zune (who finally accepted our feed into their database after A YEAR of trying), or the raw RSS feed (if you’d rather subscribe to the show using a feed reader).

We’re still working on the problems with the podcast player. If we can’t get them resolved we’ll be switching to a different one soon. I’ll try not to make it a flash one (because no-one really likes flash, we just tolerate it), but we might have to.

Douzo!

Wow that was a really long time without updating.

Woops.

I had a very good reason though. You see for those four weeks without episodes or posts I was in a vegetative state with New Super Mario Bros Wii and Zelda Spirit Tracks. I’d wake up, brush my teeth, start playing, then at the 12 hour mark go back to sleep. The awesomeness of those games kept me from updating the site (aka the Osiris excuse.) Now I’m in the same veg-state with Batman Arkham Asylum and Ratchet and Clank. Both those games rock. I AM THE NIGHT.

But now that I’m fully rested, new episodes will start going out as usual. I’ve already recorded a bunch with M, and she has even made some special artwork inspired by the episodes. You guys can expect the first new episode this Friday the 15th. It’ll be the first episode of 2010! Even though we don’t mention that since we really didn’t notice at the time of recording. Oh well.

We’ve received some complaints that our podcast is too iTunes-centric. Well after 2 months of waiting Villainy INC was finally accepted into the Zune marketplace. Now all of you who hate convenient, user friendly, well designed music players can listen to the show on your pine cone-err I mean Zune. I can’t figure out how to get the marketplace url so you’ll just have to search “villainy inc” in the store. In iTunes you simply have to right click to get the store url. Boy iTunes is more convenient.

Some of you may have been greeted by the message ”Error connecting to database” when you come to the site. Just know that it’s not a problem on our end. Our site host DreamHost is randomly spazzing out and seems to right itself within an hour or two.

Looks like Scott Smith over at Slackerz is having the same problems as us. DreamHost must hate awesome things.

Chances are you listened to our most recent episode. If you haven’t you probably should. It’s good. We discussed things and stuff. And it was Halloweeny. Sorry got off point.

Anyway as we announced last episode, Ray and Tim from 2P Start are going to be on our show to be interviewed! It’s going to be great and I can’t wait for all of you to hear it. The episode will be going out this Friday (witch is technically our Halloween episode because it’s on Halloween but we had our actual Halloween episode the week before and if I keep trying to figure this out my head is going to explode).

In the mean time you can check out Tim and Ray’s comics here and their podcasts here. I’ll also be starting a countdown this Friday leading up to Halloween Day. With what? You’ll find out soon… TENSION!

Small update to the site. In the “Hosts” and “Contact Us” section(s) there are updated links to my (Sir Michael’s) and The Walrus Kings new Facebook page that you all can join and pry into our personal lives with. Unfortunately, no one else has made their Page, so no one else has a link.

Since this is such a boring post, I thought I’d make it more entertaining with my favorite YouTube video.
ENJOY!

(Can’t see the vid? Try clicking Here)

Remember that PodcastPickle Player we had on the site? The really bad one that was ugly, hard to see, and gave you swine flu every time you tried to listen to an old episode? Of course you don’t because Ojii just wiped it from existence.

Ojii graciously volunteered to create a brand new podcast player for the site and did a awesome job on it. It’s easy to use and looks great. Just click an episode and it starts playing. They’re all there for your listening pleasure. Just don’t listen to episodes 1-20. We’re not very big fans of those ones.

Be sure to give Ojii some love in the comments section. He worked really hard to make it (and after I broke it…) and really helped us out. You can check out his sites at squarejunkies.com and ojii.ch. Be forwarded, ojii.ch is such a beautiful site that you might go blind from viewing the page. It’s brilliance cannot be explained in any known language. Some say that the site is so amazing that you’ll be driven mad from your inability to process it’s splendor. You’ve been warned.

This just in. It’s been discovered that people from Switzerland are totally cool. And they have pure gold running through their veins instead of blood. And they smell nice.