Read on to find out the history of this website and how it came to be.

 

In The Beginning

Many many years ago, there was nothing. Nadda. Zip. And then suddenly, almost without warning; WHAM! Stuff everywhere! A few billion years later a strange man living in England by the name of Alastair decides that it’s time to start a blog. Why?

Well he was never good at keeping a diary, but it was evident that his clumsy nature was getting worse and that it was time that he started logging his misadventures. A blog seemed to be the most suitable way of doing so, so that he could look back on the majority of the stupid things that he’d done (a few still managed to slide under the radar).

The Chronicles of a DumbassAs a result, on December 3rd, 2004 “The Chronicles of a Dumbass” emerged over on the Blogger network (prior to Blogger’s acquisition by Google).

But then something happened. Other people started reading the blog and began hounding Al for more and more updates. What originally started out as literally nothing more than a serious log of clumsy events turned out to actually be a source of humorous entertainment for a lot of people who genuinely enjoyed reading the site.

After a couple of months, Al felt he was outgrowing the blogger system and wanted to move on.

The Redesign Begins

After looking at various other blogging tools, Al decides that it’s time to start from scratch and host his own blog. He begins the long, laborious task of getting his head around a new blogging engine (especially with no understanding of PHP) and works on an entirely new visual theme for the site.

During this time, at the age of 21, he got his first girlfriend, experienced his first kiss, and then 5 weeks later got his first ex-girlfriend. After being laid-off by Tesco, and with a few years having passed since he trained to be a primary school teacher, he decided to return once again to the realm of education and managed to get a job at a High School – which would turn out to be his first long-term job. It made a change to the temp work he had been undertaking that usually ended up with him getting fired for or laid-off from.

Al also decided it was time to do a web-comic. He redesigned the logo for The Chronicles of a Dumbass to reflect this change by doing it in a cartoon style. He also redesigned the cartoon version of himself and prepared to do comics, starting off with his first strip entitled “The Story So Far”.

"The Story So Far"

What’s in a name?

One of the biggest problems was that of choosing a domain name. Knowing that “www.thechroniclesofadumbass.com was a bit too long, and possibly difficult for dyslexics, it was time to abbreviate it. The final choice was to use the initials, resulting in “www.coad.com” or “www.thecoad.com”. But it didn’t feel right, or sound right. After all, was it pronounced “co-add” or “code” ?

In comes FlyakiteOSX developer, Chris Kite. Al and Chris had previously designed Chris’s revolutionary FlyakiteOSX website together, basing it on a prototype site that Al had developed during his free time in University.

Chris suggested a solution to the “co-add/code” problem – by using the “ch” from “chronicles” instead of just the “c”. This resulted in “choad” which sounded a lot better. And so it became.

The domain was registered. It was all paid for. The site was eventually finished and about to make its debut. There was joy in the air, bottles of Shloer were consumed, and Al was happy.

In a Shloer-infused state, he decided to see if there was a possible, slight, minor chance that the word “choad” was actually a real word.

It was.

The definition that he found that day was from Dictionary.com, which listed “choad” as thus;

/chohd/ n. Synonym for `penis’ used in alt.tasteless and popularized by the denizens thereof. They say: “We think maybe it’s from Middle English but we’re all too damned lazy to check the OED.” [I'm not. It isn't. --ESR] This term is alleged to have been inherited through 1960s underground comics, and to have been recently sighted in the Beavis and Butthead cartoons. Speakers of the Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati languages have confirmed that `choad’ is in fact an Indian vernacular word equivalent to `fuck’; it is therefore likely to have entered English slang via the British Raj.

Words can not express the emotions that ran through Al’s head that day, realising that not only had he been stupid enough to call himself a penis, but that he’d been stupid enough to call himself “THE penis”. More bottles of Shloer were promptly consumed.

The Choad Stands Firm

‘The Choad’ went live August 9th, 2005. It featured Gravatars, live searching, a whole new style, and [what was intended to be] the first of many comic strips.

The site was welcomed by many of its old fans and started picking up many new ones who would constantly return to read Al’s weird and random posts, with a small minority who regularly commented on the site. Even spam bots repeatedly left comments, providing Al with information on various topics such as gambling, debt-repayment services, and the apparent need for both viagra and various methods for “a larger manhood”.

It wasn’t long until spam filters were added to the list of features and the last bottle of Shloer was promptly finished.

Another Choad Emerges

November 27th, 2005 was the day of the first post by Al’s best friend and neighbour; David C. Guymer (more commonly known as “Dave”). Whilst Dave shares Al’s sense of humour, he has a completely different comedic style (a fact that Dave’s very proud of).

Al brought Dave on board to add more variety to the site. Unfortunately due to internet access restrictions (i.e. none) and time being taken up watching episodes of Lost, Smallville, Family Guy, Whose Line is it Anyway, etc, Dave was only able to make a small hand-full of posts.

However, Dave made a more prominent contribution to the site shortly after Al received his Mac Mini.

The Rise of The Choad Show

Unbeknown to many, Al had always liked the idea of doing a podcast, but upon inspection of various methods, it just seemed pretty dull and not necessarily as simple to do as he felt it could be. And then he tried Apple’s GarageBand 3 software which contains its own Podcast Studio and all the features that Al had been craving for.

In a mad panic rush, Al grabbed Dave and the two of them quickly recorded the pilot of ‘TheChoad.com Podcast’. It was extremely well received by many and Al and Dave set about preparing a second episode.

The second episode brought in a slightly new format that set the standard for subsequent episodes. The first major change was that it was re-titled “The Choad Show” – and at approximately 45 minutes in length (as opposed to the original 30 minutes) it also contained a random ‘intro-sketch’ before the theme music. It was also the first time that songs were played part-way through the show.

Hiatus

Season 1 ended its run after just 10 episodes and went on hiatus to allow Dave and Al to re-evaluate the direction of the show so that they could prepare for and make a better Season 2.

The site itself also went on hiatus around the same time. Whilst the site looked okay, there were countless bugs in the back-end of the site, especially in regards to how the show was delivered; leaving some people unable to download the show.

The majority of bugs were a result of the rushed nature of integrating The Choad Show into the site. When the site was originally designed, it was done so with comics being the main focus along side the usual posts. The comic strips never really fully emerged and The Choad Show “suddenly just… happened.” So effectively, the show just became “tacked on” to the site.

This in itself caused a lot of problems and there were other issues that needed addressing such as needing to implement automatic back-ups of the site.

Al also decided that it was time to upgrade the back-end of the site but was aware that he’d done some nasty hacks in order to get The Choad Show working in the first-place. After attempting an upgrade on his testing server, it was clear that an upgrade would break the site completely, prompting him to rewrite the entire site from scratch rather than just attempt to repair certain parts of it.

This also led him to redesign the look of the site so that The Choad Show was better integrated. The general consensus from visitors was that they loved the style of the site and didn’t want a change. Al managed to improve the navigation, update the style, added a whole new load of features and even re-brand the site with new logos to reflect the changing direction of both the site and show, whilst keeping the general feel of the original site.

In the end it all turned out to be better than monkey slaves – but only slightly!

Hiatus 2: The Dark Ages

For a myriad of reasons, Al left his job at the high school to work in the magnificent city of London for a large computer entertainment company. As amazing as it was for Al to find himself the perfect job, it unfortunately led to a period of The Choad known as “The Dark Ages”.

Having moved to the big city and focussing on his new job, the site was put on hold indefinitely. The site was left unfinished and the future of The Choad Show remained uncertain. This was complicated further given that Dave was living in the north and had somehow survived for years without internet access.

Three years passed.

Team Choad

Al was missing the work he used to do with The Choad and wanted bring the show back. Dave inexplicably still didn’t have internet access and this seemed to be the biggest stumbling block. Technological advances in recording conversations over large distances using telepathy were moving slowly and it seemed pointless to record a show over mobile telecommunication networks. It was starting to look like the show would never return unless the situation changed or there was a re-shuffle.

Trevor, a fellow colleague had approached Al about the idea of doing a podcast about movies. Talks between them began whilst they ate pizza, partook in retro gaming and generally geeked out until the decision was made that Trevor would take over from Dave as The Choad Show’s main co-host.

Al had previously considered getting more people involved in the site and the show and didn’t want to lose Dave as a contributor to that, at which point Dave was kept as a regular author on the site with plans to bring him back as a special guest star in future.

The team then grew to include the sharply-dressed Marc (featured in Season 1′s final episode) and the delectably smart Stina who serves as both author and editor for the site.

Dizzy Tissue Studios

Al had always planned that if he were to come up with more than one set of creative works, that he would put it under a studio name of Dizzy Tissue Studios. When Trevor approached Al about a couple of videos he had made about retro gaming, it made sense for them to join forces and start a new kind of show in addition to The Choad Show.

This gave birth to “Console Shock” and a joint collaboration between Trev and Al to begin Dizzy Tissue Studios – the creative umbrella for both shows – as equal partners.

The Choad Returns

The Choad proudly re-opened its virtual doors on Saturday January 28th 2012. The Choad Show remains in pre-production for a second season which will return at a later date.