Why don’t you go take a running jump?

It is approaching two years since we made our first video “Sebastien Foucault: The Life of a Freerunner”, the success of which spurred us on to create all our other videos. If you haven’t seen it, it is a short and bafflingly ill-constructed mockumentary on the sport of ‘free-running’ and its creator Sebastien Foucan (changed to “Foucault” to emphasise the faux-philosophical tendencies behind the “sport” which is essentially just running and jumping around everywhere).

Despite being quite technically inept and completely nonsensical, “Seb Fou” (as we have taken to calling it) will always have a special place in our hearts. For better or worse, it has been hawked around the place more than any of our other films and has had the most plays on the internet. We would prefer something like “Look North!” to get the same amount of exposure, but there you go. We have had lots of nice feedback from people on the film, which has been great, but there is one audience who are quite polarised in their opinions of it: Freerunners.

Some freerunners absolutely love it. These articulate, reasonable, handsome people often leave us very nice messages and don’t mind us poking fun. However, mainly the free running community has responded by saying: ‘your all jelous twats’ and ‘watta twat get out and get a life you freaks’. They have even had the temerity to accuse people who like us of being ‘fat people who sit around doing nothing but jacking off to photo's of horses.’ Our negative feedback from freerunners hasn’t been exactly constructive. In fact, it has really only told us two things. These are:

· Freerunners are easily confused, and very easily angered.
· They are fiercely proud and defensive of their “sport”, but have trouble communicating this on account of their borderline literacy skills and inability to proofread.

If any freerunners are reading this, I implore you – please, please do not think we had originally intended to attack what you do in any way. That being said, judging from your messages, most of you do thoroughly deserve an attack of some kind. You could also do with a proofreader, a GCSE in English and less free time.

From ‘stop being a little bitch’ to ‘I hope you die...’ to ‘gay gay gay’, most of the advice was just expressing heartfelt anger at the film. Some however, were of a violent or threatening nature. ‘Gays’ or ‘bitches’ we might be, but we certainly don’t deserve to be physically beaten. What if one were to find me and go through with his wish to: “fuck u up like littal pussies yu r”? Never mind that he used two different spellings of the word ‘you’ in the same sentence, he’s angry. Even verbal abuse would be enough. I keep thinking any minute now a freerunner is going to leap from a tree branch into an upstairs window, vault over a couple chairs, roll into the hallway, slide down the banister and run out the front door shouting: “you disgrace this sport this is the best sport ever how do you dare to call that freerunning you asshole...DON’T FUCK WHT THIS SPORT!!!” As he ran down the street (probably shouting that last part) I would probably be shaking my head and thinking something like: what have I done?

My favourite ‘violent’ threat is one that stops just short of describing what he will actually do by using an ellipsis:

u r asholes sebastien is my favourite freeruner u r gelous beatches do not take the piss out of him again because i will......dont fuck with us

Sorry, you’ll what? Well obviously I’ll....erm....I’ll...look, just don’t fuck with us, okay?
So much more articulate (and fond of emoticons) are the ones that like us. These cheerful and erudite runners expressed their admiration the proper way, with a colon and a ‘D’:

lol im a freerunner but i still find this realy funny :D
he said: "Dimitri, never give your cat chocolate, it make him very sick".
omg hilarious ;D
Funniest shit on youtube! :D

There was also one comment which was quite neutral but did give some constructive feedback:

its some kinda funny but sebastien isn’t white

Thanks for that. We’ll make a note of it for next time.
Chris

So, how was Edinburgh? I want to know ALL the details...

Of course you don’t - you want a brief summary before you lose interest and navigate away. It’s alright, I’m not offended. Well we’re back from Edinburgh and, as some people may have noticed, we failed in our efforts to bring you a blog entry every day. After we realised we had an awesome show, the success went to our heads. We were suddenly far too busy rocking out and doin’ hot babes to care about writing the blog anymore*. We didn’t keep that promise. And so our blog, like some online, text-based Maddy, was unthinkingly neglected whilst we enjoyed our holiday.

Luckily for us though, it is still here and it’s simply desperate to have more entries put in it. I would like, in this one, to mention our review from Three Weeks and reprint it. We were very happy indeed to get a lovely 4 stars from them. In fact, we were so happy that we just wanted to shout it from the mountaintops! We then realised, though, that this would be an inefficient and impractical way of informing people and that a blog posting containing the review would be more appropriate. Here it is:

Ladma Vs. The World
Ladma
Get rid of that archaic 'it's free so don't expect much' attitude; this is gold, and it's lying about in a stuffy little room above a pub on the Grassmarket. This show features films (not your standard grainy shot-from-a-mobile YouTube variety, but skilfully produced television-worthy ones) and sketches with a bit of banter. I'm not one for hysterics, but the film about pet hates had me in fits, and my only criticism is that people were laughing so hard they blotted out some of the jokes. A Southerner's take on 'the North' produced some priceless mockumentary genius, while the live element of the show, featuring a scarily believable life coach sketch amongst others, is well executed. Highly recommended free comedy.
Beehive Inn, 2 - 23 Aug, 18.30pm (19.30pm), free non-ticketed, fpp 69
tw rating: 4/5

Chris
*Actually we were eating soup, playing Grand Theft Auto 2 and watching Terminator 2 but it’s basically the same.

Minute man

I recently phoned up Virgin as our Internet was down and we wanted to play World of Warcraft. I hate talking to tech support as they treat you like an idiot. I understand their problem, most of the people they will be advising won’t have a clue what they are doing. My ‘advisor’ was particularly disdainful.

After I had explained the Internet was down but he still spent 10 minutes making me unplug the router and modem and conect it all back up again. He forced me on both occasions to wait a full minute when it was unplugged. What are you supposed to do when you are waiting on the phone for a full minute with a stranger? The first ten seconds was the worst. I quickly generated some stock small talk to fill the void.

“It’s been really bad weather this summer hasn’t...” No he is in India he won’t know what the weather has been like here.

“So what’s it like being from Ind...” Actually he might be in another Asian county. I don’t want to be racist.

“I actually work in IT so I know it is your line which is at fault not my internal netwo...” No, I will sound like a cock, even though I am totally right.

“So what’s it like being brow...” That’s just racist. Why did I even think that?

In the end I just kept silent until he told me to turn it on again. When all that failed he finally looked at the local exchange and told me their network was down.


Pete

Pete's got M.E.

It’s out. Everyone now knows I've got ME. People started picking up on it a few weeks ago. I would get to work and have no energy all day. I was constantly tired and lethargic. I couldn't concentrate on my job or Ladma for more than about half an hour which has lead both to suffer.

I got ME about 2 months ago. I must say it is life changing. It first came out on the Xbox 360 in November and I heard it was good but when it came out on the PC I thought I would give it ago. I usually hate console ports and this looked bad as it is a third person shooter. It is the best game I have ever played. It is well written and has the perfect blend of action and storytelling. I play it until around 4am every night before work. Not even the World of Warcraft gets that attention. Having ME has never been better.





Pete

PS We were supposed to update the blog everyday we were in Edinburgh. We managed a pitiful 5 out of 24. Sorry.