Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Ouch! is 8 years old today. Happy birthday us. Wow 8 years!

We went live to the world on a very warm Monday in 2002; the site was all light green and purple back then. Due to some delays in the department, the site designs weren't ready for us to get our hands on until 7 days before launch. This led to myself and then Assistant Producer Vaughan to camp out in the office for marathon work stretches of up to around 21 hours at a time. Late in the evenings when hunger hit us, we'd call Domino's for a midnight pizza to keep us going (compliance editor note: other pizza companies exist and take-away pizzas are generally not to be considered a staple part of one's diet. Oh and when it's hot, use sun block).

We were quite a bit cheekier back then. The media industry and the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ has undeniably moved and changed over these 8 years and the sometimes rapier-like niche wit that we used may not go down so well these days. Anyone remember Crippled Monkey? And our ill-conceived Harvest Festival giveaway competition? Wiped from the web forever more.

I had a regular column for many years until other workload made it difficult to keep this up. One of my fave pieces was when I decided I'd share my UFO story with you all. Blind people aren't that well-known for spotting alien spaceships as you can probably imagine but there was an incident in the mid 90s that I couldn't let slip past without sharing. Oh and beautifully there is an audio clip of a phone call I make to my mum, the alien denier who claims they never came to our street. They did! They absolutely did, dammit.

In 2006, Shot through the heart was an interesting disability slant on the terror alert situation in London, not long after the 7/7 bombings. It's what we at Ouch! like, these untold stories. Disableds can get themselves into all sorts of scrapes that the general public don't even think about.

What else, oh gosh yes ... there was the time that me and my disabled mates were mentioned on the vicious gossip site Popbitch in extremely unflattering terms. Some would call it disablist. I was absolutely staggered to see someone talking about me so randomly and unpleasantly, he hadn't expected me to see it ... but I did. The article about the incident is called Somebody's watching me - it generated a lot of discussion. And thank you readers for being upset on my behalf, too. I note the incident is mentioned on the Wikipedia page about Popbitch though probably it'll get deleted now I've mentioned it.

Have a drink on us later.