Scraping the barrel: reviewing bog roll, hamsters, etc.

Dave's dooyoo stats

Reviews: 1,750 (Frankingsteins) + 136 (Brains)

Timeline: 27 June 2000 – 5 January 2011

Word count: ~1,035,000 archived (+ 275,000 lost or I didn't bother to save, so imagine how bad those must have been)

Earnings for all that: Maybe £1,300–£1,500, most of that in the year after graduation when I cranked out a £50–£150/month production line before getting steady employment. It helped.


Dave's dooyoo archive

Music reviews (Ab-Am | An-Az | Ba-Bi | Bl-Bu | C | D | E-H | I-J | K-M | N-Y | Offspring | Korn)
TV reviews (Sci-fi | Comedy | Kids)
Film reviews (Juvenile)
Book reviews
Game reviews
Internet/shopping reviews (Top 10 websites 2003 | 2004)
Edinburgh Fringe reviews
Misc. reviews (that's this page you're on now, idiot) [Classic Dave c.2004]

Bringing an end to my obsessive-compulsive filing of my old consumer reviews from a dead website that should have been allowed to rest in peace, here's what I thought about groceries, theme parks and other miscellany on the rare occasions I ventured outside my comfort zone or house.

Written for dooyoo.co.uk aged 15–24.

Old school music reviews: N-Y

It turns out my alphabetical archive is a bit top-heavy. Here are the rest of the album reviews I wrote at school and university, without a slightly older me to fill in the gaps any more. If only I'd delayed getting a real job for another year, I might have made it to Z. Or possibly starved to death.

Reviews of albums from bands in the second half of the alphabet written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2001–2007. Offspring reviews sold separately.

Old school music reviews: K-M

I wrote my last 50p album review at the start of 2009 (I got as far as 'Ma-'), tailing off due to a combination of reliable employment meeting my needs and unreliable to non-existent home internet. I always thought I might carry on and complete the alphabet one day, but then I started my copywriting career where I basically do the same thing, only writing repetitive descriptions about blockout blinds rather than Blind Guardian. And for slightly better pay. Not quite as enjoyable though. But now it's too late.

Reviews of albums from bands beginning with K, L and M written for dooyoo.co.uk (RIP) from 2001–2009. My angsty teenage Korn reviews were too toxic and have been quarantined in their own post.

Old school music reviews: I-J

A teenager's enthusiastic, inconsistent, interminable track-by-track odyssey through Iron Maiden, many of those tracks covered multiple times on various compilations, live albums and DVDs of those same live albums. Plus a handful of other bands.

Reviews of albums from bands beginning with I & J written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2003–2008.

Old school music reviews: E-H

The bloated and enthusiastic teenage reviews are intruding ever more on the concise adult summaries. Good. Fifteen-year-old Dave may be a bit of an idiot, but he generally has better taste. Stop listening to single-one-hour-long-song albums and stick some Green Day on.

Reviews of albums from bands beginning with E, F, G and H, written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2001–2008.

Old school music reviews: D

I had a job by this point in '08, which meant there wasn't as much free time to explore strange curios from the past and it was easier to earn my bus fare churning formulaically about the CD-Rs in my big box. The alphabetical adventure is picking up pace.

Reviews of albums from bands beginning with D, written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2001–2008.

Old school music reviews: C

Ten-years-ago Dave stubbornly persists with the entire Cannibal Corpse discography, assuming it must get better or at least have a different song at some point. I was getting lazier now, not bothering with the pun titles any more, barely exceeding the minimum word count and sticking to the repetitive metal I was bored with because I knew the context and the terminology, so didn't have to learn and experience interesting new things.

Meanwhile, teenage Dave underrates the Cure's masterpiece, preferring his goths to squawk unintelligible vampire poetry, and student Dave enters a crazy world. Reviews of albums from bands beginning with C, written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2004–2008.

Old school music reviews: Bl-Bu

The more enthusiastic side of 'B.'

Written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2001–2008. Spot the teeny bobber section, if it can even be distinguished amid the general immaturity. Sabbath still rules though \m/ \m/

Old school music reviews: Ba-Bi

Writing "consumer" reviews was my full-time job in early 2008 while I half-heartedly looked for a proper job, working through alphabetical band lists and committing blindly to discographies for better or (usually) worse. I can't say I've spared a thought for many of these artists in the decade since, apart from the ones I liked already.

Reviews of albums from some bands beginning with B, written for dooyoo.co.uk in 2007–2008.

Old school music reviews: An-Az

Today's letter is still somehow 'A.' This was my poorly-paying day job while I was otherwise unemployed and chasing ghosties at night, and I was committed for the long haul.

Written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2004–2008. Includes a literally old school review towards the end.

Old school music reviews: Ab-Am

I wanted to put all 750,000-ish words of my teenage and YA music reviews into one absurdly massive blog post where they could quietly gather dust and cause occasional mischief to anyone who accidentally opened it. Sadly, Blogger started crashing even before I'd got past 'A,' so I had to break it down.

Here are my reviews of albums from some bands beginning with A, written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2007–2008.

My long-term plan when freshly graduated and unemployed was to review one album per artist every few days, mixed between the TV, film, book and retro game reviews, but then the site changed its payment model to favour churning over community feedback and I adapted by spamming a discography a day to get my fiver for as long as it would take to get a proper job.

Old school TV reviews: kids' TV

"Not aimed specifically at the adult generation" – Me, 2004

21,000 words waxing nostalgic in far too much detail about a random assortment of children's programmes from the 1960s–90s, irrespective of quality or memorability.

Written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2003–2007 (aged 18–22. An adult, then).

Old school TV reviews: comedy

"Not only inexperienced, but also massively inept" – Me, 2004

60,000 words on sitcoms, sketch shows and stand-up DVDs, mostly written when I was still at school, if you somehow require this information.

Written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2000–2010 (aged 14–24).

Old school TV reviews: science fiction

"Reveal very little at a tediously slow pace" – Me, 2007

77,000 words on some sci-fi shows I liked and some I didn't, giving you the lowdown on the latest VHS releases and DVD boxsets, sometimes covering the same eras more than once across different releases at varying degrees of obsolescence, and closing by recommending you import cheap Chinese pirate copies like I did. It was definitely worth picking these out of the trash.

Written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2000–2011 (aged 14–25).

Old school film reviews

"Frustratingly terrible and a chore to sit through" – Me, 2008

When I was finished being out of character, I wrote 44,000 more words of boringer movie reviews for dooyoo.co.uk from 2000–2008 (aged 17–22).

Here are my game-changing insights on films I owned on DVD or video, other films I'd seen and notorious turkeys I sought out for the sake of a "funny" review, because slagging something off is less intimidating than having to write about something good and risking enriching myself.

Alrightreads 2003–2007: boring student book reviews

"Far too long, for very little reward" – Me, 2007

There isn't much to be gleaned from my exhaustively long-winded high school and student book reviews, beyond helping me neurotically maintain a never-comprehensive record of everything I've read like an Art Garfunkel. That's reason enough to post it. Why do I bother posting anything?

Here are 99,000 words about books, written for dooyoo.co.uk for pocket money aged 17–22. I didn't write about absolutely everything I read during those years, especially since I was supposed to read two to three books a week for my literature course during term time (though didn't always), but some of those still made it in.

The switch between comedy travelogues read for pleasure and 17th-century plays where I'm trying to monetise revision is often very subtle, so I've highlighted the study books to make those easier to spot. I don't think I went so far as to copy-paste my essays, but you wouldn't call them "reviews" either.

Absolutely pointless nostalgia: unhelpfully reviewing retro games that are no longer commercially available

"The very premise of writing a review on a 1980s arcade game today may seem a little silly and unnecessary, however this is not the case: it is good." – Ms. Pac-Man review, 2003

I lost interest in computer games around the time people stopped calling them "computer games," but when writing "consumer reviews" became my £1-a-day job as a penniless teenager and then student, I got plenty of mileage out of digging up the classics (and less than classics). When those ran out, and I needed a steady stream of fresh topics to write about to keep up the momentum, I cracked open the 16-bit ROM library to see what treasures or otherwise lay therein.

Here are 79,000 words of inherently unhelpful game reviews written for dooyoo.co.uk between 2000 and 2010, mainly concentrated in the middle of that span.

Nearly all of them are much too long and go into more detail than would be strictly necessary even if the games weren't obsolete, because waffling on meant higher ratings and more chance of getting a coveted crown (£1.50!) from the majority of people who didn't actually bother to read what they clicked on and mistakenly equated quantity with quality.

I apologise for the occasional interruptions by "modern" (i.e. late 1990s to early 2000s) games. Most of these are early abberations before I set myself straight and clogged up the site with worthless product suggestions just for me.

Absolutely pointless nostalgia: obsolete consumer reviews for websites that don't exist any more

"I've also recently dabbled in comparing prices through Google, which is worth a try" – Me, 2004

Do you want to buy CDs or DVDs online in the UK, and it's still 2004?

These long-winded reviews of online shops written from the narrow perspective of a teenager on a seemingly endless mission to save a quid on RRP could help! If you cut through the sitcom quotes, heavy metal bias and digressive insights into his own pathetic life, and understand that this review site's misguided peer rating system favoured quantity over quality.

If you (somehow) enjoyed My Top 10 Websites of 2003 and 2004, here are overly detailed elaborations on some of those defunct shopping sites and other domains, chronicling a time when the retail behemoths were rising to power and crushing the mom and pop sites one by one.

Reviews exhumed from the wreckage of the also now defunct dooyoo.co.uk via the Internet Archive. With [self-critique] if I can be bothered to read through it all.

14-year-old me's appropriately juvenile film reviews

"With Cameron Diaz in it you know it's going to be good" – Me, 2000 (apparently)

Raised on an arguably unsavoury diet of perverted sitcoms when I was still in single digits, some of my permanent tastes formed early. But there was still a lot of developing left to do.

Less independent in his tastes and more beholden to what's on at the cinema, what his mum's rented on video or what gets put on the school TV when a teacher can't be arsed, 14-year-old Dave's choice of viewing material and falsely confident declarations thereon often couldn't be more different to my opinions today. Other times we're still the same, there's only so much growing up you can do.

Here's my earliest surviving online content from the year I was first connected to the world, a terrible decision in hindsight. Most contain at least one stand-out remark that made me laugh in spite of myselves. Hopefully 52-year-old Dave will come back and laugh at the clueless, out-of-character pap I post nowadays.

Edinburgh Fringe reviews: August 2004–2010 (not 2006)

Despite not being a performer, showing up at the Edinburgh Fringe every August was a very formative part of my young adulthood as I kept up with the latest work of some of my adolescent idols. My path through life would have forked unrecognisably without its influence.

The 2004 Fringe was my first solo excursion, a valuable taste of independence right before university. I popped up again briefly the next year, missed 2006 for financial reasons, then when I had to decide what the hell I was going to do with myself after graduating in the summer of 2007, pre-festival Edinburgh seemed as good a place as any to relocate to. No, it seemed like the best and only option.

After leaving the UK and travelling for almost a year, I felt particularly homesick in August 2011 knowing that I was missing it, but Reekie was a bit too extreme a pilgrimage from Indonesia. Every year since it's affected me less, and this year I forgot all about it until near the end of the month, probably because Richard Herring isn't banging on about it and neither he nor Stewart Lee are even there.

Since I haven't done this in one place before, here are my Fringe diaries, mostly processed through the filter of paid or free-ticket review sites that have all expired now and had to be dug up through the Internet Archive.