Back to blog.

Its been over two months since my last post so apologies. There are tons of reasons for this but the biggest is that I was news editor for the college newspaper which pretty much took over the lives of my entire college class for close to a month.

We published successfully the week before we were told to scoot off to work experience, that didn’t happen for me but I will hopefully have something scheduled later in the year.

I hope to update this blog a fair bit more than I have been, not quite returning to the daily post madness that I embarked upon over the summer but still maybe an update or two a week. They should be of decent substance also. For instance I’ve finally gotten around to watching the Sopranos and am currently around halfway through the run of the show. I’ve been planning on doing some kind of review of the whole series or perhaps a comparison with The Wire. This article will pop up here at some point in the future.

I’ll also hopefully be going to see the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” in cinemas sometime this week if this awful weather lets me get anywhere near Dublin. Hell if that review doesn’t happen I’ll just do some kind of hilarious post about snow.

My phone also has a decent camera now so don’t rule out seeing some original photo content from me, how fucking exciting is that. Thats all and hopefully this should be the last apology post I’ll be doing before I kick the blog into high gear again as college comes to a close.

 

Long haired creepy fucker.

This is one of the search terms that people have been using to get to my blog apparently. Weather its in reference to my post on Aphex Twin a few months back or whether it brings you to a post where I mention games writer Andrew Fitch. In any case I enjoy the fact people are using this search string to get her. That is all.

 

The reality of starting back college also a new article!

I’m sorry but the District Nine review never got off the ground, the day I was due to start writing it I received a few articles to do for college. On the upside I’m about to post one of these articles right now. Its entitled “men are redundant” and was written to a specific brief given by one of my teachers. I personally do not think men are redundant so please don’t take anything in the article as my own views. I tried to make it funny and entertaining so I hope I succeeded.

Since the late nineteen nineties in laboratories all around the world elite groups of scientists have been hard at work to ensure that men will no longer be needed to keep the human species alive. Aside from ruining all the fun IVF, sperm banks and various other techniques have raised the possibility of side lining men from the child creation process.

However unpleasant this would be men were at least ensured a nightmarish existence where they are occasionally harvested for genetic material while women solve the worlds problems stopping only to glance through a catalogue to choose the ideal sperm for them.

I imagine a clean white room with a rounded modern table, comfortable chairs, the gigantic booklet detailing the family of the prospective sperm creators triumphs and failures. I then imagine something almost exactly like the start of the Matrix when you see the fields of humans the robots are using for fuel.

However according to new scientific advances we are to be denied even this. Amongst one of the seemingly endless parade of miracles that stem cells can conjure up is sperm cells. Professor Karim Neyernia of the University of Newcastle announced in July that “Other cell types don’t generate the next generation, these do”. Simply put these cells can be turned into sperm and in turn into new people.

Beyond the scientific wonder of the whole thing it raises an ethical and moral debate that would and probably still does seem completely unthinkable: From an evolutionary standpoint has humanity outgrown its need for the male? As grand as that question seems it can be answered very quickly by simply saying “no”. The technology is still in its infancy and Professor Neyernia also said “We think, for normal structure development, sperm needs the testes environment,”.

Simply put without balls the artifical sperm will be useless. Now unless science can come up with artificial testicles I think mans place in the world is secure. For the record the image of a room containing thousands of artificial testicles is simultaneously hilarious and revolting.

However that is not to say that the issue of men and their relative usefulness to the species is disarmed completely. The science points out that men are still fundamentally necessary to the whole process but the reality of my matrix situation however unlikely, could still happen.

There is no denying that gender relations in the human species are a total aberration from how things normally work in the animal kingdom. For instance the male preying mantis has a secondary brain in his body so that he can continue mating when the female inevitably starts to eat him head first. Similarly the male black widow can expect to become a meal when his gigantic love interest has gotten what she needs from him. As a side note it gives the term “first time horror story” a whole different meaning.

Humans are one of very few species in which the male is dominant over the female, the reasons suggested for this are numerous, they range from us simply having a different set of rules than most other animals to the way in which our society has developed.

In any case there is very definitely a change on, at the most culturally resonant level various forms of media are now taking an increased interest in women while also maligning and side lining men. The immediate example that springs to my mind is an advertisement in which a patronising woman’s voice explained to her barely hominid husband how to use the washing machine. A new series of advertisements for Alpen go out of the way to point out that they are targeting a female audience by objectifying men.

Or the increasing proliferation of shows aimed squarely at women such as Sex in the City or Samantha Who both of which feature strong female lead characters as well as characters that treat men as sexual objects in a way similar to male characters such as James Bond. Of course I’m not suggesting that this in any way counteracts the fact that women have been portrayed as weak and objectified in all media since media has existed but any change surely indicates that the mood of society is beginning to change.

MEN ARE REDUNDANT.

All it would seem is to now decide what it is exactly that is going to finally spell the end for the male gender. Will it be the uncertain and far off science of stem cell sperm or the even slower march of evolution when it finally realises that humans aren’t playing by the same rules as everyone else. I imagine I will have all the time to wonder how it came to pass while I lie in my pod and wait for someone to pick me from the catalogue.

 

An excuse to post a cool music video.

District Nine review will be up on Saturday, a college exercise presented itself and demanded my attention. In the meantime enjoy this pretty well done 80’s cartoon spoof video by new dancehall/reggae outfit Major Lazer. Lazer is the new outfit of Diplo and Switch. The song is called Hold the Line, also worth checking out is the only other (as far as I know) video the group has out which pastiches the new dancehall craze of daggering which has literally BROKEN the penises of several men.

 

Apology post no. 1445

A number of things have kept me from posting, initially it was a brilliant week long sojourn to Dublin and then it was a virus that my computer contracted at some point. Suffice to say all of these things stood in the way of my internetting. I’m now back though and am working on a review of District 9 and possibly of metroidvania hero Shadow Complex. The Shadow Complex review is dependent on whether I can restart the game to remind me of the first few hours, to be honest I don’t see it happening since I burnt myself out on the game thoroughly while getting 100% items on my first playthrough.

All in all I’m sorry for the lack of activity but expect way more when I go back to college and all things journalistic kick themselves into a higher gear. I have inordinately high hopes for myself this year and hopefully most of them will be realised and any of them that are will be broadcast on this blog along with my articles, assignments and the usual diary muck you’ve gotten used to over the Summer.

 

It’s a…perfectly explainable situation. (This article has 666 words in it!)

So after the unveiling of “footage” of Michael Jackson walking from his ambulance alive my mind was turned even more onto the cult of conspiracy theories. It was also spurred on by a really pleasant and rational discussion I had with a friend about the conspiracy theories surrounding September the 11th. This conversation almost convinced me to try and find a place online to have a rational chat about conspiracy theories, it was at this point that I remembered the online presence for skeptics and conspiracy theorists alike is akin to two gangs of apes flinging increasingly potent shit at each other.

Don't worry conspiracy theorists, theres a picture of a conspiracy theorist looking like a douchebag below to keep things balanced.

That said I still had a look around different forums and various other web presences (yes I used “web-presences” it is 1998 and I am putting this on geocities) of the two groups. I have discovered two universal truths:

A) Hardcore skeptics and conspiracy theorists are both incredibly smug while being total insane.

B) They are virtually the same.

I imagine that point A will have come as no surprise to anyone but point B is something that (hopefully) will interest you. One thing that kept coming up was that both sides justified their viewpoint with absolutely insane and unverifiable information. In the case of the skeptics this is especially odd since most of the stuff they are arguing has mountains of real and verifiable information. As a point of reference you can look at almost any conspiracy theory in existence and then compare with some of the reasons given on infamous skeptic website Snopes. No references, not a sausage of anything beyond taking the writer at his word. When wikipedia is more reliable than you, you have a massive problem.

True to my word - a skeptic looking like an ass.

In both communities exist figureheads who hold an inexplicable sway over the majority of a groups members be they theorist or skeptic. In the case of the theorists my handiest examples are the creators of hogwash marathon Loose Change. Both of these young men (one of whom is a anti-semitic Holocaust denier) are now idols to a legion of people who have been taken in by Loose Change, no matter how insane the “facts” these guys put out the audience laps it up and writes their website address all over bathroom stalls. Now I would like to point out that I think the people who make loose change are profiteering scumbags and am only using them as an example of a figurehead in the skeptical world and in no way comparing them to the person I’m going to talk about next.

So I’ll also throw a paragraph break in here. On the Skeptical side of things every forum has a poorly informed skeptic giving frankly bullshit reasons various conspiracy theories didn’t happen or happened exactly the way you saw them happen etc. etc. Now to apply this to a relevant scale this video:

Shows exactly how a skeptic, even one who produces entertaining videos (and videos that are generally very good at snuffling out the real source for a problem and again admittedly Captain Disillusion did post an addendum to this video which completely solves the mystery) can be lead by a figurehead offering a convenient answer to a problem.

All in all I think its the arrogance people generally take up when they are completely convinced that they are right. They are willing to snatch at any shred of evidence in the heat of an argument instead of researching something themselves. Now in fairness this argument has still probably come off as being quite one sided and so it should since generally if you do that research you find out that there is never a conspiracy and exactly what you saw or learned in school/from rational sources happened is exactly what happened.

 

Stuff and things.

With college rapidly approaching I’ve been attempting to get myself back into the habit of writing news stories like a proper journalist instead of the more casual/lazy and shitty style that I’ve been using on this blog. Its not been as hard as I’ve been dreading it would be so thats good news but something you care even less about than the usual muck on this blog.

Hypothetical picture of me perfecting my journalistic skills provided by Zoltan Glass.

This will be one of my patented “kitchen sink full of shit and plates with congealed satay sauce on them”(be thankful google images didn’t turn anything up for this) posts that attempts to get across all the amazing things that I’ve been thinking about in my wonderful action packed life. This post will apparently also contain enough irony to cause cancer and be dangerous to pregnant women.

The first thing I want to write about is probably the reason I want to do this post but am not motivated enough to write a full post about. MTV and VH1 are just about the worst television networks I can think of. In particular I’m referring to the way that MTV networks desperately attempts to please both its target audience while desperately trying to not offend anyone ever. This morning I have heard the word “bitch” (not too surprising” censored, but it was done in the most ham-fisted way I can possibly think of. The song was “Shoot the Runner” by Kasabian, the offending word is barely audible so instead of attempting to blend it out they just blank it completely putting a giant silence in the middle of a cool rock song.

Even worse was that later on I heard both the words “knife” and “drugs” censored (Stan and Rock Star respectively), this is bizarre coming from the station that was prepared to show the fairly visceral street crime adverts (which also serve as an example of MTV trying to keep its place as a relevant force in culture, see also the embarrassing anti-smoking ad with the break dancing and unironic use of the term “My man”) over the past while.

The whole thing is just ridiculous, what started as something that espoused rebellion and genuinely completely revolutionised the face of music while also giving us gen-x touchstones like Beavis and Butthead (completely innocent at this point but at the time an equivalent to South Park). Now we have Zane Lowe sitting on a couch with faceless indie-twats while “hilarious” substitute words come up on the screen. I guess I was just depressed to see how far MTV has sunk from when it showed some genuinely cool programs while also showing decent music, something absolutely none of its stations do these days.

Zane Lowe is a total *pritstick*

The next thing that has been on my mind, and in my hands, is that ever present part of the Irish summer – Turf. For those who don’t know turf is a fossil fuel that has a multitude of tedious jobs associated with it. The one I’ve encountered the most of is throwing it back into a shed. Now I don’t particularly mind throwing things, its not as if turf is heavy, what I do mind is the dust, oh the dust, it gets literally everywhere. It didn’t help that I was listening to the This American Life podcast wherein they detailed how microscope dust particles of a flammable substance (corn or some shit I guess) blew up an entire factory and that it happens in silos everyday. Suitably terrified of being exploded I managed to move a considerable amount of turf. It briefly gave me a job so it was pretty nice. I attempted to find the clip of Frank Grimes running into the silo that explodes but couldn’t so have his last moments instead:

That should just about do it for this post, I actually had a lot more on the MTV issue than I actually thought I did at the start. Although I would actually like to say: Those cash for gold services, are people really that naive and gullible? Now have some Chemical Brothers:

 

To borrow from Charlie Brooker…

A few years ago Charlie Brooker did a segment on the worst cocks and she-cocks in advertising:

I’ve decided to rob this concept entirely and go through a similar thing. I’ve been noticing more and more that people in advertising that have been absolutely wrecking my head. I’ll start with that T-Mobile ad with a square full of attention seeking knobs singing along to rubbish songs in particular the guy who sees himself on the big screen:

Oh isn’t he mad and crazy, look at his genuine embarrassment as he is caught off guard at this heavily staged advertising event. Some kind of comedically giant saw like this:

Cartoonish saw.

but way  bigger turned on its side would have sorted out the whole thing in my opinion. You can tell from almost every face shown in the ad that the people doing this are almost certainly mind numbingly dull in real life, they probably then proceeded to go home and laughed about how “crazy” and “random” they were over a single bottle of white wine with their insufferable friends while watching Grey’s Anatomy. Please fuck off T-Mobile advertisement.

The next person, thanks to the incredibly creepy person who has compiled all of the Veet advertisements into a playlist on youtube I have learned that her name is Tanit Phoenix. In particular I despise the desert advernture ad where three incredibly smug looking women return from an adventure in the desert ripe for some snob filled party. I’m not sure what it is about this ad that kills me but I think its the look of utter smugness and arrogance on the face of our heroine as she strips into her entirely desert unfriendly jumper dress combo. You just know that she is going over to those people to waffle on about her “life-changing” experiences on her trip like some awful J1-type back from the asshole of nowhere.

Now for the final part of this countdown, this ad literally makes me sick to my stomach. There is not one thing I like about it, it has it all in terms of terrible advertising tropes and general levels of wank. It’s this appalling advert for festivals or something:

As I said this ad has it all, terrible and annoyingly trendy soundtrack combined with terrible and annoying people doing terrible and annoying things. As someone who has been known to enjoy a good festival this ad just rubs me up the wrong way. People like the ones in this ad are the worst thing about festivals, they invariably come from uber-wealthy families and consider staying in high priced pod pads etc to be “slumming it” or some kind of “festival experience”. They get me going in real life and the get me going in advertisement form aswell.

Thats about all for this post, hopefully it’ll get a bit more regular as time goes on.

 

Summer Sanity Savers.

As I’ve mentioned over and over again I’m unemployed this summer. Seeing as this Summer is nearly over I thought it would be interesting in some way to run down the things that have been keeping me at least in someway sane over the past three monthes.

Mafia Wars.

I’ve written about this enough now for it to be one of the biggest tags in my cloud but I’ve never really gone into any depth about why I actually like it and I think this might be because I don’t. I mean I did for the first while, it was a serviceable little time waster that took up 5 minutes of my day. But predictably internet nerds have found a way of turning a five minute a day game into some kind of vocation. Many of my blogs hits are generated by the Mafia Wars tags and a referral from another post where you can find the statistics of weapons and other items from the game. This inspired me to go looking deeper into the kind of person who seeks to gain an edge in a facebook app.

PC Gaming Guy

I’ve hated on internet nerds before but this is pretty bad if this is how people treat a few minute a day facebook game I am really fucking glad I never have or will play a game like World of Warcraft. So all in all thank you Mafia Wars for wasting away a few hours of my Summer and fuck you to the people who treat it as anything other than a bit of distraction from finding out what kind of shit you are in some quiz.

Podcasts.

This part of the post is going to be entirely positive believe it or not. The job I had last year swung from me using loud heavy machinery to doing quiet jobs in the middle of a forested golf course so I only had so much time to dip into listening podcasts. Mainly I focussed on Steven Frys once in a blue moon podcast but also found myself branching out into listening to more general interest podcasts. In particular This American Life is almost always incredibly informative and entertaining offering a wide variety of stories that range from being hilarious to pretty moving. Then I pretty much stopped until I found myself with an abundance of time to do fuck all and listen to people talk about pointless crap.

This is how I began listening to videogame podcasts, for the most part they are train wrecks where 4-5 sweaty nerd breathing into a mic with no pop screen about how they want to fuck the girls in Final Fantasy games.  They will then usually move onto some pseudo-intellectual bullshit about games as art and promptly stuff their faces with disgusting American nerd food directly into the mics, you can almost hear the grease rumbling over badly kept facial hair. Andrew Fitch is the worst example of this I have ever heard, I’m not going to mention the podcast because I’m not giving that creepy fucker any publicity. I will however post his staff picture from a website that fired his  ass:

*Shudder*

However it did lead me to stumble onto the Giantbombcat and Idle Thumbs, two podcasts that treat videogames as the transitory and fun entertainment they are and not as some revolutionary new artform.

Hating on annoying musicians.

Please take a step forward Lady GaGa, La Roux and Little Boots to accept the award for giving me something to genuinely hate this summer. The music of these three harridans has been hard to escape this summer, probably since even before it. They all have many things in common first and worst in my opinion their obnoxious pseudo dance/electronic music. Second they all have ridiculous and infuriating names (I have particular disdain for Little Boots, I’ve no idea why but I hate it so much its gives my pleasure). Third is the fact they all look like rubbish science fiction villians:

The spice must flow!

Surfs Up!

pretentiouswank.jpg

Or at least characters in a rubbish student science fiction film that ends with the word “Fin”. The music of these three sounds broadly similar, GaGa going for idiotic and insane lyrics set against teeth grindingly poor disco beats while desperately attempting to be mildly edgy or offensive. La Roux has to be given points for not being able to sing but still going on out and shrieking about “going in for the kill” while the Eurythmics get sick on a synthisiser to make her backing track. Little Boots fails more on the basis that her choruses seem to be decent but then the tracks just melt down into mismatched and go nowhere beats.

Still ladys thank you for keeping my rage fueled for the Summer months.

I’ll stop now since this post is almost a thousand words long, I was going to include a section on music that I have actually liked and been listening to over the summer but instead I’ll just post one video that I have been unable to stop watching over the past few days, it also fits in with the current G.I Joe trend thats going on (this is also the oldest thing online so I’d be surprised if people had not seen it yet):

 

So…

After the the extremely busy last few weeks (if going away two weekends in a row counts as being busy) and the excitement of being published my poor blog has seen a bit of neglect. Overall I’m really happy with how my posting style has come on and that my blog has been gaining readers pretty much from a day to day basis. If any of my classmates or other aspiring media types read this I urge you to start a blog of your own, its fast, easy and will reap benefits as it serves as a living portfolio of your work aswell as being an enjoyable little project all of its own. I have now rambled on like a sentimental idiot, have a funny picture:

Yes, eat it.

Other than that the blog will roll on with its usual mix of me rambling like I belong in a lunatic asylum and me pompously extolling how well things are going for me (not really of course). As college is also rapidly approaching I’ll probably  start throwing up the odd assignment that I like and feel is appropriate up here.