“I just asked Coco’s lil brother was he rockin a Justin Bieber hair cut? He said NO. Like he didn’t like him.But he’s still got the hair cut”.

This apparently caused  @bieberthuggin to absolutely flip the fuck out at the perceived slight of her floppy haired musical hero. For those of you who don’t know Justin Bieber is a small child who seems to be trying to act like hip hop star while still remaining white. Think lil’ bow wow crossed with the Jonas Brothers but even worse than that sounds. Here his is with his hat at a slightly elevated angle:

I’ve only heard one of his songs and seen another of his videos while a television was on mute but he is definitely not my kind of music. What I do know about him is that his fans are completely fucking insane in a way usually reserved for Twilight and the Jonas Brothers.  The best example of this I could find is that several of his shows have had to be canceled after 3,000 fans swamped a baseball field which led to 35 units of the local police force turning up.

Now with this set up its somewhat easier to understand bieberbthuggins motivations as she posted this in response to an idle comment about her pubescent heroes hair cut:

“More than you can say for yourself, joyboy. Now keep my name out your mouth before I knife fuck you and put it on YouTube.”

Very nice. It went from here with Bieberbthuggin urging Ice to become a “beibliver” (I don’t fucking know either) and then making a lot of nasty/crazy accusations and comments about him, his fans and SVU. Maybe its because this girl is just a fucking insane normal person but I was disappointed with the level of retaliation offered by Ice after last month but I guess he’s the better man.

Also I wish to clarify that Bieber himself seems to be pretty level headed and fully aware about how bonkers some his fans are while still fostering support for the ones who aren’t threatening lawyers daughter and not much else Kim Kardashian with death.

I now fully expect to to be inundated with threats and such if any of his fans find me.

Also in news about myself as college again comes to a close things will probably pick up around here. However I will also be the news editor on Irish gaming site gmrfm.com so please look out for stuff from me there. I’ll be starting in the very near future and will be posting a link up here in the sites I write for section.

Her offending tweet hit out at Ts acting with the comment “there is no reason in the world anyone should have cast Ice T in a tv show”. This was then relayed onto Ice T himself by a member of  his twitter gang and within the hour he delivered his reply:

FLTG

The tweet spread around the world and it took Mann over a day to deliver her reply in which she (far more delicately than Ice T had done) that she was sorry and for her fans not to bother him.

The “twitfeud” marks the culmination in Ice Ts quiet internet celebrity that has been gathering pace since internet gaming sites picked up on his fascination with the multiplayer first person game “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” and more recently this fantastic picture of him holding the games sequel:

Ice T with the Modern Warfare 2 special edition.

He plays under the sublime username “Lord 187x” which refers to both his status as a lord and the California state penal code for homicide while also adding the obligatory X to his username which as everyone knows just makes you look damned cool.

Ice T is just the chief amongst a slew of celebrities who have embraced modern social networking and gaming (which celebrities such as Jimmy Kimmel and Will Arnett chatting about Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3 on chat shows). However where as celebrities such as Kirsty Alley whine about being fat and descending into mediocrity Ice just posts about being Ice T which is generally entertaining or at the very least a confirmation that Ice T is pretty damned cool.

Unfortunately the answer the this question yes and I say unfortunately because it seems that the games developers have spent all their time forgetting what exactly made the first games single player so entertaining in the first place: character and the freedom to blow shit up how you wanted.

Instead the player is presented with 7 tightly scripted and linear missions that follow the games non-sensical plotline across a variety of completely unrelated locations. This deviates completely from the first game where it was possible to hit the enemy from any angle and in some cases even from the air.

The games other huge problem is that it completely ignores the four main characters who have turned from four hilarious fuck ups on the hunt for gold to four of the usual gun-ho, kill ‘em all military hard men that inhabit every second release these days.

So the single player has none of the charm or originality of the first game and isn’t well crafted enough to stand up against the obvious competitor Modern Warfare 2 (DICE went as far as deliberately insulting MW2 in advertising and some half hearted jokes in game). So then this game is a total disaster? Well, no it really isn’t.

After completing my usual practice of fully finishing a games single player I jumped into the games much touted multiplayer in which two teams of twelve players battle it out on the expansive and gorgeous maps the series is known for.

Within minutes my bad mood brought on from the single players lacklustre conclusion was a distant memory as I jumped through the window of a collapsing building while gunning down a hapless enemy player.

The sheer insanity of what can be going on from one moment in the next in the online mode is at times staggering. Other players characters shout out enemy positions and ask for help if things aren’t going well (for instance if a tank has driven halfway through the building they were hiding in before firing its cannon destroying itself, the building and everyone inside it).

The multiplayer is team focussed and while players used to the selfish action of a game like Modern Warfare 2 the concept of actually working in a team comes quickly to all but the most idiotic hardcore gamers that haunt the xbox live service.

In all if you are coming to Bad Company 2 for a satisfying single player shooter you might as well forget it but if you are a fan of multiplayer mayhem that offers something a bit different to Modern Warfare or Halo this should keep you entertained for a long time to come.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: