The Dark Prince

I don’t usually pay much attention to celebrity gossip. Lets face it, since I (or you for that matter) don’t know the people involved directly, or even indirectly, you simply cannot know what is true and what isn’t. The media provides a very, very small and controlled window of these things and I simply don’t believe it’s possible to be sure of anything other than extremely general vibes about people.

But I have just spent at least a couple of hours reading the full judgement of the McCartney / Mills divorce case. It has moved me enough to write on a blog/writing thing/mess that I haven’t updated for over a year.

The thing that surprises me so much is just how underhanded and frankly horrible Heather Mills is. There are plenty of reports on the proceedings, portraying her as the villian, but it’s a sensational story and you shouldn’t really believe any of them. After all, stories are designed to get readers, so they’re going to play it up.

But, the thing is, when you read the judges thingy which I linked to above it’s quite surprising. She’s far far worse than the way she’s described in the media. She is not just a villain, she’s a pantomime villian. From exaggerating every claim in every possible way to actively attempting to steal half a million pounds, it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in some overly dramatic law show. In fact, reading through the judgement, you not only get a feel for the deep dislike the judge has for her, but this image of the proceedings as an episode of “The Practice”, with her, the villian, finally being revealed at the end, just before the closing credits, maybe even with a shout of “And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”. But that would just be far too dramatic and ridiculous.

I’m amazed that someone can be this self centred, so sure that they deserve anything they want and should give nothing in return. But I’m also glad to see that at least sometimes people like this get caught out. It’s more amazing still that people will both forgive and believe her. Sir McCartney has protected himself well by remaining quiet, but how many people will believe this to be an admission of guilt?

I don’t think someone who is that needy of the spotlight, so convinced of their worth and how much more important they are than everyone else can ever be changed. I doubt they would even consider that they should change and maybe not actively screw people so thoroughly in their quest to get what they deserve.

She is so transparent because we are so far away. Her eagerness to scorn and insult someone who genuinely cared the moment she could wring no more from him is easy to spot from a nice comfortable distance. It’s so easy to dismiss her taking credit for things that had nothing to do with her because we are not involved. But in our lives, we rarely get to be that detached. These people get under our guards, and reap as much as they can before we even realise. They exaggerate and lie and change the story as much as they can to make themselves appear righteous and we believe them. Then they move on to the next victim and do it again. Over and over again.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s so easy to say that McCartney was utterly stupid to be tricked by her, but if you can honestly say that you haven’t been tricked in a similar way and you think you’re above it, then my sympathies are with you, because at some point, you will be tricked too. It may even be already happening. Just try to only let it happen once, and don’t be so harsh to judge those who are tricked.

It’s one of those semi-serious rants that I sometimes make when I feel a bit important! Don’t worry, I’ll try and avoid writing anything for months after this to keep the balance of nature steady.  Right then, off we go.

One of the biggest problems to academia, progress, whatever you wish to call it at the moment is not a lack of information about things, but rather too much of it and no decent way of finding what you need. This is a relatively recently recognised problem and is fast being tackled, or at least valiantly attempting to be tackled. Google make their entire living doing just this, but like everything in life sadly, computers are not going to magically fix everything.  It is becoming very clear to even mainstream media that Google is not winning this fight.
The problem is simply that too many people want to have their say and not enough of them actually know what they’re on about.  This is the main failing behind Wikipedia, (and the fact that people are willing to trust information from this source is frankly frightening), but it extends to the web in general.  When you have no way of controlling what gets submitted and who by, there are just too many loudmouthed people who are too sure of their often insane opinions that the crud rises to the top whilst valuable and useful information sinks into the murky depths of the ever growing pile of crap that the internet has become.

So how do we solve this problem? Well, we can’t.  It is impossible for everyone to have their five minutes and for all views to be covered equally and sensibly.  People are selfish creatures and always push their agendas, the loudest mouths always win and the world steps backwards.  People purely want their words to be seen and heard, regardless of their correctness or even their possible interest to others. Blogs (which, lets face it, exist solely to boost egos and are of little benefit to anyone who isn’t the author), wikipedia, comments on news articles and forums seem only to consist of people all re-iterating their points with little or no regard to others in the hope that if their blab is repeated enough, it will drown out all other blab.  Forums in particular, even those that have a good community, slowly fill with more and more people who just have to have their say, or who can’t be bothered looking for a simple answer and ask repeated questions or start the same discussions over and over again.
To be honest, the only way forward is to filter and weight opinions based on the people that say them, but this in turn is also unsolvable.  Who has the more important opinion, someone with academic credentials, or someone with deep experience in the field.  It is possible the academic is merely a learned fool and equally possible that the experience gained by a field worker is repetitve and limits innovation.   In other words, there is no way of creating a metric of any accuracy whatsoever to rate the value of someones opinion.  And until this problem is translated or reduced to a problem that is solvable or even a hacky solution that almost works, the world will consist of far too much useless information.

I only have a few placed on the internet that I really enjoy looking at, and so far each of them have been systematically destroyed by either getting so far up themselves that they lose sight of their original goal (something awful and Way of the Rodent spring to mind, but more about them another time), or someone else manages to fuck everything up. Today, we’re going to have an in depth look at just such a person. His name is Ensign Teela. Well, actually, his name is something else, which isn’t very polite to give out on the internet, but he also calls himself NyarthMaul and then in a fit of wankiness decided that he was ‘reborn’ (yes, he used the word reborn…what a twat), as Snuffkin. If you really must know his actual name, so you can dedicate a trust fund to his eradication (and I won’t even get into his completely fucked up wife), then I suppose you might find something here.

Anyway, Ensign Teelas incredibly ability is that he lives in Japan. Don’t worry if you didn’t catch that because he will tell you about it again and again and again on possibly the most unpleasant forum on the entire internet. He also cannot write a sentence without it consisting of 5000 words and doesn’t have any sense of humour at all, which means that every update he does on UK:Resistance drags the high quality of writing down. I thought I might help him out and maybe convince him to carve his eyes out with some sort of Japanese thing with a sharp edge by doing a full critique of his newest amazingly shit article on called Goddammit, Japan . Which is partially reprinted here with no permission whatsoever. So here it goes.

Given how inescapable Final Fantasy is, its publicity machine has always been relatively low-key. You can’t see merchandise of Cloud and Zidane and The One That Looks Like Jamie Oliver on the shelves like you can with games such as Pokemon and Dragon Quest. Then, one day, you wake up and Ebay looks like this.

This is the first paragraph. UK:R is meant to be quick to read and funny and to the point. Perhaps phrases like “publicity machine” “relatively low-key” and the massively long winded way of saying everything that stains your shitty articles should be avoided FOR THE SAKE OF JAPAN. The first semi-joke comes in at around 23 words of pure pointless blather. And it’s not even that funny. Who the fuck wakes up to ebay? do you have some sort of computer alarm that wakes you up by bringing up the searchpage, turning the contrast up and playing a sample of the word “JAPAN” over and over again? It doesn’t need to be introduced like that you could in fact replace that whole shitstirring sentence with two words: “Until now.”

I think it’s safe to say at this point that you’ve lost 80% of your audience because it’s just a poorly written introduction, it isn’t that funny and there is something that I can’t quite identify that makes it strongly elitist. Anyway, here’s what happened after you fucked up the entire article within one paragraph:

It’s Final Fantasy in a bottle, courtesy of Square and Suntory! This is exactly the kind of stuff we would have spent WHOLE TENNERS on when we were teenagers, despite not having enough money to even heat the flat. Now we can’t escape the certain knowledge that Hironobu Sakaguchi has wanked into EVERY SINGLE BOTTLE.

Admittedly this isn’t too bad, it’s not quite so verbose, but it could have had a proper joke, the first thing that springs to mind is how many teenagers have their own flat? The last sentence is doing a typical Ensign Teela and expecting you to follow his peculiar train of thought. Did this mysterious Japanese Person (who I presume had something to do with Final Fantasy but I honestly can’t be fucked finding out) wank into the bottle because the fans demand it, or because all his work is wank or what? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’m sure it’s clear enough to someone who really has played Final Fantasy for months on end, but to the rest of us (ie, those who aren’t 15 year old girls), why should we have to work for entertainment? Particularly when it’s not very good entertainment. Spell it out and make some more of what could have been a fairly funny joke.

It really is Final Fantasy in a bottle, too! Here’s how your brain reacts when you drink it.

1) Initial repulsion and horror.

2) The palate begins to

..blah blah blah, wank wank wank, boring pointless self important text..

only this one has a packet of Jawbreakers dissolved in it. And spunk.

Right idea, but once again, the former writer for NTSC-UK one of the most pretentious sites in the entire universe shows his true style and spoils any smile that might have risen to your face over a drink being terrible just like the game by talking about fuck knows what and not stopping until you’ve lost anyone who still was reading up to this point. Nice spunk reference at the end though, shame about that.

The ingredients are listed as parsley, sage, thyme, royal jelly and something in Japanese that we can’t understand because we don’t know the kanjis for “Company Chairman” and “Tadpoles.” Horrible as it is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the “Collectors Edition” set which comes in these poncey perfume bottles.

What could have again been a good joke is totally spoiled by delivery. “The ingredients are listed as”, sounds boring and dull, much like the rest of the articles. But the worst attrocity comes just after, instead of going the “we have no idea because it’s in foreign” path, like the actual owner of the site, you needlessly show off that you can speak Japanese and unintentionally speak down to your audience. Finally you included these two pictures in your homage to yourself, namely these:

It’s absolutely GAGGING for a dildo reference, then you could link that to the wank jokes you’ve made before and even refer to some of the more bizarre Japanese sexual practises that everyone knows about.

The thing that annoys me most about this article is that it has no reason to be about Japan. This sort of merchandising has been happening here in the boring old Western civilisation for decades. Unecessary references to Japan are what you life for, I understand that, but try and at least keep them to your annoying attention seeking posts on the forum.

There are so many problems with your spamming updates, the lack of spellchecking, the poor wording, the failed attempts at humour and just the self importance of everything you write destroy anything you set out to achieve. UK:Resistance is one of the funniest sites out there at there and you’re very priviliged to even be allowed to write for it, so take the time and get it right. But secretly, I’m hoping that the next Employee update will have you being blown up in classic Star Trek fashion because time has shown that you have no ability to accept criticism or even listen to anyone who disagrees with you, so I doubt this will ever improve.

I went to the Australian Open yesterday and bring you the most shocking, most topical and most important news in Tennis today, namely: Serena Williams has an absolutely enormous ass. I mean, really, until you’ve actually seen it for real, it’s hard to believe, because it’s just beyond belief. Here is about the only picture I could find to prove this to you my stoically unconvinced but loyal readers:

See? But even this picture seems to lack the impact that being within 500 metres of this glutonious glob of fat has. The fact is I strongly belief that her ass is so incredibly massive that has a considerable gravitational effect on a light object such as a tennis ball, because there must be some reason why she actually wins matches.

In every match I’ve seen her play, she makes countless errors, hits the ball strongly and confidently way outside the line and generally acts extremely aggressively. Her acclaimed power is indeed there, but the ability to choose where it goes is not - she just hits hard, nothing more. For every shot you see of her hitting a ball close to the line she will have made at least five that missed by miles, yet everyone defends this lardarse. She is praised unconditionally by commentators, regularly stating that they don’t understand why she is making so many mistakes and that she doesn’t usually play like this. Just for reference, if you’re a tennis commentator, the word ‘usually’ means something that occurs regularly, and this is something that happens regularly.

Really the only thing that she and her slightly less rear-dominant sister have proved is exactly how terrible the state of womens tennis is.

Unfortunately for anyone reading this though, it may not make a lot of sense. See, I’ve just started writing for this site. A good site, and I’m more than a little dwarfed by the guy who runs it all. To put it bluntly, he’s a brilliant writer with his finger on the pulse and about 48 more hours in his day than everyone else seems to get. So, in other words, he’s far better than me.

Now I know this comes as a shock, my hallucinated readerbase. How can anyone possibly be better than me? I know, it’s something that defies the very nature of the physical world. But it’s also true. Presumably he exists in some sort of magical parallel dimension where women don’t insist on putting the toilet lid down and don’t always have headaches at extremely specific times. They may or may not also enjoy wearing school girl outfits but I cannot say at this point.

School…girl…err.. What was I saying? oh yeah. So, that’s the guy who I’m essentially working for, and the problem is, that he’s too fucking fast. He writes about 20 articles in a week, at least, and they’re all usually of a very high standard. Plus the forum related to this site usually contains a large number of links about material that could be used in an actual piece. So this brings me to my first problem, actually finding something to write about.

Because you see, the wonderful thing about the internet, is that everyone likes finding things wrong with everyone else. The moment you write something that has already been said, some wonderful specimen of humanity points out that it was in fact done before on sub obscure site that no-one else reads, not even the person who writes said site. It’s impossible to find something that doesn’t already exist somewhere else, because people are fucking inconsiderate.

Despite all this, due to my amazingly cool amazingness, I did actually find things that weren’t covered on this site or others and wrote about them. They were vaguely related. WHAM FUCKING BAM, the internet provides it’s finest thinker and instantly my only abilities are writing on a field which practically covers an entire scene anyway, according to Confucious reborn. It may also have been because I criticised an old movie, and presumably said intellectual liked this old movie. To top this off, another figment of the internets imagination who had otherwised seemed nice suggested I should do more research when I practically screamed out that I didn’t want to see some festering old try hard movie about things that I don’t care about. That was part of the joke. Maybe I should have written it in bold and capitals, but I assumed that was a bit unsubtle.

It’s these sort of things that make you feel like throwing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures at random people. And if you’ve never been hit by one of these plastic menaces, you won’t realise how damn sharp and pointy they are. And that is as good a sentence as any to end this on.

It’s nice when people can make light fun of stupid things in this world. There’s nothing quite like having a good chuckle at goths claiming that they are somehow superior and interesting and intelligunt and such, (yes that spelling mistake was intentional, it was a joke. Bugger off already). More than ever due to the internet and such, very specific groups bringing out extremely strong stereotypes make themselves extremely easy targets, lets examine these closer shall we children?

1. Goths - The fashion style can look tremendous on the right kind of person, but like most fashions, 90% of the people who adopt it look shit. Oh, and they’re usually stupid and pathetic, and for some reason have a massive ego about how wonderful they all are.
2. Teenage Girls/weblog types - Animated GIFs? Hideous clashing colour schemes? Unreadable text due to said colour schemes? Pictures of famous people or anime or Final Fantasy Characters? All you need now is thousands of words about precisely nothing that is in no way enjoyable to read due to the lack of spelling, punctuation, grammar or content and you’ve got yourself an award winning shitbox.
3. Feminists - Not the real deal, I have no problem with those who fight for sensible things like equal pay and such, but the screaming females who want more women in gaming (or female friendly games) and such I have trouble understanding. Most females I’ve met don’t like gaming. They think it’s pointless and they don’t care. Why force it on them?
4. Protesters - Not those who have a genuine reason and carefully research a cause but those who blindly follow on the parade of protesting about something. VSU (Voluntary Student Unionism) is a really fantastic one. I guess they’re worried they won’t get thousands of dollars to staple poorly written propoganda all over everything.
5. Believers - Particularly in the religious context, these type can just be really stupid. There are plenty of others who read that Make Money Quick malarky and believe that the right “formula” can make you a millionaire. Either way, they’re all the same sort of gullible idiots and they deserve what they get.

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It goes on and on. Simply put, they are generalisations and cruel ones, but there are so many people who fit this generalisation down to the last dotted ‘i’, people you’ve almost certainly met in some context that you can really understand the observations made. I’d like to point one out that will probably shock you. The screaming queen.

Got your breath back yet? I must be homophobic just saying it mustn’t I? I must be. But I’m not. I have no problem with homosexuality, I have that many people close to me who are that it just isn’t a concern. What does bother me is the type that shove it in my face. A while ago, my best friend, who I spent far more time with than anyone else before or since turned out to be gay. He had some unsureness at first, but he dealt with it. I was impressed, but then it started. Before, he had always argued vehemently that gays shouldn’t be allowed to adopt kids, now, unsurprisingly he was for it. Everything had to have a gay subtext. I was practically forced to read all sorts of books expressly written for gays, on and on and on. I’ve seen this behaviour everywhere, but recently a fantastic spoof site called idiot toys (look in the links if you must) suddenly attracted the short attention span of this tool.

For months Idiot Toys (geddit? look at the initials and stop making me explain good jokes..) has generally made a lot of very good observations about the marketing of electronic gizmos, one of the common ones being that marketing is more and more pushing towards the female/gay market. It’s not an insult on the writers part to lump these two groups together, it’s very clear that this is how the manufacturers are lumping them together. Anyway, this is what started Mr Tom Gay Coates on his bike. Note how first he laughs and appreciates the humour and then goes on to say that it’s all rude and prejudiced. Note how the author actually explains that this is not the case and is ignored. Note the endless ranting.

Thing is, it’s not nasty humour. It’s clearly meant in a light hearted atmosphere, it’s not in any way proclaiming that all gays should be shot or such. But Mr. Coates knows, and by god is he going to tell us about it.

If I was nasty, I’d say that Tom Coates is very likely just recently out or extremely immature, not yet at the stage where he’s dealt with it and isn’t so sensitive. But instead I’ll just say he’s a dumb fuck and should go and seek commiserations on one of his rambling and shitty blogs.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to go and see a movie that I had neither heard about (because I don’t spend my entire time waiting for the next movie fix), nor particularly cared about once I knew what it was. I went, because it sounded like a fun idea and the rest of the night was good anyway. The movie was a pathetic and boring Sci-Fi Film called “Serenity”.

For those of you that haven’t seen the film and want to see the film at some point in the future, please stop reading now, because what I’m about to say will spoil the non-existant pleasure to be gained from watching this crud. It’s shit. There are some good lines in there and some amusing moments but the premise of the film, the plot, the characters etc are typical Joss Whedon generic bullshit and I’m fucking sick of it.

Every forum I frequent says something about how this film is so much better than Star Wars. Well done universe on producing the dumbest generation of idiots yet. It’s a shit film that slightly better than an extremely shitty film, lets praise it all because watered down lameness is the new cool. Perhaps the fans of this pap like to eat paper mache testicles for breakfast every day, because after all, they taste Sooo much better than smoked dog shit? What a fucking stupid comparison to base the claim of this thing being good on.

Next up you see blatant fanboyism in halfbaked poorly attempted jobs like this:

From sensible people who know better. WHY?? Name me one thing that Joss Whedon has done that hasn’t been generic, soft and pale imitations of much better things. I’ll get onto that in a second, let’s first go over the ridiculous statement that this movie is somehow cool and good.

First off, The brilliant Whedon has to include at least one dream sequence. He always includes a dream sequence, he just can’t help himself - he has a strict formula to follow and a very specific order to follow it in. Needless to say it doesn’t work. Moving on, there are these creatures who are stated, with certainty to be extremely aggressive and nasty things. Pure aggression in fact. Yet these creatures who spend every waking second on screen growling and making scary noises have time to carefully paint their ships, burn the flesh of skeletons and neatly tie them around their ships and of course, sit in a massive fleet in orbit around a planet for, ohh…no reason at all. Let’s not get into the trivial detail of an animalistically aggressive thing being able to smoothly pilot a ship, or the fact that they’d attack each other due to their own aggression. This is the genius of Whedon, he’s obviously really carefully thought this out.

Okay, so that’s only one plot hole right? Surely that’s just a minor oversight, it can’t be that bad. Ohhh..but it is. You see, one of the characters has a deep dark secret. That secret turns out to be that the big bad empire is in fact big and bad. Who would have guessed it? It was made out to be some amazing thing and in the end it was quite boring, but get this. The team of bumbling idiots we are forced to follow finds a video of a woman explaining that the big bad empire is bad and big. This video could have been made anywhere, and has nothing that places it in context of any planet or indeed actually proves any of the womans claim. Ignoring all this, we are led to believe that by showing this video to the entire planetary system, everyone will now understand that the big bad empire is big and perhaps even bad.

Let’s ignore the fact that different planets will have different nights, some people won’t happen to be actually listening or watching some media (a concept completely alien to americans of course) and of course the huge technical impossibility of actually broadcasting such a video on all forms of media to an entire solar system, these can all be poorly explained away by the sort of warped logic that claims this is a great film. Let’s instead look at a very very disturbing idea that is marketed as completely possible that broadcasting this video is somehow going to not only convince everyone in this system that the big bad empire is in fact quite large and not very nice, (again, Whedon-arse-licking-logic can rule out the idea that people might have been savvy to this idea before seeing a video of someone talking with no context to what they are talking about or where they are talking from), including a zealot of the strongest order. If only the Americans had realised this and broadcasted propoganda to the people of the middle east. Or vice versa, depending on your current dietary habits.

It’s shit. Pure shit. And as well as these hideous plot flaws and continual standardised form, Whedon manages to make a fight scene that should have been vaguely impressive boring, as well as making a straight forward battle scene impossible to follow. Need any more evidence that Joss Whedon is a complete arsepastry? Go and look at this hideous mess of a script for Alien Resurrection. Certainly not the finest work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but by no means a particularly bad film. In fact, in later interviews he describes how he couldn’t create the film in his own vision, but was forced to make severe compromises. Read that script. The work of the Master Script Writer Joss Fucking Whedon. Personally, I think it’s amazing Jeunet even managed to get a good movie out of it at all, it’s a pile of cliched shit with all the usual Whedon trimmings.

So, if you watch this stupid Serenity film thingy (or any other muck involving this child protege), be sure to look for the following generic elements of the most boring scriptwriter/director around:

• Dream Sequences - It doesn’t work. It never worked. Please stop.
• Angsty ‘Cello Solo - Because it just shows how mature and clever you are for watching this and how highbrow your musical tastes should be
• Generic cast of characters each with very obvious and very exploitable character flaws - All of these characters have to look cool in some failed way as well.
• Female “super fighter” - again with deep personal problems, because only the best fighters have such anguish
• Attempts at horror that seem pale or watered down - In particular making someone being eaten boring and somehow presentable at a nice christian dinner
• Extremely unconvincing fight scenes - How can you make an armlock seem weak and tacky? Who can honestly believe that trained fighters move so goddamn slowly? Why do the kicks look like they’re being performed by a five year old?
• Theme plagiarised directly from some other source - The entire first season of Buffy, that was complete originality there.
• Sledgehammer Symbolism - Naming the ship and the movie Serenity just in case you didn’t get the clever reference. Jesus fucking christ.
• Admittedly half decent humour - To hide the complete lack of plot coherency or interesting storyline.

The most tragic thing of all is that the amount of money wasted on all this bullshit would be enough to fix an entire third world country, rather sobering that.

Yes, this is old. It’s a fair few months old, but every now and then you see something that just makes you feel ill. Really really ill. I can hear you anticipating the reason for this nausea, and here is the start of it:

MAME over

Now, I have never been a big fan of Stuart Campbell, he always sounds like he’s got a big bloody chip on his shoulder. No matter what I think of him though, I’ve yet to see an argument he’s made that doesn’t have extremely good backing or merit. Even when he’s criticised something that I truly love, I cannot do anything but agree with his points, because he obviously thinks pretty carefully about them. In either case, I agree with him wholly on this article, although I wasn’t sure how true it was. So I did some hunting.

I found things that really really shocked me. To start with, on the softer front, here is a poorly constructed and utterly shit rebuttal from one of the self-righteous developers. Here’s the real give-away:

…our target audience is not primarily gamers.

Who then? What is the fucking purpose of documenting games if not for playing them? Not wanting to get into an “Are Games Art” debate, but you don’t see art collectors closing their collection into safe sealed up completely dark boxes because their target audience is not primarily viewers. It gets worse though. Far far worse.

The famous justification of removal of high-score saving

Now, I can side with a small part of reasoning that high-score saving may make bughunting difficult, but removing an entire and wonderful feature for everyone because of it? There are far better ways of handling this, allow it to be disabled, even leave it disabled by default, but for christs sake, forcibly removing it? I think Stuart far more elegantly sums up the arguments against this, so read that first article again.

Okay, I thought, the developers are a bunch of fucks. The selfish self-centred types who turn up everywhere more and more. The free-style jazz players (an ugly sound that is utterly unenjoyable for the audience but the musicians enjoy playing), the podcasting losers who just want their opinion to be heard, the “I know more about Japan than you” bullshit artists that seem to frequent the internet everywhere, the list goes on. So, I tried to see what the rest of the scene was like and found this:

The most sickening read I’ve had in a long time

I can understand the development team being stuck up fucks, because, well, most coders in the world seem to be. But the fact that they have a bum-groping bunch of wankers happy to shove a nose up the ever more cavernesque rectum of said team is just scary. I could only read about half the wild justifications and attacks made by people using the word “gamer” as an insult, (rather like calling someone a “drinker” because they think wine should be enjoyed and so on..) before I gave up. Apart from the obvious fact that a large portion of their audience is going to try and actually play games on this shitbox of an emulator and they have all been ignored by a statement clearly meant to protect the project from litigation, it’s very obvious that many of the defensive types on there are completely useless as programmers and are just trying to gain kudos for agreeing with the development team.

Now, the MAMEDev team will never read this, none of the whacked out fucks on their forum will ever read this and there’s a very good chance that no-one else apart from me will ever read this. But, if so much as one other person apart from myself reads this and thinks “I’m never going to let that happen on a project” as I am now, then this has been worth writing.

Here’s to all the programs that worked so well until some fucker went and improved them:

• Winamp - Fast lightweight media player that is now bloated with a shitty video player and even shittier browser plugin
• Trillian - Straightforward chat client filled with bile and just plain ugly now
• Nero - The best burning software around until someone decided to hide all the useful options (or simply remove them, to make the whole thing “user friendly”), and of course add tonnes of useless shit.
• MAME - Which at the current rate will probably be usurped by a new package, perhaps Final Burn
• Many many more - I just can’t be fucked thinking of them

May their hard-learnt lessons be remembered. May no-one ever fuck things sideways like this again.

Today, whilst retrieving food from the bowels of the city I was accosted by a fairly drunken lout asking me whether I barracked for West Coast or Sydney. I replied that I didn’t give a flying fuck about watching musclebound men in tight shorts running around after balls and acting like spoilt children when things don’t go their way (in slightly politer terms). Naturally of course this was taken as some sort of insult and was in general not fun. Thankfully, the grand final is over, wonderful news that because now I can finally stop being asked about it all. This entry is going to be the link that I send everyone to when they ask me if I watch AFL or try to engage me in a conversation that in some way involves AFL.

So, here it is here and now, my definitive statement about it all. I don’t care about AFL. I’m not interested in Football. Lots of people aren’t. Please go away and stop fucking asking me. If I have to make a website called idontgiveafuckaboutafl.com just to
prove that I don’t give a fuck about AFL and plenty of other people don’t either, then I will.

Hello again all you very very bored people who actually read this. Today I thought I’d just quickly point out one of the stupidest reports ever in the history of something or other. Here it is:

Have a good laugh at this

Among the most stupid comments, is this one: excluding murder, Scots were almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans.

That’s a bit like saying, “if we exclude all accidents involving cars, then there are no road accidents in Australia”, well done UN on proving yourself a valuable asset to the world. I know next time that I’d far rather be in America, because it’s much less violent, oh..except for the violence that ends in death I guess. Maybe that should be called something else then.