Oh hey look I had a draft saved from July 25th. It was about the election too! That would have a been a wonderful post too…oh well.
While being a nerd and reading up on gay nerd stuff I found an article about the new Resident Evil game, and how it was being accused of racism. So, lets break it down.
African womens’ blog Black Looks has accused Resident Evil 5 of racism, questioning the games setting and depiction of black people as “inhuman savages”. Surely, in a game about zombies, and the killing of said zombies…well, this isn’t District-9 style.
I can’t be arsed writing more, and if you have a higher brain capacity than a monkey with depression, you get where I’m going with this. I could mention the fact that there has already been four or five games worth of white zombie-shooting, but I have a feeling its almost a wasted argument. Oh, and the producers folded to these people on grounds that they didn’t want moral hysteria.
‘Moral hysteria’? Pardon? This has the capacity to blow up more than No Russian did. And leave it to a bunch of crazy internet women to start it (hey, at least I’m not being racist).
Yes, I’ve been lazy with writing more for this. I was actually supposed to do this entry a couple of weeks ago but I just went on living my life.
Today is World No Tobacco Day and in hindsight there is no better day to write what I had planned to a while back. By now, you all (implying more than one person reads this) would have heard about the cigarette tax hike, and the new blank packaging that has been introduced. Why the blank packets? Apparently, our generation is attracted to shiny, colourful things, much like a red packet of cigarettes. When the blank packaging was first mentioned on the news, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for anyone who took the story seriously. The reporter actually asked these four kids if a blank white carton was appealing to them. What else were they going to say, other than “nah not really”? I’m sure if they showed a carton of Winfield Red, the interview would turn into a battle royale over who gets the cigarettes, because they’ll be attracted to the bright colours and fancy patterns.
Almost 50 years ago, people were saying how everyone would quit smoking when the price would rise to $1/packet. It seems that nobody has been paying attention to this fact, and really, if you have been smoking for say 5-10 years already, you aren’t going to stop when it starts costing $1.50-$2 more. The Cancer Council wants to stop people our age from smoking.
I was almost definitely planning on writing more than these pissy little paragraphs, but as of right now I really can’t be bothered. I’ll add some more to it (read: I won’t) later when I think of it.
This just isn’t right. Sorry… Alliie(?), even though you’re away from your friends and family and yo lyf, I for one hope you are stuck in lame asz Kentucky in college. I can see why you hate it thurr lolsz. I wonder how long this girl (assuming its a girl) spends before going back to reppiin her 352 in Floriidha with her friiendsz and fam, just seeing whats p…oppiin with yo niikkasz. TaRd!
With this post, I have successfully upped my average posts per month to: <insert drumroll here>
Picture that glorious number flashing and rolling across the screen. It would have been but it won’t work and I really can’t be bothered trying to fix it for tumblr (yes I know it may seem like I can’t get off tumblr these days but it may shock you to find out that I spend less time on here than you think).
We all know that at different times of day, television channels play ads that cater to the target audience of the shows they revolve around (I hope that made sense). As much as they say it isn’t true anymore, there are still the ‘junk food ads’ on in the afternoon, and the trend continues like this. One thing I have been noticing though is the amount of life insurance ads that have suddenly sprung up. Its been going on for a good two months now and shows no sign of slowing down - I’m even seeing new ones coming up now. Even Aussie are joining in on the life insurance bandwagon. At Aussie, they’ll save you with home loans, but now they can also save your family when you die!
…I should be doing a marketing major.
All the life insurance ads are the same. Always a shot of the family playing around, enjoying themselves, then the serious talks start about what would happen if the parents were to suddenly die.
Once you see one of these ads, you have seen them all. That being said, I have kinda run out of things to say about this topic which I’m sure my ten(s) of readers will be disappointed to see. Anyway, I suppose I should include some kind of humour in this post so heeeeeereee we go.
Ensemble Studios (the developers of Age of Empires 2 ) knew that 9/11 was going to happen. The truth is in the taunts.
What are the taunts, you non-AoE players say? If you type in a number from 1 to 42 during a game, different voice clips play so you can ‘taunt’ your enemies or just quickly chat with your team. Lets explore the numbers in question.
If you play the 9th taunt (obviously by entering ‘9’ into the game chat) it plays a sound clip of people saying “ooooooh”. The number 11 plays a laugh.
If we think about these taunts together, we get a crowd of people saying “ooooooh” and then someone laughing. The Taliban laughing at America while they are in shock?
Now, bear with me as I explore these taunts further using advanced mathematical theories. If we add nine and eleven together we get twenty and by entering ‘20’ into the game chat, you get a man saying the following phrase:
“My granny could scrap better than that.”
The word scrap also means ‘fight’. This can be construed as the Taliban taunting America, saying that their collective grandmothers can fight better than the US Army, which one can say holds true to this date as America is still at war in the Middle East.
The flight numbers of the planes that hit the World Trade Center were 11 and 175. Eleven was an obvious choice, wasn’t it? Its the laugh. Now a more complicated question arises. Why 175?
The taunt that plays when a player types in the number 17 is the following voice clip:
“It is good to be the king.”
What countries still have kings? Countries that hold oil. Now, to add in the number five to this web of numbers. The number 5 plays a short clip, simply saying “gold, please”. Oil is known as black gold…a coincidence? The terrorists knew that America was after oil, where were they going to get it all from?
This leads me to a slightly different theory of the number 175. We have already established that 17 is ‘the king’ taunt, and that 5 asks demands ‘gold, please’. The terrorists may have used these numbers (combined to give 175)to emulate how America thought of themselves in the world. 17 being of course ‘the king’, and 5, asking for gold. Some say America went to war the Middle East not to catch bad dudes, but to get oil and more oil (remembering that oil is also known as black gold).
This is as far as my research has gone, but I will be sure to develop more theories, or add on to my current ones. Stay tuned.
Facebook in general has been giving me the shits recently.
That is just stupid. No Facebook, I do not want to see when someone comments on some random status that I never even saw. Also, I do not want to see how many retarded groups you join, how many things you become a ‘fan’ of and what events you are attending. Facebook is just removing the challenge of stalking people now. Thank Christ there are such things as filters.
Now that I’m on the subject of Facebook, I’m going to go over another facet that is out of control on this wonderful site: groups and other pages. Some of these groups (from here on in I am including those fan pages when I say groups) make me want to move my computer to the laundry just so I’m close enough to a bucket if I start projectile vomiting because I accidentally read a really bad title. There are some different categories that groups fall under, and they are all as bad as each other:
And the list goes on like this. There are, of course, the outstanding displays of idiocy that make you want to question who would win if the person who first made the group went up against a vegetable in a game of chess. After opening the flood gates on Facebook on my own news feed, I went looking for groups that made me think a short and simple “why?” Here is the result of five minutes work:
The following group takes the cake.
Yes, this group has over 1.5 MILLION members. All under 14, and who sadly believe that this could actually happen. I have to share a few amazing posts that people have made on the wall of this group.
Yeah I edited out names in the first screenshots and not these ones, what of it?
Mad tangents aside, Facebook is easier to troll than an 80 year old with dementia. It helps that people get far too involved in some groups and madly invite all their friends to join and help the group reach its target number (all the cool kids set a target number for groups to reach). Little do they know they are slowly handing themselves a legal warrant for their death because amongst the group invitations they send out to everyone, there are numerous Farmville requests asking people to send them gifts and help them out with crops that just keep getting attacked by those darn crows!
Shoutouts go out to a few people this time:
Bad spelling and grammar in that chat log aside, it has been too long since I last wrote something on here, mainly because it only occurs to me to look at Tumblr when I’m feeling on the bad side (would not have thought that hey). I’m hoping that the above log explains why I haven’t written anything and even though I did get my wisdom teeth out and it made me house-bound for days, it was great, and I have one special person to thank. You know who you are.
I think to kick this off I’m just going to list a number of things that have been making me rage. I present my ~*RaGe*LiST~~*
I’m quite sure there is more but this is all I can think of so far. On a brighter note (wait, why is this going in here?) I stumbled upon a new-ish Irish alt.rock band. When I get around to it I’ll cut down the radio rips I got my hands on and upload them. This should take approximately five minutes but I’m sure I can stretch it out to a couple of hours. Go me.
A little too hot, in fact, to write something worthwhile…so I’m just gonna say a few quick words.
Hot weather sucks
You are the people with room temperature IQ.
You are the people who do not have any scientific knowledge but pretend you do.
You are the people who make these claims, and then ask everyone else to prove you wrong.
You are the people who base everything around the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. I ask you, do you even know how it works?
You are the people who use Bible codes and vague quatrains from Nostradamus to help backup your claims.
You are the people who write things like “scientists around the world agree that X event is overdue, and is expected to happen in 2012.”
Are you trying to tell me that in 2012 the poles will switch, a solar storm will mess up the magnetic field, Yellowstone will erupt and a giant planet will come close enough to Earth that it will fuck up our gravitational field? Wait a minute… and those crazy scientists at the LHC are going to possibly create a black hole that will condense us all into a tiny ball?! At that rate, there will be nothing left by 21 December…or is this all supposed to happen on the same day?
You are the people that the world would be better off without.
Shoutout to my gr8m8 Rob. I know you’ll love this.
This comic (courtesy of xkcd) pretty much sums up my feelings about the idiots who plague 95% of YouTube videos.
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that I got capped this month. After all, I am in exam mode and I tend to find random things to download during my procrastination. However, I did have to redownload one game in hopes that it would fix a problem, but of course it didn’t (goodbye 5GB!) and the problem still remains to be fixed. Random tangents about my sad existence aside, its been way too long since I last wrote on this stupid thing.
Because I’ve been capped and thus most of my entertainment when I’m bored has been capped, I resorted to watching the tele for longer than an hour and I can easily say that most of the ads I see in 30 minutes are either repeated every break, or are just as annoying as each other. Seriously, how many times could anyone honestly watch television and not get pissed off when they see the same ads over and over. I’ve resorted to finding two shows I want to watch that are running at the same time, just so I don’t have to sit through anyone telling me to spend $10 texting them so they can send me something for my phone to not turn it into a lie detector, a GPS or an x-ray machine. God help me when both the shows go to ad breaks at the same time.
I’m not sure which are worse - the ads for Leimo hair regrowth, 48 hour detox diets or the seemingly infinite phone companies trying to sell you shit that obviously won’t work, and then screwing you out of money because they send you things and charge you for receiving them. Furthermore, I don’t understand why some ads are louder than the actual show you want to watch.
Getting into the thick of the problem here - I am absolutely sick and tired of all the fucking ads about how you can turn your phone into X object and “impress your friends!” I can say without hesitation that if someone I knew got one of those things, they would not be a friend for much longer. On the plus side they would still be able to impress me with their stupidity. At the moment I am looking forward to the couple of weeks before Christmas and waiting for Jamster to come out with the stale and repetitive animal greeting cards that have been animated by a monkey with Parkinson’s.
God damn it, now its storming. Don’t want to let anything fry my computer again (hint: LOLPOWERSURGE) so I’ll cut it short.
Ads about hair regrowth - IMPOSSIBLE TO ENJOY
Ads about weight loss - IMPOSSIBLE TO TAKE SERIOUSLY
Enjoying television by sitting on one channel and just taking the ads - IMPOSSIBLE
More to come soon because I’m having a bad week. Fuck you ACU, put your exams closer together.
I haven’t been in the right mood to write another entry in the last few days, things have been going too well. Today is different for two very big reasons.
1) I have work tomorrow, and
2) I have work tomorrow
If you couldn’t figure out why I’m in the right mood to write here again, you should probably throw away your modem and bash your head against your desk repeatedly.
link directs to the OFLC classification report
If we go back in time a month or two, we would see Australia filling in (read: complaining to) the rest of the internet about how Left 4 Dead 2 is going to be banned from their shores. Of course, their outrage was met by sarcastic bastards from everywhere else in the world (except Germany) who didn’t give us any sympathy, and why should they have? We here are backwards criminals! We don’t have a rating higher than MA15+ for video games for a reason I am yet to understand.
Actually, I lied. We know full well why we have not recieved the coveted R18+ classification, and it is due to the Honorary Michael Atkinson, the current South Australian Attorney-General. In order for Australia to get the higher rating, Australia’s Standing Committee of Attorneys General (SCAG) must all vote unanimously in favour. Atkinson, however, has been opposed to the higher rating for quite some time now, and has actually blocked several past attempts. He argues that computer games are special, and need to have a higher level of censorship than other media.
His argument for this is that video games are more interactive than film or television, and that it is more harmful to view the same material by virtue of it being a game. He has no evidence to support this claim, other than the fact that he may have seen his kids get a bit involved in the games they play. Search youtube for something like “Halo 3 kid rage” and you will probably get an example of this. Computer games are now consumed by more adults than children, even Atkinson accepts this fact. We all should realise that adults should have the right to consume material intended for adults.
In an interview with GamespotAU he stated “In cinemas, the age of moviegoers can be regulated, and at the video store people must provide ID to hire R18+ videos. Once electronic games are in the home, access to them cannot be policed and the games are easily accessible to children.” He seems completely oblivious to the fact that adults can hire out R18+ videos and bring them home, thus being “easily accessible to children”. The same goes for R18+ magazines and the like. This is the fucking internet Mr. Atkinson, you would be amazed at how readily available everything you wish to police is available, and all at the click of a button!
On 15 September, the OFLC released their classification report. In it, is reasons why it was refused classification. Yes, Atkinson wins again. L4D2 was given the fateful RC (Refused Classification) for a number of reasons. It is worth noting that Valve (the publisher) did appeal this decision, but lost. To allow L4D2 to be sold in Australia, Valve cut out some of the content that the OFLC commented on in their report. This new cut version of the game went through the screening process again and came out with a brand new MA15+ rating.
To sum up what has been changed in the Australian version read this link. To view the differences, go here.
Apparently people have gotten a hold of Michael Atkinson’s details and posted them on the internet, getting people to continually complain via mail and telephone, which I can only imagine would be really, really annoying. I would probably call up him up and ask him what year it is.
Seriously, this is the shit we have to put up with these days? I’m not going to scream dictatorship as that is what the uninformed masses of spastic dropkicks would / have been doing already. Its just a little bit stupid that the rest of SCAG can see the benefit of an R18+ rating for video games, yet one guy can’t. I knew there was a reason why nobody likes South Australia. Oh, before I forget, Germany has gone through the same thing we have.
It suddenly feels so Orwellian around here…
Tuesday has rolled around and as usual I was at work, thankful that I got to stack the freezer with the stock that had just arrived. You wouldn’t call IGA the hardest place to work at, especially when the hardest task is probably having to face the heat upstairs to bring boxes downstairs. Anyway, my point is I get a lot of time to think while working, and today I thought about what this first real post should be about. Without further ado, here it is.
Before you read this article, I warn you: have a bucket nearby your computer because when you read this there is a good chance of projectile vomiting from sheer disgust.
Congressional ethics report leaked onto the internet. Cue shitstorm
tl;dr (too long;didn’t read) a Congressional Ethics investigation was leaked accidentally onto the internet by an employee. The employee was allowed to work on the file from home on a computer that happened to have P2P software installed on it (i.e. Limewire). The employee claims that he/she didn’t know how P2P worked, and so was oblivious to the fact that people started downloading the document to their own computers. The report summarised confidential ongoing investigations relating to 33 members of Congress and some Congressional staff. The employee involved was fired but a few questions remain.
Who is to blame in all this?
To sane people (me), it would be the guy with the extra chromosome who didn’t realise that P2P is fucking retarded in the first place, especially if you have no clue about how to properly use the programs.
However, to the usual band of misfits that enjoy jumping on any excuse to urge Congresss to pass laws and pretty much present P2P as a national security threat are at it again. Those folks may be going a bit far in saying that this could be NSA related, but it does have a slither of substance to it - the Ethics chairwomen said in a statement about the issue that this was an “isolated incident” - you would like people to think that wouldn’t you? Oh, did I forget to mention who these people are?
You may know of the MPAA and/or the RIAA. Yes, these guys again. They are trying (note trying) to say that the P2P is to blame in this. Sure, the staffer put the file on his computer but it wasn’t his fault that people saw it when browsing the network and decided to download it!
This is clearly the type of shit that the world does not need. Lets forget the fact that P2P is illegal, and just focus on the employee who has a severe case of down syndrome. The leak is entirely his fault and what do the people in charge blame most? People downloading the file from his shared network. There is no justice in the world for stupidity.
Over the last few weeks I have run into a problem. So many things in this world make me angry (mostly just trivial bullshit but whatever) and I don’t really have a medium to vent it. Naturally, if I stumble across something on this large series of tubes Al Gore calls the internet I’ll link it to one of my friends who I know will share the same thoughts, we will discuss it, but I won’t really vent all the emotion I feel towards it (look out for many upcoming posts).
I know it sounds really homosexual but this blog should suit my needs. I want to vent to people, but not so much to their face because I don’t really want to scare them away.
This will also probably get used for when I have brain waves about interesting (note my definition of interesting being things that interest me) things, like my talk with Ally earlier today about why zombies are violent. This lead to some interesting (yes we are still using my definition of the word) research and will soon be featured as a rage-free post sometime later on this stupid thing.
Enjoy this because I probably won’t enjoy telling people I have a blog.