Naked Crab Man Returns

Idea time! UhOh!

2011-08-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

So I have a plan.

Its probably not a very good idea. But, basically, I've bought a monthly bus ticket and starting on the 11th, I'm going to get up, get out of bed and go to the gym

Every Day.

Except days when I'm doing something else (tuesday, basically)

Oh dear!

Book 29 and 30 - The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rossfuss

2011-07-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

An old innkeeper recants his youthful tales of daring do to a chronicler.

I'm not a fantasy guy. Except for all those pictures of half naked elves I collect for completely innocent purposes, I do not really enjoy the fantasy genre, I don't really know why either! But my friend, lets call him Simon (because that's his name) does. Friggin loves fantasy he does. All them books about magic elves saving the city of Bla'dork from dastards. Can't get enough of them. So a month or two ago I think, hey, maybe I just havn't read anything good. I'll ask him. Simon suggests this beast of a series to me, and trusty kindle in hand, I began reading.

I love and hate this series with every fiber of my being in equal amounts.On one hand, we have ultimate badass Kvothe doing all kinds of cool shit, the magic system is awesome, the world is super cool (kinda) and every now an then we have a cool wizards duel or some shit. Its killer stuff. However on the other hand I'd say at least 40% of the book is entirely dedicated to ATM recipts of Kvothe's increasingly bipolar purse. The second book has a million pages dedicated to Kvothe having a sexventure with a being of pure lust, during which the only impact so far has been "Kvothe met a scary tree" and "Kvothe got a new cloak". Maybe the third book will make that 100 pages of awkward sexual metaphors worth it. It fucking better Rossfuss, It fucking better.

The main problem with the book, is that it feels like, for all it's fantastically exciting set pieces, when you look at it, nothing happens. I don't mean that literally obviously. But take an example from a scene near the end of the first book, Kvothe visits a nearby town, uncovers a massive drug production facility and finds a Dragon. With these two items he could make a lot of money. Also he's in the town looking for hints as to the evil men that killed his father. After a massive, very exciting and griping adventure, Kvothe comes away from the town with nothing. He doesn't find out anything (other than the badmen who killed his father and mother also kill other people!) and he doesn't get any of the drugs or dragon skeleton or anything. And we get to hear about his empty wallet again and again and again.

I do love the series and I'll be buying the next book when its released sometime in Space Year 2121, and I'd hate for this to be entirely negative so I will say that this is the first book in a while that grabbed me so much I would read hundreds of pages in one sitting. I very thoroughly enjoyed it but I guess I just wish something MORE would happen. I've read 1500 pages of the story so far and Kvothe is still in magic school.

This turned into more of a rant than a review and to Patrick Rossfuss, I'm sorry, the books are really good man, I enjoyed them, but when you really like something, it makes those little problems stand out a lot more.

I still recommend it highly, pick up a copy of the first book and give it a whirl, it's really fun reading. On the back of it I'm actually picking up some other fantasy novels so, thanks for that Patrick.

Read it

P.S.
I have a theory that the series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where civilization has just recovered. C/D Patrick, C/D?

PPS finish the last book soon please please please

Book 28 - World War Z by Max Brooks

2011-07-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

A Post-Post-Apocalyptic tale of humanities struggle against the zombie hordes, and the many tales of the people who survived.

Max Brooks wrote the Zombie Survival Guide, a book that 12 year olds and man-children alike worshiped, which helped push out a thousand other "nerd books" and other fake survival guides. However, its main problem that apart from it's gimmick, it wasn't very good at all. The best parts of the book were at the end, the series of stories that detailed zombie encounters. They were little microtales that showed Brooks had a talent for that sort of writing. And luckily for the world, he seems to have had the same idea here.

I once heard the Zombie Survival Guide described as a survival manual from another dimension, one like ours bit where zombies came about. Brooks here tells the story of that dimension through the means of interviews with various people who survived the zombie apocalypse and are now working toward recovering the human race. And against all odds, its actually a pretty fun read. Not high drama or anything obviously, but some of the stories are downright fantastic, the worst of them are still, at the least, entertaining. Theres a world of twists and the non-linier way the story is told actually really adds to the experance. Brooks proves himself extremely talented in what many will see as a gimmicky form of writing, but I tip my hat to him. He made me, a anti-nerd culture guy who hates WACKY and LOLZOMBIES more than most, really enjoy a book about killing the dead.

You'll probably like this book a lot, if you're reading my blog an all.

Do give it a read.

Book 27 - Nothing to Evny by Barbara Demick

2011-07-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

A look at the people who live in North Korea, their stories and the stories of their families.

Like so many people, North Korea interests me beyond comprehension. Its such a strange place, with so much we don't know and so many odd and weird quirks. Run by an insane dictator and his children, it garners interest from pretty much everyone these days.

If you're looking for more information about North Korea's many many hilarious and bizzarre quirks, this isn't the book you want. Or it is, you just don't know it. What Barbara Demick does in this book is show NK from the point of view of the people who live in its borders. By actually interviewing and getting to know several NK defectors, she has allowed us to live through them. Her use of language and mastery over imagery holds the attention in a vice grip throughout and by the end, if you don't feel moved by the stories within, well, sorry about your soul I guess.

Something I wasn't expecting was a message on how powerful the human spirit is and our specie's natural ability to come together and pull ourselves from the brink. About half way through the book something happens that reaffirmed my belief in humanity in a way I never would have imagined a book like this could do, so thanks Barbara, you're a cool cat.

Read It

The curious saga of Newzbin

2011-05-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

There's a place called usenet. an old place, ancient even. Before there was an internet, there was usenet, before there was forums and twitter and facebook, there was Usenet. and today, with the rest of the next running on Web 4/0 tactical Feedback and Social Webworking technologies, Usenet still stands. Dusty but faithful, forgotten, but present.

Usenet used to be the Forum's of yesteryear, the old image of the Internet Nerd being a guy who posts arguments regarding Star Trek uniforms on the net stems from actual shit that actually got posted on Usenet every day. This is back when maybe 2 people were online mind you. Sounds exciting I know.

These days, like all protocols online, it's used for Porn and Filesharing. There's also legitimate conversation for people too set in there ways to give up, more power to them I suppose.

This is where our story starts, on a website known as Newzbin, a prominent player in the Usenet filesharing world. One of the biggest indexing sites ever (Usenet works fundamentally differently than torrents, imagine Indexing sites as address books, pointing you toward the files you want) and inverters of the now universal NZB file time (a kind of set of directions through Usenet, if you will). Newzbin was chugging along quite happily until last year, when they caught the attention of the MPAA. The MPAA did as the MPAA is want to do and sued.

What followed was a year long court case, the MPAA tried to get Newzbin's users details, Newzbin made some hilarious arguments toward the validity of their business and in the end, Newzbin lost and went under. No more Newzbin.

In a way, it was like if Pirate's bay went down. But if Pirate's bay was populated by 50 year old internet veterans. It brought with it a wake up call to the Usenet world, obscurity is not enough to protect them. Although Usenet is a marginally unknown bit of tech, the big businesses certainly know about it by now.

So users migrated to various different services, sad at the loss of Newzbin. Most complained that the replacement sites had half of Newzbin's functions and many cost more to use. sad times for everyone who used the service.

Then, about a week after Newzbin's closure, Everyone previously signed up to Newzbin received a mysterious email from a Mr White. Mr White claimed to now be in control of Newzbin's databases and webcode, that him and an expert team had stolen it from the previous owners during a hack several months ago and were in the process of updating it, and bringing Newzbin back online. They'd even procured the domain name in some kind of backroom deal.

At this point, everyone flipped their shit. Accusations of identity stealing, credit card gathering and all manner of unhappy nastiness were thrown about with abandon. And who can blame people? A strange and mysterious reservoir dog's fan has control of a site you pay for the use off. Email addresses, names, addresses, possibly credit cards at his disposal. Anything could happen. And this promise of reviving the site? So soon after the MPAA had sued the previous owners? Why, for a start? Did this insane man not understand the risk he was taking?

One thing was for certain. The next few days and weeks would be, if nothing else, interesting.

So for several days, various news blogs dedicated to Usenet spoke about the subject, posting theories. Usenet user's made do with whatever site's and services they'd gotten elseworlds. Then, as promised, Newzbin2 clawed from the ashes, like a a magicians trick, the site was back again. It lacked one or two features, buggy but essentially, this was Newzbin, with the every mysterious MrWhite at the helm.

Fear stayed high. This wasn't supposed to happen! The bad guy's had won. We know, from experiance, that the world does not work like the movies, promises like MrWhite's go unfulfilled and the big bad companies always win. Always. But not that day. That day, just for a moment, the world was like the movies and games and books that Newzbin's customer's had been downloading. The website had been taken over by a ragtag group of mysterious hackers, hellbent on their own morals and ideas of freedom. The team grew larger and larger, Database admin's, web programmers and moderators all joined the group as Newzbin2 recouped the lost faith and trust. MrWhite gave every user a large number of free Newzbin credit and, somehow, a glimer of the old Web shone on a moment longer.

To this day, the website is still run by the mysterious group who call themselves TeamRDogs. The group posts information on the current crackdown on filesharing, methods of getting around internet blacklists and have discussed plans to release the Newzbin code and databases to the wild. They have multiple servers established around the world and a system to rout people if their main site falls under. They are prepared.

As for the MPAA. TeamRDogs' have said they have been contacted, and suspect that the MPAA may strike again. However, they have also been compliment with any and all takedown notices, using the law to their advantage. They promise that the site will stay up this time, and they are prepared to fight the giants.

And so the tale comes to an end, at least for now. Newzbin2 is still up and running, and TeamRDogs is still posting. The site is being improved on every day and MrWhite and his team continue to represent an age long gone for the Web. A time when the power for changed still laid in the hands of the individual, when big businesses still scoffed at the power of the net and before they began to buy it up for themselves. Maybe TeamRDogs represent a vision of our future, perhaps there will be a time when we stand up against what we feel is injustice and make a stand, against all accusations and on-comers. Or perhaps they're simply out for the money, and will soon steal the Newzbin collection of credit cards. Who knows. Only time will truly tell. All I know is I'm happy to live in such interesting times.

-Nem
P.S.
Just as a heads up. The question of the legality of Newzbin is not in question. I do not condon the services they provide nor do I make use of them. If TeamRDogs had done the same to some out of work chinese paper airplane model site, I'd have made the same post.

Book 26 - Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay

2011-04-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

Dexter Morgan, blood splatter analyst and part time serial killer, uncovers a world of vampires and cannibals in Miami.

I guess this was like the book equivalent of diet coke. Kinda bland and it isn't exactly going to change your life but it'll do if you can't have the real thing.

This was just a bit of DumbBook I started reading between better books and I decided to finish it against my best wishes. It was alright and I guess entertaining enough but I wouldn't exactly recommend it. Only if you really like the series. It dumbs the weird Owl Cult thing they had last book and generally tries to return to a simpler time in the series so that was nice.

I couldn't help but sit there and think about the morality of the situation, about how terrible Dexter is as a person and his forced "humanity" awakening that takes place in the book just feels forced, overwrought and poorly written. Psychopaths and sociopaths don't just "get better" and you'd think Jeff Lindsay would have known that. Maybe he did and just didn't care. I don't know.

Can't recommend

Book 25 - Cosmos by Carl Sagan

2011-03-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

Carl Sagan essentially makes you love everything about the human race and makes that tingle in your spine go off every couple of seconds.

Now, I know Carl wrote Cosmos as a kind of, every man's version of science, and granted I didn't "Learn" much from the book. But I did grow as a direct result of this book. Maybe its a bit early to say that but right now, as I sit here, I have the most profound respect for my ancient ancestors, to the ones that came before and "prepared the way" as Sagan said. I actually did learn a lot from the book really, but it was all about past civilisations rather than Space.

Which isn't to say that Cosmos is not a masterpiece of science, space and cosmology, it really is. The information within is solid science, nothing is overly simplified into nothing, and yet its written in an elegance and beautiful way that it almost brought me to tears several times. Sagan's descriptions of our place in the universe are so moving, so fundamentally true. Its breath taking at times.

And the imagery. Planets close to the galaxy core being awash with star light, Supernova's in the night sky being so bright you can read by them and causing a global reaction from nomadic tribes in America and Africa to Muslim scholars in the middle east and Chinese astronomers in (funnily enough) china. Planets orbiting quasars. The list goes on.

This book took my breath away in a way that only happens very rarely. I hope that one day I can have a single iota of the man's talent with words, his amazing way of conveying such high level information in a poetic and simple way without dumbing it down. I hope one day I have a single atom's worth of Sagan's influence on our world.

In 1000 years, people will say Carl Sagan was one of our greatest people, and Cosmos will be seen as his greatest work. That isn't meant to marginalise the work he did for the world in his research and development, only to underpin exactly how important this work is. It brings science to everyone. Anyone could read this and understand the importance of the Cosmos entirely. If more people read Cosmos, no one would ever argue that science makes the world a more dull place.

Read this. I will literally buy it for you if you ask me to. Its worth it.
Nems

Book 24 - WASP by Eric Frank Russell

2011-03-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

A special ops agent is dropped onto an alien planet with the instructions to mess it up as much as possible. Officially the funniest terrorist's handbook ever.

Now this is a fun read. James Mowry is thrown on a planet full of aliens that humanity is warring with. his exact orders are to make things hard for the people of the planet and disrupt the world as much as possible. The way he goes about this follows a simple continuation of steps that results in an entire world in anarchy and disorder.

And it is really fun to read too. Following Mowry as he sows seeds of dissent, encourages rebellion but ultimately single handedly brings an entire planet to its knees with little more than stickers, some letters and about 5 murders, its great fun.

Also the author may have actually known people who did this kind of thing so there's always the fact that its basically a fictional retelling of WW2 Spec Ops.

Nems

On Nuclear power

2011-03-08T02:54:00.000-08:00

I had a little thought yesterday and just got around to running the math. I wondered how much energy you could get if you converted all the nukes in the world into power station fuel.

The results are kind of interesting, unfortunately I've had to make some assumptions cause I guess they don't give out too much info on nuclear bombs out. As such this just concerns Uranium as fuel, which sucks because Plutonium is way better but our needs must I suppose.

The amount of Uranium in a nuclear bomb these days is unknown, but the best we can see is between 50kg and 10kg. For the sake of this we'll say they use 25kg (info from here). The amount of uranium used in a nuclear power plant is around 25tonnes every 2 years.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world is around 23,500 (from here). Assuming each of these are uranium weapons (nope but oh well) that comes to around 589,350kg of uranium.

Now, there's 1000kgs in 1 tonne, so that means there's around 23 refuels worth of fuel in nuclear weapons, which is 47 years worth of power from a nuclear reactor. Now this does'nt sound like too much but in 2009, a single nuclear power station produced around 12,300,000,000kWh worth of power (Info here). So that 47 years worth of power would come to 578,100,000,000kWh. Which is a decent amount.

Again this is making at terrible assumption that every nuclear reactor uses Uranium, every bomb is Uranium and I don't even take into account the amount of processing required to convert one kind of Uranium to another. I have'nt taken into account the potential for breeder reactors or reusing nuclear fuel either but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

-Nems
P.S. Another book review on it's way.

Global WARNING MO LIKE

2011-01-29T05:43:00.000-08:00

Man, its getting hotter huh? World is heating up and the polar ice caps are melting, penguins and polar bears are dying and soon our world is going to resemble a Wendys' frosty. I'm pretty scared guys. This is some serious shit. We need to cut back on our energy use and stop shoving so much terrible shit into the atmosphere.

Hahaha no sorry that's insane, the earth goes through these periods every now an then, warming followed by ice age followed by a nice middle ground, then warming again. We're simply in a new warming period and its not our fault at all. Nothing we can do could cause such an immense and fundamental change and such thought is egotistical.

Ok how about you both shut up. Both sides of this argument miss one single massive issue. If global warming is our fault or not, its still happening right? Even slowly? ok well I do not want my earth to flood. Am I the only one who sees it this way? Why argue about causes and reasons and the root problems? It does no good for anyone at all.

This is the issue I've been considering recently. I saw This fellow on a couple TV shows and he kinda sparked some thinking in my old noggin. I know he looks like a douche bag but he's actually kinda cool and has raised some points I'm going to steal for this article.

Ok first up, It does not matter who's fault it is. Global Warming is happening. If its our fault, well shit sorry guys our bad, if its earth's fault well fuck you earth I was planning on living near the coast (I suppose that'll be loads easier now anyway). The fact of the matter is that pretty soon some awful shit is gonna happen to this ball of rock we call our home and we need to do something about it REGARDLESS OF WHY ITS HAPPENING.

I can't imagine why anyone would disagree with me here (besides trying to make stupid point about how Global warming ain't no thang. tell that to our ancestors who lived through the last ice age. I imagine they probably didn't get much of a kick out of it. Its easy for us to go "welp let someone else deal with it" but if we keep saying that eventually we'll all fucking die.

Second, We can not solve global warming by driving hybrids and stopping our progress. No one on earth is going to voluntarily lower their standard of living for some vague unexplained problem that will not effect them and might not even effect their children. Why bother even trying? Instead lets maybe work out some ways to solve the problem using the thing we humans do best; Inventing some awesome shit.

The glorious fact of the matter is that humans could stop global warming, we could reverse it using shit like making more, whiter clouds and placing mirrors over deserts to reflect heat out, some of the stuff in this video would help too (some of it is terrible but the science is mostly good)

My point is we have the technology to solve this problem, so lets stop arguing who knocked over the vase and just fix the damn vase. We have the glue and the smarts and no one wants a smashed up vase just lying there, pick up all the little bits and lets deal with the problem rather than making it a massive political shit storm.

-Nems

Book 23 - Getting stoned with Savages by J. Maarten Troost

2011-01-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

Sequel to Pacific Parasite-A-thon, our intrepid explorer now decided to check out Fiji and the surrounding islands

I actually finished this ages ago and just forgot to write my little bit. This book is really fun and entertaining. All my feelings about Troost hold over to this book and I just have to say its a delight to read about his adventures. I still don't want to go anywhere near the hellscapes he describes, but he seems to enjoy them enough. I absolutely love the fact that he spends a good long time talking about the histories and worlds within the islands he visits. It would be easy in his shoes to just write about silly things the islanders did but he takes it much further beyond that.

All I can really say is I enjoyed it cause its a lot like his last book and I suggest you check it out.

-Nems

GM Rules, Organic Drools

2011-01-24T06:33:00.000-08:00

Do you worry about GM foods? Do you ever sit around your grande latte and say stuff like "You know I just don't think we should mess with nature" or "Technology and Nature just shouldn't be mixed" or "We just don't know the long term effects, science doesn't know everything"?

Its you.

You are the dumbest person.

Genetically modified food is one of the greatest innovations mankind has ever made. It has saved literally billions of lives. Its guessed that Norman Borlaugh, one of the leading proponents of GM food, personally saved one billion lives. I know I'm constantly blowing figures out of proportion to make a point but I mean it. The man literally is responsible for 1/7th of the entire population having something to eat.

He did that with some incredible science and a will to save people. For those keeping score by the way, that's 1Billion to Scientists, 0 to stinking hippies and Greenpeace.

In today's world, its cool to reject science, because we're all backwards ass idiots with weird guilt problems about the earth, as though it belongs to anyone but us. But the fact is science is why you have enough food to be able to choose between your Organic yoghurt and the GM food, science is why you are able to live long enough to bother wondering about what we're doing to the planet, if you wanted us to stop fucking around with nature you should go back 1000 years and kill off anyone who comes up with the idea of crop rotation or irrigation or genetic modification.

Genetic modification? I'm just saying that to be funny right? No you moron. Breeding plants together to create stronger strains has been around since forever, and that's all GM is. No squid genes, no fluffy corn, just more corn per acre, more disease resistance and better tasting food. Its fucking awesome.

Honestly though this is a bit of an old topic, I don't think many people seriously believe that GM foods are bad, especially no one who is likely to read this blog. But just in case, here. There's been an actual lowering in stomach cancers in the past 10 years. There's been a lowering of colon and rectum cancer. In fact to cut this short, there's been a lowering of every cancer since 2000. GM foods are not causing cancer in any way shape or form. Considering ever bit of food you eat is GM in some way shape or form, even if you grow it yourself in your own stupid hippy garden, its not surprising that the issue is still seen as "inconclusive" to some. If GM food killed people, we'd have a lot more dead people frankly, and the opposite is happening.

Never mind the fact that every single food agency and peer-reviewed science journal has declared GM food safe and the only people who disagree are "The Organic Farmers Association" and Greenpeace. In the interests of fairness, some reports have also been published by heavily pro GM lobbyist groups stating the safety of GM food. Let it be known that I think dishonesty is horrible no matter which side is being dishonest.

Anyway, there's your rant and your evidence to back my shit up. Stop bitching about something that has genuinely saved the world. A lot of you guys don't realise this but 30 years ago people were very very worried about where we'd get food from, people were terrified that we'd not be able to grow enough shit to feed everyone on the earth. Well we solved that problem with GM foods and its benefits. GM foods literally saved the human race and all we can do is pretend we're too good for it.

To say nothing of all the brown people who would die if you shitty organic cunts got your way
-Nems

Book 22 - Blindsight by Peter Watts

2011-01-18T03:39:00.000-08:00

65,000 alien probes appear in a flash above earth, a forgotten deep space probe picks up signals from the very edge of known space and a crew composed of broken zombies and a monster are sent to have first contact with an alien intelligence.

That is the biggest undersell I've ever done. Peter watts manages to scare the shit out of you while making you think your little brains out. I spent the book equal parts in fear and in awe at the ideas, speculative philosophical debates and all round future-y stuff. The book starts off slow and a little confusing but it quickly changes and becomes an amazing journey with discussions and uncomfortable arguments about the state of being, of consiousness, of our place in our own world as we rapidly invent things better than we could ever hope to be. Each character is broken in some fundemental way and uses technology to make up for that problem. I won't spoil it by analyising everything because I'd rather you did it for yourself, its damned fun and rewarding too.

I havn't even spoken about the plot yet, the plot is deceptively simple on the outside, while seemingly just another First Contact story, it is so much more. It has a concept of aliens that has never been done before (As far as I know), First contact ends just about as you'd expect but the journey to that ending is way different than you could imagine.

My only real complient is that half way through it feels like our perspective shifts and we're following another character for a little bit, but thats probably my fault. It gets hard to keep up when one of the characters is split into 4 different personalities and one lives through machines and sensors.

Really really read this. The genius has even left it up for free on his site. Right within these bloody words

Maybe I might ended up overselling it a bit but only because it was such a bloody good book. read it nowww.

Book 21 - Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

2011-01-06T04:54:00.000-08:00

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. This is the story of a man who suffered through one of the worst bombings in history, and also happened to time travel to a different planet sometimes.

I didn't really intend for my last book of the year to be anything specific. In all honesty it would have ended up being either Dracula or Blindsight or Getting Stoned with Savages, had it not been for my plane getting delayed.

As it turns out, Slaughterhouse is a fantastic read. A great anti-war book with some fasinating passages and parts that will blow your mind (imagine an alien who can see in 4 dimensions. Now imagine what he'd think when he saw a dead body).

I really really enjoyed this book. It was very meaningful without being overly in your face about it, it had a nice tight storyline and it was very very well written. Sometimes the time traveling leaves you a bit disorientated, and the constant repetition of So it Goes gets comedical at some points, but overall, I highly recommend this book.

Book 20 - Short Story Collection by Ted Chaing

2010-12-06T01:56:00.000-08:00

A big collection of short stories by Ted Chaing who you may remember write Hell is the Absence of God.

Ted Chaing is a very talented person. Every story he writes is guaranteed to have a very very interesting concept and 9/10 will have a very good story and good writing to top it all off. The problem arises only when he tries to write endings. The poor man can not do endings at all.

Its hard to review short stories, so I'll just go ahead and say that Ted is fantastic at writing amazing worlds. Every story in this collection is magical and amazing and unbelieveable. Its just a shame that sometimes his writing ability stops him from pulling it together in one nice package.

Still suggest you give him a read, if only for the story about Golems, or the one on AI.

Book 19 - The High Frontier by Gerald O'neil

2010-12-06T01:50:00.000-08:00

Not a sci-fi book, not a hopeful utopic look at the world, not overly hopeful but solidly realistic in his estimations. A roadmap to human orbital development, C.1979

I've wanted to read this book for years now. I really wanted something that could show me the hows and whens of the whole issue. I think in my head I built it up as some bible of orbital development, something that explains everything and makes it easy for me. And somehow I was right. If you ever want to be completly sold on the idea of space development, read this. It clears up everything and makes every element of the process clear and obvious and shows how we could have fantastic structures in space for cheap. On 1970s tech. It also helps that he massively overestimates everything. Makes you think he understands better.

My only criticisms are that O'Neil seemed fixated on 3 activities; Ballet dancing in space, 0G Love Hotels and man powered flight. Three things one can understand being excited about but maybe a better time would be while righting a tourist guide for the station, not while writing a speculative paper on how one might build a station. The only other thing is that the first 3 chapters are full on Doomsday mode. He makes some excellent points but comes out sounding a little depressing.

buy it buy it buy it

Book 18 - Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

2010-11-14T12:06:00.000-08:00

An insomniac and his best friend attempt to destroy civilisation and thousands of idiots around the world miss the point.

Fight Club is a popular movie. It's also a very good book, which is obvious seeing how I'm currently reviewing it now. The thing about Fight Club is that almost no one who watched or read it really understood it. They walk away from the text with the idea that Tyler is right, that Tyler is wise and intelligent and Fighting is a good idea. This is basically the worst interpretation possible. Fight Club is about being yourself. Despite the movie/books constant assurances that you are not special, the message of the book is that you can be. Its not about fighting the system through self destruction, its about being more than normal by taking charge of your life and moving forward with your own goals and mind at the forefront. It is a parody of the whole, raging against the machine thing we all go through, its a joke against the overtly masochistic way men aim to be. Every character in Fight Club, besides the narrator and only right at the end, are laughable, pitiable wrecks of human beings that you are supposed to feel sorry for. You are supposed to walk away from the piece with the knowledge that you do not have to be a butch manly man, you do not have to be anything other than yourself.

I can't say much else in these short reviews. Just read it because it is great and also its short and I know you like that. Keep what I said in mind and enjoy it. Its a misunderstood but good book.

Book 17 - The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

2010-11-09T04:02:00.000-08:00

A woman finds herself the execurtioner of an old boyfriend's will. While processing and sorting his effects, she stumbles on evidence of a secert conspiracy regarding an underground postal service.

What can I say? Its a classic. Its a novel about a million and one different subjects and subtexts. Ranging from the British Invasion of the 1960s, to Humanities need for certainties in life. I really enjoyed this read. I've been meaning to read it for a very long time but just wasn't able to get around to it. The book is utterly differnt from what I expected but in a very very good way. The characters are fantastic, the story is great and the world is very well done. I'm being very general but if I say anything more then I'll just spoil it for you.

The one big issue is the writing. Even Pynchon has said he hates the way the book is written. I found it pretty hard to follow at times and required quite a bit of effort to get through. some passages are really hard to parse and the story jumps from location and event over and over. It fits the story undoubtably but it does make for a difficult read.

Let me tell you about Consolevania

2010-10-31T13:29:00.000-07:00

Video games have a harsh time when it comes to TV. Currently the most popular video games show is actually some horrible channel called G4, a show so bland, so offensively mediocre it has to rely on youtube content that it can steal to avoid its viewers killing themselves out of desperate need for some sort of stimuli. Shows paid for by advertising and made with the sole reason of getting you to buy the shitty games they cram down your throat over and over again. Places that genuinely act like the Kinect is a good idea.

Dark times indeed. Most people who play games these days are probably too young or too stupid to remember the golden age of games shows, Gamesmaster on a Friday night with the amazing Dominik Diamond radiating class and suave, showing off the newest games and systems before they had even been anounced. and Sir Patrick Bloody Moore telling us all cheats. They'd have contests where two hapless little kids like me would battle to the gruesome end trying to collect the most coins in Mario 3. Amazing times, Pure times. You had the feeling the show wanted to tell you about the games for their own sake, and in a time before the internet this was amazing.


Pure Class Act

Gamesmaster and shows like it weren't bogged down with endless drivel, with female hosts who act as little more than nerd candy, with male presenters acting like some horrible pathetic dickhead version of geek culture, no pandering to the audience here, no acting like being a asshole VIDEO GAMER is somehow a good thing, no indirectly advertising the biggest and most well paying advertisers, just video games, contests about video games, news about video games, a childlike, raw love of this new medium that was only just emerging, tadpole like, from the primordial ooze. It was fantastic.

I know what you're all thinking. You're all going "oh but nems you're just remembering it different cause you're an old fogee with cataracts and a bad hip and you're mental" Well fuck you you little shit I bought all the dvds years ago from some knock off site and I watched them all a couple years ago so fuck off. I know what I'm on about here.

Your only real comment on this would be "Well times have changed. You'd be right, times have changed. Its acceptable to say things like "rofl" and "lol" in public now, TV like G4 is apparently 'good' now. Its a shame. If only there was something better, a shining star in an otherwise shit stained sky. You know where I'm going here don't you you little bastard.

Meet Ryan and Robert. The two best video game reviewers that have ever lived. That might be a bit much but they were very very very good. I say Were because unfortunately they have both moved on from that world now. Robert is now doing boardgame reviews at RockPaperShotgun.com and writing shit for the BBC. Ryan is...Well I have no idea what Ryan is doing but it sure as hell isn't more episodes of Consolevania I am bloody sure of that.

Rab and Ryan used to do a show called Videogaiden, and a show called Consolevania. I won't mess around and try to work out which came first because honestly I have no clue. Both were very similer with the main difference being VideoGaiden seems to have been given a small budget due to it being on the BBC, and Consolevania is basically them two and their mate Kenny bombing around Glasgow doing silly game related stunts. This was pretty much the best review show ever made. possibly the best video game based show ever.

Its all down to those two guys up there. You see, they are friends. You can tell they are friends just by watching the show, go, click some of the links at the bottom and watch these two. They are best mates and you can FEEL it. They are also equal parts honest, funny, entertaining and insightful. If either of them ever read this and see I called them Insightful they'll probably kick my teeth in. But they are. and its wonderful. All they really seemed to care about was telling you about stuff they liked and stuff they thought was naff and why. It was never about telling you all about the latest flash bang whiz super call of duty 6 future space combat elves game, just about whatever amazing or utterly horrendous game they wanted to talk about. and it was always one of the two. Never have I seen these two review a mediocre thing, wheres the point in that?

They spoke to you as a person, not you as a wanky GAMER, not you as a pretentious GAMES AS ART dick but just you as a guy who wants to play some games. They was their charm, that was their uniqueness, that was probably their downfall. Neither of their shows were ever popular which is a massive shame. I would have loved to hear what they had to say about games these days. They always had this way of cutting through the bullshit and just telling you if you'd have fun with a game, you don't get that much at all these days. It's just unique. At times its downright lynchian, with Kenny going off and ruling alternative dimensions, implied evil overlords and unnerving sets. Rab expanded this in Downtime town, another amazing thing you can find below.

Please. If I have any readers at all (I do not) and you want to watch some really funny and interesting stuff about video games you might not have played, look these two up. You can watch all of Consolevania through the million and one links on their website, and you can watch series 1 and 3 of Videogaiden on youtube and the BBC respectively. If you find Series 2 please mail it to me you git. (Edit, An amazing mentalist left a comment with every episode of every show Rab and Ryan have ever done, What a world of dreams we live in)

Consolevania
Some mental who has loads of Videogaiden
An even BIGGER mentalist with litterally everything your tiny heart could desire
Rab sums up my entire feelings of GAMERS
The best intro to Consolevania
Videogaiden on the BBC
Rab's old new boardgame site (thanks for making me spend mad cash on a hobby I didn't even have Rab. You asshole)

Zaa Ooo Zaa
Nems

Book 16 - John Dies at the End by David Wong

2010-10-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

Two friends accidentally gain the ability to see into hell. They ustilize this ability the same as pretty much anyone would. With confusion, difficulty and a major lack of understanding.

There isn't a whole lot to say about this book. Its a very simple very entertaining read that isn't filled with any deep symbolism or any intense thought provoking passages. It doesn't pretend to be. It manages to do its job perfectly, simultaneously keeping you hooked and entertained throughout. If you make it though the book without wishing you were John, I don't really know what to tell you. You soulless machine.

My one gripe is the book takes a hard left turn about 3/4 of the way through and changes alot. in some ways that just doesn't tie in with the rest of the book. It seems like David Wong stopped writing at some point and when he came back took the story in another direction. This makes some of the passages near the end a bit difficult to parse. Still fun though.

Cheer up. Its not that bad!

2010-10-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Recently we found the oldest galaxy yet. Some megaboffins in some big building got together, pointed some mirrors and some telescopes and did some spells with some candles and out popped a picture of this old foggie;

Look at that bad boy. 12.4 billion years old and still pulsing away, looking barely 10 billion.

But I'm not here to talk your ear off about some utterly unknowably immense ball of fire and gas from the ass-end of the universe. No, I'm here because while I was reading about this fantastic, amazing, jaw dropping discovery, I started reading forums and web pages about it. A poor move on my part, amateur even. I should have been prepared. I've been around the net enough to know what comments and forums are usually like. What I found was a bunch of idiots saying that this discovery only makes us even more insignificant, only punctuates the pointlessness of life and the ironic duality that science presents us with, simultaneously making the world an amazing place, while giving us concrete proof that there is no point in it all.

What a big load of assholes. For a moment they even had me, they pulled me in with there toxic cloud of utter negativity. I sat for a moment and went "yeah, its a shame isn't it." Then something snapped in my head and my apathy turned to anger. Not at the universe as you might expect, but at these dickholes, these self important little shits. How dare they.

They arn't alone. Infact its the In thing these days to ramble off about how humanity is but a single drop in a vast ocean and our lives are as a single blink of an eye in the life of the universe. I hope these people all blink into incoming traffic. All our achievements will all turn to dust and every memory and idea ever formed will someday be gone. Pessimism.

But here's the trick. You want to know a secret? Really? Ok come close, listen in. Keep it quiet now. They are wrong.

Yep, really. Utterly, Wrongingly wrong.

These people are also trash. These are worthless people, secretly masturbating to this fetish of a doomed universe where all of human achievement amounts to nothing, because that makes life easy for them. Pessimism is the easy road. If the universe is ending and there's nothing we can do, why worry? Fuck it. Sit back, let life pass us by. They cruse through their pathetic lives infecting others with their vile poisonous worldview, somehow justifying this utterly nihilistic look on life by twisting science and stories like this to fit their needs.

While reading this stuff I was hit by the realisation that these idiots probably support their local football team more than they support their god damn species. But I can see you guys, yes you, you dickwad. Tutting and smiling a smug smile. the same smile that you put on when another amazing discovery or theory is made, happy to know that your nothing life is just as meaningful as the lives of these super human scientists, because in the end, what difference does it make?

To be a bit more eloquent, and nice to the people on the fence on this whole thing, let me explain why and how these pessimists are so awfully wrong. and Smile. Please.

First of all, I want to clear this up. Science. Science isn't a tool by which we can stare our own pointlessness in the face. Its the tool with which we make ourselves so so much more than a blink of an eye. Its the jack we use to prop open the eye, to stare into it and to scream at the top of our lungs. Science not only makes us the single most important thing in our solar system, and possibly beyond, it gives us the power to know we are important, if only you look at it with a slightly less final look at everything. With time, with more super scientists, slowly, science will even save our species from any and every eventuality up to and including the heat death of the universe. Yes. Really.

People forget our achievements so easily, or minimize them to the point of nothingness. Even normal people who just plan dont have a stance on how to look at the universe sometimes forget, I understand that, some of this stuff seems to happen so far away and so unreal sometimes, it becomes easy to forget. But really when you think about it, in the short time we've had to work it all out, we've done some bloody cracking stuff.


Pictured: Something We Actually Actually did.

And the next comment is obviously "but look at all the horrible things Nems Look at the waaaaaaaaaaars and the faaaamine and the deeeeeath" and yes its horrible and terrible and sometimes when humans do bad things we do bad things. This hurts more if you're constantly trying to see people for what we are as a group, amazing, intelligent, nice people. Some people are horrible though, I know that. I just don't think that's a good reason to decide that humanity is worthless. Amazingly though, science helps even here. I know it may seem terrible but Science and technology has made war a much easier and bloodless thing. Time was to fight a war you needed numbers, raw, meat grinder battles and that's about it. Now you need robots, a small standing force and an airforce. Time was a single virus could wipe out humanity, now science is curing every aliment that attacks us. Time was if the weather wasn't perfect, no crops, and without the crops, you'd die. No more are we hunted beasts, flapping in the wind of nature and bending and breaking to the random whims of an angry planet. We are now this planets masters. Using our massive brains and our immense understanding we are able to plant our feet, turn and face Nature and smile in the face of what is now our equal.

Next, Our apparently unalterable course to our timely demise. This is the kicker I think, you can laugh at me over the whole science issue, because we're obviously going to wipe ourselves out. Mankind is a bunch of raving lunatics waving nuclear weapons around like an overplayed metaphor about a cat. I'll actually grant this to the naysayers. Yes, if we manage to blow ourselves to hell before we leave this planet, then we're boned. However, that's right I said however, don't let your fucking guard down with me you dreary bastard, We're getting off this rock. Soon. Sooner than you negative nancies think. within our lifetimes we're going to see the start of the movement and within a could generations, mankind will be living on two massive rocks in the void. I beseech anyone and everyone to come up with some method by which humanity can be wiped out when it lives on two different planets. Humanity becomes immortal.

That's about all I have the energy for really. The end message of all this is that its more likely than not that we're going to come out aces. We're the greatest thing this solar system has produced and we have potential to be an immortal race that will shape the very universe we now look at in awe. With science and ingenuity and drive, the only thing holding us back is attitudes. People who rally against science for interrupting there own personal power trips, religions, "spiritualists" and of course, the same pessimists who twist what is a pure and amazing tool to their own, evil needs.

Boom, stitch that.
Nems

Book 15: Roadside Picnic By Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

2010-10-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

A haunting, humbling, minimalist science fiction story about the aftermath of an alien visitation and its (often unforeseeable) consequences.

I had originally planned to read Romance of Three Kingdoms starting last week. That plan fell through. I'll be outright honest when I say I couldn't get past the first few pages. I think I'll be ready for it now. This poorly translated book follows two characters in this uniquely Russian world. Aliens have been and gone, leaving Zones, filled with amazing trinkets. The lives of the Stalkers (men who make their living breaking into the Zones and bringing back objects.) take center stage. The book mostly follows Red, quite possibly the best Stalker in the business. The trinkets and traps are the true stars of the show though, infinite batteries, indescribable magnetic plates, The Meatgrinder, all really lite your imagination. In between touching segments dealing with Red and his family, and tense, nail-biting excursions into The Zone, the book takes us along with a scientist discussing theories for the Zone and its many bizarre and strange property's.

The issue with the book, at least the version I read, is that it is awfully translated. This was distracting in many places but I'm certain you could find a better one than the free version that's online. Other than that, the style of writing isn't for everyone and it leaves a lot for you to make up your own mind about.

Maybe now, after suffering through Roadside picnic and coming out richer for it, I can venture into the Zone once more and maybe even pull out a trinket.

The Door is closing

2010-10-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, hows it going? Good? Good. Just gonna walk up here and take a massive dump on you.

I think I've said before I had problems with the university's funding system before. I believe I took offense that my money should go toward cheap pretend science that is a waste of life, time and money for everyone involves (except the ones getting my money I suppose). The solution however was not to double the university fees. That wasn't it at all.

Let me tell you all a bit of a story. Back when I was much smaller, my school was getting renovations and new awesome stuff for the playground. We're talking climbing frames man. All kinds of shit. I was psyched. Unfortunatly building took a bit longer than planned and I wasn't around to see the totally rad climbing frame. I was so peeved that I got a few friends together and under the cover of darkness we wrote "G-TOWN PRIMARY SUCKS" in some drying cement. Sorry about that guys.

Fast forward 5 years and I'm in the last year of England's High school equivilent. Half the school is closed down and to get anywhere you had to follow a route that would leave Theseus scratching his head. Every day lessons and breaks were interrupted and in some cases utterly destroyed by bulldozers, cranes and workmen. This was all in aid of a new building they were putting up to replace the football courts and the inappropriately named Math Houses. Once again I didn't get to see it for myself but passing by one day I found they had not only finished this massive, multistory super modern building, but also erected an amazing military style obstacle course. Who knows how many hours of my childhood could have been made radical by the addition of a military obstacle course? Truely one of the biggest injustices of our time.

Yet again it seems I'm about to miss out on some amazing academic innovation. The ability to charge whatever you want, however you want, when ever you want. Fantastic. I'm really glad the new government isn't trying to ease into its place as Evil Doers and have decide to go the White Cat and Long-Scar-Over-The-Eye route of government. If anyone needs me, I'll be lowering myself into the pit of ravenous piranha.

As a quick aside. It also marks another stone in Nick Cleggs road of completely and utterly shitting on any promises he made during his campaign. As if forming wasnt the only sign you needed, he did promise to lower student fees. A stance he's very quickly forgotten about. Thanks Nick. Glad to have you around.

Book 14: The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

2010-10-06T04:22:00.000-07:00

The author follows his wife to a tiny, hellish atoll in the middle of the south pacific and tells us all about his fantastic adventures.

Reading this book gave me a fantastic sense of adventure. It seems like not a day went by in Troosts stay on Kiribati with him being attacked by sharks or riding in a plane that has more in common with a bus. Every turn of the page brought new, exciting, funny adventures that filled me with a real sense that even here, in space year 2010, its possible to be a real adventurer. Funny, heartwarming and all round fun to read.

The book has another side though, below its surface. It critiques western culture, attacks the things we rely on and shows us what happens when we tamper in other peoples lives. The I-Kiribati are a poor, desalute people whom every meeting with the western world only damages their already corrupt and broken government more. At the same time it makes you feel like, well, maybe its not so bad. Though that may be the author's way of dealing with it.

I would highly suggest this book. Its fascinating and Troost is the perfect man to tell this tale. You won't be disappointed.

Book 12 - Columbine by Dave Cullen

2010-09-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

A look back at Columbine and a journalistic story of the events that transpired before, during and after.

Columbine is a subject that illicits a huge response. Its a confused mess of a subject to be honest. Few members of the public know the true story, fewer still know the whole story and only 4 or 5 will ever know everything. And 2 of those are dead. I've had a huge interest in Columbine for a very long time. I realize that makes me sound like a nut but its just, to me, a very interesting topic that has captured me.

I've watched the documentaries and played the RPG thing and all of that. They never answered vital questions on the subject. Micheal Moore's money grabbing attention spree of a documentary just made it harder for me to understand. I even looked over the notebooks and journals released by the authorities but to no avail.

This book explained everything. It opened my eyes to alot of the issues that have since spawned from that day and answered alot of my questions. It has got some confusing, conflicting reviews but from what I know of the tragedy, this is the best book to learn everything there is to know about it. From the killers, to the town, to the people, it explains it all.

Quit Being Dicks

2010-09-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

For the past couple million years, there's been some animosity toward "outsiders". I think its always been there as long as animals has congregated in groups. Being suspicious of newcomers is just something creatures do. It keeps predators away and you never know when that new guy is going to turn out to be a no good double crossing Lion.

So my usual response of "WHhhhhhhhyyyy" doesn't really work too well when applied to the topics of immigration and xenophobia. I understand why people are scared of horrible invaders from outside coming and stealing all the jobs, women, government benefits and whatever else the tabloids accuse them of. But that doesn't make the argument any less bananas.

Standing against immigration is probably the dumbest thing you can do as a human being. This is really one of the topics that shakes my core as a humanist. To imagine enough of my fellow human beings are ignorant or evil enough to stand in the way of their own countries progress for some pathetic tribalism? It tests me. I'm getting ahead of myself here, Let me compose myself and we can begin.

Immigration is a touchy subject. There are many factors at play. Some of these factors are imagined and feed to you by mass media, some are real and need to be addressed. On top of all that, there's racial aspects to consider, jobs, the list goes on. I'm not an expert, but I like to pretend to be one on the internet, which is good enough.

Just for a start, lets begin with Jobs. This is a huge concern I hear a lot when I'm in America. That waves of Mexicans are flooding the country and stealing all the jobs for themselves, then sending the money they earn into Mexico, thus DESTROYING THE ENTIRE FOUNDATION OF HUMANITY. This to me poses some interesting questions. First of all being, who's jobs are being lost to this vile plague, exactly? Its not the middle or upper classes that's for damn sure. I can't see many illegal aliens entering the country with collage degrees and a full work resume. I honestly can not envision a situation where skilled jobs go to an untrained guy who just crossed the border.

Logically this leaves lower class jobs. Drivers, basic unskilled work, that sort of thing. Ok I can see this being an issue because our hypothetical Mexican might work for much less than our hypothetical American. However the blame here is misplaced, rather than blaming the penniless Mexican who needs a job to support his family, why not blame the richass guys hiring him? Presuming our Hypothetical American lost his job directly because a Mexican would do it for cheaper, that seems like the bosses fault, rather than the Mexicans. He'd do the same if an American would do it cheaper I'm sure.

Maybe the concern is that there are limited jobs and by having too many outsiders, you strain the job market by introducing too much completion and so on. This isn't a good thing? I mean competition encourages growth, why not just be the better candidate? I mean hell the Hypothetical Mexican is already starting on a handicap, given his hypothetical ethnicity.

I get that life isn't always so black and white. Maybe the American has a family to feed and needs his shitty factory workers job to live. Maybe he loses it cause some Mexican guy will do it for dirt. That's shit, its horrible and can destroy lives but as I've said. Its not the fault of the Mexican. Hes just some guy looking to earn some cash same as the Hypothetical American. Its the guys that run the factory, their bosses that are to blame.

The world is currently in a very weird place when it comes to immigration. Its almost at the point where you're just screaming at people you think MIGHT not be from around here. Oh wait. With media fueled anger against so called "terrorists" and invaders and interlopers, every single country on earth is on edge, keeping an eye out for vaguely "not from round 'ere" types, ever vigilant lest they deflower our fair lands and crumble our infrastructure.

Lets compare the two main powerhouses of the world right now. The US and Europe. The fear in the US (and everywhere else really) is that if you allow other people into your country, all the jobs go, culture becomes dissipated and all kinds of other utterly mental arguments. As if by simply allowing people to work and live where they want to, you undermine the very tenements of the economy (These people obviously don't understand economics very well). This is all well and good if it wasn't for the fact that Europe has had open borders in regards to work for the past 10 years and is currently the most culturally diverse continent on earth with some of the highest standards of living in the world. To clear that up, The EU allows anyone from any EU country to work in any other EU country, provided they have a valid passport. Reports that Paris is consumed in the fires of anarchy are, as yet, unfounded.

Speaking of which, there is one final argument that makes no fucking sense that I feel obliged to type endlessly about. The so called Culture Clash that "proves" people should just stay where they are. This may seem like a pretty solid argument. Just last month we had literally tens of insane Americans storming a clothing warehouse to try and stop a community center being built because Glenn Beck told them to. Before that we had literally ten fundamentalist Muslims going apeshit over some danish political cartoons. You may notice something funny here, In the first case, a bunch of fat old white dudes are going nuts over a harmless thing that has a religion attached to it. In the second, a bunch of old fat brown dudes are going nuts over a harmless thing that has a religion attached to it. No one really took the mosque people seriously, no one acted as if that was the entire of America's stance on the subject. Hell even the president came out to say "Quit being dicks guys." Its exactly the same with the Islamic protests.

The message here is that there is no "clash of culture". It doesn't prove that humans should stay with their own tribes. The only proof on show here is that there are idiots, fundamentalists and nutjobs from everywhere. There are Middle eastern nutjobs, there's American nutjobs, there's European nutjobs, Asian nutjobs and when we find them, probably a whole lot of alien nutjobs too. Given any number of people, you're gonna find a couple nutters. That's just how life goes.

The only difference between this;

And This;

is the color of their skin. I guess only one of them are capitalizing on the victims of a tragedy to further a political campaign but lets not get into that.

Lastly I want to talk about integration. Its a large part of what ~~people~~ idiotic self-centered morons without a single intelligent thought think about when they worry about immigrants. Will they integrate into our society? The short answer is yes, given education and encouragement. The evidence is, yet again, all over the place. You only need to look at Universities all over the world to see different cultures and peoples working together and forming their own cultures. The real issue is education. People complain that phone lines and menus and signs are in Urdu as well as English in England (mostly the aforementioned nutjobs) and then in the same breath complain that "they" don't try to learn English. It sounds like madness but how in gods name are you supposed to integrate into a culture and society if the society and culture is impenetrable? Efforts such as phone lines being in English, free English classes and further education programs for immigrants allows them to integrate properly, to share their culture and become more than residents, it allows them to become citizens. You want all the menus and phone lines in English only? All you do is segregate and create isolated groups. This is basic social dynamics. I'm literally getting angry just writing that cause it's hardly fucking rocket science that if you put 50 people in a room, tell 48 of them to only speak french and 2 to speak Russian, The 2 speaking Russian will, 9/10, segregate and isolate themselves.

Really, honestly, all this is moot. The kind of people this is aimed at don't care about rational problems, they don't care about real issues that arise from immigration (of which there are a few). They just want "Them" away from their precious tribe. I know the message of this article is Hate Breeds Hate. But Fuck them. They stand in the way of progress, actively dragging humanity down by their shear hatred and bigotry. Its our duty, not as Americans, or as Europeans or whatever, but as human beings, to kick them in their stupid faces and drag them into the future.

I really hope I've been clear in this article. Its really a simple message and numbers agree with me. Countries work better when they open their borders. the evidence is everywhere, in history with the development of the united states, in Europe now, everywhere. You just have to ignore the nutjobs and put some thought into it. Of course, if all I did was ignore the nutjobs, I'd never write anything.

Some thoughts on Ereaders

2010-09-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

I hate these kinds of posts. Really, they're horrible places where people just show off their new toys and it kinda pisses me off to imagine someone just going "oh laddidah i got a new expensive thing look at me". However, I'm not gonna do that here. I wont quote figures and facts copied from Amazon.com, I'm just going to say how reading a book compares to reading an ebook. This might be really hypocritical but hey, what am I but hypocritical.

In sort its fantastic. This is how reading will be done in the future. It really is not better than this. Oh I could go on about the features and the fonts and the screen and the clarity and whatever for hours, but that isnt important. If you have never used this device before, you won't be sold by the idea of being able to listen to music while you read or that you can increase the font size. Its just not important.

What is important is that it has It. That indescribable goodness that makes something great. It takes it from being a gimmick, a silly toy, and makes it a necessary component in your life.Everything about Ereaders just comes together to produce the single best way to read a book. It is the perfect tool for the job basically.

When these things first came out I wasn't too sold on them. Its just a book, I figured.Then after a while I warmed up to the idea. In all honesty I'm a young student with some disposable income and an affliction for electronics and gadgets so it spoke to a part of me. But it transcends that. Its no longer just a gadget to me, it's my book.

Its frustrating to write about an indescribable thing. All I can really say is go out and try it. Some stores have preview models but don't write it off if that one sucks. The one I tried out was utterly horrendous with its load times and that made me feel like they were all like that (in actually fact turning the page on my Ereader is quicker than I can physically turn the page). You might still think its naff, but then you're probably an idiot. Everyone with half a braincell will probably go "oh, this is neat" and maybe consider it. The experience is fantastic and makes reading better.

The downsides of it are..well the publishers don't like them very much but thats going to change the same way it did with MP3s. Old men don't like change but technology forces that change. Within the next few years you're going to see Ereaders becoming much more popular. Other than that? I guess PDFs don't work too well sometimes and the internet loads somewhat slowly. Thats it. Any moron ranting about how it doesn't "Feel" like a book is mentally incontinent and needs to have their brain examined.

This is kinda low content I know but there's really little I can say without boasting about how awesome MY ereader is. I think I'll write a bigger article on the subject of Ereaders and their impacts and the publishers reactions and so on at a later date. Consider this a preview to that.

Book 11 - H.P Lovecraft collection

2010-09-07T12:17:00.000-07:00

A collection of the Famous writer of eldrich horrors H.P. Lovecraft's best stories.

I used to really like Lovecraft. Some of his stuff is very interesting, unique, scary and strange. When I was younger I really enjoyed the ideas behind the stories and I don't think I paid much attention to the writing or the construction of the tales themselves.

Now I'm older I can't help but realise almost every single story is exactly the same, starts the same and ends the same with the "freaky stuff" happening roughly the same time in all of them. There's always an unreliable author, a madman, some strange myths and in the end, there's always a reveal of something you already guessed.

I don't really like Lovecraft any more I suppose. His stuff still have the weird and wonderful ideas behind them, some of it boggles the mind to imagine. But as anyone who has read the most famous entry into this blog knows, its all a bit silly in the end.

Aside:
I'm debating what to read next, Either the recently released Columbine or Romance of Three Kingdoms. I'll probably do the first one but this means that after that, no book review for a good while. Considering I'll be on vacation I'll probably be reading alot but the book is 150 chapters long. Should be fun times.

FAQ about Space

2010-08-25T06:04:00.000-07:00

So apparently many of you still harbour issues with my insane space idea. Thats ok, you aren't stupid, just horribly misinformed. Thats like being stupid, only I get less punches in the face for saying it. So today I'm going to run down a couple of the biggest issues people had with space mining, colonisation and other similar subjects. Thanks to Joe, Keef and Hannah (I.E all but 1 of my readers) for helping me out with the questions. Your contribution to the betterment of mankind will not go unseen.

1. How do you land on a friggin asteroid?

Its easier than you think! in fact the Japanese have already done such a task. That part is actually pretty easy. In space you can go alot faster than you can on earth with alot less power. Most NEOs that we'll be mining only go about 2KM/s. That sounds like a lot but the Shuttle (an outdated model by 1980s standards) goes at about 28,000km/h just chillin in orbit.

2. How do you mine an asteroid without air or gravity?

Again, this sounds really difficult and brings images of rocks floating around, foundries burning down cause the superheated metal is just floating around. But in reality its not that much different from here on earth. Its actually easier in some ways. See the asteroid isn't like minerals on earth now. They are literally massive blocks of metals. much richer ores than the ones we have here on earth. This makes extraction much much easier.

As for the actual mining process. Well, there's a handful of ways we can do this. ranging from Magnets to strip mining to just plain scraping that shit up. The best way to go about the whole process would be to take up materials for a automated processing facility (an engineering problem, easily overcome), deploy automated gathering robots or have them guided by hand from earth. This probably sounds like it'd be very expensive, but automated systems would actually be much cheaper than sending people up there in rotating shifts.

3. How do you get that stuff back to earth?

Either by producing the necessary fuels in situ and just fly it home, or drop it into the ocean with a specially developed air brake or parachute system. This is probably one of the more difficult issues with the mining process, but the tech is there for this already.

Aside from that, minerals in space would optimally be used to build things in space. The aim of space mining is to set up an infrastructure to allow building things in space. Hotels, ships, habitats and so on. This doesn't mean that minerals won't be sent back to earth, only that the majority will be used to make it cheaper to transport materials around between Space and Earth.

4. What about manpower?

The first round of mining will definitely be automated with minimal human input, guided robots most likely, so thats not much of an issue. however as space begins to develop I can envision massive amounts of jobs, both for scientific work, and labour jobs. Training I envision will be expensive at first, you are teaching people to do things no one has ever done, but as time goes on, the process improves with every iteration and it becomes easier and easier to do.

5. How long till all this is possible?

It's all, every single bit of it, from basic robots moving rocks on an asteroid to massive Island 3 habitats, possible right now, today in Space Year 2010. Why aren't we there yet would be your next question.

6. Well why aren't we there yet?

A number of reasons, prime would be that its not seen as profitable yet. In most peoples eyes Space seems like such an insanely expensive place to go. There's a million and one political reasons and also the fact that very few people really care about space development as a whole these days. The 70s where a big publicity stunt and thats pretty much how we view Space as a whole. Hopefully this will change as asteroid mining becomes more and more desirably with earth's resources slowly running out.

A huge issue is rising launch costs. This issue disappears once you have the infrastructure in Space. But for now its the biggest stumbling block for space development. A lot of people seem to think launch costs will decrease once interest in space development picks up. We can only hope so.

7. What minerals could you get?

Quite a huge number of things actually, ranging from Oxygen, Water, and Hydrogen to Gold, Silver, Iron and Nickel. So long as it doesn't rely on dead animals (like oil) you could probably find it somewhere in space.

The next lot of questions deal with space stations and colonisation. They tie into mining but are primarily about Humans living in Space.

8. Would station be small? Claustrophobic?

Probably not. It depends on what station we're in. Almost all stations we have designs/ideas for are built for human comfort while in space. The psychological aspects of space travel are well known and its important to make sure miners, builders or whoever are comfortable and happy while suspended 300 miles above the earth in the inky blackness of cold space. Stations could range anywhere from a small, house sized Asteroid base to Massive twin 10kM long cylinders.

9. How would you power it? No nuclear stuff in space remember?

Thorium reactors, maybe even Fusion if it exists at the time. I like to only think about things we can build now though, so we'd likely power anything small with solar arrays (Solar power is alot better up there than it is here). Anything bigger and we have to use Thorium reactors paired with Solar. Waste isn't much of an issue in space as firing at the sun is an actual genuine way of dealing with waste up there. Heres an excellent video showing how great Thorium reactors can be. Eventually though, space development should push development of Hydrogen fuel sources, seeing how its very abundant up there.

As an aside, Thorium isn't really a nuclear material in the same way Uranium or Plutonium is. I can see media twisting it to look like such though. One of the future space races greatest allies will be a very well funded PR department.

10. How connected will we be with earth?

Point a dish in the right direction and you can have internet. Yes, you will be able to play xbox live in space. Which leads nicely to the next question

11. What would you do for fun?

Whatever you want! Space stations will all have areas of zero-gee, which I'm sure alot of people will have fun with. Other than that you'll be able to get satellite TV and internet if you like. Being that you live in a space station with a massive abundance of minerals? I'm guessing entertainment will be aplenty to be honest. I once read a paper that said people would build space hot rods and have races around the cylinders and such. Sounds pretty dumb but there's nothing really stopping you.

12. Can it be self sustaining? How?

To begin with, any space endeavour is going to be very reliant on earth. For minerals, fuels, food, all kinds of supplies. But by the time we have O'Neil cylinders any space colony will be completely and utterly self sustaining. Massive solar arrays and endless supplies of hydrogen providing unlimited power to the station, hydroponics and solar reflectors used to grow all the food needed, water from recycled waste and processed asteroids, oxygen from the same place.. Not that import and export wont happen, but it certainly wouldn't be necessary at that point.

13. Would it be safe?

Yes. in short. The station would be built to withstand the micro asteroid impacts that occur frequently in space, with modular systems allowing the station to be sealed instantly if a breakage did occur. massive impacts that could utterly wipe out the station would only occur once every 3000 years, and remember. This is a space station completely designed to mine asteroids. I have faith that future station dwellers will be able to deal with such a problem.

14. Isn't living in space really unhealthy? Lost bone mass an stuff?

Normally yes. If you go live in space without any kind of gravity then you're boned. However. All space stations are built around centripetal force. Thats the force that keeps stuff in a bag when you spin it around. In short it simulates gravity by pushing you to the outside of the station. This defeats any bone mass from living in zero gee.

This actually means you'd be healthier in space. Slightly lower than usual gravity, a regulated atmosphere and genetically optimised foods mean that you'd be able to lift more, run further and live longer that those pathetic Earthers.

15. Governments, Gangs, drugs, economics and social issues

I honestly don't know anything about these issues yet. I'm not a psychologist or an economist so I can only speculate on what would happen on the station in regards to these subjects, and I don't want to pretend to know stuff I don't. Sorry, I've failed you. Hari-kari here I come.

Thats just about all the questions I could find or come up with. Thanks again for everyone who helped out here and if you still have any concerns over this subject or aren't completely sold on the idea yet, usually I'd tell you to throw yourself off a space-train bridge but in case you didn't notice. I'm super passionate about this subject and actually love talking about it, unlike most of the subjects on this blog. I'm really just trying to get it across that space isnt this unattainable, useless goal that so many see it as today, so leave a comment or send me an email with your question and I'll answer it, and I won't even call you a moron in the process.

Some links if you're interested in the subject

Mining the sky. A fantastic book on Asteroid Mining

An economical study of asteroid mining
A nice article about space stations

Book 10 - Flim Flam By James Randi

2010-08-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

A short book detailing many examples of psychics, dowsers, mediums and countless others who claim to hold amazing abilities. And their intense failures.

Randi is known world wide as The Skeptic. Once a magician, he has turned his knowledge of misdirection and trickery to uncovering those who use such talents not for entertainment, but to claim mystical abilities. The book details some of Randi's bigger encounters, exposes some of the more prolific technquies used by these people and demonstrates Randis famous cash prize. Its a very interesting read at times.

The issues I had with it were twofold, the first isnt Randi's fault and I dont hold it against the book. The book was written a while ago. This comes through alot in the writing obviously and obviously all the targets he examines in the book are dated. This didnt detract from the book really, and was more just me being a dong.

Second though, Randi is not a writer. Some parts of the book were difficult to grasp at first scan and more than once it was hard to make out the meanings of his awkward sentences. This is still a minor issue, it doesn't come up much.

The exploration of the media's attitude toward mystics was pretty interesting, and all the more relivent these days with the New Age focus on things, and the media is still going on about mystics and Ghosts and so on.

A good read if you're interested in the subject, though I'd suggest seeking out a more recent book.

Facebook is bad for you

2010-08-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

A good few years ago some guy invented a website called The Facebook. Originally only used by Harvard students as an alternative, online version of the old "face books" handed out by universities to help students get to know one another, it wasn't long before it was expanded to all universities. Pretty soon that expanded to just Everyone Ever. About 500 Million people are now on Facebook. What originally started as Facemash, a Hot or Not clone using hacked and stolen dorm ID pictures of Harvard students has become one of the most used websites on the planet. Predictably, this pisses me off.

You've all heard the privacy problems, heard about workers getting fired for having the wrong groups or saying some stupid things or posting dumb pictures, heard the stories about people losing jobs or even being straight out actually killed cause of Facebook. I'll save you the age old arguments there. I trust all of you are smart enough to not end up dead cause you left your address and working hours on Facebook along with a detailed description of the best and worst ways to break in.

The reason I really dislike Facebook is manifold, its censorship of critical subjects, lack of customer support and H-h-hilarious views on your right to not be sold like a Thai bride being just some of the many many issues that the site has. They seem like a decent place to start;

Censorship. That can't be right? Surely Facebook allows people to spread messages quicker and get news and ideas out into the open, why, just look at how many people join those petition and all the good they do (none). Well you're wrong, again, damn why do you even bother. you big stupid ape. In February 2010 Facebook deleted every group that had anything to do with the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong. No reason was given The groups were later restored and Facebook said it was "due to opposing members flagging the groups". In May they deleted the group for a radio station that posted some critical comments about Facebook and linked to an article about why Leo Laporte deleted his account. Small fries maybe, but there were no repercussions for this censorship, just as they wont be for any future ones. I realise Facebook is technically a private service and are allowed to do whatever they please, but deleting accounts cause they said mean things sounds almost so childish I can hardly believe it.

These articles highlight one fact that you should always remember. Facebook owns your ass, they own everything you post and everything you say. they own your address, email, real name and phone number. The can, do and will sell all of this to whoever has enough cash, they are in many ways a bigass mailing list. Course, what other mailing list lets you send your friends pokes and show everyone the pics of you getting mad wasted? As if that wasn't bad enough, Facebook boasts Paypal as a major shareholder. You may know of Paypal as the big online NotBank famous for screwing everyone and selling everyone's details all the god damn time. If you have no idea why an online NotBank having access to every bit of info about your life is a bad idea well I guess you're probably a happier person than me.

Facebook's customer service is non-existent. I can't really describe it in any other terms while maintaining my impeccable journalistic integrity. Much of its reporting facilities are automated and scripted. For example, imagine you stumble upon a profile that has nudity in the profile picture. You hit the report button on the page and file a complaint for nudity. What we'd like to imagine is that one of the administrators of the website has a look and decided what the best course of action is. Unfortunately that isn't always the case. There have been many many cases of people ebing banned for posting reports. This ban is automatic. This is just one of the nigh infinite ways you can be banned from Facebook.

Facebook's legal history is more that a bit murky too. There have been a handful of times when the website has been sued by others for intellectual copyright theft. I have yet to find strong evidence either way on this subject, but Facebook has never been cleared by law, only by out of court settlements, of which I am always weary of. I'm not saying here that all or any of those cases are true, but they warrant notice.

As one final note. Facebook has a very long history of being dishonest with its terms of service agreement. This is basically a contract you sign by using the service. A while ago there was a brouhaha about the terms when it was found that Facebook has the right to hold all of your stuff, forever, and do whatever they like with them. This started a large domino effect leading to the new "democratic" system they are implementing. There is, unsurprisingly, problems with that as well.

I'm not saying "Do Not Use Facebook". Though it may look that way cause I've just been a cock this whole article. All I'm asking is to think about what services you use. Facebook has many benefits, millions of people connect each day in ways that would be impossible otherwise. Just two weeks ago I helped my Granddad find some old guy he knew 60 years ago. Turned out the guy was dead but thats hardly the point. On the other hand (the massive, overused hand that we've been on this whole article) you only need look for a second before finding pages of complaints and disgruntled users. The question, I suppose, is "Is it worth it?" And the answer is No stop using that shitty site.

-Nems

Book 9 - Towing Jehovah by James Morrow

2010-08-12T06:24:00.000-07:00

God dies and the angels charge the captain of a supertanker with transporting the body to its tomb in the Arctic.

The first book in a trilogy concerning the aftermath of God's actual literal death. It mainly focuses on the voyage of the supertanker, carrying its massive cargo behind it through some pretty horrible and interesting situations. Regular readers will know this kind of strange and bizarre plot and concept is exactly what I love, I wasnt disappointed.

At every turn in the book the world seems to get more and more bizarre. From the strange appearing island made of human trash and an ex-pagan civilisation, to the World War 2 re-enactment society, hell-bent on the destruction of God's corpse. By the end it was almost too out there.

The book of course isn't really about some guys towing Gods corpse. its about what it means to be an atheist, what it means to be a Christian and why sometimes both of those are horrible things. Its about life in a world where religion is quickly becoming less and less relevant. It is, at its heart a satire of both sides of the argument.
The hardcore atheist characters in the book are painted with the same brush as The Vatican as single minded foolish characters. One main gripe I had with the book concerns these characters however, at times (alot) they come off as extreme straw-men, walking parodies of themselves. I'm aware that was sort of the point but it detracted from an otherwise well written satire.

The book isn't perfect, not even close. The writing is jumpy at times, sometimes making it hard to remember where people are, what they are doing and whoy. At times its silly, at others its far too serious about itself. But it does manage to entertain while also making you think about yourself and the world we live in.

Book 8 - Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

2010-08-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

Sequel to Ender's game, 3000 years after the events of the first book, Ender travels to a planet which is home to the Piggies, the first intelligent lifeforms humanity has found since the Xenocide.

The first Ender book is a hard sci-fi space war book, with mild philosophical musings on childhood, warfare and humanity. The sequel is the latter cranked up to 10. The story starts with Ender being called for to "Speak" the death of a Xenobologist on the planet Lustina. It explains that in the 3 millennia since Ender wiped out the Buggers, humanity has embraced their tale, wrote by ender himself, and have great sorrow for the actions of the past. Ender himself is hated almost universally. Almost everyone knows Ender must be dead by now though. Through this, a new quasi-religion has sprung up. It involves Speakers, men and women who come and learn about a recently dead person, then "Speak" for them, telling their life as they lived it, without trying to condemn or condone them.

Scott writes fantstically, creating characters that are at once flawed, broken people with tragedies and terrible lives, and at the same time wonderful, likeable even lovable. Ender himself is portrayed as both a master at the art of interaction and reading people, yet one of the most powerful parts in the book relate to him losing a dear friend, due to his misunderstanding.

The book muses on what Humanity is, what makes us human, why and how we hate each other and fear each other. It draws some interesting ideas and doesn't disappoint in taking them to their conclusion. I really enjoyed this book, more than I thought I'd enjoy it. I'm really enjoying the series as a whole and I suggest it to anyone looking for a good sci-fi story.

Book 7 - Confederacy of Dunces by John kennedy Tool

2010-07-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

Absolute asshole, Ignatius, blunders through New Orleans, destroying lives and businesses as he goes.

I really am not one for the classics, I dont know what it is but you say something is a "classic" or part of the "canon" and it ends up being just a big let down. In a way thats what Confederacy was like for me. I'd read it was the funniest book ever written and I guess I didn't find the book VERY funny. There are moments in it that, once you spend a moment and visualise it, they are very funny, Ig as a character is a horrible bastard that you hate very soon, mostly because you probably know a Ignatius. he's the loud, obnoxious guy with "ideas" that will blow your mind. You know the one.

The characters are this books strong point. You probably know every single one of them in some way or another. The long suffering mother, the mothers harpy friends, the cynical business owner, etc etc. They all "feel" real. as does the city. New Orleans itself is the books main charcter and you really get a feel for the city itself.

It can be at times a bit of a slog but its a fairly fun read and I suggest you at least try it. If only to act superior to everyone else when they finally make the movie.

Space is the coolest thing

2010-07-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I was discussing human achievement with a group of friends. I brought up space travel, in my mind, space travel is probably one of the greatest things mankind has done so far. Basically everyone else responded by asking "Where’s the point?" huh.

Well, I know a lot of people are just dumb as heck so I put it off. Until I slowly realized basically everyone has this exact same outlook "Where’s the point". This was, to say the least, slightly disheartening. I love space, its my passion. What the hell is wrong with you backwards bastards? Ok, let me start by squaring away that one issue that keeps arising "Where is the point". Little do you know but NASA is basically responsible, in some way, for almost every single device you will use today. Starting with the most obvious, your keyboard, Mouse and even your computer itself are all the result of research and development by NASA. If you make a phone call today, or browse the web on your phone or use a GPS to find the shops near you, NASA is to thank for that. Oh well someone would have made those eventually, No, no they wouldn't have and even if they did, at least ONE of the following important discoveries and technologies would have slipped past their dumb earth brains;

• Pacemakers

• Bar Codes

• Smoke detectors

• Almost everything in an ambulance

• Cordless electronic tools

• Memory cloth

• Fuckin' baby food

• Water purification

• Solar Energy

• Cancer detection

Most of the devices up there have probably saved thousands of lives in the time its taken me to write this. And that’s just a small smattering of the 30,000 or so by products of the space race. Man they must have spent tons of cash on that right? Wrong you moron. They spent less than 1% of the national budget of the US on developing all that shit. That’s less than 1 cent for every dollar an American makes.

Its probably one of the best industries too, all that tech creates jobs and income and taxes for people and the government. It’s estimated that for every $1 spent on NASA, the US gets $7 back in the form of new jobs and taxes from those jobs. I mean screw taxes but that’s one hell of a return.

And just for you guys out there that don't get motivated by silly shit like "World shattering inventions" and "Devices that save millions of lives" or "taxes" what about the fact that exploration is the single greatest thing humanity does that separates us from animals? Since the dawn of time we've had brave, stupid or just hungry and lost people finding new, incredible land then fucking it up forever. For me, that’s what space is about. For less money than you will spend today on the cost of the electricity to heat up your hot pockets, humanity is going into the dark, scary world outside of the safety of our planet in the name of exploration and finding out cool shit.

Now that we have THAT out of the way, lets talk about all the cool stuff you get out of space travel.

The big one is asteroid mining. Boring sounding I know but asteroid mining is, literally, something that could save the entire planet and introduce a new golden age of humanity. Ok maybe that’s a bit much but follow me here.

You know how in space movies everyone always has whatever they want? I mean apart from like, Mad Max or anything else set in GRIMDARK, resources in these places are infinite, enough to build space stations the size of moons, to send craft all over the universe, establish worlds and build fantastic machines. Guess what? We already have that shit a couple of miles above your head. Above you are approximately 450 big rocks full of gold, iron, copper and whatever other raw materials you can imagine. By rocks I mean one of the closer ones is 2.5km in circumference and is made of gold.

I shouldn't really have to say any more "Massive rock made of gold" is probably enough for most anyone, but I'm insane, crazy and drunk with power so I'll go on. As well as being a gangster rapper's dream, the solid gold asteroid also holds massive amounts of other, useful stuff like tin and iron, which can be used to build MORE space stuff. Yes you earth people can have some of it too, seeing how its much easier and cheaper to drop stuff to earth than bring it up to space.

This builds into the next stage, colonization of space. Naaah nems, that shit is futurewacky stuff. Costs trillions and we dont have the tech.....oh we DO have the tech? and you can build it completely with space materials? Welp I guess I'll shut my big strawman-mouth then. woop-doop-de-woop.

In closing. Space is so kickass all the shit I just talked about for a page or so is stuff within an hours flight away from Earth. I didn't even touch on the stuff that’s just plain "cool" that naysayers would say "has no applicable benefits for mankind". If there’s one thing you should take away from this, its that we live in a time where, if they wanted to, we could have everything I just described within a decade of work. The tech is there, the profits are all up there, all we need is someone with the cash and the personality to get it going.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. - Carl Sagan

-Nems

P.S. just in case you were also thinking that cash has to be mountains of the stuff? I estimated that the whole project would cost less than $60 Billion. That sounds like a lot until you realize that the money you’d make back, and the jobs it would provide outdo that number tenfold.

Book 6 - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

2010-07-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

A timeless tale about the monster within us all, the perils of indulgence and friendship.

What can be said, its a classic. Its very very well written, perfectly paced and the characters are all fantastic people. For those who haven't read it, do so. Its not what you may think, the actual structure of the book is mostly the account of Jekyll's best friend, a lawyer named Utterson. One thing I found was that the book was still as thrilling and interesting today as it was when it was written.

While you all know the book is about the duality of human nature, I think one part of it that is missed is the way the book deal with friendship. Jekyll's friends are the ones telling the story for the most part and you get an intense feeling of love they have for their friend and the terrible fear they have for him when things start going wrong. Its not the main focus of the book, not even nearly, but its important enough that it made me think.

Read this, its only 100 pages or so and its famous literally because people who didn't read started reading because of this book.

Book 5 - Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

2010-07-03T03:17:00.000-07:00

Immortal SuperFuture tale of intrigue set in Disney World.

This books premise is so nuts its difficult to actually type it. I'll do my best. It is THE FUTURE and people can now live forever via a bizarre cloning process that leaves you with whatever memories you had at the time of your last backup. The world has changed fundamentally and the book takes place in Disney World, now considered one of the greatest works of the 20th century. For some reason.

Superfuture in Disney land was enough for me to grab a free copy from the authors site, but it didn't live up to what it was aiming for. While I'm not pissed off at it or anything, it just felt like its messages and commentary on the human condition were a little empty. God knows it tries hard, but in the ocean of unexplained, difficult to understand concepts, and silly names, This book was basically a big pile of neat ideas (the idea that the currency in the world is based solely on what other people think of you) jumbled together into a silly plot that takes itself far too seriously.

At times I felt like I was missing something, like there was a big idea just under the layer I was reading at. There are parts of the book that are genuinely exciting, fun and thought provoking, so it succeeds there. I guess I was mostly annoyed that it didn't keep that up through the book.

Its free, so go look it up if you like the concept. Just be prepared for endless pages of flashbacks and the word Whuffie alot.

Book 1 - Flatland by Edwin Abbott

2010-07-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

The idea of a book based completely in a 2D world where the main character is a square was...interesting to say the least. So I jumped on Project Gutenburg (the best website in the world for me right now) and grabbed it.

Good plan. This is such a fun read. The book's main point is to paint a satire of Victorian culture, something that becomes evident as soon as the book picks up a mallet labelled "Civil Rights" and starts beating your face (which is now labelled as "Oppression") until your brain flies out of your skull (which is now labelled hate or something i dunno this political cartoon joke died before I started to write it). The book literally refers to women as a single lines that are seen by every other shape as almost animals, but they have the ability to quite easily massacre everything in Flatland (cause they are the pointiest). Very good social commentary, if a little strong.

The visuals and concepts of higher dimensions are the main reasons I loved this book and they didn't disappoint, Every single chapter blows your brain with accurate ideas of how a 2D creature might "see". I couldn't possibly begin to explain most of it to you so I'll just say stop being an illiterate slob and go read it, its free cause its older than dirt but, like dirt, its deep, more complex than it seems and brown.

-Nem

Book 2 - Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell

2010-07-02T14:38:00.001-07:00

Sci Fi writer finds himself in Dante's hell. Oh my.

I have a confession to make. I have never read all of Dante's inferno. Cause its boring as fuck. It's a book that requires a massive amount of footnotes and prefaces to ensure you know who the hell is talking and why. I'm sure at the time it was a rip roaring ride but I'm not an 14th century Italian. What I am is a 20th century nerd. So when I read about a book that starts with a sci-fi writer killing himself and ending up in the very same hell that Virgil walked, I thought Why not.

I don't feel right calling a book "pointless" cause I guess at their heart, alot of books are pointless. but this one doesn't even tell a new story. I guess the inclusion of a bunch of different characters from various times and places is kinda neat but, I dunno, could have been alot more creative. Theres no real message or criticism or anything, unless the author's self insert's constant ramblings to himself count. One main issue I had was that it leads you along for a very long time on two plot points that are both painfully obvious and played as if they are incredible mysteries.

I don't have much more to say about this, it was alight I suppose but I wouldn't recommend it unless you really like the idea.

Book 3 - Mass Effect: Revelation by Drew Karpyshyn

2010-07-02T14:38:00.000-07:00

Prequel to Mass Effect, famous RPG, dialogue and alien sex sim.

My secert love of Halo books made me read this. I don't care what you bitchs say this book has a part where a giant rino alien uses magic powers to throw an APC 30 feet into the air so screw all of you. I really enjoyed this as a mindless, space military tie in. Its written functionally enough, got a decent enough plot, clears some issues you may have with the plot of the game and is just really fun to read. If you like Mass effect, you'll probably like this.

Book 4 - Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang

2010-07-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

Angels, God, Hell and Fallen Angels exist as real, frequent, and problematic as Tornadoes.

I kinda liked this book, the message of Humanities place in a world where the promises of angels and the like are actually met is really strong and even through the almost mechanical way its written there's a very dark sadness to the whole affair. The plot revolves around visitations from angels, which sometimes will heal you, sometimes result in your death from the effects of the angel. The people who see these angels hardly even care what the angels have to say, they just want to feel the magic light that surrounds him when he arrives or leaves.

If you can get past how utterly mind-numbingly boring its written, it's actually a really great read. short too so you can't complain about it. Theres far too much story and message and underlying plot for me to get into in these short reviews, but it is a solid experience.

Book review idea

2010-07-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

So I just got a kindle and I love this thing so much that I've read about twice as much as I usually would in the last week or so. Its insane how much I'm reading now with this thing and its, undisputably, the best gadget I have owned this year. Unless they bring out Rocket boots very very soon, its probably gonna stay that way.

So I had an idea while browsing around for ideas for articles. I read about this one guy who had the bright idea of doing like 10000 movie reviews in one year, through twitter.

What a stupid asshole.

The problems with this seem obvious, only 140 charcters, and most of those will go to telling you what movie it is. No, bad plan. What I may do is try to read one book every 2 weeks and post a short (paragraph) review on here for every one of them. Going from the current date, that would mean I'd read about 12 books. Given I've already read 4 in the past few days, I expect to beat that pretty harshly. The question is will I stick with this idea to the end? Would anyone even be interested? Who knows. All I know is I read alot, I love talking about books and love suggesting them to everyone. I also read alot of werid stuff and think people might be interested in some of them.

This will not interupt usual "RAGHHH" posts, I have one in mind on how much no one gives a shit about space coming up, but I think it'll be nice and refreshing.

So what do you think, invisible, barely existent audience?

-Nems

Excuses Excuses...

2010-06-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Hey gang

I realise there has been a bit of a drought of updates on here the past month or so, Reasoning is I was on vacation for a while, and now that I'm back, I just straight up havnt had any inspiration for anything and while I do love writing stuff on here, I'm very much aware of the fact that I have absolutly no readers, with that in mind I havnt really been trying very hard to come up with anything.

I'll have a think and come up with a couple topics, maybe flesh out some of the half written ones in the draft folder. Till then.

Nems

Exteremism and Stupidity, Younger than you'd think Pt.2: Wiccans Witchs and bears oh my!

2010-05-24T05:31:00.000-07:00

So I pretty much dispise Wiccans. I know thats not much of a shock, given my virtol for the vast majority of people, but rarely does a group of people so encapsulate everything I see as wrong with the world. Wiccans manage to be, all at the same time, the worst parts of Christiantity, Veganism, Technophobia, Nostaligia and Hypocritics.

I'm going to talk about the origins of Neo-druids and wiccans, as they are very closely intertwned. That way when your lame fatass friend turns up talking about how much they love the "Godess within me" and how "pure" life used to be, you can laugh at them more than you usually would. As usual though, I wont give you everything. But enough to find out the rest easily.

Lets begin with how old wicca is. Wicca is often seen as an anchient religion, a closely guarded horde of magical secerts passed down through generations and in covens. Hell, they burned Witchs way back right? They were Wiccans I bet.

No dont be stupid why would I even use that subject if it was what you expected? I'm not gonna write a paragraph on how Wiccans have subpar bathing habbits either.Wicca, in and of itself, is about 60 years old, give or take. Yes 60. My Grandfather is older than these "secerts". I will concied one point to the Wiccans for having the Religious Leader most likley to play himself in a a movie about wizards:

Look at that fucking guy. If I showed you a picture and said "hey guess what this guy did" your answer would have to be either Gandalf or Wicca founder.

Thats Gerald Gardner by the way, Founder of Wicca. He claimed that, after spending a couple of his years traveling asia gwaping at the "magical" natives, he came home and was indoctrinated into a coven of anchient pagan witchs which no one else has been able to find. After this conversion he goes off and spreads this new "old" religion around like some kind of horrible, moldy butter (something I'm sure the Wiccans reading are able to picture very well, seeing how they likley just got finished eating a chunk of horrible moldy butter). 60 years later and that fat goth girl is telling you how much shes intouch with a vague, unexplained "godess" (completely leaving how the dualistic part of Wicca, there should be a God and a Godess and Doc Brown up there made up names and everythuing for them).

Now how old a religion is shouldnt make a differnce I guess. Its just as "valid" as one made 2000 years ago. At least it would be if it didnt pretend it was made 2000 years ago to add to the mystic, I guess. I mean for christ sake their 10 commandments are called the Wiccan Rede and are all written in friggin Ye Olde Englishe, their festivals are called Sabbats and they all dress like people who get turned away from Ren Faires for being "too into it".

Wicca is a bit like the English language, in that its a filthy, lying thief without an origanal idea in its head. The vast majority of Wiccan beliefs come from a guy called Alister Crowely, who you may know from a certain song by black sabbath. Basically he made up a whole lot of shit about magic and evil and darkness and was essencially the first dude to go "Hey, if I pretend to be deep and brooding and cool and dark, I get alot of sex!". So he set off on his white horse and became known as the "Most Evil Man Ever" Cowley is a pretty interesting guy I guess, but this isnt about him, only the madcap thing he helped spawn.

Everything else in Wicca has been pretty much made up as they go along, so much so that almost every "Coven" of Wiccans has VASTLY differing rules, ideas and belifs. It has one of the highest numbers of denominations in the entire world.

Their morality code is pretty much the funniest part of the whole thing. As I said earlier, its in Ye Olde, despite being written about the same time as Elvis was alive. It can be summed up as such "Do whatever, so long as no one gets hurt". If that sounds like something a 10 year old would write when making up his own totally rad religion, then congrats, you're not a wiccan. if those seemed like wise words of unfathomable meaning, go fuck yourself. you selfish little shit.

So in conclusion, Wicca is 50 years old, its rules are made up on the spot even to this day and its morality code is some simplistic bullshit with no real meaning. Tadaaa.

Nems
P.S.
Interesting note on the fulidity of the ruleset of Wicca by the way, The Wiccan "Holy Book" is the Book of Shadows (yes really) and it was origanally invisioned that every single wiccan would copy a version of it down from their teacher, changing parts where they saw fit and basically producing billions of differnt texts. I actually love this idea, its utterly fantastic. Except they dont do it, every single copy of the book of shadows is exactly the same as the one Gardners' student copied down. Well done Wicca.

Exteremism and Stupidity, Younger than you'd think Pt.1: Islamic Extremism

2010-05-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

LOOK OUT! ITS A BROWN PERSON! FROM THE MIDDLE EAST! ITS A TERRORIST!! RUUUUUN!!!

I hear that from pretty much every news channel basically 24/7. So being the bright man I am I decided to find out exactly who these "terrorists" are and why they want to blow me up and steal my kids. And because I also like positive reenforcement from a buntch of annonymous internet people, I think I'll share my findings with you.

The Terrorists, as the news likes to refer to them, are, for now, Muslim exteremists, You know the kind, woman stoning hand cutting off bastards who steal our planes and kidnap news reporters and the like. You would be forgiven for assuming these guys have been around forever, really, thats fine, I did too. What might shock you is that they have been around for less than 70 years, by one or two guys. Just because I like making you guys work, I'll talk about the first guy, you guys can find the rest.

Sayyid Qutb was a critic at heart. Untill sometime in the 1950s he took a trip around the US, and, as critics are want to do, he got angry. He was angry at what he saw as an evil empire, where the people were corrupt and decadent, where the country itself was falling appart and spreading its influence as it did. This line of thinking happened to coincide with some of the darkest times in America's history so far, the war just ended an all, prohibition, rioting and so on.

Now this wouldnt be so bad if, at the time, the US wasnt the biggest guy around. I know today its similer, America is this huge giant that sort of blunders around, wrecking loads of shit, but back then the UN wasnt really a power, the world still thought in the terms of East v West. So Qutb declared his hate for the entire West, after seeing the US. He hated everything that came with the West, democracy, nationalism, but mostly what he saw as the decadence and commercialism.

So he says "Fuck that" and goes home to Egypt, only to find his world had already started changing into the west he so despised. And because he hated what his country had become and the goverment of egypt was "west friendly" to say the least, he was arrested. While in captivity he was also tortured. If its one thing life has taught me, its this: If you have some crazy guys that hate something, unless your name is O'Brien, Dont fucking torture them you idiot.

As it turns out, having your balls bitten off by a dog will do loads to radicalise a guy, so our man gets to work, writes a book called "Signposts" that attacks the government, accusing it of being unmuslim and explaining that, due to them being unmuslim, killing them is tops. The book painted the world in black and white, with Qutb as the Good guy and the west as the worst of the worst.

Sayyid gets out of jail, and a couple of years later is the head of a group know as the Muslim Brotherhood. in 1966 he was hung and died.

Unfortunatly, before that he taught someone called Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who in turn taught everyone's favourite cave dweller, Osama Bin Laden.

I want to go on about hos Muslims are smart, and at one point where the one shining light of civilisation in the world during the Dark Ages, but I honestly dont know enough on that subject.

Next time we're gonna take a look at where those ancient gods of Wicca come from. Because I fucking hate wiccans.

I'm paying £3145 for alternative medicines

2010-04-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, I go to Teesside university. I study a computing subject there. Most of my classes take place in the School of Computing, the single most underfunded part of the uni with the possible exception of the punching bag in the gym.

To give some of you an idea of how insanely underfunded my part of the uni is, let me try and explain how my uni is set up. We have a number of buildings, each of which has a "supposed" purpose. The Olympia is the lecture hall, with loads of lecture theatres and only a handful of work rooms. In reality pretty much every building is a General Purpose one, Except the bigass media building we have full to the brim with new and amazing technologies, a cafe, a couple thousand big screen TVs and what seems to be a quadrillion rooms filled with the most powerful computers my tuition can buy.

Now I'm not really complaining about this, the media and video games design portions are Teessides' specialities, its why we got the University of the Year this (or last) year. Yeah its kinda shit that my money goes toward stuff that I will never use and literally can't even enter the rooms containing the stuff, but whatevs, its computers and hardware and hurfffff.

No what I am pissed about is how much of my money goes toward 2 things; the "Therapy" stuff (that they also charge for) and the (lack of) facilities in the Students Union.

I think its pretty obvious that I'm not the kind of guy who believes in "alternative theropies" so, last week when an email arrived in my inbox happily telling me of the special offers on theorpy sessions in the Health area of the gym, I was not best pleased. I was so unpleased I even went out of my way to contact the people who run this stuff and ask about it. I hav't heard back from them. The Candle wax treatment must be fucking with their sense of hearing I guess.

Meanwhile, at the gym in the uni, you cant get a pair of punching gloves, the machines are damaged and there's very little support. Its insane. I've recently found we actually have an entire floor dedicated to this horrible shit. Why? What place does this have in the uni? Why am I paying for it? Why can't my money go toward something imporant?

Such as entertainment and proper usage of the Student union, for example. For those that don't know, the SU at Teesside is a bar. Its a small pub with a cafe and a cash machine and a small area where people harass me about joining Islam or the drama club or the anime club rejects bother me about their "pirate society". and theres a shop.

There is, however, a very very minimal amount of stuff for people who don't want to just drink all the god damn time. I get it, you guys are students, you want to have fun, whatever, thats cool. Theres some bars litterally 20 feet away from the uni. Knock yourselves out. But I can't hire a single part of the "Students Union" for the purposes of societies or clubs. The people at the students union (for example, the financial support) are completely useless and every thing else is aimed at sports. Which, I suppose, brings me to another point.

Sports. Hey guys, do you like sports? No? Well fuck you. We have no less than 2 sports buildings, 3 if you count the several outdoor football pitches we have. These buildings contain tons of shit that is sololy used by sports students or the "ELITE ATHLETES" program people. Just a heads up, nothing against you guys. You guys are the most helpful people in the world in the gyma nd I apperciate all your help and admire your abilities but hey maybe instead of another football pitch we can have a vending machine in the SCM building yeah?

Could be worse I guess. I could be a drama student here.

Kremploch tournament went well.

2010-04-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

If you believe this barbaric sport can go "well" at all.

Another year another Kremploch tournament over.Thanks to my village's champion wining we're allowed internet for the next couple days. Courtesy of the Black Sails. Let me ask you something. Am I the only one who is getting sick of seeing our nations athletes cut up?

2 score and 2 years ago, my farther came to this village with a desire to farm, raise some sheep and adhere the the great one's almighty plan. We fled the battles of the Black Sails and began a simpler life here in Britain. what we did not expect was Kremploch.

And I am sick of it.

Zarr'thx lying to us again!.

2010-04-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

I told you this would happen.

Looks like Zart'thx is fucking us again people. last year he promised to keep trade routes with the alpha quadrant open, you may remember his rousing speech on Titan. The one where he promised the take over was "temporary" and "for your own good". Well back then I said he was a liar and now I'm proven right.

Yes today the great galactic commander and conquer of a million suns has locked us in a space field. What the fuck is that? How does he get off on this bullshit?

According to his press release:
"Today I have decided to close all contact with the rest of the galaxy. This includes the Alpha Quadrant. I realise that this may upset some of you but I assure you it is best for you in the Beta Quadrant."

Now where the hell are we supposed to get our supply of Karlank materials to power our Flack drives? Not that it matters I supposed, now that we're all trapped on this worthless hole of a space.

Its time to fight back people. I'm sick of this Reptiles shit. I told you all that his entire race were a group of intergalactic locusts, and it looks like someone in Alpha agreed with me, and now we're all alone, no army, no Karlank materials, no Coca Cola. I hope you're happy with yourself Urth.

I hope you're happy with yourself.

Easter Bunny Flowers.

2010-04-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to walk you through how to create your very own perfectly arranges bunny themed Easter flower pot.

First start with the container. I used a simple basket but you could you practically anything.Then take some floral foam and some water. Pour the water directly onto the foam. Now you are ready to begin arranging. I've used tulips and a bundle of lime stems here, neatly decorated by some free range eggs. I've also got some daffodils in there and some reindeer moss.

For the rabbits you can kill and stuff a real rabbit for the best effect. I recommend a bow and arrow or slingshot for the hunt, as it will do much less damage than a rifle shot. After you have the dead creature, I highly suggest taking it to a taxidermy. If you can not afford this however, thats ok. Simply take 3 handfuls of sawdust and begin inserting it into the corpse via any orifice.

And now you have your own Easter themed basket! Congratulations!.

How the Pirates Stole Christmas

2010-03-15T05:09:00.000-07:00

A good couple years ago I used to know some people who were involved in the whole, internet downloading scene. The guy I knew was pretty low down but through him (and since him, through my own research and interest in the subject) I have gained a fairly decent image of how your Handicam version of Avatar gets to you. I've asked a couple people and they said an article about this would be interesting, so in the interest of pandering to the 2 people who read my blarrrgh, here’s some info about some pretty rad guys.

I'd just like to preface this by saying most of the info within (if not all by now) is easily found on the net. Despite some myths and what you may first thing, the scene is fairly open and transparent.

The Scene has been around for as long as there have been ways to distribute digital information to and from people. With odd naming schemes and bizarre collections of rules and regulations they can seem a scary, sometimes evil group of shady people, out to ruin movies and music for us all.In order to really understand what the scene is and what it does we're going to go back to the 1980s. It was here that the beginnings of what would become the scene formed. Groups of young talented coders would crack the security on games and later applications; upload them to a BBS (a primitive version of a web forum) for all to download for free.

At the time there were no rules and no real information for anyone outside of the scene, only the included nfo file (an antiquated file type that is underused now, but is still used for traditional reasons in the scene), which often included stunning ASCII artwork. Also routinely included would be midi files or artwork.It was a much more innocent time, games and apps were traded freely, there was no formal structure and groups ran wild. Slowly however the scene became more organized, rules were drafted and eventually hard Communities were established. Essentially there is one community per "thing" you can imagine downloading, from the Scanner groups, uploading comic pages, to Movie groups. Each community has its own set of rules and regulations both to protect them and to ensure quality releases. As bizarre as it may seem there actually exists committees and tribunals for the sole purpose of working out these rules and declaring releases good or "nuked" (Nuked meaning its trash or breaks one of the rules somehow).

Eventually of course the scene caught the eye of the FBI and other law enforcement and in a series of devastating raids was cut down. Many of the more prominent groups were targeted and taken out. People being People though, the scene quickly grew back to its original size and then some, however the scars from those raids still show, with the scene being much more secretive now than it used to be.

UPDATE: I'll just add everything here, its not a very long update so no point adding another post when there's no point.

Now, the scene is actually also split up into different mediums too. Most of the higher up groups belong to what they see as the true Scene, a series of secert high speed websites (known as TopSites) where files are uploaded and downloaded on a kind of novel credits system, where every megabyte you uploaded allows you to download 3.

"below" these are a series of less elitist groups, refereed to usually as P2P groups, due to the medium of their releases. Occasionally a group will be found of either leaking Scene releases to the P2P groups or even copying releases wholesale. This usually results in humiliation for the group in question. Why a group would leak something varies from group to group, it can range from simply not agreeing with the Scene rules to antagonism between groups.

There are other, less well understood and published groups, such as groups that post only to Rapidshare and the like. These fit somewhere in the P2P groups depending on who you ask.

As you can see, the medium that you download with is tied to where you stand on the hierarchy, with P2P being the worst and the elite TopSites being the best. Your average downloader will never see a TopSite their entire life (I certainly haven't, only in screenshots) and will probably not even know they exist. This ties in with the community, allowing those on the inside to (at least feel) they are superior to others.

And thats pretty much all I can think of writing. If you have any more questions I'll try and answer them in the comments.

Nem

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

2010-03-10T11:52:00.000-08:00

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The Worst Superheroes

2010-02-28T12:15:00.000-08:00

Recently I've started to read comic books. I've always loved me some comic characters but never really read them. I started with some more niche ones and have slowly moved into more mainstream ones like Batman, Superman, Spiderman and Alfred Zimmerman (the last one is an exciting romp through the reign of Alfred R Zimmerman, Mayor of Rotterdam during WW1.).I've noticed two things about comics. The first is comic book artists can be much much worse than your usual artists. I'm talking utterly utterly shit. The worst are guest artists, which I assume is Comic Book code for "Korean Outsourced Artists". Its a shame because a book I follow (one I think is pretty aces) constantly has a "guest artist" and it does horrible things to the characters, like Tumor Face-man up there. Poor guy.

The second thing, which the article will be about, is that some superheroes are so so shit. Either in their uselessness or otherwise, there are just hordes of horrible useless saps who float around doing whatevs. So many of them Marvel had to get rid of a ton of them a while back with the House of M storyline, which saw the depowering of such incredible mutants as;

Hanna Levy (Power: Had a second tongue)
DJ (The most flirty Mutant!)
And Bugman (Like The Tick but naff)

God just reading about those fucks I stumbled over 10 more who still have their "incredible" powers. These worthless fucks are everywhere. Now I'm not complaining that a superhero comic has superheros coming out of every orifice, thats normal. Its like heavy metal bands have skulls and shit on every surface avalable. Thats cool. I can dig it.

What I AM complaining about is how 99% of all of these "heroes" are so inescapably awful that I'm fairly certain your average New Yorker has more special powers than these guys.

The worst superheroes however arnt the bad ones. Those guys are just unfortunate. I'm gonna go over 2 of the worst characters in the industry. (more accurately, I'm gonna go over 2 of the most popular and shit characters).

First up is Deadpool. Deadpool is really really shit. Let me start by saying he was good for a very brief period a couple years ago. He had a story arc where he tried to be a hero but failed horribly, much to his own displeasure. It built character, made him more than the WACKY NUTTY MERC WIDDA MOOF, he was even, dare I say, funny back then too. These days hes in every single comic book fighting off monkeys in waist coats. (yes really. upcoming comic he teams up with Spiderman to fight a monkey in a suit)

I'm not a complete cunt, Deadpool CAN be kinda funny, sometimes. But at this point hes a played out joke, old and tattered and overexposed like a 75 year old flasher. Somehow he keeps getting attention. I really don't know why? Maybe its because he's pretty accessable for people who don't usually read comics? Hes this witty fast talking mercenary for hire who will kill anyone. He threatens to kill whoever he wants and everyone treats him like a gigantic badass, even when he just seems like a prick. nevermind, I digress. Deadpool has shitty powers, shitty humour, shitty plots and shitty art. Fuck Deadpool.

Next up is Superman. Superman is shit in the sense that he is the catch all hero that is invunerable to everything and has any power he fucking wants. Superman is so hardcore even his one weakness doesnt hurt him all that much these days. Superman can burn through the earth with his eyes, fly faster than light, punch through the sun and breath fire and take a nuke to the chest without flinching. If he wanted to he'd be able to stop every single super villian in the world with a flick of his wrist.So wheres the drama?

How am I supposed to feel worried for Supes' life when I know the one time he died he gained Super-Jesus Resurection Powers, came back and killed the monster thats' whole gimmick was "if you kill me, I adapt and you cant kill me again". 3 times.

This in turn makes most DC comics kinda let down, cause you know no matter how bad the big bad is, Supes could take him, no problem. It aint no thing for superman.

There's tons more. The Green Lantern for one used to be allergic to Yellow. How the fuck do you get through life like that? poor fuckers worst enemy was Mustard.

In closing, Read Transmetropoliton and then stop reading comics forever

-Nems

Prisons are the worst things ever Pt2: The Quickening

2010-02-16T04:34:00.000-08:00

So last time I covered Rape and touched on Gangs very slightly. Today I'm going to cover gangs in more detail, false imprisonment and some more general inhuman cruelties. I will also touch on how and where it can be much, much better.

Gangs in prisons are almost identical to gangs in the outside. They control illegal services and substances (sex, drugs, weapons) and grant a degree of protection to those under their wing. They have the same allure as in the real world, a chance at some kind of family, friends, even a shot at becoming someone. All of the last draws are obviously executed tenfold inside, where you have nothing and no one to help you. Loved ones stop coming, the rapes and beatings keep coming and you have nothing. This is also the reason for the huge number of born again's coming from prisons. It’s nice to know someone will always forgive you and be there for you when your entire world is now a never ending suffering.

As I mentioned before, Prison gangs were started on purpose. It started way back in the 60s. Shit was bad for government in the 60s; you had 'nam, massive social upheaval and all that danged rock music. This made things tense, Nixon and allot of other government officials predicted a mighty rising of the people and were preparing for it. Then in 1971 the Attica prison riot shook the world.

For those who don't know, Attica was a typical prison with typically horrific regard for basic humanity. The inmates were given one shower a week and one roll of toilet paper a month. As you can possibly envision, things in Attica were kinda tense for the prisoners. On the morning of the 21st of august a man named George Jackson was murdered by Corrections officers at Attica. A couple of days later, on the 9th of September, the inmates responded. 1000 of them took the prison by force and took many of the staff hostage. They released demands which included:

       •    Amnesty from the taking of the prison
       •    the rebuilding of Attica by prisoners or prisoner supervision
       •    Amplify minimum wage laws to new York prisons (meaning inmates would no longer be slaves)
       •    Educate the officers on the needs of inmates
       •    Proper medical treatment
       •    Proper dietary treatment.

Full list here

Following 4 days of negotiations the authorities agreed to 28 of the prisoners’ demands. Then the National Guard stormed the prison and caused, directly or indirectly, the deaths of 39 people.

So what does this have to do with Gangs? Well, in response to Attica prisons were changed radically. Young Mexican offenders were placed with older black inmates, with the foreknowledge that they would be abused and segregated. This is how the notorious Mexican Eme's were born. Before long the government had managed to force almost the entire prison system to segregate and war against themselves. This is not conspiracy shit; this is the cause of the widespread prison gang problem. Very quickly prisoners turned from protecting each other (stories tell of large gay men beating and killing prison rapists back in the day) to trying to kill each other daily.

So prison gangs were formed (or, if you want to be nitpicky, heavily encouraged) to help keep order in prisons. They are now a vital part of prison security, helping to keep understaffed, 200% capacity prisons controlled through violence. Combined with the massive increase in popularity of DART teams (SWAT and the like) any uprising or riot is quickly struck down.

Put all this together with the incredible media control prison wardens have (see the quite frankly evil Joe Aprico for an example of this. He is portrayed as a hero while kicking pregnant women and cooking his inmates in the sun.) and you have what is basically an unbreakable hold on prisoners. Attica simply cannot happen again.

So how are the gang's kept riled up? Well that much is simple. Beatings, cruel punishments, boots and batons. You could say a prison guard’s job these days isn’t to protect the inmates from each other but rather to force them on each other, create an atmosphere where violence, suffering and anguish are the norm. Force people into gangs; force them against each other so that they won't stand against the Machine.

On that, I swerve violently toward my next topic. One that should scare the piss out of you. False imprisonment and even false executions happen. They happen relatively allot. I apologize that I cannot give you hard numbers and facts for this, as I mentioned earlier the prisons maintain a press choke hold and any attempt to catalog the justice systems incredible failings are met with unhealthfulness at best, outright threats and Boots at the worst. Allow me instead to link to several stories that convey my point and with luck, convince you that even one wrongly state murdered human being is far, far too many.

I make this point so I can stress, the Machine will get you if it wants you. Regardless of how rich, white, connected, young or old you are. If it gets a sniff of you it will have you and it will never let go if it doesn't want to. I also make the point to quite obviously say the death penalty is a hopelessly evil punishment and anyone advocating it is...well they are a misinformed and poorly educated person that needs enlightening. Remember what I said last time, even the worst human beings are still humans. Yes even Joe Aprico. Love them. All of them.

Now earlier I said I was going to tell you all how and where it’s better. Well as it happens the US army already runs a perfectly good system. Inside there is very little fighting and very little animosity between guards and inmates, the gang problem is nearly none existent and the rape issue is also practically a non-issue. So why does the Army run one so well? Well essentially the Army took how the main prison system is run and did the opposite. Rotating guards to avoid burn out, the guards are just other soldiers doing a term, prisoners are well looked after and given adequate healthcare and help. In such an environment violence is not needed to keep the peace, and without the need for gangs to get what you need, they cannot grow.

Of course the more astute of you will note that to run all prisons like Army prisons would require a complete change in the system and an overhaul of the job of a Guard. This will never happen. The prison unions are far too strong and deeply set to achieve that. You may as well wish for the upheaval of capitalism or something.

Norway also runs incredible prisons, the closest I have found to my preferred ideal of a prison being more of a hospital than a cage. I found a very good article on the subject by a man who visited one. I found it rather balanced and the man does a good job of stating the facts. Have a read.

Well that’s everything I can think of on the subject. If you want me to go over anything leave a comment and I'll see what I can do. As I constantly say I realize no one reads this blog but I am hoping that perhaps one person reads this series and learns something. Education is the tool that we can use to fight the Machine.

Guest Article by Professor Matlock

2010-02-12T10:38:00.000-08:00

WHY WAVES ARE AWESOME

So I was sat in my physics class the other day and I thought to myself, why can’t we bend light? You are told constantly through school that ‘oh no light ONLY travels in a straight line’. For some reason I decided this wasn’t true. So I brought out the laser we had lying around and I worked out a way to prove conventional wisdom wrong. Diffraction was my first thought, so with the help of two little sticks of lead from a mechanical pencil, light was bent and everything I’d been taught about light was proved to be all an utter lie. This intrigued me and I decided to set out on a quest. A quest to find out everything my education had lied to me about!

You are told through school that you are made of atoms and waves are like vibrations. So we could not have a wavelength right? WRONG! the average persons’ has a wave length of about 1.8 X 10-18 now that’s just a roundabout figure because that shit is crazy complex. But in a case like this I can see why school lied to you, I mean look at this equation---H/WGΔS=Lamda Now do you know what that means? No, but I can but that’s because I’m awesome, but importantly you can’t, and neither can a 10 year old. My point is that school was probably right to lie to you all.

Now, the second thing I found to be a lie is how school explained electricity. When in secondary school I was told the reason electricity wont flow down a wire is because the circuit is not complete, but how would the electricity know? Imagine being in a car and driving to your destination, you don’t know there are road works around the corner. Is the electricity psychic? No, how it works is there is a knock on effect, one electron hits the other and so on, like angry rugby players or twilight fans at a midnight screening. Another thing you were told is that if you stuck a block of wood in a circuit then it wouldn’t work, also not true, if you shoved enough charge in that block of wood, it WILL conduct, not very well but your little light bulb will light up. Literally any material in the world can be forced to be a conductor, given enough LIGHTNING.

So I guess what I’m saying is that schools do lie to you, this causes a ton of confusion, nobody knows how anything really works and if they do its normally simplified childlike explanations. Even me, a totally rad physics nerd, was confused as heck when I was told you can out run electricity. I guess What I’m saying is that I don’t expect primary schools to teach their children advanced quantum physics so they know how they see things, but it wouldn’t hurt to explain a few things.
Thanks for wasting your time on my article.

=====
That was Matlock writing is very first blogpost. His stuff is a little akward but I think he has some raw talen that just needs honing. We'll see how it works out.

Fuck Apple

2010-02-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

I want to push Steve Jobs down a well.

Not that it would help of course, according to most apple enthusiasts he'd simply stand on the water, levitate up and present me with a compact stylish new music player or toaster oven or some other shiny white turd ripped from a cheesey 70s sci fi serial but with less functionality. Oh no Flash, I can't get my Smiths album to load because my MP3 player is shit.

Maybe its gulibility or more likley the same tribalism that binds all of us to our certain lifestyles but somehow Jobs has managed to create a cult surrounding his substandard products. The irony of this is they seem to consider Apple the "good guys", the Paridiso to Microsoft's Inferno when this could not be farther from the truth. Lets find out why!

I'll start with evidence that MS is the devil. Well, I suppose the first thing they did was aggressively market MS-DOS and various other DOS products over genuinely better software. I will concede this is kinda a dick move but when you are in the business world its usually whoever makes the most dick moves wins. Apple themselves are guilty even today of marketing substandard products to their fan base for exuberant amounts of money. Two wrongs certainly don't make a right, but my point is in the world of business there are much much worse things than Aggressive marketing.

Evil Evidence Number Two: The whole monopoly thing. Yes this could be seen as evil if you are litterally a baby. MS is not a monopoly, After all Apple is doing oh so well!

Which leaves pretty much the only real reason anyone has to hate MS, the thing that seems to effect everything in the end. Money.

Yes Microsoft makes alot of money! Is all of this money made from horrible back room deals, cloak and dagger shit, satanic soul part exchanges? No. No of course not you moron. They make that money because Mac, Linux and whatever other childish, horrifically programmed operating systems are shit and are designed by a buntch of Internet hippies who are too pussyfaced to actually go outside and protest something decide to band together to make the worlds worst OS instead. Fuck you dad, I'm designing a lunux distro and its gonna change the WORLD! *includes use for scroll lock, negates to properly test anything*.

Microsoft's clown sized pockets are the cause of alot of antagonism toward them, so let me clear the air for a moment and show you where all of those billions of dollars go and come from.

Based off of some of their quarterly revenue reports, MS makes most of its money from server and business applications. This is no suprise to anyone, what may surprise you is where that money goes. Contery to popular belief the money does not fill the Gates Money Vault, instead the vast majority of it is pumped back into the company, a significant amount paying for wonderful things like R&D, infrastructure costs and pictures of Steve "The Woz" Wozinack to put on dart boards all around the company.

But heres the big kicker, the reason MS will always beat Apple in the eyes of anyone over the age of 15.

Currently Microsoft stands as one of the most charitable companies in the world, with Bill personally have recently made the single largest charitable plegde in the world (A quite staggering $10 Billion dollars to vaccination research and delivery). The total number of corperate donations stands at around $2.8 Billion dollars, mostly to charities dealing with the third world, sick blind kids and that kind of thing.

Despite my best efforts I am unable to see what, if anything, Apple donate to such worthy causes. Argue all the want about how MS is rich enough to do that, but I've yet to see Apple applying its corperate image to help people, only to cheat attention seeking pricks out of their money.

Not all Attention seeking pricks though, as is evident by this post!

Chruch Decides to Fuck Poor

2010-02-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

(aside, Yes I did stop posting, no I will not apologise, yes I have wrote more slenderman stuff, no I dont think anyone is actually reading this)

A couple weeks ago the Catholic church in Washington DC decided that it would finally lay down the law on Gay and lesbian marriage. They did this by threatening to stop all social contact and help toward the homless people. Stop me if you've heard this one already.

Yes thats right, a church is lowering itself to the kind of childish inane gesture that it touts itself as being so high above. What a bleeding surprise. I am shocked, blown away by this, shook to my very core. I simply can not comprehend a group based solely around pretending to help people while simultaneously hurting and damaging all those who stand in the way of their plans (or money. Whats the difference really) would go massively out of their way to hurt some people just because their billion year old flavour of witchcraft is slowly being phased out of society.

The church makes me sick. I'm not going to bring religion into this because at the heart of the issue this is not about religion. There is nothing religious going on here. fact of the matter is the catholic church runs shelterers and hospitals an soup kitchens and other such niceties that cater and help nearly one third of all the homeless people in Washington DC. This would affect about 6000 people. Love Thy Neighbour! But not if he's gay! Then you need to literally kill thousands of people! Its right there in the bible folks.

I realise this is an old topic. Thankfully the church also lacked the nuts to follow through on their horrific plan and those loveable gays seem poised to get their marriage. For once it seems justice prevailed. Its nice when that happens. I'll leave you with a nice bible passage;

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ - Mattew 25:40-45

Prisons are the worst things ever. Pt 1.

2010-02-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

I remember when I was younger I was in an RE class. RE stands for Religious Education and is compulsery in alot of schools in this country. Its sort of a hybrid between a "Learn about Religion" and "Learn about Politics an stuff" class, where we'd learn about immigration, different cultures and various different issues with the underlining "And THIS is what THIS religion thinks about THIS topic". Topics included Abortion, Women's rights, Homosexual rights and, in my case, the death penalty.At the time, I was a dumb kid and thought an eye for an eye was a perfectly acceptable idea. More recently, as I've matured I suppose, I've realised not only is the death penalty wrong, the entire system is fundementaly wrong.

(A quick aside. I will be talking mostly about US prison systems, The UK has significantly better prisons but they still have all the same problems, just in a much much lesser regard.)

Now, I realise this is a slightly Out There view point, but hell if the seceret police start rounding people up I'm probably already going to disappear so I might as well air any "nonstandard" feelings I have while I'm here. I believe all Prisons as they stand should be abolished. Thats slightly hyperbolic, In an optimal world I'd simply say I want them to reform and allow prisoners the basic human rights everyone in the world deserves and allow an enviroment where rehabilitation can occur. This can not currently happen in any of the US prisons at all.

I'm going to throw a number out there, 100,000. That is the number of rapes in prison every single year. There are half a million minutes in a year. The average time a rape lasts is around 10 minutes. That means that chances are right now someone is being raped in prison. That persons' life is being destroyed. This treatment they are reciving RIGHT NOW will force them into a cycle of self destructive behavour, they will commit more crimes when they finanlly get out, become cold to their wife or girlfriend, eventually blocking out all emotional support and in the end will likley purpetrate the cycle again. And thats after he gets out of prison the first time. If.

Theres the argument that the deserve it, knew it was coming, shouldn't have commited the crime. I think thats the weakest argument against this. If you seriously believe its justifiable to ruin someone's entire life, and chance at reform, regardless of the crime then you are a broken human being. Lets consider what prison is supposedly for shall we;

Prison is supposed to be a place where the guilty can be held, reformed and pushed to become a hard working contributing member of society. This is supposed to be achived through a series of programs, workshops and help sessions.

In reality, prison does not even begin to provide the correct enviroment for this. Prisoners do not have access to basic health care, most do not get simple counciling, all are under the threat of serious violence at all times from gangs and the guards. Basic excorsise is limited, social interation even with other prisoners is held as a carrot infront of them. This is not primarily because of the prisoners. This is policy. The main problem in a prison is commonly seen as Gangs. This is true on some levels, this however ignores the fact that gangs are essencially an insitutionized policy. The Machine actively encuraged gangs and gang violence as this keeps prisoners fighting each other, as so long as they do that, the Machine can feed.

Prisons are supposed to be, if nothing else at all, Safe. In reality the prison system is a Machine. A machine expertly designed to break, eat, reguritate and eat again. It feeds upon people and suffering and hate and every single time a person is raped (like right now.) or beaten or locked in solitary for years regardless of guilt, they become a part of the machine, Either the food that feeds it or, should they pass on this pain and hate, one of its bloodied talons, a tip of its grinding teeth.

I've addressed rape and gangs briefly here, theres much much more to go over, such as the coruption within the system, the guards, the torture, false imprisonment and other wonderful topics. I will get around to them I promise. For now I leave you with a story.

Chris J. got gang-raped in prison today. He needs surgery to fix his rectum, and probably other medical attention for the rest of his injuries but he's probably not going to get it. He knows this and is thinking about the pain his rectal scarring is going to cause him for the rest of his life. He laid in his bed for a little while covered in semen and his own blood thinking about AIDS. Since shower time has come and gone, he cleaned himself up with the water in the toilet, he also sat on it for a long time trying as hard as he could to evacuate all the semen out of him. His phone card was stolen as punishment for fighting back and he doesn't have any money in his account to call anyone on the outside, so he's just trying to deal with it on his own. Many inmates and guards are already making fun of him and discussing prices for having a go at him within his earshot. After TV time he's going to have to try and sleep in his cell with 2 other guys who ain't trying to hear his sob story and may even have been involved in his attack.

The pictures of his wife and kids were taken as punishment with promises to defecate or ejaculate on them while a different man was inside him as further punishment for fighting back. He's been clean for 9 months but that heroin would make all this pain go away for just a little while. Chris is more likely than not to go back to the heroin.

Chris will never be able to fully express the pain and rage caused by his rape even to a professional; and he's definitely not getting insurance which covers the help he needs when he gets out. This psychological trauma will have a severe impact on his ability to have healthy relationships on the Outside- out in the World- and will likely lead to bad arguments with his wife resulting in domestic violence. The effects his mental state has on his kids will be profound and probably irreversible. They might grow up in the sort of state in which prison is a very real possibility. When they find out what happened to dad how will they react?

His pain and anger will manifest itself in all sorts of ways and he might go off on some taxpayer in a convenience store or seriously injure someone who cuts him off in traffic. When that happens Chris will go back to prison and there will be similar ripple effects on his victims. Even if that doesn't happen remember Chris uses heroin to suppress his pain and will likely be re-arrested on a drug charge or a property crime he did to get heroin money.

Since there are no secrets in prison when Chris returns it will already be known he is a bitch who likes it in the ass, and he will have to become someone's sex slave. Staff will encourage this. Or he can stab somebody to try get a new rep. If he wins the knife fight & isn't killed outright, the person he kills has loved ones & family members who will become enraged at this, and the violence will continue.

What happened to Chris happened to 200 people today if you go by Alberto Gonzales' DOJ. If you go by HRW it happened to more than 400 people. This does not include juveniles in programs like Nihilanthic posts.

This is every day, every state. There are no exceptions. Going by HRW's numbers it's one Chris every four minutes.

You could be the next Chris, no matter how white you are- no matter how rich your family is. The Machine cares not. It must feed and It will feed.

And the Machine will never be satisfied.

(A huge chunk of this info and the story here comes from a thread on SomethingAwful.com by the fantastic HidingfromGoro, a man who has seen these injustices first hand and held many of the victims of the system. Read more of his stuff at the wikilink in the article.)

World Ending, Hurrah.

2010-01-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

I don't really have any investigative stuff to post here, only some basless assumptions and ideas that may be wrong and sound VERY SCARY so maybe it will attract some attention because I love attention.

A couple days ago the British government decided to ground and ban all flights to Yemen. This followed a "terrorist" that, as Tim Key put it, Blew his balls off. Based on some tenuous links that the man was from Yemen, thats apparently reason enough to completely cut off the country.

Some (all 4 of you) may know where I stand in regards to British foreign policy (and basically all British policy ever), for those that don't (Hello!) it can be summed up in the words "I" "Dont" "Like" "It". So I may be biased, oh well, I don't claim to be a paragon of integrity or an unbiased news source and this blog is just a tube I like to yell into and piss and whine so lets not get caught up in that.

So now you can't get to there from here, aside from the problems I see this causing the Yemen people, does no one else see how unbelievably unfair this is? We never closed the airports to Leeds, or Bradford or Jamaica when the last group of mentals tried (and succeeded that time) in blowing a bunch of people into bits. Maybe because those places arn't deserts filled with brown people.

I have avoided mentioning the obvious till now though. The upcoming war against Yemen. Just another desert for us to bomb into glass I suppose. Except its not, Yemen is unequivocally one of the most beautiful places in the world. Here let me show you;

Look at that, look at the green, I know the buildings look kinda shoddy but I'm not here to do the work for you, go look up the incredible buildings and palaces in the country for yourselves. Then say goodbye to them because they (might) be gone very soon.

(as a very quick aside Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the other middle east countries we've went to "war" with are full of beautiful, breathtaking sights, but I know people from Yemen and none from Iraq and complaining about the Iraq war is now passée. I'm trying to go big-time here people)

With that out of the way, lets try and discern the real reason for a potential bloodbath in Yemen. It has oil, all though very little and the country is currently shitting itself as it runs out, so it can't be that. No real resources of importance to us. Oh wait, thats right, Its another boogeyman target for you to hurl hatred and abuse at because its got terrorists and we're the valiant good guys who need to slay this improbable beast.

I'm being a cock here, I'm being your typical smelly collage protester by suggesting we'd go to war or cut off contact with a country just to keep the populace scared, but in honesty I see no other reason for it. If you can, answers on a postcard to the usual address.

I certainly can't wait to destroy another rich group of people for no reason other than too keep people scared. I look forward to the rolling news coverage, the useless protests, the massive increase in military spending (US already spends most of its budget on military, enough to pay off the national debt infact, the UK is not too shabby either, spending about $60 Billion on guns to shoot brown people with. For those that need a visual representation, thats about 40 nuclear power plants, enough to run the entire country off. Forever)

Go team.

Why Tabloids are Worthless

2009-10-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

I'll preface this by saying that I know this is an easy and overdone traget but its something I feel strongly about and NO ONE READS THIS ANYWAY SO I CAN WRITE WHATEVER I WANT.

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I'm going to be all Current Issues Journalist here today and talk about a couple things like the war, Mr Richard Dannatt's criticisms of the governments methods of fighting the war but most of all I'm going to us these as a framing device to attack the Tabloid papers here in the UK. With that out of the way, lets begin.

The war in Iraq is a terrible war, with heavy casualties on both sides, questionable reasoning's behind it and worst of all, full time 24/7 media coverage of every single idea, decision and bullet launched in this gruelling, horrific blotch on the world. let me first be clear in saying my feelings on the war are irrelivent to this discussion, Werther or not I am against, for, or activly fighting the war doesn't matter right now. My gripe is with the coverage of it.

In the news very recently, Sir Richard Dannatt has publicly attacked the government over their refusal to provide more troops. The news and media as a whole is having a god damn field day with this, twisting quotes out of context, blowing it out of proportion and as ever, playing the public like an idiot. Allow me to link you to two reports, one from now and one from a little while ago. Now, read both of these and tell me what you found. If you found that the newspaper in question both is against more troops in Iraq AND for it? Well done, you have found the point of this blogpost.

The more astute of you may have also put the following together. One of the main reason we can not send more troops to Iraq is because of the publicity the war gets. There is also funding, with the economic crisis and manpower and a whole host of other issues, but PR plays into it also. A large number of newspapers have been, for the past 2 or 3 or 4 years, fighting the deployment of more troops with all of their wordspace. Thus making it harder for any PM to justify more troops, thus they have to deny deployment, thus the Leader of the Army stands down and attacks the PM for not deploying more troops, at which point the newspapers go "YEAH!". Still with me? Good.

Here is the problem with the Tabloids in the UK. They will spend as long as they want to, whipping their readers (a significant portion of the country) into a frenzy over a certain topic, then when they deem it newsworthy, pull a complete 180 and have their readers decrying the very ideal they have been standing for the whole while, regardless of the effects of this on the rest of the world. Its as if the concepts of journalistic intergrity and a journalists duty to the public simply don't apply in this country.

Further proof of this can be seen in this years Famous People Death Streak, and is best shown through Micheal Jackson and Jade Goody. Ho HO! you all must be saying, Now hes going after the dead horse with a steam roller.

Some of you may remember MJ's coverage in the media pre-2009 as...shall we say, negative? And most certainly unbias, if nothing else. Then he died and all of a sudden he went from Wacko Jacko, Kind of Pedophiles and lord of all Strangness to THE KING OF POP. All in one day. Funny how that happens. This, to me, seemed probably alot worth than the Jade hysteria the media had created, because here was an innocent man, who changed the world and created wonderful, incredible things, forever tarnished by his coverage in the media. It sells more papers to say "JACKO PEDO" than it does to say "JACKO NOT REALLY PEDO, PROVEN INNOCENT, WE'RE SORRY". Perhaps the coverage of his funeral and death is supposed to be penance. I'd like to think that, but now the subject is "JACKO OWNED BILLIONS" and "JACKO WACKO ON TABBACO" or whatever.

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As a side track, MJ did not owe billions, nor did he take any more medicine than is normal for a man in his condition. The man owned most of the Beatles rights and he took loans against that. He was far, far in the green. My grandparents probably take 50x the amount of pills that is claimed he took and no one is attacking them for listening to doctors to stay alive.
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Jade Goody had a very similar and at the same time, differnt rise. Jade started off as "The most annoying BB Contestent" at best, and a shoplifting moronic child at worst. Then she got cancer and became a maytr. her antics that were described as retarded became "childlike innocence and hilarious blunders". The poor woman was hounded down to her last moments and the public loved it. They treated her as if she was the second comming, culminating in a funeral rivalling Jackson's. It came to a head when she was described by multiple sources as a Hero. At least more people got check ups after that and undoubtedly that saved a couple lives, which I am thankful for.

My argument is a well walked one. There is little intergirty or any real journalism going on in the current news media here in England, and when there is, it is overshadowed by slop like the crap I have shown here.I do have more to say, but I feel I should cut this here. Just remember the next time the news is complaining about the lack of troops in Iraq or how Yobs are ruining England, remember that they themselves are part of the problem they are against, and every word they write only serves to increase the issues they so verminantly protest.

-Nems

P.S.
I know I used The Sun in this, but this isnt a attack against them in perticular, they are just one of the biggest tabloids and have one of the more usable sites of them. Thanks for that Sun.

Cthulhu is Bullshit

2009-09-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Cthulhu is a giant horrible squid head basterd who lives at the bootom of the sea bothering troubled writers and estranged brothers. He looks like this;

He's also probably the least threatening monster every to be overhyped and turned into an internet meme. But Nems you charismatic stallion who steals "audeence talks to entertainer within his own section as though they are really there" jokes from old 50s comedians, Cthulhu is scary as heck, he can send you mad and hes really tall and Cthulhu flatagnag'r'ythel;yehjl'thyel', I hear you cry. Well no, no he is not, I can tell you this because I am without a doubt better than you. So you should listen to me. All 2 of you who read this get strapped in. I'm going to be all "Negative critic" because everyone on the internet likes those!

First off, the big C is asleep. This renders him significantly less terrifiying. He isnt just napping either, hes asleep iuntil "the stars are right" meaning hes asleep for fucking ever. The various books he is in say he can control minds and send everyone in earth mad within seconds, except he cant because he is underwater.

Now, I'm a pretty forgiving reader, so long as it seems to make sense within a setting, I can accept that. However, Cthulhu is a fucking squid monster. Look at him, go on, scroll up and look at him. He has tenticles for a mouth and big googly eyes and fins and he commands an army of fish people. And his powers dont work underwater too well, oh thats fantastic Cthulhu, You're striking fear into me already, what with your usless mind powers and wings (why does a God need wings anyway?)

Next up, Hes a preist. I'm not insulting any priests reading this (though I would wonder why they are. but then I wonder why anyone would be reading this) by saying it is not the most terrifying profession. I am not scared by priests. But Lovecraft chose to make Cthulhu, the big demon squid monster from outerspace who lives in atlantis and will be what he was remembered for, a priest. I'm just not feeling it.

In door number 3, and probably the biggest killer of C's ability to scare me, Every single time he shows up in any of the books (by lovecraft) he dies. I mean he doesnt DIE, no he has godmode on, but someone makes him go back to bed.in his first apperiance (Call of Cthulhu) he makes a boat captain go nuts and sends a writer slightly upset. The writer responds by driving a fucking boat through his big head. God DAMN a fucking BOAT, I'd like to take a minute here and say how god damn badass metal fucking balls to the walls nuts you have to be to see THIS.

And then drive your fucking steam paddle boat pile of shit through its head. I mean come the fuck ON. This guy should be making action movies or some shit

C's head explodes and slowly starts forming back, but not before Writer and Loony Captain make good on their escape. Then C decided he didnt want to burn the world that day and goes down for another nap. Now see, heres the real problem I have with Cthulhu. He gets stopped by an author driving a boat through he head. A boat from the 1920s or something, imagine for a second this giant beast turns up on earth now. I can not see it making much headway (badumtish) before the military fire some missiles at it or they send in some demo experts or the writer guy drives an ironclad into him or they send in bruce willis with that guy from the green mile. I can not, in good faith, be scared of a monster that can be completly rendered usless and helpless by an inept and soon to kill himself writer driving a wooden steamboat through his head for these reasons.

Last of all, I ran a DnD Campaign where the dwarf killed him by teleporting inside of him and casting a spell that made him grow 200 feet tall. That pretty much robbed me of all fear I could ever possibly have of demonic squid men living in a pineapple at the bottom of the sea.

-Nems