Blogging...

Hmmm...I'm supposed to find something fascinating to write...shit...

I just got hit by the feeling my life isn't particularly interesting.

Meh, whatever!

Today I'd like to talk about unhealthy stuff. I really couldn't care less about it. Take smoking or drinking or eating too much, I really don't give a damn. I know that drinking too much at parties now and then will probably not do wonders for my lifespan, but I can't muster the energy to give a crap about whether I live to be 75 or 74.

Now, don't mistake me for one of those tossers who go "Live each day like it's your last", because they are not only stupid, they are also hypocrites. Because, let's face it, they don't live each day like it's their last, they plan ahead and prepare for tomorrow and worry about the past just like the rest of us. It's just a meaningless platitude that some people spout because it sounds deep and philosophical.

How about simply enjoying the good stuff when they happen, and fondly remembering them afterwards, while also preparing for more good stuff further on down the road? There's nothing wrong with thinking about the future or the past, we all need to do that, but that doesn't exactly preclude us from thinking about the present as well, does it?

Look to the future. Always do that. It's not a bad thing. What matters, however, is that when good shit happens to you, you enjoy it and don't exclusively bother yourself with how it'll affect your future prospects.

Because, in all honesty, future you is a cunt, so fuck him!

Well, that was fun!

Holy smokes, I'm tired as all bollocks!

...but pleased as well. Been to my first LAN-party.

Well...more of a LAN-trio, to be honest. We slept extremely little, scoffed down high-caffeine beverages and subsisted on snacks and junk food. In other words, we were teenagers.

Frankly, I didn't think playing Left 4 Dead 2 would be quite this much fun. Unrelenting, somewhat silly and great for griefing your friends, in other words considerably similar to your mom.

All in all, I haven't got much to say about this weekend, except it was fucking awesome. Also, sacre fromage du mide fappé.

Hmmm...I need to pad this thing out...let's try this:

I can't help but constantly be amazed by the Total War-series, especially what with the Darthmod modification pack for Empire Total War. How could anyone ever hope to find better representations of moving regiments of troops around to outflank the enemy and break their morale? It really drives home the point that there's not a whole lot of tactics involved in most RTS games. Basically, in those, you build the biggest boots you can and try to stomp the other guy, and the biggest boots win.

Yeah yeah, I'm sure you'd like to talk at length about the intricate sweet details of making a zerg rush in Starcraft, but...okay, I don't think I know anyone who thinks that way, but that's beside the point!

My point is that, in the Total War-series, you've got to balance positions, numbers, angles of attack and morale in a constant flowing dance of death. You could, theoretically, if you've completely and utterly missed the fucking point of the preceding two paragraphs, line up all your men and have them shoot stuff at the enemy lines until one line breaks, but why on earth would you do that? Surely, the pleasure isn't in having the biggest army and trampling any other armies you encounter, it's in using superior cunning and tactical thinking to pull off a win when the odds are NOT in your favour.

When you're royally screwed and you've got five regiments of danish line infantry pounding your two regiments into the dirt, then pulling a fast one and throwing your men into a melee on their left flank and hitting the right flank with a cavalry charge to break the morale of the danish tossers, THEN you're looking at a sweet fucking victory.

If life gives you lemons and you proceed to shove them up life's arse with a bayonet, THAT is what's called winning. Just making some kind of sticky liquid spurt out isn't winning, it's just fapping.

What I mean to say is that people who play Starcraft competitively are wankers.

Absurd!

Have you ever considered how insane it is that we drive fucking cars?

Hey, I have an idea; let's just sit ourselves down in big tin cans and travel at speeds at which you couldn't possibly survive a crash!

What do you mean "Fuck off, you're insane!"?

Also, have you actually considered the fact that we are seated in front of extremely powerful computers capable of making millions of calculations a second and project the results in graphical form on a screen using liquid crystals, and we're using it to watch people having sex or cats falling off chairs?

Come to think of it, the use of it to view adult entertainment seems to be quite fitting. I mean, the internet is, after all, in existence for the sole purpose of displaying pornographic material. In other words; the internet is for porn!

Additionally, aren't energy drinks the best invention in the world?!

What, addicted, me? No way!

Killing Zombies!

No, wait, zombies are silly, I don't want to make a post about zombies. Therefore, I won't! Ha, take that, Renée Descartes!

Also, I've redesigned my blog. Largely because the old one looked like arse, as it happens. I'm also intending to keep up a more reliable daily updating schedule again, so stay tuned!

Here's what I really want to talk about; classes! Specifically, classes in gaming.

See, whenever you have a game with different classes, that is something that the developers and/or publishers like to tout as some kind of really innovative measure, having forgotten that it's only been used in gaming for roughly as long as the concept of pressing buttons on a control pad to make shit happen onscreen, that also brings a whole lot of variation and versatility to the game. After all, if you have five classes, that's a whopping five games in one!

Bollocks.

What we're always stuck with whenever a game features different classes is a different set of skills for each and every one, but the game itself is the same fuckmothering game every single time you pick it up. Diablo II with a paladin is the exact same game as Diablo II with a barbarian, only you look kinda different when you click things to death.

Now, this is what impressed me greatly about Star Wars The Old Republic. There were different classes, like in every MMO and their dog, but each class had a different main quest that tied into the type of character it represented. For instance, the smuggler gets a main quest that is centered around finding some kind of hoity toity treasure left behind by some twat or another, and the sith sorcerer gets a main quest centered around getting into the fucking ruling council of the empire.

These don't just lend a little colouring to the regular monotonous grind of MMO questing, it is a substantial enough part of the questing experience that you get a considerably different experience depending on which class you play. Heck, you even get a different set of sidekicks with actual personalities and storylines of their own with each and every class. Okay, Bioware, you can stop showing off now; we already know storytelling and characterization are your little EA prison bitches.

I happen to have discovered that the polar opposite to Bioware's erect macho grande is the flaccid and whimpy Dead Island. Now, I might've said at some point that it's a good game, and I still think that, but by fuck have the developers phoned it in when it comes to the four different characters with supposedly different skillsets.

They all get the same story, conversations, if you can call them that since you don't have any choices to make whatsoever, and weapons. The only thing that differentiates them is their skill trees, which are still not particularly different except they seem to have been randomized for each class. So yes, they all get roughly the same skills, except they're switched around the trees randomly. What the fuck, Dead Island? I thought I could trust you! I know one game that isn't going to be joining my group of plucky survivors after the zombie apocalypse has kicked off!

That was about zombies, wasn't it?

Fuck.

Religion. What is it good for?

Oh, this is going to be an interesting one, can't you feel it?

Let's jump right into it, shall we?

Christianity, if it would ever be permitted to actually use such a collective noun when there are thousands upon thousands of different denominations most of which are more or less enemies of each other and neither are ever capable of actually entirely accepting the views of the others, is deeply, deeply, inconsistent.

See, when the subject of consistency arises in relation to the topic of christianity there are always excuses bounded about.

Example: Why was slavery fine in the old testament? Because those were the times, and slavery was acceptable back then, says the christian. Sure, sunny Jim, but if you're going to argue that point, you've just invalidated every single argument you could ever make based on any part of the scripture whatsoever, because then the Bible is suddenly worth absolutely nothing. See, if what is good and proper in the eyes of god, which really can never be anything but the one and only measure of what is right for any christian, and this point is impossible to argue against since it involves belief in a god that literally defines good by his mere existence, boils down to what is good and proper in that particular era, then we don't need god at all. If the excuse is to be made that the general social context of any situation is what dictates what is good and proper, then god doesn't actually fit in.

In short; you can't both argue that something which was right back then is wrong now AND argue that an eternally unchanging god decides what is right or wrong.

Related to this is that most annoying and very least credible argument that christians basically just follow the good bits and don't give a shit about the bad stuff, like how a disrespectful child should be murdered, because for some reason only the good bits apply to them. What is then either forgotten or intentionally omitted is all the things that the nice bits leave out. If a good christian throws out all the stuff about murdering gay people or people who work on the sabbath and only follows the fourteen or so big ones, that still leaves alot of evil stuff.

For instance, you're still stuck with thinking slavery is alright, because that is something that is never ever denounced in the major commandments, or for that matter in any of the smaller ones. Of course, you don't think slavery is alright, because you're not an evil bastard. I don't chalk this up to just picking and choosing which bits of scripture you like the most, I chalk it up to compartmentalization involving the realization, no matter how unconscious, that morality is really a social construct and nothing that god plonks down in a ready made Unhappy Meal. We all get it; social constructs matter; what society considers to be okay matters, it's not something that we can honestly disregard just because it's not written in some holy text.

This is what we always end up with when analyzing the Bible and how christians relate to it; either the scripture collides with reality to such an extent that the christians themselves reject parts of it because it's bonkers, or the scripture demands arguments be made that invalidate it. Neither option spells success for the Bible, does it?

So, how about you try to make an argument for why slavery is wrong that doesn't in any way clash with either existing commandments in the Bible or the notion of god being eternal and unchanging, then see how it stands up to logical scrutiny.

Oh, and then present some evidence for god, because if you believe nonbelievers go straight to hell, then that absence of evidence is condemning me to eternal suffering. Nice to have that on your conscience, right?

Oh, the huge manatee!

Ahem, roight!

Apparently, I was supposedly too quick to dismiss modern horror movies as piles of gore mixed up with some titties and shotguns.

Indeed, I was pointed to a movie called Grave Encounters, which was regarded by one of my cousins as a shining example of the kind of movie that'll have you shitting your pants inside two hours. Enticing, but I've never been one to fall for hype, oh no siree!

First impressions are good, because the movie is set in an old asylum, and in spite of that particular horse being flattened enough in the preceding years, for a good horror movie an abandoned asylum is fucking awesome. It has a history of madness, mania, dementia, cruelty, barbarism and just a hint of good old fashioned evil.

It gets a gold star as the movie gets going by actually pacing itself. Sure, some might see it as being too slow, but I'd argue that a horror movie must build up suspense, rather than just showing you a bunch of cum shots gory deaths within the first five minutes. The movie goes from not being scary at all, through being a little creepy to full-blown, balls to the wall scares.

The latter bit rips away the gold star, though. Sure, it's never really explained what the fuck happens, which is good, but in the crescendo of the movie appears an actual, fairly corporeal, ghost, the face of which you get to see. It's rather scary, but it kills the mood abit, by showing us what it is we're afraid of. See, this cannot be stressed enough; the shit our brain can come up with to scare us will ALWAYS, without exception, be scarier than what the moviemaker can show us.

Oh, and adding a bit about that all this shit went bananas because the head evil physician was worshipping the devil? Come fucking on! Did you decide to just invalidate all of the scares that came before? "Hey, what's this mysterious presence in the asylum? -Oh, it's just some guy who worshipped satan!"

Of course, all this is shot in the kneecaps completely by one big flaw; you don't give a shit about the characters. They aren't sympathetic worth a damn, and you sure as hell won't be identifying with them. They go from being a bunch of twats to being a bunch of scared twats. There's no character development, and there is also no reason to particularly want them to survive. This is what I'd refer to as "Friday the 13th"-syndrome.

All in all, it was a pretty frightening movie with really creepy visuals, but it fell short of being really pants-shittingly terrifying because of crappy characters and a simple explanation at the end of what had been going on, and also a complete and utter lack of any twist ending.

It'll scare you, but it won't leave you sleepless for a week.

Horror, or what passes for it...

What the fuck happened to horror?! When exactly did horror movie makers decide "Fuck it, I've had enough, let's never make another psychological horror experience ever again!"?

Don't believe me? Name one horror movie made in the last decade that's actually been scary. Other than Dead Silence, that is, which is creepy as all fuck.

The remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street? Oh come on, those are all just action movies where people you don't give a fuck about are killed in exceedingly gory ways

That's not horror. Horror doesn't squick you out, it terrifies you, it makes you afraid to go to sleep, in other words it doesn't simply make that bacon sandwich you're eating seem slightly less apetizing.

The latest example I've been watching is The Final Destination. It's essentially the same as all the other movies in the series; a guy has a vision of his and his friend's deaths, so they get out of there and then death hunts them down in extremely gory and contrived ways.

Now, that series has always been shit in the "Horror" department, and not even once has it actually tried to get under your skin. What does it do? Show you gore and incredibly weird coincidences that lead up to someone biting the dust. Of course, gore doesn't have to be a bad thing, but when you make a series of movies where it is the one and only point of the movies, then it totally is.

I can't help but draw a parallell to porn in how it's presented, and it's not a coincident that there is such a concept as "Gore-nography". See, there's always the same buildup of tension before the person dies, and it ends with an orgasmic crescendo where the moron gets stabbed through the head or whatever. And it's even more like porn in that other movies generally stick to softcore gore, Final Destination goes all in and throws hardcore at you. Most movies cut away when someone is actually crushed by a falling pane of industrial strength glass or shot ten times with a nailgun through the head, but these movies seem to relish in it. It's like the movie makers actually got a jolly out of the whole thing. Instead of showing the money shot, most movies leave the boning implied, but Final Destination has no such consideration.

It's shit, that's what it is!