James’ Poor Brain

Since the concept of criticism is alien to a lot of people, and with it being Christmas soon (season of goodwill and whatnot), I’ve decided that I am not going to post a single negative post from now until Christmas Day.

Besides having the benfit of not receiving poorly thought out anonymous comments, it means come Boxing Day I’ll have a whole 55 days worth of bullshit that I can vent in the form of thick and fast updates, which have been a bit scarce recently.

Ever been curious as to what I sound like when I’m not angry at something? Watch this space.

If evolution affected plastic and metal, Xbox 360s and Nintendo Wiis would have already been eaten by the mighty yet graceful PS3, due to not having grown wings or a sense of sight.

The PS3 is a testament not only to technological brilliance but also to brilliance itself. This machine plays games, Blu-Ray (high definition) films and videos, stores photos and mp3s, has a massive hard drive and a full internet browser, features downloadable content (including complete games), uses motion-sensitive wireless controllers (7 can be used at once), complete 1080p HD support, and all kinds of other technical stuff that is in abbreviations that I don’t understand. But it’s probably awesome.

Or, at least, it is in comparison with Microsoft’s convexed box of crap. It only has 4 controllers (and, if you own the core model, has no wireless capability), has worse graphics, and you need to pay a subscription for the online stuff. The fact that it’s made by Microsoft should be warning enough, but Bill Gates’ bitches are still willing to fork out £40 to play Halo with each other over a phone line.

Why? Halo sucks anyway. How is it different to the other 20,00 near-future FPS games on Xbox? Except the shockingly bad ad campaigns. Plastic toys and pianos - a recipe for success, in the eyes of morons.

As for the Wii, here is a list of the times when you will actually use it following the two-week honeymoon period:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7053982.stm

She sums it up perfectly: “Oh my god, the fan fiction”.

And the internet becomes an even darker place.

Whilst browsing Stroud-based alt-electro bands I strayed off a bit and found a website with a picture of a cow with a black person with the rather short-sighted caption “RACISM = SPECIESISM”.

I haven’t been annoyed at anything recently and as such had not updated in a while, so I gave it a read and decided its the worst site on the internet. Here are some things it advocates:

Feminsim - Show me one example of sex discrimination that is anywhere near as bad as it was in the 1960s or whenever. Time’s up! If someone started a Masculism movement they’d get bitched into next year.

Antispeciesism - Cows are eating our grass and destroying our ozone layer. If cows, chickens, sheep or water rats are equal to humans, why not accept them into schools or represent them in Parliament?

Gordon Brown: I now hand you over to my new Chancellor.

Cow: Moo.

Or, you could go all the way and start a sexual relationship with an animal. Go on, if animals are so equal.

Liberation: From what? In Uganda maybe, but not here.

Veganism: There are people who have summed up how vegatariansim/veganism doesn’t ACTUALLY result in that big a decline in the deaths of animals much better than I could, but here is a link that they used.

Anarchism: Have fun in the total chaos that the sudden removal of government would bring, just because YOU thought it might be better. Did you check to make sure it would work for everyone else…

Activism: …because not everyone wants what YOU want. Nobody is going to change their beliefs because they read a book/saw a TV program/got handed a leaflet in the street by a sandwich board-wearing hippy. Stop forcing your agenda down my throat.

You’re probably reaching for the “Comments” link to arrogantly remind me that my writing this, I’M forcing my agenda on YOU. Afraid not, assholes. I never asked you to read any of this, but activists are either pushing leaflets through my door (or into my hand when I’m trying to walk through the town centre) or crapping up my favourite websites with their propaganda. Did anyone see the “I’M A VEGETARIAN” campaign that was on Explosm? Does PETA think I’m a stupid celebrity whore who’ll abandon my preferences because some actress won’t eat meat?

Bah. How people can compare racism to eating animals (see slogan at top) is beyong me. Feel free to disagree, but I doubt victims of race discrimination are grateful of being compared to something which does little except eating grass and taking a shit whenever and wherever it pleases.

According to For Information’s “BE SAFE!” booklet, you’re a moron.

Whilst they’re probably right, FI have managed to take pure molten bullshit and put it in glossy paper form. Here are some of my favourite tips:

“Electricity can kill or cause severe burns. Treat it with respect”

What, as opposed to treating it with disrespect? When was the last time you saw someone laughing at a mains socket because it had no friends?

“Always close drawers”

Like recoiling when punched and turning the TV off when Zoey 101 comes up, closing drawers is an instinctive reflex. If you need an instruction booklet to close a draw, you probably can’t this, due to being retarded. But at least the instructions are serving their purpose.

There’s even an entire section devoted to “Tidiness”. Kim and Aggie better watch out; they’ve got some competition of the free leaflet persuasion. That reminds me, I hate Kim and Aggie. I don’t know whats actually wrong with them, but I reckon it ends with ‘iality’. And is probably a synonym for “scat”. Fucking weirdos.

Fact: If you type “leave Britney Alone” into Youtube, you get 3030 results. “Leave Chris Crocker alone” submits 2400. I was never that good at maths, but I reckon that’s about 5429 Chris Crocker videos too many.

The original, I will admit, was funny. Or at least as funny as a man in a blonde wig under a duvet cover can be, except if the Benny Hill theme was dubbed over it. Sadly though, Youtube is to unskilled video makers what a corpse is to maggots. Here is a list of things that would benefit the world more than making a Chris Crocker pardoy video:

- Plant a tree.
- Bake brownies.
- Have sex.
- Punch someone you don’t like.
- Put your cock in the microwave.
- Blow up your house (and a good chuck of your neighbour’s house - bonus points if one of them is injured) with dynamite.

I have a scheme to improve the general quality of Youtube. It’s called Man in Penis Costume. Whenever someone uploads a crappy video made under their bed after applying some non-waterproof mascara, special (by which I mean “unpaid”) moderators will find out their IP address and track them down. Once located, Man in Penis Costume will be despatched in the Man in Penis Costumemobile. Due to being locked in a cage with nary a copy of Playboy to keep him company and forced to listen to Kate Nash all day, Man in Penis Costume will go into a sexually frustrated rage, dry-humping the offender until a) he dies or b) he deletes the video and promises never to do it again.

Eh? EH? What an awesome idea. I’m so great.

- I would be called Erin or Sara, apparently.
- I would have perfectly sized breasts, but complain about them anyway.
- I wouldn’t receive such strange looks when I say how great Matt Bellamy is.
- My hair would be exactly the same.
- My adam’s apple wouldn’t move up and down in the strange way it does, due to it’s non-existance.
- I could take my clothes of and get away with it. And by “get away with” I mean “applauded for”.
- The phrase “It’s what (my gender) do” would be a valid excuse for my obvious flaws.
- I’d be oblivious (or at least pretend to be) to the blatant sexism in condom ads.
- I’d still play bass, but I’d be in much higher demand due to the whole “girl bassist” thing.
- I’d actually bother to shave.
- I’d be able to sit through Ratatouille without wanting to vomit.
- I’d constantly have “that bloated feeling”, according to Activia adverts.
- I’d get moist over said Activia.
- I wouldn’t know how to plug in my PS3, let alone play it.
- I wouldn’t be writing this, because it’s a proven fact that girls update their blogs approximately once every two months. (Proof, and further proof)

There are a lot of Che Guervara shirts around at the moment (if you don’t know who he is, he’s the guy in a hat who spends his days on T-shirts, gazing purposefully into the distance), presumably because he died a certain amount of years ago yesterday. Anyway, before he became a staple of bootleg clothing, he was one of those communist revoloutionary types who went around forcing his beleifs on others.

Good for him! After all, besides the Cold War, worldwide political instability, apparent struggle to create a stable economy, complete obliviousness to the near-impossibility of its ideals, oppression of free markets, free speech and religious freedom, ruthlessness of dictators like Stalin, use of Nazi-style secret police, circulation of propaganda, mass surveillance, deaths of over 680,000 people during the Great Purge and the Great Leap Forward, use of Gulag camps, blatant hushing-up of public deaths, the famine of 1932-1934, support of terrorist organisations such as the PFLP and the Japanese Red Army, the complete shit-fest that was the Tiananmen Square protest, subsequent censorship of said shit-fest (it’s been blocked by Google China), North Korea’s love of nuclear weapons, lack of free healthcare in China, and anything between 94 million and and 144.7 million deaths under Communist regimes, it’s not so bad really!

If little kids weren’t so deprived exposure to real talent, the following argument would take place in the playground:

Kid 1: Who would win in a fight between Superman, God, and Dave Grohl?

Kid 2: Uhh….. 

 

Of course, Dave Grohl would use Superman’s stupid quiff to batter God into a fine mist. That’s because David Grohl is so awesome, it is rumoured he was created in a test tube with a hair of Chuck Norris’s beard and Matt Bellamy’s leftmost vocal chord. One time he played a gig and his voiced not only stripped the walls of the venue of its paint, but also the faces of hundreds of audience members. The police (or families of the dead) decided not to press charges because they all agreed it’s how they would have wanted to go. Hell, if I could die by having my skin blown off my skeleton, I’d die a happy man.

I am one of the lucky few to have seen Dave Grohl in person. I was passing by a church when a great light appeared in the sky. At first I thought it was the sun, but when I saw it was surrounded by lips I realised it was actually the light reflecting off Grohl’s mighty teeth. I bowed down before the floating spectral deity, My Lord Grohl, and asked if I was allowed to look at him, because if you look at him without warning, his sheer aura of utter perfection will cause you to implode instantly. He said “Hey buddy, don’t worry about it”, because Dave Grohl is so damn friendly and inexplicably humble he is even willing to talk to mere peasants like me. I wanted to touch his goatee - the source of all his powers - to try and gain some of his brilliance, but inside I knew that it would be too much and I’d catch on fire. Then we went for a beer and discussed the new Queens Of the Stone Age album.

Needless to say, it was the best day of my life.

I don’t like calling this blog a blog. I’d prefer using the phrase “site” or “page”. I could probably get a proper domain, but I’m not nearly lame enough to know HTML and, since the ownership of a modem seems to have a negative effect on people’s intelligence, I’d probably get people coming here and wondering why I don’t update anymore.

Anyway, the reason I don’t like the word ‘blog’ is because it brings to mind the millions of poorly spelt, unreadable shit-fests that anyone with a connection and an email address can create in minutes. The ones on my blogroll, although seldom updated, happen to be written by some of the most intelligent, articulate people I know. Unfortunately, I think these are 5 of about 6 (including mine) decently-written ‘blogs’ on the internet. 

However, there is a word with even more negative connotations - Livejournal.

I’ve only seen about, ooh, far too many Livejournals in my time, and they can be easily distinguished from a blog in two ways:

1- The constant need of the author to call it their “Livejournal”. Hold down Ctrl and press F, then search for the word “Livejournal” or, more effectively, “LJ”. Both the users and designers of Livejournal are determined to point out that NO! THIS ISN’T JUST A BLOG - IT’S LIVEJOURNAL! Get over yourself. It’s a blog, like every other one on the internet, only in fancier packaging. Like a iPod is just an mp3 player, stop with the pretentiously ‘arty’ adverts already.

2- There’s an ad in the top right of this (urgh) blog. I admit it. But one time I went on someone’s Livejournal  and there were 3 in the top 2 inches alone. Two banners, both flashing to the point where they could cause epileptic fits, and one square thats about the same size as my annoying little one. It won’t make you flop around on the floor until you swallow your tongue, but it’s still taking up valuable space that could be used for something more useful, like, say, photos of the same tree from 12 different angles.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m taking the time to type ‘Livejournal’ each time, rather than just ‘LJ’. That’s because, to put it bluntly, ‘LJ’ is stupid. Like the phrase ‘D of E’ annoys me, abbreviating something that can be said properly with only a couple of extra syllables is all kinds of dumb. Why don’t I call this a ‘BG’? Save some time, because, like all the other teenagers who have LJs, I’m extremely busy with all my 16-year-old-type activities, such as writing on my BG. Blimey, I’m surprised people like me have time to think with our 16-hour school weeks and parent-provided food, hence why we have to save time by using phrases like ‘LJ’.  Wank.