Enjoy.

Speakers on full, if you please.



My work here is done.

That's that.

So then, The Apocalypse. I hope you didn't have any plans, because apparently Israel is ready to leap into action if it 'feels threatened'.

Just let that sink in.

We're fucked. When they feel threatened? It's Israel. They always feel threatened. It has a lot to do with the threats. Who would have thought putting 7 million Jews in the Middle East would lead to shenanigans? Really, you just couldn't see it coming.

In The Details.

From George Bush's July 4th speech:

“Thomas Jefferson understood that these rights do not belong to Americans alone. They belong to all mankind. And he looked to the day when all people could secure them. On the 50th anniversary of America’s independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, ‘May it be to the world, what I believe it will be — to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all — the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.’”

And what Jefferson actually said:

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”

Spot the difference?

Did You Know Your Brain Does Nothing?

Ok, here's something I hadn't heard of before. Non-Materialist Neuroscience.

I need to find some books on the topic, because this is Ding-dong, zipp-eh-dee-doodah crazy. Good times.

What's The Conservative Take On Special Sauce?

Last one. Promise.

Note the level of detail, and attempts to simplify and codify. Magnifique!

Occasionally Abandoned In Vague Murk

Alone In The Dark is the most frustrating game I've ever enjoyed. It's packed full of really good ideas, is pretty damn atmospheric (until someone speaks), and generally shows more ambition than almost anything in the last two years. Unfortunately, it's about a year away from being finished.

First up, the title is just plain wrong. Point one: You are rarely alone. Point two: It is rarely dark. Even putting the darkness settings way down to 'emo bedroom', it is still pretty well illuminated for the most part, and you have a full and luxuriant view of the horrible monster chewing your face off.

The plot and voice acting are absolutely atrocious. The writers seem to have confused swearing with mature and well-written dialogue. All the characters swear constantly. It's like it's been writeen by a bunch of 15-year-old boys (as opposed to most videogames, which are written for that demographic). It's genuinely painful. It's particularly galling because there are moments of brilliance in the presentation, particularly the graphics and score.

The plot then. The main character has amnesia. Duhn duhn duhhh!

What dark secrets will be uncovered? I am fucking gripped from the onset by this original and bold premise! I realise that, as a group, videogame characters suffer more head injuries than the average person, but this doesn't justify the prevelance of this default crutch for bad writers. Suffice it to say, it's a very clumsy attempt to bring the character from the original, 1920's set games into the present day. Precisely who this panders too, I am not sure, because fans of the original games released nearly 20 years ago are not that desperate to see the character returned. Most people playing games back then, and bearing in mind that these titles were niche even then, who is being targeted for this?

Anyway, the rest of the plot. Basically, Lucifer has decided he's going to come back to Earth. Unfortunately for him, your character is some sort of immortal ghostbusting MacGyver. The whole game involves improvising weapons and puzzle solutions from whatever you can find lying around. Again, unfortunately for Lucifer, he seems to have come back on prom night, meaning the streets are scattered with cars just loaded full of booze and duct tape.

The bugs are incredible. Given that the physics engine in this game is one that has been the industry standard for about five years now, to break it this badly requires a serious commitment to dodgy coding. Minutes before sitting down to write this, I watched as a hot dog cart started to mysteriously, and with no external force, roll towards me. Then it exploded. At one point, all the objects within 15 feet or so of my character started very slowly to float upwards. There has been nothing quite as funny as Boiling Point, in which the developers once proudly announced they'd fixed the bug that made all the leopards in the game float at treetop height, but it's pretty daft nonetheless.

It's barely possible to control the character a lot of the time, and yet the combat almost redeems the game. The idea that you can combine most of the items into the games into impromptu weapons means you're always scrabbling for something to use to defend yourself - and it really sets the game apart from anything else on the market. The fact that you can just set nearby detritus on fire to ward of enemies means that there are a genuinely huge number of emergent tactics available to you, and the enemy AI almost copes with whatever you do.

It's not enough to rescue the game, and it's sad to think of what it could have been, but it's interesting and certainly not dreadful. I did get it for free though.

Bloor? Or Ooasis?

From generic Rock'N'Roll nihilism to "Hey you kids, with your drugs."

10 Years. That's all it took.

A Radical Leftist Perspective.

I'm in a spiteful mood, and so pointing out the manifest flaws in others is just what I need to balm my wearied soul. So then, to Conservapedia, where wonders are ours to be had.

It was Ben Goldacre that reminded me of the fun to be had with Conservapedia, in posting this link. Please, please read it in full, because it's the funniest thing you'll read all year.

It's either incredibly brave of them to post the dialogue in full, or Andy Schafly genuinely doesn't understand just how badly he's been taken apart here. He also clearly doesn't understand what citation is, and has confused cited data for arrogance. In his second letter he again asks for data that is publicly available to be made available to him. If I ever get rich, the first thing I do after getting a big TV is to pay a guy to follow Andy Schafly around with a swanee whistle.

Shall we go with a little bit of pseudoscience first? This is a good one. I like this. It's a wonderful example of the fingers-in-the-ears "La la la, I'm not listening" approach so vital to 'creation science'. Make shit up, don't give a reason.

A little further leftfield, have some dinosaurs. Everyone loves dinosaurs, right? Everyone including Adam and Eve, it would seem, as dinosaurs lived in harmony with man and other animals in the garden of Eden. And of course, talk of dinosaurs leads to talk of that other children's favourite, dragons. Despite being cited (oh, the irony) in support of the 'dinosaurs done lived wit humanz and shared their sandwiches' hypothesis', they're referred to as mythical here. Funny that. So dragons were dinosaurs, and so were unicorns. Settled? Good. Moving on.


The only thing that would make dinosaurs more awesome than being dragons and unicorns

How about my old friend Jack Thompson? The Conservapedia article on him is rather brief, despite his being a very vocal proponent of conservative values. Wikipedia is a little more detailed. Amazing that a positive spin on Jack should be significantly shorter than a thorough take on his behaviour.

Of fuck it. I'll just through a few more insane links at you and we can be done here. This one is lovely. I've noticed that so much gun crime here. It's everywhere! And of course, I wholly buy into the idea that a deactivated gun cannot be reactivated. After all, it's pretty fucking hard to make or buy a firing pin.

Here's a page that ponders what to do about witchcraft. Here's a lovely essay. And here's the death of irony.

Gah. Enough. I can't wade through this shit any longer. So, in the spirit of cooperation that should apparently be outside of my egocentric leftist ways, what's your favourite page? Links below, if you please.

Prevenge.

Well, that's it. We're fucked.

"Would You Like To See My Nightgaunts?"

From a park in Russia, by all accounts:



Not as good as this though:



Our dark lord form beyond all time and space spends a lot more time lurking in the bushes than previously thought.

Meet Bob.

In one of the most fantastic pieces of shrill idiocy yet displayed in politics (it's an election year, no-one's short of examples), Senator Gayle Slossberg wants GTA IV legislated against because it contains a rape scene.

Problem is, it doesn't. She made it up. And everyone knows it. Doesn't stop her though. She says the only reason she can't confirm it's existence is that she's not good enough at the game to reach it.

This is a classic case of what I like to refer to as 'Bob The Magic Goblin' syndrome. If you are going to say something is true because it cannot be disproved, check first that your argument doesn't dissolve into undignified slop when it's subject is replaced by the words 'Bob The Magic Goblin'. Just becauase no-one has any evidence of it's existence doesn't mean it's not there of course. We're likely to come across new fundamental particles in the next few years. But if you have no evidence whatsoever, making bold claims, be it on the street or in the US senate is a bad idea.

Bob The Magic Goblin. Effective against 99% of known media scares, new age cures and deities.

Rant.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying here, but a courier's job is not particularly taxing on the brain. You pick something up in one place, put it down in another, traversing the intervening distance as you please.

Except that it seems not to be. The last three things I've had delivered have turned up damaged. The one we at the Little House That Could are waiting for at the moment has had a hefty surcharge applied to it to ensure it's delivered in the evening, when it's vaguely possible to be in to collect it.

So they tried to deliver during the day. Imagine my surprise.



The contents of the Amtrak vending machine, yesterday.

So I'll say it here. Amtrak (for 'tis they) are cretinous weasels. Typing 'Amtrak + Useless' into Google brings up a lot of results. One that was in the top ten seemed to assert that their drivers involved themselves in exceptionally complicated acts of congress with farmyard animals. I am in no position (you'll be relieved to hear) to confirm or deny this, though I am strongly inclined to agree.



After a hard day breaking and losing people's stuff, Amtrak employees like nothing more than to relax with a delicious glass of lead-based paint. You can taste the lead!

The bottom line is, if someone cannot tell day from night, I certainly do not fucking want them to be driving.

Wha-huh?

Now this exists, and the world is just peculiar enough to tolerate.

Quality Journalism.

Oh, the Daily Mail. How I love you so. Here, the Daily Mail show how our very ever so very very brave (GOD BLESS THE QUEEN) boys in the RAF have destroyed and Afghan drugs nest. Where they were turning cannabis into heroin. Take a look - the quote's just below that picture of a Harrier in flight (designed to pop an erection in middle-aged little Englanders).

If this is true, then the RAF have just destroyed the fucking Philosophers Stone. Even as an abuser of nothing stronger than cheap Mexican lager, I really do find the right-wing "Argh! Drugs!" approach to be a good source of cheap giggles.

Makes Sense.

My output at work has been less than impressive:

'Rithmatic.

From the daily show, on the topic of evangelical Christians voting for Obama:

Jon Stewart: “There’s talk that 40% of evangelicals will go with the Democrat [on Election Day]. When did the evangelicals lose their values?”

Ralph Reed: “I don’t think that’s supported by the polling data. I think if you look at most of the general-election polls, McCain’s getting about 60 to 65 percent of the evangelical vote.”

Engage Hyperrant.

Right. This is should really be three posts, but I'm tired, and frankly you don't deserve it. Item one on the agenda: Barack Obama. Well done, sir. Hilary not giving up at this point: pretty damn funny. She'll still be trying to secure nominations next February.

Item number two: I just rewatched Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, AKA Kenneth Branagh's grotesque egotistical wankfest. It is a preposterous shambles of a movie. As a director, Branagh seemingly considers melodrama to be 'a deft touch', and so wanders past it, down the road marked 'mawkish oblivion'. The result is a soap opera with zombies. Usually I would be in favour of such a thing. This must be an off day.

Item number the third: apparently, atheists have no sense of decency. That goes without saying, really. The thing I really want to know is, what is this ceremony, and how much would it cost to have one performed on my sofa? I have my own matches, and it's despoiler is genuinely far more unholy than a couple of amorous goths.

The Reality Sickens.

Because you asked for it:







If everyone would please be careful what they say in future, this need never happen again.

A Moment.

John Gray is apparently one of the most well-regarded philosophers currently published. Still, I find it hard to read this without stumbling across a few of the old classic right-wing arguments.

• Science as a uniform discipline? Check.


• An absence of doubt as integral to the scientific method? Check.


• Evolution as 'ideology'? Check.


• A deliberate misunderstanding of theory and theorem? Check.


• A 'belief' in evolution as tangential to fascism? Check.

Of course, they're all nonsense, but he continues through the usual well-worn anti-intellectual paths for a while (Morality without religion? Impossible!), and of course, his arguments are inherently Judeo-Christian. Why give to conscience anything else? But that's not the problem here.

This man earns his living as a philosopher. He is both published (regularly, in book form as well as article) and a teacher at LSE. That he should present such appallingly weak arguments should be a cause for concern. An example:

"Promoting Darwinism as an intellectual orthodoxy - a creed rather than a provisional hypothesis - these writers renew the old quarrel between science and religion. Though controversy has been intense, it can hardly be described as having made any large intellectual advance on the debate that raged in Victorian times."

I have never wanted more for the written equivalent of a slide whistle. Let's pretend for a moment that the remark is not vapid nonsense (that is to say, the discovery and understanding of DNA, to name but one small step made in the last hundred years, should be thought of as a trivial thing). What 'intellectual advances' are we supposed to have made? The fact that the majority of scientific discoveries, and here I do mean quantifiably, and of all time, have been made in the last fifty years seems to have escaped this man. That they were meant to be set as some vast scheme to disprove religion is a nonsense, and they were never put forth, initially at least, as part of that debate. That they continue to weaken the hold superstition has over the human race is a blessing, but the idea that that is what they have been working towards is precious little but a right-wing fallacy. In Gray's case, though he has always been demonstrably right-wing, you have to wonder what he imagines scientific endeavour to be. Is the quest for knowledge deliberate counterpoint to his musings? From this evidence, he would certainly seem to think so.

The term 'provisional hypothesis' is something I always appreciate when it comes up in a rant of this nature. To call evolution a 'hypothesis' is to misunderstand the nature of scientific inquiry. As previously stated, Mr. Gray is a philosopher, and so I have to hope that he understands what qualifies as a hypothesis. A hypothesis is either untested, or in the process of being tested. Evolution is a theory. The most tested theory in history, in point of fact. Genuinely remarkable amounts of work go into it each and every day. Have a problem with gravity? Call it a hypothesis - after all, God could be holding you down. But know this - gravity, the theory of gravity - hasn't had one-thousandth of the practical work conducted on it that evolution has. That certainly doesn't make it a hypothesis, much less one one-thousandth of a hypothesis.

Here's another memorable quote:

“Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, not the Vatican.”

Not Gray's own words, but ones he feels suit his arguments quite well. Again, the need for a slide whistle is profound. Poison gas and barbed wire? No - not work of the Vatican. Work of organised athiests? If you want to believe that, then quite frankly you can fuck off right now. Two things that were amongst the many horrors to come out of the trenches of WW1. An atheist invention? No. How does that even merit an argument? It's genuinely pathetic.

High explosives? Again, I'm pretty sure that wasn't the vatican. The first modern high explosive, TNT, or dynamite, was invented by Alfred Nobel, renowned scientist and philanthropist. It was designed to make mining operations safer. What a cunt.

Zyclon B was created under the auspices of Nazi Germany, led by known Catholic, Adolf Hitler. Of course, Hitler held whatever religion served him best at the time, but you could play this game all day. Most of these things were the works of single men or women, working for a company or government, with precious little idea or control of how their inventions would be used.

Let's play another game. Who covered up organised paedophilia amongst priests in the US and the UK? Who endorsed the Nazi government of Germany? Who organised witch hunts from the 14th through 16th centuries? Who denies resources to help prevent the spread of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa? Whose agents have beaten women in Irish communities? Who has systematically persecuted people whose only crime is to have known more than those persecuting them?

Going beyond the Catholic Church, of course Northern Ireland, where I was born, has seen an grotesque amount of bloodshed in the name of religion. It can't have escaped many people's notice that there has been a certain amount of trouble with non-Christian religions of late (not that it would bother Mr. Gray - after all, his discourse is not against religious persecution, but is explicitly pro-Christianity). Then you have the Crusades, anti-Jewish pogroms across Europe from the middle ages to the middle of twentieth century, persecution of Muslims in Palestine and across the world, honour killings (which are socio-religious, but require religion as justification). Stop me if this gets old.

Isn't the blame game fun? Seems to me as though we could play for hours.

The idea that this short list of things that are not ostensibly Christian constitutes an argument for Christianity is hilarious. These things are no more Athiest (we're getting a capital letter too, spellcheck be damned) than they are Christian. It's a standard of modern politics - the argument that's there to be read and accepted, never questioned - but it should never be one of philosophy.

These are the piss-poor arguments of a man who's already made up his mind - dangerous territory for any philosopher, particularly one chasing tenure. It's going to take quite a lot more to convince me.

Try harder.

Not Bioshock.

Peoples of the internet, hello. I've been drinking for nine hours. This makes me incredulous. I was wrong about the last Doctor Who. There were not bees, but there may have been wasps.

With that in mind: "I chose the impossible! I chose - The Libwawy!"