This is a Classroom Exercise

Draft post for Grumpy Cunts

2008-03-07T15:54:00.006Z

There are many things that make my blood boil. In fact, I've got a rich cornucopia of ideas that seem to suggest that the majority of people I meet, experiences I have and events that surround my lifetime are all absolutely abhorrent and lead me to conclude that life cannot possibly be something to have its praises sung (don't get me started on the swathes of humans who tick a box other than 'none' in the religion section of the census).

So, that's pretty much how the genesis of 'Grumpy Cunts' came about. A collection of six disenchanted students who, in the style of the grumpy old men (and now for equality reasons, women) seen on the BBC. See, it's not just the ancient that can moan.

So what to choose for a first subject? Shall I 'have it large' and lay into a world affecting issue, such as our British Government, or maybe have a whinge about a pet peeve of mine? I think however, I might have just answered my own question, and narrowly avoided becoming something I can't stand - indecisive people.

"Oooh, when shall we cross the road?" Argh, just MAN UP AND CROSS.

We all make choices in life. I'm sorry, but it's just something we all have to do. Be they big or small, ranging from dropping a bomb on a country you don't happen to like, or what colour socks you wear in the morning, nearly our whole life is dominated by making choices.

So, now that I've established the necessity of making decisions in life could someone please answer me this small, niggling question that I constantly ask myself every day?

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO BLOODY SCARED TO COMMIT TO SOMETHING?

I'll give you a case in point - people who can't decide what clothes to wear. Right, essentially the only purpose of clothes is to hide all the horrible parts of your body. If you're ugly, then you're ugly and no amount of frustrating dressing choices is going to change this. And if you're attractive then it is your right to parade yourself naked anyway.

"Oooh, what top to buy?" Yeah, because it's not as if clothes are all VARIATIONS ON THE SAME THEME.

People seem to think stuff like this is a big deal. Hours are wasted every day as women and (more so in recent times) men enter a shop, mmming and aaahing over what clothes will cover up their horrific inferiorities the best. These are hours that could be spent doing much more productive things, such as having sex or, if you're all alone due to your repulsiveness, inviting Palmela and her five lovely daughters round - you know, something fun and enjoyable.

At the end of the day, all decisions you make are just as insignificant as choosing a pair of pants. No one cares, no one will ever care, it is just people's elevated sense of worth for themselves that seems to create this immediate pressure that every choice you make will change the globe. It isn't.

Unless you're in control of enough nuclear weapons to blow the Earth to pieces and kill us all, in which case - make the right choice...do it.

Yeah go on then, you might as well. Plus that shade of orange looks divine on you.

RE: Banning Downloaders from the Internet

2008-02-18T22:43:00.004Z

"Greetings. I'm a representative from Her Majesty's British Government© . How are you? Actually, don't bother answering that. Allow us to get straight to the point. As Her Majesty's British Government©, we have decided that the issue of music and film piracy is one of utmost importance. Millions of beautiful American dollars are lost to the filthy scum who chose to download their entertainment for free via the use of 'The Internet'. Therefore we have given the go ahead for a new plan to be formulated by our top scientists in order to hunt down these thieves. Do not say we did not warn you - we have spent much of our own money on ingenious threats, such as the advert that plays every time you put a DVD into your Playstations, or our recent message displayed in our 'Knock Off Nigel" campaign. What is wrong with you people? Do you not understand that the artists and the actors, the visionaries and the talented, and most importantly, the movie studios and record labels need money to feed you your 'entertainments'? As a result of your selfishness, Her Majesty's British Government© has now decided to take it upon it's own shoulders to tackle this problem, and we will defeat you. But do not worry for now. Go on, make a cup of tea - as long as you have paid for the teabags of course. Goodbye, and long may Britain prosper!"

Yes yes, this is of course a little exaggerated. The subject is concerning the recent story that our MP's have been spending their time concluding that something must be done about the seemingly ever increasing problem of illegal file sharing on the internet. The basic concept these idle minds have come up with so far is thus: if people are downloading illegally, ban them from the internet.

Now. I do not know a lot about the technicalities of the internet. I know what WWW stands for, and I know some HTML, so allow me to establish that this is by no means an expert's view on this proposed idea. However, what I do know is that this plan seems absolutely bloody ridiculous. Here is our Government, now fighting the fight on behalf of these whining big league record companies who for once have no answer to such a vast change in the market.

There was once a time when things were the other way round - record labels introduced CD's, making vinyl and cassette owners grumble relentlessly as they were forced to follow the tide and re-purchase all their albums on these new fangled 'compact discies'. But now, with the internet and mp3's the tide has changed. It's the customer that has performed the switcharoo on the labels, and now they're the ones complaining and like a granddad using a CD player for the first time, they're shit scared of all this new technology, and just don't know what to do with it.

"Yargh."

The trouble is, how do you solve a problem like Mari...erm, filesharing? It's so easy, all the kids are doing it these days. I remember when I downloaded my first track off Limewire and how quick I was to get caught up in the world of torrents and Rapidshare. Music for free? Fuck yeah! And generally this is the attitude of the younger generations today - if it's out there for free, why should I bother paying a bloated price for it?

However, I think one of the biggest misconceptions made by record company executives today is that their fear of the pirate overwhelms the respect they should have for the customer. The majority of music today is absolute trash - they know that, and they pray that the drones who buy or download the next X-Factor release don't realize this fact. But beneath the purchasing power of these plebs, is the kind of music fan who the labels should really be appreciating. And I'm one of them.

The idea of downloading your music, to me, is repulsive. I love CD's. I spend far too much on them, and all they really do is sit arranged alphabetically. I love picking up an album - not just one song that I heard on the radio, but a cohesive collection of songs that take me on a rollercoaster ride of emotions. And what's more, I know I'm not the only one. Since coming to university (where music piracy is apparently at it's most rife) I've met loads of people like me, who buy their music honestly, and love having a physical collection to admire. Call us nerds, geeks or dickheads - we're what the labels should be aiming to please.

Tool's latest album was a great example of how ingenious CD content can become.

Piracy will never go away. It is a problem that will, eventually, destroy the music industry as we know it. But it isn't the pirates who are to blame. No, it is the labels themselves, for allowing music to become a commodity. A thing that means nothing, has no worth or value to it. A hollow artform. How can you charge an audience for something as shallow and unrewarding as three minutes of a girl singing about Umbrella's? The sooner this trash is got rid of, the sooner the music world can begin to rebuild itself anew. It won't happen any time soon, but slowly, within the next few years, the industry as we know it will be no more. Artist's will have to actually try and create something worthy of our attention, and only then will they get the money they deserve.

Michael apologies for any tangents that may have been wandered down in this article. He's a passionate bugger.

Youtube Video Review: The Lord of all Farts

2008-02-14T21:05:00.006Z

The Lord of all Farts, is a brand new edit of the popular Lord of the Rings trilogy, and is an effort by the creator, 'gwizie' to bring the grandiose rumblings of the big screen to a short and sweet five minutes of sheer pleasure.

As with all re-edits, some liberties have been taken with the storyline. In order to keep viewers in the know, the video is subtitled with cue cards, that re-tell the epic storyline so it might fit into it's shorter running time. The storyline follows the traditional fantasy fare, keeping alongside the lines of Todorov's theory of balance and equilibrium.

The video opens with an epic score composed by Howard Shore. As the low ebb of the cello's draw you into where the sun no longer shines (after the Shire is pillaged by Orcs) we hear two hobbits whispering, creating a vastly epic atmosphere that chills you to the bone. "A foul stench plagues the land" hovers a caption, and indeed this is the unsurmountable force that these mere hobbits must battle against.

As the score escalates, so does the tension. "A pressure builds" the video threatens, keeping the viewer just on the edge of their seat, leaning forward in a desperate effort to relieve the tension. All of this leads to a shocking scene, visceraly and aurally thrilling as in a gloomy forest, one of the hobbits experiences this shocking force for themselves.

The video goes on, and the power that threatens these innocent people increases in strength, dominating the senses like a World War Two nerve gas. The video does a fantastic job of building atmosphere, with the edits smooth and natural, never feeling as if the scene has been cut too soon.

Of particular note is the simply superb display of talent on offer from the thespians. The reactions and physical awareness of this silent but violent enemy remain believeable throughout, and in some cases it is generally shocking and heartbreaking to see how the evil affects and contort's the character's bodies, notably their faces. There are certainly some career making performances here.

A brilliant example of how the re-edit can bring cinema to a completely new audience, this video is certainly one that you deserve to treat yourself to. Just make sure you aren't sitting on a plastic chair, otherwise the video might have an overpowering result upon you.

Who's on t'Internet then?

2008-02-01T15:43:00.000Z

There are a lot of statistics bandied about regarding the internet, all massive numbers in this modern world that demands almost everyone have at least a rudimentary connection to the World Wide Web.
One survey carried out by the National Statistics Omnibus Survey in April 2006 estimated that 13.9 million households in the UK alone had access to the internet, a figure that has increased to 15 million by 2007. The graph below visually shows the exponential expansion of internet connectivity in the UK.

Percentage of households with access to the Internet in GB

Now, that statistic is just households - we aren't talking working environments here (of which I would have thought that nearly all businesses are connected to the Internet), and most importantly we haven't even considered the amount of people on the net.

These ever increasing numbers just go some way to show how the internet has invaded every aspect of our lives. A lot of India and the Middle East was recently crippled when an undersea cable carrying 'the internet' was severely damaged, leaving millions without basic internet connectivity, and the results were fairly catastrophic.

It acts as a firm reminder that the incredible service that is the internet is something not to be taken for granted, and could destroy societies just as quickly as it helped build and reinforce them.

I Want Some Answers: Who's to Blame for this Blog?

2008-02-01T14:06:00.000Z

When put into perspective, blogging is a mere infant child compared to the father figures of newspapers and broadcast reporting it so aspires to be. But like any child, you need parents. People who combine to create a new entity, a new opportunity, a fresh start. That and people just love getting jiggy with it.

So who put their creative 'bits' to good use in order to conceive the rapidly growing baby that is Blogging?

It's a pretty widely debated area. One thing's for sure - no-one is really certain of who made the first bona fide blog post, but there are a series of important landmarks and people who have led to the universe of blogging that we are so used to now.

A quick Google search for "first blogger" brings up a plethora of arguments and suggested names. A brief scan of the results lists names such as 'Richard Steele' and 'Dougie Howser' (the blogosphere's equal to Snoop Dogg perhaps?).

A great article by Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache on the subject guides us through an extremely brief history of how the act of blogging came to be, however even they are having a stab in the dark, beginning their article thusly:

"Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It's just not quite clear who."

There's a few egocentric members of the internet universe who are keen to lay claim to the invention of the blog, one of these being John Barger who started his website as a means to post up articles he had found, stating that the day to day logging of his intellectual pursuits and findings heralded the creation of a new term - the WebLog.

So perhaps that was the foundations that the blogosphere was built upon? It's a fairly reasonable claim to the title of world's first blogger, but it certainly isn't the only one, and it's all but impossible to really ascertain just who really began this whole blogging shishkebang.

Some even argue that someone called Jesus was the inventor of blogging, so you can see how this whole argument could go on. One thing's for sure, it might not be the first blog, but it's certainly the best, so stop worrying about pedantic questions such as these and read this.

Casting my all-knowing gaze over the BBC online.

2007-11-19T15:37:00.000Z

As it's paid for out of my hard earned wages, it seems appropriate that I tear their web design team apart with savage opinions on their visually abusive website programming and crazy ideas, like I would towards whoever felt this was an ingenious choice of design inspiration. However, I am very aware that I do not live in an ideal world, seeing as I have to not only pay for the BBC, but live in a world where that money is spent on Eastenders. Eastenders I tell thee!

But allow me to check myself before I break myself (word up). As much as I'd love to whinge about the webpage, it's difficult to really find any major complaints. Obviously when evaluating a popular web page like this it's important to remember the purpose of the site. Being a news resource it's vital that the information is clear, in that a reader can look at the page and be informed of all the latest stories, concise, in that the story summaries the news in a short sentence and collated, in that the stories must be organised in a logical manner, and kept up to date.

The BBC News front page as it appears in Mozilla Firefox.

The BBC news main page manages to achieve these three key aims, presenting the information in a variety of ways. First of all we have a scrolling news ticker, providing links to the latest breaking news stories. The headlines provide the really important information, and the links take you to a full story.

Below this, the page focuses on three main headline stories, with the main story being accompanied by a larger thumbnail than the others to help those users with a short attention span (being the internet that would be the majority) to find the story visually appealing. Older, less important stories are given their place further across the page with plain text links in order to keep...order.

The page is kept in shape by a simple border of links on the right hand side that provide navigation to particular areas of newsical interest and the top is presented with a neat BBC border. Not only is this efficient, it is a theme that runs throughout the majoirty of the BBC website, so the consistency reminds users of where they are, and breeds familiarity. It has a rather homely effect, creating a website where users feel secure and confident that what is presented on the page (depending on how they feel about the BBC and its news reporting ability).

So overall, the web designers at the BBC have crafted a webpage that, for what it lacks in visual flair, it makes up for in relevance and effciency, which is a lot more than you could say for the majority of these fancy looking, flash based mistakes.

Blogging for Journalism?

2007-11-05T15:58:00.000Z

Blogging. It's a funny old thing. Well, it's not really old and to be fair most aren't particularly funny. But one thing we can certainly be sure of is that it is a thing. A thing that exists for a purpose, whether we like it or not. A thing that was created out of a necessity for normal people to voice their loud, obnoxious opinions and tell the world what's happening in the world.

In the past few years Blogs have become a source of competition to the traditional journalism universe, especially print media who are slowly learning to embrace this idea of 'opinion' from a 'normal person' via that thing called the 'interweb', or something along those lines. I've never particularly considered the function of Blogging to be a substitute for journalism. The majority of them seem to focus on people's own little worlds, which is fair enough I suppose (people seem to find themselves more interesting than anyone else ever would) and a few blogs that I have come across are entirely opinion based, a sort of free for all editorial where anything goes and everything can be a target. An example? Maddox a foul mouthed, opinionated bastard who's soul aim within his blog is to rile the masses by, pretty much, telling his version of the truth.

Maddox: Self confessed owner of the Best Page in the Universe

But back to the issue at hand, is all this blogging nonsense journalism? The describer of words, the Dictionary, says that journalism is:

"1.the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business."

First things first, the Dictionary considers journalism an occupation. Blogging isn't particularly considered a job. Bloggers have the opportunity to earn a bit of bread money via services such as Google's AdSense, but it's a bit difficult to really say that this is a bona fide career choice. Chances are, even if you pull in millions of readers that have an attention span longer than ten seconds, you'd only really be earning a slight bit more than a Gap worker in India. So no, blogging is not a career, at least not right now anyway.

As the definition kindly tells us, news is a key part of traditional journalism. Funny that. There are blogs that cover developments in many different fields, such as Collision Detection, a blog devoted to the world of technology and nerds and H5N1, one that focuses just on the pressing issue of Avian Flu, a subject that the likes of the BBC and Sky have completely forgotten about, until the next epidemic. These examples, and I'm sure a lot more, are clear indicators of blogging as journalism. They report news stories, often of a particular area of interest, and therefore of course count as journalism.

I think (and that's the key point) the biggest thing to consider with blogging is the independence it offers. Some people will be keen to share the latest news on 50's comic book horror whilst others will just use the technology to let people know how they felt about something. Essentially, be it journalism or not, the biggest victory blogging has over more traditional mediums such as newspapers is its ability to inform us of millions of opinions. Not all of them matter, and not all of them are right or fair, but to be able to have the chance to speak our minds, instead of being spoken for, is a massive jump in freedom and opportunity. Use it wisely.

Polls and Jedis.

2007-11-05T14:32:00.000Z

According to a very recent BBC poll (which should instantly put doubt into your mind. Who knows how much we should trust it now?) most people are quite happy to accept massive changes in their lives to combat that most ominous of threats: "CLIMATE CHANGE." When I say most, I am of course referring to the majority of people the poll actually asked, which was only around twenty-two thousand (22,000). As much as I hate to sound cynical and a bit like Jeremy Clarkson, many resources tell me that the estimated world population as it stands at the moment is 6,687,639,322. And counting. That's a number so big that typing it fully would consume a whole sentence, therefore I decided to just use numbers.

You'll notice I was quite happy to type twenty-two thousand out fully, and behold! I did it again, which just goes to emphasize how insignificantly small this so called 'majority' of the world is. I've never been a massive fan of these 'polls'. When you consider that one of the most important polls, the Census, had three hundred and ninety thousand (yet another tiny statistic that I'll write in words) people classify their religion as 'Jedi', you've got to appreciate it when I admit to getting a little voice in my head that suggests that quite a few people don't take these 'polls' seriously and that, essentially, the 'findings' are just sheer bullshit.

The Jedi: Religion or, no wait - LIES!

Maybe I'm just speaking for myself (that would make sense, after all this is my blog and therefore it should be what I think) but I genuinely do not believe all these people really took the whole thing seriously. I'm not saying that 'GLOBAL WARMING isn't a problem, or that we're just avoiding the metaphorical elephant curling one out in the middle of the room. What I am saying is that these kind of polls have a tendency of giving us, the people reading the results, and the people 'finding' the results, a rather...unbalanced view on how we as a global community can react to events and problems which will affect us all.

I'm sure there are some people who will be willing to make dramatic changes to their lifestyles in the face of 'GLOBAL WARMING', but I certainly do not believe that the majority of the world, hell even the Western world, could even begin to consider just how much would be asked of them to change. And that's just the people, nevermind the good old faceless and greedy mega corporations, squeezing the world and the man of every last penny.

On the subject of 'GLOBAL WARMING', I'd invite you to watch this video on a possible solution. Even if you don't care for the subject, it's still vaguely entertaining as the bloke has a very bizarre looking face.