Religions

The 15 minute post.

I want my lunch, yet I want to update this before then. Then is in 15 minutes. Now 14.

To complete the post in the time necessary, I have decided to take a cheap shot at something everyone seems to either accept and almost ignore, despite the fact that it factors greatly in their lives.

Religions should chuff off and take a bowl of my chode for the journey to snack 'ponst.

I mean really. What the hell (see what i did there?) is their problem? I mean believing in something is all fine and dandy. I mean I completely believe that I shall live forever. If I were to have a rational argument with someone, then the conversation would probably go something like this.

GAME OVER - "I will live forever."

Religous - "Prove it."

GAME OVER - "It cannot be proved, you just have to believe it."

Religous - "You can't just say you have to believe, you have to prove it. Just saying that something is true puts the onus of truth and proof on you to come forwards with said truth and proof."

GAME OVER - "You mean like your religion?"

Religous - "I hate you."

At this point I would normally hand them a ticket and tell them to get in line with all the other Religous persons. I shall not though.

HOWEVER, were I to switch the roles around, the conversation might go a little something like this.

Religous - "I believe I shall live forever in the kingdom of God."

GAME OVER - "Not only are you wrong, but I call upon you to prove your claims."

Religous - "It cannot be proven, you must believe in the power of something that is three things at once, yet one thing the whole time. You must put your faith in Jesus to be saved."

GAME OVER - "So you cannot prove what you are saying, yet you are telling me that it is the truth?"

Religous - "Presactly."

GAME OVER - "I hate you."

Religous - "I will always love you as the Lord Jesus does."

GAME OVER - "If he loves me, then I can let him go, and he will come back? Does he love me enough to accept me into heaven without accepting him as the one true god?"

Religous - "I hate you."

These are ACTUAL FACTUAL conversations that I have encountered by religions. As you see I am mainly going on about Christianity, simply because it is the one I know most about. I have heard talk of people going easy on the Muslims due to the possibility of uprisings. Hmmm... The Crusades anyone? Those Christian guys were straight in there converting the "unbelievers".

The Muslims seem to have equally crazy ideas. I mean women have to wear a sheet like some kind of 1920's minstrel bands' stand in ghost.

STOP WITH THE IDIOCY. You do realise you are killing humanity don't you?

What kind of God sets a time limit to Armageddon? Think about it. If your a Catholic, and you are LITERALLY JUST BORN when the second coming of christ occurs, you are well and truly boned. I mean you could not have been baptised in that small amount of time, nor christened. You would be going STRAIGHT TO HELL. For a decision you did not make.

Way to go oh "loving one".

The fundaMENTALists are the worst though. The ones that think the bible is literally true, and that god put mineral and oil deposits in the ground and put the dinosaur skeletons there to "fool us". Check these guys out. These are transcripts from a fundamentalist websites. Actors have been used to protect the morans.

If Atheists ruled the world

Im 21 seconds over my timelimit.

Italy

Now lets get something straight here. I do not dislike Italians. I do not dislike Italy. In fact in the last year I have even been there of my own volition. The food was amazing, the weather beautiful, and the company both. What irks me about this leg kicking a football like nation is it's government. In fact it's not even it's government, it's just the people that run said government.

In a few of you this may conjure images of the Cosa Nostra taking meetings with the democratically elected Prime Minister to let him know what his public policy will be looking like for the next few years. In others, images of Italian Gordon Brown's and Tony Blairs, or God forbid, an Italian moran like George Bush, but more Italian obviously, running about talking up the war on terror and taking tea with the Queen of England.

You would most likely all be wrong.

It's this Berlusconi bloke that is the problem. He is what you call a magnate. That is not the kind that you manipulate to make an Etch-a-Sketch drawing. It's the kind that owns alot of stuff. In this case it is newspapers and magazines. He is like the Rupert Murdoch of Italy.

Like Rupert Murdcoh, or children, he really does not like it when people express an opinion of him that differs to his own. If someone straight out calls him 'whack', then he is all like 'Oh no you didn't!'. Cue epic cat fight. You know the record, it's been played so many times before.

Normally, this is fine. I say normally, I mean only in democracies, as those are the only places one person can get away with doing something like that. Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi are both from democracies if you needed any more proof, which of course you didn't.

Controlling the news is essential in controlling the minds of the populace. What the unfastened coins brigade call sheeple. Surely enough, as Fox News convinces people that Bill O'Reilly is a serious investigative journalist and skilled debater, after a while the masses become complicit with the forced opinion thrust upon them by the machineries of a man who controls at least half of all the media in the country.

The worst part is yet to come though. He wants to ban The Internet. Not only is he the (barring the good old Cosa Nostra) most powerful man in Italy, but it seems he is also the most stupid. OK so he doesn't want to ban the Internet, he just wants to make it illegal in some senses. Say this very medium you are reading now.

Blogging. Something that is so distasteful that I can barely force myself to do it more than once a week lest I break down in tears from the sheer force of will I must exert into becoming one of them. It may also just be apathy.

There is a new law in debate in Italy's Parliament. It says that bloggers should register with the government. Basically so that the state can gain control of the last unregulated and truly free medium. All the national papers in Italy take financial backing from the state. Hi Ho Silvio owns half the TV stations, the state owns the other half, with one left to pick up the crumbs.

I, am right now, doing something that in a few short months may be illegal in Italy. Just typing some words into a web browser. That's all. That could be illegal.

What next? Ban certain combinations of words in sentences, so that you can't 'diss The Man'. "The Prime Minister bribed Tessa Jowell's husband", "Hi ho Silvio used to be part of a masonic lodge tasked with reshaping Italian politics toward a more authoritarian regime" and "The Man's TV companies abuse their frequency ranges" may all become illegal. Where does the madness stop?

If you want to regulate blogs and get the bloggers to sign up, as is the plan now, how much money do you think that will cost? I mean these people have come out in their millions now that they just have to turn the box on the desk on to reach the rest of the world. Getting them to register by post will not work with people who only use computers because they are too lazy to buy stamps and use them.

It's going to have to be electronic. Nothing governments ever do on the Internet ever works out.

The Italian government are going to get stung by the series of tubes. They will overestimate their ability to use it, and overestimate bloggers ability to not FUBAR things.

I suppose it's alright really, as the paper work and impracticality of it all, along with unfastened coins, is just immense. Huge. Gigantic. Like Hi Ho Silvio's barrel chest.

Still at least they make fine automobiles.

Freedom FTW!

Fanboys

There is nothing worse in this world than a fanboy. OK, perhaps a fanboy of Shellshock 2, but nothing else. They are also still a fanboy.

I am a moderator in one of those most vicious of message boards, an Internet forum. Forums are supposed to be for like minded individuals posting things of relevant interest for all the community. They rarely live up to this expectation. Most of the time they are vitriol (one of my personal interests) infested pits of the worst part of the Internet. The part that is not free movies via bit torrent or porn. So about 2% then.

Fanboys, wikipedia would have us believe, are people that are devoted to one single subject in an emotional and fanatical manner. In fact it may be true to say that I am a vitriol fanboy. But let's not.

I have to come into contact with fanboys on a regular basis, and it is not something that I enjoy. OK, that may be a lie. In fact it is a lie. Being a fanboy is fraught with difficulty. It requires a complete devotion and the emu-like ability to completely ignore what everyone else says, and most especially, complete ignorance of facts.

I recently had the displeasure of seeing a fanboy in action on the YouTubes. He was in no short terms, a moran. The video in question, available here, starts off with the neanderthal claiming that not only do Sony do what they do (is it possible for them to NOT do what they do?) but that they also do not advertise. They don't? I beg to differ, in fact, the truth begs to differ also. The user name, ELPRESADOR, possibly all in caps because he can't not shout, seems completely oblivious to fact driven argument. In fact I indulged myself in such an argument with him for the space of one day. I say argument, but that would imply that there was some point of dispute as opposed to what actually happened. He was wrong and I was right.

ELPRESADOR also seems to have two chins in said video. He is a strange one nonetheless. A classic example of neanderthal man with the sloping brow and all. Also, he spends most of that video crying. I think it's supposed to be an impression of someone without a PS3 who can't play Killzone 2, although it could just be the face of a man who has just had the sad realisation dawn upon him that he has been played like a flute by an excellent marketing team. For those of you that do not know what Killzone 2 is, it's a PS3 'exclusive' game that is immensely overhyped and not actually as good it could have been. The render lag is bad enough.

The mark of a man's intellectual ability can be easily measured by the quantity of swear words used in 'comebacks'. These are those verbal ripostes and parries that any such argument flits between. Stephen Fry would never have to use one, as he has the intellect of several men combined. ELPRESADOR however seems to do nothing BUT swear. Any attempt to goad him into the realms of rational argument was greeted with calls of 'faggot' and 'c$%& sucker'. I almost feel sorry for him.

Not only are Sony loosing the console war in a spectacular way, along with Microsoft, but they do not even have the good grace to bow out with some form of dignity intact. It is a pity. It means more fanboys.

Sony also seems to have the most fanatical of the fanboys too. They seem to think that as the PS3 has a Blu-Ray player, that is basically the end of the argument. Why so? I would attempt at this point to formalise some kind of rational argument as to why that meant they had actually been duped into early adoption of something that will not really be very useful for another three years, but why bother? A fanboy would just tell me that I was angry that I had bought an XBOX360. The Sony fanboys believe that anyone that does not love Sony with every quantum of their being, must be a Microsoft fanboy. These are the people that post videos on YouTube using Microsoft windows. Talk about sleeping with the enemy.

In a recent forum post, a fanboy of Sony asked if the PS3 version of a game was going to be better than the 360 version of the game. Obviously the PS3 is superior to the 360 as it just is. No logical reasoning. Another poster said this in response.

"No amount of programming will give the PS3 more memory"

How right they were. A brief search of wikipedia shows that the PS3 actually has half the amount of RAM the 360 does. Sure the PS3 has two different types of RAM that when added up equals the same amount as the 360, but it can't all be used in the same way. I really want to try to explain further, but as fanboys do not regard truth with the same crystal clear goggles as the rest of humanity, why bother? To those who would say that the PS3 has 8 cpu's, and the 360 only 3. I would say yes. But as a maker of games, you are only allowed to use 5 of them, which puts the processing power waaaaaaaay behind those 3 in the 360 that are actually useful.

If you are in any doubt as to which console is better, have a little try out on the controllers. The 360 seems to have springs loaded into the thumbsticks. It offers some resistance. That's exactly what you want if you are going to be playing a FPS game. The Sony controller feels like there is jelly loaded into the thumbsticks.

If there are any fanboys out there that are reading this. GO AWAY. Also, I would like to point out that I do not own a 360 or PS3. They are both equally crap for playing FPS, especially compared to a PC's control method. Or even the Wii for that matter.

Fanboys are also under a complete delusion that console manufacturers have their best interest at heart. They do not. They LOVE money. They are labouring under the misapprehension that they would not lie to them. Killzone 2 is actually a very good example of this. In order to build hype around the game, Sony showed off a video years ago that was meant to be 'in-game footage'. It looked totally sweet. Even I thought it looked totally sweet. It did. That was because it was anything but in-game footage. It was a pre-rendered video, like Toy Story. Sony did not loose a wink of sleep. The fanboys went wild. It was party central for PS3 owners. Then the lie was exposed. The fanboys went into a kind of hibernation. A controlled slumber. They shut their eyes and ears to all negative commentary levelled at the lie. Some of them I'm sure even maintained that the lie was just the liberal media bias, out to get Sony, racist as they were.

What idiots.

If you think for a second that your favourite company would not lie to you to improve their bottom line when they have a 'hardcore' and loyal fanbase, think again. If you think that any company in the world would not fire you if it improved their bottom line, think again. They would and they have.

Fanboy territory is even more rugged than the console fanboys when the subject of stars is introduced. Yes, you guessed it. Star Wars vs Star Trek. This is nerdology at it's finest. Who would win in a fight, the borg or the empire. Darth Vader vs Captain Kirk. Han Solo vs Spock. Princess Leia in the gold bikini vs T'pol. These are all obvious answers (Empire, Kirk, Solo and T'pol in that order).

There is only ONE good thing that has fanboy as a name in this world. It is the movie by Kyle Newman. It is out now. I highly recommend you see it.