There’s this quote, I’m not sure who it’s from and I can’t be bothered finding it out but it says this:

‘The worst moment for an atheist is when he is truly thankful and has no one to thank,’

And I can understand that because that happens to me all the bloody time.

Take this weekend for example. I have maybe five different assessments due in by Tuesday and each takes a large portion of time to complete and each sucks when it comes to finishing due how freaking blank I’ve come up in the ideas’ department. But I’ve managed to find a way to knock one completely away, to get a workable version of two more and to come up with a decent structure to hang ideas from for the other two. In other words, despite my self-destructive procrastinating and my seemingly overwhelming workload, I’m in a position to survive.

But I have no one to thank but myself. And I don’t feel like I deserve any of the credit or thanks. I feel bloody grateful that I can hold on but I have no one to feel grateful to or any real reason to feel grateful. And this happens with other thing too.

I feel very thankful that the guys at the bank realised that I wasn’t buying French train tickets or spending $200+ on steam, (although, I have done so before) and decided to check whether my debit card details had been misused. And they had. So, I feel thankful that my money will be refunded and that I’ll be getting a new card, PIN and all the rest.

In these sort of situations I can almost understand the faith of theists. I almost understand that incredibly comforting feeling that something bigger and better than you is watching your back and making sure you’re okay. It’s a nice feeling to have but when I think about it more and with a clearer, less stressed, mind I can see the bigger and likelier pictures. The writing was all me and what I did was just pressure combining with prior knowledge to shape my essays. The bank guy was just doing his job. So, while it might be comforting to think you’ve got someone in control of everything watching your back, saving you from these sorts of things, it’s disturbing to think that maybe that guy was responsible for all that stuff in the first place.

So, my worst moment is when I am truly grateful and have no one to thank. When I almost feel looked after and cared for by some unseen, unknown force but then realise that it was all luck or just me being me.

You ever sit in an English class and write an essay discussing ‘how an image conveys its message,’ like I have?

Yeah, it’s not exactly fun because you’re making stuff up constantly, you don’t believe what you’re writing and you certainly don’t look that far into it. To me, the message of an image was, ‘Hey! Buy Coca-Cola, it’s full of nice stuff!’ or ‘Stop Global Warming, you dick!’ and it did that by just existing. I wasn’t thinking of the symbolic nature of the colour red or the way the lighting is shading the globe in the image. But that’s the kind of thing you end up writing.

Take today for example. I got thrown that question in a uni class. ‘How does the image convey its message?’ and I’m looking at the bloody picture of home cooked food and thinking, ‘What message?’. In the end, my friend and I went with the good ol’ fashioned ‘wing it’ approach and came up with something about Western Culture foods and the idea that home-made is better than commercially produced, processed foods. We were just in it for the pictures of food.

However, someone looked at this picture and article which had two lunch boxes positioned side by side and each one was flanked with various items. One lunch box was pink and full of healthy food and the other was blue and full of terrible stuff to give a kid for lunch. The pink lunch box had crayons, pens and all that good stuff next to it and the blue one had a single pencil.

Sounds like pretty basic stuff. Don’t give your kids crap food and here’s some pro tips to avoid that. Well, you’d be wrong according to the person that looked at that image.

The blue represented boys and the pink represented girls, according to our intrepid investigator and I could kinda get behind that idea. It’s common enough to give either a blue or pink thing to a baby depending on gender. But the next part, where it was suggested that the image suggested that boys ate more junk food than girls which affected their creativity as shown by the mass amounts of utensils by the ‘girl’s’ lunch-box and the single pencil by the ‘boy’s’ which gave me problems. Furthermore that this some how represented male single parents feeding their children more crap in comparison to female single parents was also bullshit to me.

I was going to ask this person whether it was also demonstrating that left handed people ate more crap than right handed people due to the way the pencil was positioned but held my tongue.

The fact is that people look far too deeply into these kinds of things, like the women’s studies class who looks at an advert which shows a woman looking up to a man. The class all said that it was because the patriarchy was oppressing women and that it showed this and that and all manner of shit. One woman just laughed and said it was because the man was taller and the woman had to look up.

So, whenever people ask for the message behind something they often forget just how much of it they are making up and then get wrapped in what they think is there. Take looking at novels for symbolism or motifs. I doubt many writers actively put symbols into their work to show the fight between rights and the system, I doubt that they take a cd or a record in the case of Catcher in the Rye and make it into this big deal. As far as I can tell, writers just write. They’re like giant wind chimes for words. The wind blows, the chimes chime. The idea comes, the writer writes.

That’s the bullshit involved in the kind of higher education that I see and that’s the kind of thing which pushes people away from learning more. They see that kind of crap and ask, ‘Why does this matter?’ or ‘How is this important?’ and get discouraged.

So, if I had my way, I’d avoid teaching that crap constantly because the only value that you can take out of it is justifying useless crap. Sometimes that’s helpful and needed but it is such bullshit.

There’s a saying or a phrase which essentially says that any and all magic is simply a science we just don’t fully understand yet. And I kinda agree with that. At least for all the magic I see represented in fiction.

I mean let’s take some of the most popular approaches to magic over the years and let’s take them from video games, books/movies, (I use books/movies because all good magic related movies have essentially been taken from a successful book series) and just general knowledge.

Now, in the video game world, you essentially run off of the rules as laid down by DnD or what I know about DnD. You have schools of magic and some of them cancel each other out or combine together, you can resist some of them or be weak to others and these usually fall around the original ideas of the elements. That is to say, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Aether and Nether. Although with aether and nether, I’m not overly sure, so let’s roll with holy/arcane and shadow/arcane.

Spells in games either come with a cast time or a simple and instant. Cast time is representative of the old fashioned incantation and instant is instant.

In books/movies, we see the same thing, cast times and instant casts, as well as items and enchants but they fall more under the scope of enchantments from spells. In Harry Potter, it’s magic item patterns and fucked Latin incantations, in something like The Sword of Truth series, it’s weaving elements together for effect. In LOTR, it’s Gandalf making the room brighter. Seriously, he doesn’t do much actual magic except for bright lights most of his job is swinging a sword around.

So… that’s the basic magic we see and what we think of as magic. How could those things be science?

Let’s go back to the elements. People used to think that those things were elements and they were right in a way and the way they used to mess around with them with things like alchemy. They’d mix and match things and call it magic. Black powder would be an example, some of the half arsed medicine they had back in the day would have been seen as magic too.

Let’s apply this to Harry Potter rules. Certain people are born magic. Can happen to anyone from any family. Higher chance from those with a genetic background of magic. These guys are less magic and more X-Men, very specific strain of mutation. Beneficial genetic mutation. Perhaps a whole new breed of humans. Same sorta thing with Sword of Truth and pretty much all other sets of fiction. LOTR is different because there is just wizards and magical people. But anywho, science of magic people is genetic mutations.

As for the magic itself, well… any number of arguments could be made. Ranging from quantum physics, (correct me if that’s not actually a thing) to any number of different things. So, that’s what I think about when I see movies or read books which involve magic. I think how is this a science?

Look at the Avengers, they use science to explain magic, like Thor and Loki, old school gods are just super powered aliens. What once was magic is now science. What once was science is now magic. Or maybe they were always interchangeable and only ceased being one when you understood too much about the other.

No, I’m not talking about the politically correct term for a dwarf/midget. I’m talking about kids and what they are these days. I see people bitching about kids who are too young to dress the way they do, talk the way they do or do what they do. And while I agree with a lot of the complaints, I just think that maybe the way we look at kids is wrong. Maybe we should stop seeing them as little innocent beings who do cute things and love Pokemon and unicorns and see them as people who aren’t so different to us.

I mean I like Pokemon and I think unicorns are a useful concept for messing with theists. So, maybe I’m more like a kid than I previously thought.

Anyway, it depends on how you consider these people.

Children are seen in two different lights in history. The first is the miniature, stupid, adult who is only a child until they advance in age to a point where they can take on adult tasks. These should be seen and not heard. These should keep their opinions to themselves and should watch and learn. Effectively, children were just apprentice adults and that’s kinda true. They don’t start with the knowledge to actively function in this world. You kinda pick it up as you go along.

Secondly, we have the ‘innocent children who should run free and happy who need constant protection from the horrors of the world’ concept. This one I actually disagree with because kids aren’t these innocent, defenceless little angels. They’re people, simple people but people nonetheless. They don’t need protection until they’re eighteen or twenty-one because as soon as they hit that age they are just going to be overwhelmed by all the shit you’ve been protecting them from. It’s like not getting chicken pox as a kid and then getting it as an adult. That and kids are often able to cut through the crap that older people tell you. Kids are honest as hell because they can be. 

So, if you’re thinking about kids you have to consider your definition of ‘kid’. Is it the mini-adult in training who is worthless until it can hold a salary? Or, is it this little immaculate, innocent, naive little being who should be protected until it’s old enough to vote?

I say both those ideas are broken. Kids are people, very simple people at times and very complex at others. The important fact is that they are not so different to adults. I know adults who can’t handle scary movies as well as kids who love them. I know kids who devour books and adults who think touching a book is repulsive. I know kids who write in proper sentences and I know adults who are yet to master the comma.

Fact is kids are a little like the humble goldfish. People think they’re stupid, when they can actually learn to do some quite complex tasks, (well complex for goldfish). And they grow to fit the size of their bowl. A kid will grow to fit the scope of how you treat ‘em. Treat them like little degenerates and you’re going to get some little degenerates. Treat them like their your pals and maybe you’ll get some pals.

So, next time you talk to a little cousin or the little kid you’re babysitting, ask them what they think of that politician or that current global event. Then ask five people on Facebook the same question.

What response would you get?

Ever notice the amount of kids with more technological toys than you?

I’m talking about the kids with the most recent iPads, pods, phones, tunes, MacBooks (fucking macbooks) and you’re rocking a 1st to 3rd generation iPod, a basic phone and the simple desktop set-up. These kids are kids; Twelve to fifteen and they don’t know what the fuck they are doing with these things. They’re on social media, chatting away to their friends using phrases like, ‘c u l8ter xoxox’ and ‘your so cuute’, doubling up vowels, using the crappy text talk like it’s still useful and generally just aggravating your older, wiser and superior mind.

This is what we have to look forward to. We can look forward to a generation that has grown up on Facebook, grown up with the iPhone/pad/pod/tunes and will use these things and whatever replaces them for the majority of their lives. The big question is, should we look forward to it or should we try to crush it now?

I looked at it for a little while and thought, ‘What possible use do they have for these things? I didn’t need ‘em and to be honest I still don’t. What the fuck could they talk about anyway? Who has the coolest light-up shoes? What are they listening to? Beiber? The latest bloody Gaga or Adele song? The latest Skrillex bullshit? Are they discussing crappy games like MW3 and terrible shows like Jersey Shore?’.

Problem is that is exactly the kind of thing these kids are likely to use tech for. That and the endless conversations of who has a crush on who and who is cool. Terrible right? Not the kind of thing people who are 16+ use Facebook for. Not the kind music real people listen to. Not the kind of games real people play. Not the kinds of show real people watch and talk about.

Nope. Never. That’s totally not what we intelligent, sophisticated, superior, self-assured, responsible and forward thinking young adults use these technological devices for.

Not at all.

So, these kids that we look at with contempt, bewilderment and scorn are really no better than us. Maybe they’re naive and stupid but aren’t we all? Are their tastes really worse than ours? Are these kids really spoiled and ruined already?

Or are they just ahead of the curve? Catching up to us?

Fact is these kids are just more obvious versions of ourselves. They talk about the same crap, more or less, and often in the same way. They just don’t rationalise it or make it more complicated than what it is. They’re straight up idiots. They don’t hide it away like we all do.

So, before you condemn the kids of iPods/pads/phones and tunes, think about what you do with these things. Think about what you do on Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter.

Is it so different from what they do?

Fuck no.

It’s just high school online.

And high school kinda sucks, everyone knows that.

But time and time again, people scream, ‘WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN AND CYBER-BULLYING?’ and make crappy movies showing teens trying to kill themselves after a comment online. I’m sorry but with cyber-bullying, there is just too many options to avoid it.

Let’s look at a cyber-bullying scenario that is paraded through the media.

You are a high school teen of an undefined age. You are on a social networking site. You have added everyone from school to your friend list. You are now receiving hurtful comments on your half naked photos and are being, ‘bullied’. What do you do?

A) Do nothing. They’ll go away eventually.

B) Remove the pictures. The kids are right you do look like a walrus in a sleeping bag

C) Put up a generic status which implies those people are ‘dirty bitches’

D) CRY HORRIBLY LIKE A MELODRAMATIC HAM WHILE STRUGGLING TO OPEN THE CONTAINER OF BABY ASPIRIN IN A HALF BAKED SUICIDE ATTEMPT

E) Block and delete these people and don’t add them or anyone like them in the future. You don’t like them in school, why pretend to like them online?

E is the correct answer. A is half correct and acceptable if you just don’t want to delete them. B is an odd choice but probably for the best; you don’t want to become an attention whore anyway. C is stupid and ineffective, it just feeds the trolls.

D…

D is the approach that crappy, ‘made for tv’ films would have you believe that most bullied teens take. And a few of them do but not just because of cyber-bullying but a range of other factors including mental health and home life. But I doubt the overwhelming majority take that course of action and I really doubt they choose pills.

However, the things is cyber-bullying is pretty much an invited terror. On social networking sites you choose your friends, you choose your photos and you choose who can and cannot view them. So, why the hell would you let BitchTits McCrabby, a person you never liked, be friends with you on Facebook.

So, no, cyber-bullying is not this terrifying monstrosity stalking our good internet. It’s just high school online with the added bonus OF NOT TALKING TO THE PEOPLE WHO YOU HATE.

It’s a waste of fucking time and resources to establish, ‘cyber-bullying programs’ or ‘cyber-bullying education’. Instead you should be focusing on teaching kids that eventually they don’t have to put up with those assholes. Or if they really need to, they can just not put up with them then either.

Long story short. Please focus on the real issue and not bloody cyber-bullying.

You’re just wasting time and money.

That’s probably the only way I can think of my lack of tumblr posts. I just stopped using this site a while ago because I felt anything and everything I discuss on this blog like thing is ultimately a futile gesture. What do I hope to change? What can I hope to do with it?

Answer is nothing. However, what I did end up doing is what a fair few people wind up doing: impressing themselves with their own self-importance. I’d see something and take a superior glance at the issue and think, ‘Yes. I can write a post on that. I can attack the issue! I can make a witty statement,’ and what I actually did was just rant about it on the internet.

Not very exciting stuff.

Despite the fact that some people enjoyed it, it just became more and more about pissing off other people and seeing how much I could confront them with. The problem was I would write a post on a topic and get the exact opposite reaction I had hoped for. I’d write about feminism and look at the gender equality issue only to encounter the crap I had just written. I’d discuss theism and suffer the same sort of attitudes I had just highlighted. I’d yell about One Direction and get told by some naive teen girl that I, ‘… just don’t understand what the boys mean to us…’.

At that point they had one song and were as generic as a Steven Segal film.

It reached a point where I spotted an anti-atheism lecture at my uni and I just threw my arms up in the air and said, ‘Fuck it. They can do what they want. Doesn’t matter what I do anyway,’. I wrote about and people gave me the same basic crap.

I was getting the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted people to discuss the ideas I had written about and I wanted them to assess what it was they believed. Whether that was religion, feminism or a strange taste in music, I just wanted them to think.

And I failed horribly at it.

Turns out I changed more people’s minds about the myths surrounding Marilyn Monroe in five minutes on facebook than I had changed people’s minds on tumblr total. I sat down, ranted to a friend, we did some research, I put a status which called people out, they commented back and then my friend and I just backed each other’s replies and gave the real information. At the end of the post/thread’s active time, we had swayed about five people to at least pretend they had re-thought that belief.

So, yeah.

I look at tumblr as place where I fed my ego and propped up my self-importance. Eventually, you realise that it’s worthless for the purpose of changing people’s minds and that the only real purpose for it is mindless entertainment.

Hrmmm, can’t say I am or that I’m even interested in the idea. I like The Beatles but not quite that much.

Also, you got amazingly lucky to get an answer here. I stopped using this a while back.

That’s now my opinion on everything related to ethics, morality, sexism, racism or any other form of oppression; just deal with it.

It’s been a rough night in the world of the non brain-dead. I start off the night with this crap:

http://events.murdoch.edu.au/event/why-im-not-an-atheist/

Oh yes, it’s real.

I find that fucking irritating from the get go. That’s my university hosting a bloody lecture about how atheism isn’t practical and, let me directly quote this, “… the truth uncovered under a smokescreen of ‘I don’t believe in anything:’ God.”. Are you for real? God, as in aChristian God, is behind my own personal belief that we can never know either way that there is a god or any gods or of that superstitious supernatural crap? That’s what this person wants to say?

I’m still trying to work out whether I can do what all other religious minorities do in the face of this idiocy and just claim that it’s offensive/oppressive/hurtful. You know; play the victim. It just gets me. I’d normally be furious for an hour and just think, “HEY! I CANNOT LET THIS SLIDE. I’LL PROTEST AND START A GROUP AND THE LIKE!” and eventually I just write up some shitty post on the internet like a whining baby.

GO ME.

Next, the feminists start arcing up. I have had it with feminists. They are starting to annoy me with their constant barrage of “equality” and “sexism”. They’re chasing shadows and overreacting and no one calls them out on it because it’s “sexist” and a symptom of a male dominated society.

You want gender equality? You want the scales to be equal? Then look at both sides of those metaphorical scales and you balance them up. You don’t just lump weight on one side.

So, I’ve given up on all this crap. I just can’t wrap my head around the denial of some people and the idiocy of everyone, including myself. I’m going back to my big lists of sayings, mottos and quotes and I’m picking this one: deal. Deal with it.

People can do what they want and I cannot change their minds. I cannot change it with reasoned arguments or by pointing out the gaping holes in their own arguments. I cannot pierce the wall of politics and change things there. I just can’t change anything of any value.

So, I’m sort of getting back in touch with my cynical roots. I’m exploring the idea that nothing is ever going to change and I’ve found out one thing.

I just don’t care.

What do you think?

I play on a pc. I play my games on a pc for a few different reasons and yet I feel like companies, game designers and the like and other assorted people just like to stab the pc community in the eye. Let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of PC and Console Gaming.

PC.

PRO: You can download games that you bought online. Great if you’re lazy, great if it’s on sale and you want to try it, FREAKING OUTSTANDING if you don’t want to have enter fucking cd keys every four seconds.

PRO: You can upgrade your pc or just individual components of your pc at any time providing you have the cash. This is a big deal. Consoles cannot be upgraded until you have to buy a new system. Therefore, with a pc, you can upgrade your system at any time to fully explore the range of graphics at your disposal. Play the game in the graphics it warrants.

PRO: You have a wider range of games at your disposal. You aren’t just limited to FPS or RPG style games. MMO’s are pretty much all pc games and some of those are really good. Indie titles too. Look at Minecraft, I mean it’s coming out on the 360 but pc is its home. And Terraria. QUBE. RTS Games as well. Starcraft 2, Civ5, Empire Earth, Age of Empires and all those titles, I am yet to see on a console. Closest I’ve seen would be Halo Wars and… Halo Wars? Really? Seriously?

PRO: Mods. Modding adds a great aspect to a game, whether it be bug fixes or adding extra content.

PRO: You usually don’t have to pay for online gaming. MW3, Battefield 3, TF2. You don’t buy XBOX LIVE TIME or Playstation equivalent. There’s just the game. And fuck, you don’t even buy TF2.

PRO: You can upgrade your controller. You have a mouse and keyboard and you can buy the biggest, baddest, coolest gaming mouse possible and same thing for keyboard. It can give you an edge.

CON: Hackers. There are probably more hackers on the PC versions of games simply because it’s easier to get them for it.

CON: You miss out on some games. No Guitar Hero. Seriously, Guitar Hero is the only reason I am looking at getting a new Xbox. That and the Halo Series. And the PS 3 has some games I wouldn’t mind playing through.

CON: Some games have their own stupid little outside influences. Like the bloody ubisoft thing for Assassin’s Creed, Steam for most games and Origin for Battlefield 3. Annoying ass crap when you need to make a new account every time.

CON: Gaming Developers often hate you because of pirates. EA Games backed SOPA because they didn’t like people torrenting their games. First off, EA games rarely make anything worth playing in my opinion. It’s all sports games and crappy racing games. They were a part of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning but I’m assuming they were just financial backers and not involved development wise. So, we don’t see the Halo Series for PC, we don’t see Guitar Hero for PC.

Consoles.

PRO: You can rent any game you take a fancy to and then decided whether you want to buy it. I like that. It means I don’t have invest money, time or bandwidth into buying a game just to try it. If there’s no multi-player content, it’s even better because unless I’m going to love the game I can just spam through the campaign and leave it alone.

PRO: Guitar Hero and social interaction. Sing Star for fuck sake. I mean with pc you really do lack the face to face aspect of gaming that you can get with a console and you miss out on drunken Sing Star and Guitar Hero.

PRO: Your machine is always guaranteed to able to play that game. you don’t need to worry about specs and the like. It’s a console that can and will play game at it’s optimal quality. The flip side is that console graphics and processing are being left way fucking behind by pc’s and games deserve to be played in the graphics that really make the game aesthetically pleasing.

PRO: As long as that’s the current system, you never, excluding malfunctions and the like, have to buy a new one. It’s a flat fee. PC’s could find you upgrading parts at different times.

CON: You have to pay for online play. That seems a rip to me, you bought the console, you bought the game, why should you have to pay any more to experience the full range of content offered.

CON: The Xbox 360 is known to fucking kill itself for no reason. BAM! RED RING ASSHOLE! Go buy a new one.

CON: Disks out the arse. When I’m playing games now days, I only get the hard copy of a game I really like. SPACE MARINE and Skyrim are the two games sitting on my shelf right now. And I only bought those in store to save bandwidth, to get the awesome Bolter Edition Case and Skyrim comes with a cool map.

CON: No mods or DLC. That’s not to say ever but is to say it is so much easier to acquire on pc.

CON: Games become hard to find after a certain period. Steam regularly pumps old games back up to top sellers just by putting them on sale. Have fun finding an old game you like on console at a low, low price.

CON: Disk damage. My brother once dropped my beloved copy of Halo 2 on the ground. It was scratched to shit and never worked properly again. He moved my copy of the Lord of the Rings RTS while it was in the xbox by flipping the xbox, thus scratching the ever lasting shit out of it.

CON: No back-ups of games. Your disk gets damaged? TOO BAD SON, BUY ANOTHER COPY. With pc, Steam especially, you can back up your games to a external device or just borrow a copy of the install dvd from a mate to re-install.

So, there’s a quick list of pros and cons. Obviously, I am biased as hell towards the PC but I just feel like some developers just make a pc variant just because they know people will buy. They don’t put the same fucking effort into though. Steam regularly has over three million players online at any one time. I doubt you could match that with the console communities combines.

Anywho, fuck the consoles for proper gaming. You wanna challenge people to Mario: Drunk Driving? That’s fine. You want to play Guitar Hero? Fine. You want to play Skyrim on the graphics levels which do it justice? Get a gaming PC set-up. You won’t just game on it, it’ll also play movies better, it’ll run faster in photo and video editing, actually, it can photo and video edit. Let’s see an Xbox have photoshop on it.

What’s your opinion?