12 posts tagged “rant”

It's winter and gaming is on my mind so I'm going to be starting some running commentary about games for your reading pleasure.  This is the first of my running rant about Dungeons and Dragons, note that even though I personally can't stand this game, I have nothing against it's players or their opinions and will be happy to hear contrary opinions on the matter, though I can pretty much guarantee you won't be changing my mind.

Star Trek Online - Trailer

If you are a true trekkie and not one of those poser trekkers you already know that a video preview of Star Trek online  was released this weekend.  The game recently changed hands after the last company who had the license to develop the property into an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) went tits-up.  Last night I took some time to look into the site and check out what Cryptic studio's was going to do with the game, and I wish I could say I was pleased.  Overall the game seems like it has potential except for ONE little thing.

You Are the Captain: Command your own starship as a Federation Captain or a Klingon Warrior. Outfit it with the systems that you need to make your mark in the galaxy. Customize your ship as you see fit. Recruit, train and mold your crew into an elite force for exploration and combat.

The War on Terror.  Read those words; The.  War.  On.  Terror.  Each word has a blunt finality about it, this is not A War on Terror, it is not The Struggle Against Terror, and it is not The War on Extremists or weapon wielding maniacs, or the policy to protect people.  It is simply The War on Terror and it is propaganda.

Muslim, Jihad, Taliban, Al-Queda, we say these words and we listen to them, but we do not know what they mean and those that do have no interest in telling us.  They are words in another language that most of us don't speak, references to a culture not our own, and when we hear them, we think of what we've been carefully guided to think of for the past 7 years.  They too are propaganda.  

Before September, 7 years ago, there was a different war.  Perhaps some of you remember it; The War on Drugs.  We don't hear about the War on Drugs anymore, but not because it's been won.  There are still plenty of drug users everywhere, their dealers are still making hoards of money, and Law Officials are still struggling to shut down massive narcotic operations.  Still there is no more War on Drugs.  Why is this?  Because the War on Drugs is just words, and those words were once propaganda but are no longer.

The War in Iraq, we hear these words and they sound tired.  Some of us remember that there was a War in Iraq once before, but it isn't considered.  This is not another War in Iraq, because that other one was so short we hardly even managed to catch the exciting parts on the nightly news.  This War, the War in Iraq is not just words, it is not propaganda, it stopped being so when thousands of soldiers didn't come home, or came home crippled.  It stopped being just words when the last glimmers of the former prosperity of the 90's was submerged by market insecurity and rising fuel costs.   They stopped being just words when the Weapons of Mass Destruction, were not there... their leader was dead... but still no one came home, soldiers were still fighting and dying, but all the propaganda associated with it was gone.  

Osama Bin Laden, is a man.  He is responsible for the deaths of many American citizens, and he is in hiding.  He is not just words, but he is propaganda as well.  America's people are united in their hatred of Osama Bin Laden, his continued existence justifies enormous public expenditure towards The War on Terror.  His continued existence justifies the suspension of habeas corpus, it justifies torture, it justifies the annihilation of the Fourth Amendment Constitutional Rights, and it justifies a national suspicion and borderline hatred of the largest and fastest growing religion in the world.  Now what would happen if he were caught?

In a Democratic nation, propaganda is necessary.  It creates a unified cultural identity and gives the nation a cause.  If there is no cause than a nation will tear it's self apart squabbling over taxes and the cost of pies.  Propaganda creates the illusion of a mutual enemy which unites the people and keeps the nation functioning.  Democracy empowers any individual with a strong enough passion to change the course of his nation, but that's the problem.  A ship can only go one direction, and if there are multiple rudders all guiding it in different directions the ship won't go anywhere and something could break.  So steps must be taken to ensure that those multiple rudders are at the very least not all working against each other.  

Democracy is a form of government, it is an ideal fostered thousands of years ago by men with a dream.  "[It] is the worst form of Government, except [for] all the others" - and it is widely considered to be the best reason to be an American, or Canadian, British, French, Australian, or a number of other great nationalities.  America can be proud that it was the nation that inspired the rest of the world to begin adopting this beneficent form of government.  America lead by example and the world is a much better place for it today.  

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Carl Rove, are people, and they may yet be propaganda in the future.  They are responsible for the deaths of many American citizens, and they are not in hiding.   They were the creators of The War on Terror, they ordered the War in Iraq, and they have not captured Osama Bin Laden.  However, they have used these things to erode, undermine and shame America's greatest legacy.  The people who have been killed because of their actions are numerous, but worse is the compromise of the integrity of the nation which they have lead.  They have successfully attacked America's ideals and destroyed elements of what make America great, they have violated it's laws, and tarnished it's reputation.  And still they continue to do so every day, they tell us it is for our own good and we choose to believe them even though we know they are liars.

People say that America is being attacked, they say that it's enemies are growing stronger and that each person needs to realize this and take steps to protect their homes and families. 

I whole-heartedly agree with those words.

I'm a kid, I identify myself as a kid in the circles I travel in because my mentality is one of youth.  

Believe it or not, in real life I'm actually sorta quiet and polite.  I wouldn't say that I portray a character on this blog, but  I do present a more direct and angry side of myself in my writing.  I very much appreciate the character or person who can rant effectively.  So today I will share with you a collection of the most influential angry characters in my life.

So I just watched Jumper and I was sorta surprised, after all the horrible reviews it got I was expecting something that made Uwe Bol's movies look oscar-worthy.  l was totally ready to hate it and... I didn't.  

To all you guys who reviewed this and said it's shit I have one question; what were you expecting?  Because what the preview said you'd get was pretty much what was delivered.  Were you expecting an action movie on-par with the Matrix or something, because I sure wasn't even before I read all the reviews saying it was shit.

Let's look at what the preview promised.

Guy who can teleport: Check

Lots of exotic locales: Check

Envious playboy lifestyle making us want to buy macbooks, mercedes. and fancy clothes... Check

Hot girl:  Check

Fanatical adversary: Check

Decent Effects: Check

Plot with the Depth of a Spoon: Check

Allright, so far it delivered as promised.  It was a popcorn flick, it wasn't promising Oscar level acting or profound story, frankly I'm pleased that the world setting didn't fall apart from inconsistencies.

To me it's baffling that people could hate this movie because I remember a little flick called Spider Man.  Really it was a fairly similar movie in a lot of ways, premise was mostly the same, acting talent was the same, plot points were all the same.  But somehow Spider Man became the highest grossing movie sales in it's opening week ever, and was not beaten for nearly half a decade.  What's more, Spider Man promised something that it DID NOT deliver on, a witty hero.  Toby McGuire was the most uninspiring Spider Man there could have been.  To real Marvel fans, Spidey was always the essence of wit.  His banter in the comics was unparralelled, but in the movie he didn't deliver ONE single witty insult to the Goblin, nothing at all to make the audience laugh.  But still we ate it up and demanded more.  And more we got, 2 sequels each making more than the last.  I swear the only guy who actually played a character in those movies was the dude who played Jonah Jameson.  That guy had his character down.  But seriously guys, isn't there something wrong when VENOM delivers more  witty banter then good-ol spidey did?  That's seriously fucked.

So anyhow for all you guys who seem to be hungry to eviscerate a movie for some arbitrary reason, why not find one that actually deserves it, like the Brotherhood, or something by Uwe Bol.

Every once in a while some retarded homophobic nutjob tells me that if their government ever allows single-sex civil unions, the next step will be to allow people to marry their dogs, cats, horses, 8 year-old sisters, and potentially all 6 of them at once.  

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

This morning a friend of mine, a young mother to be sent me this article.  She didn't see it as serious, but as I read it it pissed me off.

We're planning to have a third child.
What shocks people, when we tell them, isn't the thought of hauling three kids onto a place for a vacation, or even the idea of coming home every night to a houseful of runny noses and homework assignments. What gets them is the sheer financial audacity. Raising kids today costs a fortune. Last month, the Department of Agriculture estimated that each American child costs an average of $204,060 to house, clothe, educate and entertain until the age of 18.
But to me, a family with just two kids seems minimalist, and even a bit sad. Back in the 1970s, when my husband and I were born, sprawling families were more common. My husband had two sisters and, following a Brady-Bunchy set of remarriages in my family, I wound up with seven brothers, real and step. I've always fantasized about creating a "Meet Me in St. Louis"-style household of my own, with children constantly underfoot and enough relatives around to skip to my lou en masse.
And yet nowadays, people seem aghast if a couple wants more than two children. When Elana Sigall, a 43-year-old attorney in Brooklyn, was pregnant with her third, people came up to her constantly, she said, to admonish her: "You've got a boy and a girl already. Why don't you just leave it alone?"
What's worse, the desire to have another child opens one up to charges of elitism and status consciousness. In many major U.S. cities and their suburbs -- especially New York, where I live -- having three or more children has now come to seem like an ostentatious display of good fortune, akin to owning a pied-à-terre in Paris. The family of five has become "deluxe." Last year, novelist Molly Jong-Fast mused in the New York Observer, "Are people having four or five children just because they can? Because they feel that it shows their wealth and status? In a world where the young rich use their $13,000 Birkin bags as diaper bags, one has to wonder."
We not only wonder, we marvel, we get jealous, we gawk. "Having three kids in the city is a way of showing off, absolutely," says Elisabeth Egan, who, like many families she knows, moved out of New York to the suburbs of Montclair, N.J., to manage the feat. "A third child in the city is definitely a luxury good."

Normally I like my job, but it's days like this that I want to tell the world to just fuck right off and let me go home.

On Sunday night I set forth out into the wilderness for a ONE DAY job out here.  It's Wednesday night right now and at this point I'm quite certain the job will take "just one more day" til the end of eternity.  It's like groundhog day, only without nearly as many cute girls to seduce and fresh underwear every morning.

Normally I understand and expect these things as a fact of life out in Ojay, it's called the Ojay triangle for a reason after all, but tomorrow I've got a doctor's appointment I've rescheduled once allready and he's supposed to go over some bloodwork I went for TWO MONTHS ago.  I swear, if I have 5 months to live and I've waisted 3 of them working before I find out, I'm going to be quite pissed.

Speaking of dying, I very nearly did today.  It would have been wonderfully exciting if I had a sense of adventure regarding 300 foot cliffs and tumbling off them, but sadly they don't let me do drugs out here so the appeal is conspicuously absent.  But instead of tumbling over the 300 foot drop into the river I decided to slide my tractionless vehicle into the other ditch where it now rests on a fluffy bed of snow and saplings which probably haven't even done enough damage to warrant the incedent report I'm going to have to write up tomorrow. 

Did I mention that I'm the luckiest fucker alive?  Because I'm pretty sure I have before... several times actually... and  it's true, luck had EVERYTHING to do with this one, I had no traction whatsoever on a 28% hill where I slid AROUND the death drop to land in the only soft ditch there is on the entire hill, I tell you, my guardian angel deserves one mind blowing blowjob from his secretary after that good work.

So anyhow, tomorrow morning they pull my disobedient truck out of it's cozy ditch and I'll go back to site for ONE MORE DAY, and I'll try not to act too suprised when they don't let me leave afterwards. 

So anyhow, MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone.

This is the real damage that governments and the corporations they're in bed with cause. 

"Effective Jan. 1, dairies selling milk in Pennsylvania, the nation's fifth-largest dairy state, will be banned from advertising on milk containers that their product comes from cows that have never been treated with rBST, or recombinant bovine somatotropin."

Monsanto spokesman Michael Doane said the hormone-free label "implies to consumers, who may or may not be informed on these issues, that there's a health-and-safety difference between these two milks, that there's 'good' milk and 'bad' milk, and we know that's not the case."

rBST is banned in Canada thank god, but what really gets my hackles up is that this is indicitive of a larger more encompassing problem in North America today.  Freedom of information has been completely replaced.  This is why I'm against the AMPTP, the big five control too much information and they spoon feed us what they want to.  This story about how the media moguls have been using Variety to try and sabotage the WGA is an example of this. 

Previous: When the strike is over, and one day far into the future that will be true, media critics may have a field day dissecting the slanted coverage and total fabrications which Variety is reporting in these early days of the strike. But for now, I'll do it. How much longer is this going to be allowed to continue by parent company Reed Business? The trade's Jason Blairs -- oh, excuse me, Josef Adalian and Dave McNary -- keep inventing stories which purport to show that less than 2 weeks into the strike wither the WGA's resolve is withering, and/or its writers are going back to work, and/or even its late show iconic hosts are going to double-cross their teams of scribes. Just one problem: those stories are either totally fabricated or highly exaggerated, made worse by headlines which are not borne out by the content of the articles. The latest is Variety's bullshit article today that the late night hosts may be going back to work after Thanksgiving while their teams of writers walk the picket lines. I guarantee you this is not the case and no plans are underway. My info is that NBC is putting heat on Conan O'Brien to come back earlier than anyone but he's resisting. I hear no one is telling Dave or Jay or Craig what to do, and they're not even thinking about it. And I know that Jon Stewart is saying privately that he won't even consider coming back until 2008 at the earliest. At the same time, the AMPTP keeps taking out expensive full-page ads in Variety to state its case -- as if the trade's editorial pages aren't doing a ridiculously good job of that already. I, for one, am perplexed but also sad to see the day-by-day destruction of Variety's credibility and trust (well, as much as a trade which has always been in the pocket of the Industry can engender...)

Frankly I'm suprised they're resorting to such despicable tactics against a group that makes their living showing the public who the "good guy's" and "bad guys" are.  Do the corporations really think they can beat professional writers in a PR war by publishing lies?  Do they think writers forget how to use keyboards when they're on strike?

I feel that my opinion resonates these days.  We want to be informed about the bad too.  The diefication of Al Gore and his Inconvenient Truth documentary is proving this.  But do we really want to know all the gory details? (No pun intended.)  Seth Godin thinks so.  He recently posted this blog making his point.

A different technique is starting to gain traction, though. Working to reveal instead of conceal. My fish monger in Grand Central has started placing signs in front of each fish. They describe exactly where the fish came from, whether it's healthy and how endangered it is. You'll never see fine print saying "previously frozen." They don't have any fine print. The first few times you visit the stand, it's actually off putting. It takes the romance and pleasure out of buying the fish, because you realize that there's a cost to it. The meat guy across the way doesn't have pictures of cows being slaughtered, does he?

But after a while, because the information is out there, because smart fish buyers already know some fish is endangered, the signs give you power. They allow you to make smart choices. They send a message to the customer about the honesty and intent of the seller. They build trust.

When people find out that the wool is being pulled over their eyes they get MAD!  And it's getting harder to keep the truth covered, and I'm proud to say I'm a part of that.