Catharsis - Manhunt is the new Child's Play

Yet again, popular culture is becoming the victim of an ill-informed and misdirected grief.

The tragic, violent, theft-motivated murder of 14 year old Stefan Pakeerah by 17 year old Warren Leblanc, and the subsequent media reaction, are covered here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/3936597.stm and here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/3934277.stm

Now, there's not a lot about this story that I don't find infuriating... and actually, that's one thing that I find most distressing about stories like this: the initial sympathy one feels for the likes of Stefan Pakeerah or Leah Betts quickly gets undercut, overwhelmed and completely agenda-swamped by their obviously upset parents, and it becomes difficult not to resent the deceased offspring for the acting out of their parents. And any anger one feels becomes coloured by a peculiar feeling of guilt, because it's completely understandable that a parent that has lost a child will start to cast about for reasons, scapegoats and revenge.

Which is why I'm not going to let myself get drawn on all the things that I feel need saying about this, except to make these few points.

1: Computer games didn't invent the concept of violent murder. In fact, society did. The entertainment industry works with what it knows will appeal, and it's a reflection of society that these themes are intriguing to people, and that parents allow their children access to such artifacts.

2: Manhunt is an easy target, and it's typical that it has been attacked, while games like Metal Gear Solid or Tomb Raider have been left alone. Killing is killing... the only difference in Manhunt is that it doesn't provide any sort of moral cushion for the player. Very few parent groups complained about Indiana Jones, because he is obviously on the side of the angels, and the germans are obviously on the side of evil. In some ways, Manhunt is almost commendable, in it's honest and disquieting portrayal of killing.

3: I've played Manhunt through, and recently completed both GTA 3 and Vice City, and I haven't thrown a punch in my life, let alone murdered anyone. And it's not that I'm without rage... I doubt many people are. If anything, the games provide a safe outlet for negative feeling that otherwise might fester and boil over. Often the scariest people, the most vicious killers, have some element of emotional repression in their lives from very early on. It's not like men get to go out and hunt wild animals with their bare hands much any more.

4: If Manhunt rewards bloody murder, it also rewards stealth and covering one's tracks. This isn't what happened in the case in question, so it's difficult to see much connection between incident and game beyond the "grass is green, this chair is green, therefore this chair must be made of grass" variety.

5: I seem to have been saying this periodically since about the age of fifteen, when Michael Ryan shot up Hungerford and Johnny Rambo got the blame, but if someone doesn't know that killing people is objectionable behaviour, then there's something a lot more worrying going on than what tv they are watching or what games they are playing. And if those people are only kids, or teenagers, there's something wrong with the morality lessons they're learning (or not learning) at home and school. In other words, parents need to start taking responsibility for their kids, and leave the rest of us, happily and non-violently playing nasty ass games in the privacy of their own home, out of it.

You can probably see the restraint I'm having to show, through the cracks in those paragraphs. I just don't understand how people can so comfortably and quickly become Daily Mail following cretins. To me, it's like watching Edward Scissorhands in a crowded cinema, and suddenly realising that the audience around me is rooting for the rabid suburban townfolk.

Main Stream - A Clean Dozen Squeaking Voices

Anymore, I don't know what my keyboard is for.

The bitch is back home with her one day old litter, and my bitch, her mother, holding court with her. I spent the whole of Sunday experiencing the shock and awe of puppy-birth, again and again, plop after squelch after panic after triumph. Between 7:15 AM and probably around 6:30 PM, twelve tiny new dalmations came into the world.

I have to say, I'm pretty amazed they all fit in our little girl's gut, even though she's been the size of a cow for the last few weeks. They're already showing her impatient, exploratory streak, while also reflecting their father in size and gawkiness (although it's difficult to tell at this stage if they're dumb because of him, or just because puppies kind of have an innate dumbness).

The pups are all very beautiful and cute, but it's kind of difficult to reconcile that and the peculiar pride and serenity on our girl's face with the sheer surreality of the whole birth experience. It's difficult to think of the thing as a miracle or blessed event when you now know what it feels like to pull a sac of fluid and waste out of your family pet. When you've had your fingers inside your best friend, trying to gently tease out their slippery offspring, the ineffable glory of nature is the last thing on your mind.

But still, it's pretty cool.

So you can imagine exactly how important sitting at work, pretending to be not too dramatically skiving, seems to be at the moment. It just serves to highlight the fact that I've been sitting at a meaningless desk, pretending to be doing pointless, soul destroying work, while actually surfing drivel-space, for weeks now. I tried to do my job way back when, and was told to wait, and now it's too late to get anything done until September when the lecturers and students come back. I just want to be home, playing through GTA Vice City and sitting with mah bitches, and listening in rapture to the dozen squeakers in the other room, and, of course, sleeping. Lots.

There's more to be said on the redundance of so much employment, especially where I work now, but it's for a day when I feel less despondent and morose, I think.

Think of the puppies... think of the puppies...

Main Stream - Conference Blues

The last week has been one of workplace apathy, lit with occasional flashes of rage-filled job frustration, and as such hasn't lent itself to rational commentary. Highlights were an incompetently handled and frankly insulting back-to-work interview with the director in charge of my area, and then, yesterday, the mind-numbing and almost universally upsetting staff conference.

The college that employs me holds these staff conferences ever few months... attendance is compulsory for all staff, and the opener to each one is a presentation presided over by the principal of the college... a sort of state of the nation speech, I suppose. This is followed by a return to the college campus, where we split off into groups and have annoying team-building or training sessions that have been designed by people who have no clue what any of the staff below manager level actually do or need training in, and who haven't had to work in a team since they were at college themselves.

These conference days normally bore half of the staff, and upset the other half... bearing in mind that although support and academic staff have very different jobs and needs, we all have the same "conference" experience.

Rather skillfully, and it's difficult to imagine this hasn't been what they've been striving for all along, the Principal and Directors managed to put together a package that either angered or demoralised everyone in the organisation. I don't know how they managed it, as they tend to catastrophically fail at pretty much everything else they turn their hand to, but they managed it yesterday.

The plus side, though, is that I forgot my tablets (beta-blockers), so it seemed like as good a time as any to stop taking them. Okay, I felt sick for most of the day, but when the conference was over, no tablets meant no more alcohol abstinence, and I fell off the wagon in quite a spectacular way, as did my missus, and all of our colleagues in attendance. After the trials of the day, everyone felt the need to get pissed off their heads. It made for a fun night.

Predictably, today was a muted affair, between the general depression that the conference caused, and the drink-specific malaise.

But now I'm home, with my virus addled computer, my job application busy lady, and our very very pregnant dog. The puppies are big enough now that you can see them moving really clearly, and it's difficult not to be at once awed and kinda creeped out. Screw "miracle", the easiest word to describe what's happening to our lovely doggy daughter is parasitic invasion. Still, she seems pretty happy.

Big Brother seems to be on, and I'm supposed to have got a cup of tea by now, so I must away.

Web Class - On Enemas

"He instinctively knew he had just passed the marble he had swallowed as a five-year-old; the small coloured sphere - "I think it was a bluey" - had lodged in his colon for 22 years. His nonchalance was understandable."

A sparkly read. Not much more that I can say about this, to be honest. Very nicely written piece, not to be read before eating!

Web Class - Emoticons Are Fun!

If you are a right thinking human of sane proportions, or even one of those freakish crazy types with elongated torsos, legs or arms, you should enjoy Something Awful.

If you don't enjoy Something Awful, then there's a good chance it has just gone over your head.
Don't feel bad. If everyone got to be of superior stock, then being "a cut above" would quickly get devalued, and we would all become one bland grey mass of similarity. Your inability to appreciate clever-yet-evil humour helps promote diversity.

Today, a new update about the impending emoticon race war was posted at Something Awful which, sadly, wasn't as funny as expected. The good news is, the reason it wasn't so funny was that it didn't measure up that well to the previous articles about emoticons "Your Eyes Are Like A Sideways Colon" and "The Passion Of The Emoticon" and the GREAT news about that is that it reminded me to direct anybody reading this towards those two articles.

The former has this to offer:

"I soon learned that even though the Internet was a cold and distant apparatus designed to isolate people and destroy them systematically, it was also capable of displaying "emoticons," which put little graphic faces on the feelings of the amorphous blobs populating this new digital universe."

While the latter sets the world alight with statements like:

"But more importantly, there are thousands of emoticons, far more than I hinted at or reviewed. In an event so rare that it's probably about as common as a polar bear giving birth to a lobster made out of pure titanium, that article also garnered some positive feedback and requests for more"

Go and look. Tell me on your return that you don't now believe emoticons are fun.

Catharsis - Wife Swap

Since last night I've had something stuck at the front of my brain, and I can't shift it. This wouldn't be a problem if it was some revolutionary new idea or patentable concept, such as a new pizza topping combination that could change the political face of the planet, or a cure for the common person, but sadly, it's much more mundane...

It's actually something that someone called Shaz said on the social-studies-as-light-entertainment-TV train-wreck that is Channel 4's Wife Swap. There are a lot of reasons why me watching this show is a bad idea, not least because annoying people annoy me at a basic level, and the sort of annoying people who sign up to be the subject of "reality" tv shows annoy me at a slightly more complicated level, but I always end up drifting around the doorway of the living room when my partner watches it, and often also find myself shouting at the television.

Now, Shaz was a perfect example of everything I hate about these people, being one of the "loud, ignorant and at the same time pretentious" breed (how come those three things often go together?) but the thing that stuck in my head wasn't her hypocrisy, her intolerance of others, or the fact that she has, like all good parents, managed to transfer ALL of her failings and inadequacies onto her offspring. No, it was her use of an acronym that JUST MADE NO SENSE that has perplexed and infuriated me.

I'm barely restraining myself from ranting about my hatred of acronym-fever... suffice to say that I find this bastard-twin-sister to the evil bitch of manager-speak (wet nurses to the runt baby of text/net-speak that they are) a little offensive, especially used as it so often is as a shortcut to "depth" of character. Bearing that in mind, imagine how I feel when someone uses one that, well, for god's sake, DOESN'T EVEN MAKE ANY SENSE!

So when this intellectual midget is berating her swap-partners, and starts on the acronyms, picture my horror. And when she is told to "get a life", and she shouts "I've got a life... My life is full and exciting! That's what the word means: Life Is Full and Exciting. L-I-F-E!" think about the turmoil my head was suddenly in, and still is now.

Life Is Full and Exciting? That's where the word "Life" comes from? Quite aside from the fact that I didn't think proper words like "life" and apparently "dull" found their origins in acronyms (I'd always vaguely assumed most of them either came out of either ancient Greece, antique France, and Latinia, where Latin comes from) and would be using them a lot less if I had done...

"Life" means "Life Is Full and Exciting"? How does that work? If that's what it means, what does the word "Life" in the expanded acronym signify? I can only assume it means "Life Is Full and Exciting", in which case that means that the word "Life" actually means "Life is full and exciting is full and exciting". But then, of course, it doesn't. It actually means "Life is full and exciting is full and exciting is full and exciting" and so on, and so forth, like mad cats stretching off into infinity.

It does my head in that someone would say something so stupid, and think they were so clever for saying it.

Having said that, I shouldn't be so surprised. This is the same woman who said:

"I learned how to live with false people in MFI buildings. They are narrow-minded, self-centred, self-obsessed living in a plastic world."

She seems to be operating under the impression that the house she lived in for two weeks was:
a) made entirely of plastic and b) bought at MFI.

And she says "they don't know anything about the real world"! Cripes. I want to visit her real world. The MFI store there sounds GREAT!

I shouldn't mock. The woman does "...work 55 hours a week and ... make a difference." and I could never comfortably say that about myself. Maybe I should allow her acronyms.

Brain Fart - Spell Check Oddity

For some reason, blogger.com's spell checker doesn't have the word "Blog" in it. Which seems odd to me.

Signed up to the main stream

So anyway, I've finally succumbed to the blog thing, as my attempts to sort out a regular journal update for my website just haven't worked out (laziness, really) and I think it'll be a useful place to make notes, get odd little prose doodles out of my head, and maybe excite some stimulation in my atrophied creative brain bits.

Feel free to comment... although I'd be arrogant to expect anyone to read at least at the beginning... I don't really get "blog" culture, so the idea of rooting through the thousands of online journals available to read the first hesitant stumblings of myself before I've even written much feels like quite a commitment of effort to expect of web-surfers.

I'm not even sure if that last sentence works as anything more than an obfuscating, run-on mess... See? See? Stumblings... I told you.

If you've got five minutes, check out Nix Sight and see if you like the cut of my jib. Whatever the hell that means.