klepo-literacy

I have an uncomfortable feeling that I'm unconsciously copying someone else's writing style, but I'll be buggered if I can figure out who. It's a weird feeling.

Anyway, my blogger bile has subsided somewhat, so today no rants, just links:

Firstly, Brain Stab pointed me all the way to David Wong's Pointless Waste of Time. All I can say is: why didn't find this link when I was at work this morning?I'm so inspired by this site I'm going to give you links to 4 articles, and extracts.

First up, Five Reasons Why Jack Thompson is Right. You don't know who Jack Thompson is? Shame on you. Wikipedia says "John Bruce 'Jack' Thompson (born July 23, 1950) is a Miami, Florida-based attorney at law often cited in the media for his conservative views on the effects of obscenity and violence in popular media.". Yup, he's the kind of guy that 25 years ago would have been claiming that backward messages on songs played forwards make otherwise normally suicidally depressed teenagers blow their brains out. In other words, he's a great hairy steaming mound of cock. But PWoT gives him a good hearing. And provides a graph showing that violent crime has dropped since the advent of the First Person Shooter game. Extract:

If you can successfully hold Rock Star Games responsible when some kid shoots a policeman, then you've got to hold a thousand hack authors responsible when a serial killer turns up. Jack likes to say the games are "training" the kids to kill, but no video game gets as instructive and detailed about how to commit the crime as the paperbacks at your local Wal-Mart.

Next up, The Great Internet Porn-Off: How long can you porn-surfers go without your cyber-booty fix? 100 of them decided to find out. Well, the title says it all, really, and helpfully he tells you which links not to click, which I think is some kind of evil psychological test. Extract:

The Ten Steps to Porn Addiction: Where are you?

1. You find yourself using a great deal of porn;
2. You often look at porn rather than other things that are not porn;
3. You call in sick to work so you can look at porn;
4. You look at porn while at work;
5. You apply for and take a job where looking at porn is a requirement;
6. You hide your porn habit from your friends and family;
7. You no longer feel the need to hide your porn habit from friends and family;
8. You find yourself reading porn at a funeral;
9. You read porn at the funeral of a man whom you killed for his porn;
10. You have paid for internet porn.

C'mon, how many of us haven't done number 9?

Penultimately, A World of Warcraft World. Or why virtual worlds will take over and why it's a good thing (and after finishing Collapse I'm inclined to agree). Extract:

The people are ripe for it. You've heard stories about how ticket sales are plummeting at movie theaters, in favor of home DVD viewing. Why? Why do so many people want to work from home now? Because we're sick of having to sit with other people. We want that extra layer of control that meat interaction will never give us. We want a world without the unpredictability of real, unrestrained humanity ...Humans got fed up with this world, and so we invented a new one. I suspect some theologian will come forward in the future to suggest that, in fact, our world was created in the same way. The gods got sick of their boring spiritual realm and made a more exciting, physical one to replace it.

Lastly, The Ultimate War Sim. If you're an RTS veteran you'll love it. If you don't know what RTS stands for, you probably shouldn't be on the internet, let alone breeding. Extract:

I want a super-cool custom weapons lab where I can design mech armor for my infantry with wicked acid-tipped missiles and guns that shoot spiders. Then I want to watch as a hundred men are cooked alive in the desert because of a defect in the internal air conditioning units that shorted due to condensation in the fusion coils and insufficient insulation in the wiring units bypassing the laser reactor core, due to the contractor's decision to use over-the-counter components instead of the military-grade ones mandated in Subsection 12:94A, Paragraph B of the Military Weapons Platform Procurement Act of 3013, a document that is 14,724 pages long and contains some 81,301 loopholes that allow congressmen to bypass component testing and funnel lucrative military contracts to cut-rate suppliers from their home districts at the peak of every election cycle ... beating the game will depend on how I play to Ivy League politicians who think a gun is something you hang over your mantlepiece to be occasionally dusted by the maid in your Connecticut Summer home.

On with the show ... stolen from The Giraffe Watches You, is a link to this - Top Thirty Facts about Chuck Norris. Oh yeah. Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in. You should probably look at it after reading some Ruthless Reviews reviews.

Right, so that's the funny stuff. But it's not all gas and giggles folks. And since my blog stats tell me you guys prefer rants about abortion to rants about religion by 2:1, then you should really go and read Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty's Nothing better for your mental health than a forced pregnancy and tigtogblog's We knew it was bad for you, see!?!.

Both make some pretty damn cogent arguments, and, unlike me, manage not ruin it by saying gratuitiously saying "fuck" repeatly, although CBTP slips a little by saying "fuckers". Never mind, we forgive you. Extract from tigtogblog:

The causative link explaining the trend found by Fergusson et al may well be more to do with the not unreasonable supposition that women prone to varying degrees of mental instability are more likely to have an unplanned pregancy, and therefore are more likely to have an abortion than their more neurotypical peers. This is however merely an hypothesis to be tested: the answer could be something else entirely. We simply don't have enough data examined thoroughly enough yet to know.

Oh course, the mean and petty little pCms have started popping out of their fetid rabbit holes all caked in decaying SPUC and claimed that this is, and I quote, "clear evidence" that abortion is Satan's Sockpuppet (or something, I must admit I kinda tuned out). Which just goes to show that the 'm' in pseudo-Christian moron isn't there for pretty christmas-tree decoration.

I'd say that they were being deliberately dishonest, but honestly, I just don't think that they are that smart.