Questioning evolution
This is not a topic I would usually dignify with a post. I’d usually sum up the debate by posting a witty video from my beloved YouTube nova intelligentsia, like this one by cdk007:
However, I stumbled across a recent debate between Dr. PZ Myers and Dr. Geoffrey Simmons that I thought nicely illustrates the gap in scientific understanding between a real biologist and a doubter of evolution.
There isn’t only a gap in scientific understanding but also a gap in self-knowledge exhibited by these two camps. It takes a particular sort of arrogance to assume that because one does not understand a theory, that makes the theory false. Biology students would not get away speaking to Dr. Myers the way Dr. Simmons challenges him. It is insulting that anyone would step into the scientific arena, stake out a private little area, and declare it free from mainstream science. I might as well deny Pythagoras’ theorem and by political influence force a mathematician to debate its validity.
Finding real people in Europe
The French are perfect. They swan around in interesting yet subtle clothes, choosing each word as though they were selecting chocolates. The women are all perched on a line between gorgeous and plain, one you only find at fashion shows and in France; you can’t stop looking at them, if only to decide on which side they fall. They have brilliant white teeth and fluid voices. They are impervious to tobacco, which they all consume incessantly. The men manage to look brooding and intelligent even when there isn’t anything going on upstairs.
The English are addicted to drudgery. Of course they have to get away from it sometimes, and there are days when they long for sunshine and cheap goods, but take an Englishman away from his country permanently and he’ll begin to pine for something to be sarcastic about. A big mug of tea is just inappropriate when one always gets to work on time, there aren’t any forms to fill out, the birds are chirping merrily and one’s children come home from school tanned and well-nourished. Foreigners, to an Englishman, are always braggarts, allowed to appear self-serving and proud, allowed to have faults rather than gripe about imaginary ones to appear modest.
The only real people in Europe are Spaniards. They’ve all got problems, which are all out in the open, but it’s okay, because everyone has the exact same problems. The prices in Galicia are about right; they’re far too expensive for Galicians, but at least they’re reasonable for everyone else. There are still real cafeterias, run by real people, where the food is made for you when you order it, or at least every morning before opening time. You can expect Spaniards to be self-serving, and they’re usually honest about it, but even when they try to pretend that they’re not it’s painfully obvious. They’re unabashedly proud of themselves. Just because you have more money and a better education and are better looking than they are does not make you better, what, do you think you’re better than me? Huh? You think I’m not worth talking to? Huh? Say it to my face. Gilipollas.
I hate women
I was born in a year that I now think of as the beginning of the end. After my birth year a new generation of women was spawned.
My childhood is so close to the core of me that I can’t dissect it objectively. I can’t ever hope to conclude anything about the beginning, because my oldest memories are not dry, but perfectly intact, complete with smells, the mouthfeel of foods I ate fifteen years ago, music, snapshots of desert through an open car window. They’re hubs through which everything else connects.
Cosmopolitan tells us, “Next time your guy’s mouth is agape because some chick with her cups running over saunters by, slap his butt and say, “Nice tits, huh, babe?” “
A girl for the Harvard Crimson confesses, “Cosmo is not the glamour puss monthly I had previously thought, but a magazine for tragic women.” She goes on to write, “In Cosmo girl world, a woman’s existence revolves around fear that her man is going to leave her and anxiety over how to keep him. Such a state could not possibly make a woman happy,” that “(t)his is part of the irony of Cosmo: It’s exactly the sort of publication the conservative matriarchs of my family shun, and yet the magazine itself reinforces some of those old-fashioned values.”
She is wrong. She fails to see what women fail to see.
A young man, who had never known women of an earlier era closely enough to have hope, flew into a rage upon stumbling across a Facebook group named, “WANTED: Knight, White Horse, Shining Armor a MUST.“
He exclaimed that women think they deserve love and that they have intrinsic worth. I replied that there is a culture of self-worth. Everyone is intelligent, worthy and righteous. It is their right to be considered as such. They will be deeply offended if that right is denied. Pedophiles have discussions about the moral righteousness of pederasty.
In the shallows, it is as the Harvard girl says. Women cannot be empowered if they spend their time manhunting.
Women are told to be strong and confident and better than everyone else. They are told that men are weaker than they, that men will always philander, and that women are responsible for keeping their men. They are told to accept their man’s natural inclination to wander, but not to accept wandering. They are told that the man they are dating is “their man”.
It is their fault for believing this.
Most modern feminists, like our girl from Harvard, don’t realise that they are assuming the same flawed premise as the girls who read Cosmo. The results are only different because Cosmo girls have deep doubts, and are searching for a soothing balm, perhaps a solution.
This is my answer: it is not a basic human right to be loved in a romantic relationship. It is not a basic human right to be considered intelligent, or moral, or sexy.
Women dress like whores to be certain of their marketability, but they become unkind, petty, hard-hearted, because things must go their way, otherwise they are being oppressed.
I am reminded of a post-vaccination rash when I consider the mind of a woman. We were inoculated against the cruelty of the stronger sex. Now, every man is an object of both their desire and their hatred.
Pause. Consider your assumptions.
Men have their own dreams. Princes on white horses are not objects that every woman has a right to obtain. Only the rarest, only the best of women, said the young man to me, find princes on white horses.
This is how I roll
The time has come to wax lyrical on my pet subject since I got my PS2:
Christ, do I love this game. Irrationally, I suppose, because there’s no gore, no scares, no zombies, no special powers, no big swords, no intricate plot, no crowbar, no secret rooms or passages, no puzzles, none of the things I thought I required in a game.
The thing is, the Katamari series only contain game elements that are found in the Katamari series. There is just no overlap between other games, none at all. Remember that point in your life when you accepted that monsters carried around gigantic swords, grenades, and lots of money in humongous invisible pockets? And that things like “wreath of daisies” plus “pretty stone” plus “iron spear” could be made into “Death Lance of Hades”? Ordinary items were not just ordinary items, they were extremely hard to find and had weird powers. Why, you plead with your character, can’t you just bend down and pick the bloody daisies yourself?
The Katamari series is resplendent with everyday objects. Its charm comes from mixing things (and here I refer to “We Love Katamari”) like flying cowbears with vending machines, tires, pancakes, bushes, ramen bowls: the flotsam and jetsam of modern life.
What’s even better is that objects you never thought you could pick up can be picked up, like islands and streets and buildings – what was just scenery five minutes ago. I guess the concept taps into some primordial hoarding instinct in my case, but I get so much glee from sweeping down a street and leaving nothing behind, and then coming back a few minutes later for the street.
There are no health bars, and no enemies, and there’s never any urgency in the music, so while doing well at each level is actually really difficult, playing the game is never very stressful. Even though Katamari is guaranteed to be a novel experience if you’ve never played it before, the interface and game physics are instinctive, so people looking to casually play don’t have to put up with a learning curve or memorize button combos, but the game is designed to pull you in; just passing the levels isn’t good enough.
These are games you can beat in a day, but as the plotline is not even the icing on the cake but more like the decorative edible flowers on the icing on the cake, beating them isn’t a big deal. I still haven’t finished doing everything in “We Love Katamari” yet, because that requires knowing all the maps pretty much by heart, which would take weeks and weeks of obsessive playing.
9.8/10
The character design is perfect, the music is perfect, the concept is perfect, the challenges are imaginative, and really the only complaint I have is that the games never have enough levels.
Final Fantasy X : gaming for deaf and lazy people
The visual quality, it has to be said, is bloody marvellous – a good move on Squaresoft’s part, considering just how many hours you spend watching clips in this game, a game that doesn’t have “levels” so much as “bits between clips”. There are two sorts: realtime rendered clips, and videos-proper that must have taken inordinate and frustrating amounts of time to make. The latter, I have to admit, are impressively detailed (considering the game’s release date), but really have almost nothing to do visually with the in-game characters. Nevermind that Yuna looks almost sweet in the realtime clips: in the videos she’s a squinty-eyed pig who looks like someone bashed her face in with a board. Tidus looks disturbingly like an ex-boyfriend of mine, and also like a girl, but in realtime he’s a white middle-class surfer kid.
Unfortunately, my favourite part of the visuals, and probably the game, has nothing to do with the endless popcorn breaks; the monsters, when waiting their turn to fight, do weirdly realistic and well-choreographed little dances. Really, the amount of fighting and side-questing in this Final Fantasy is roughly the same as the amount required to beat “Advent Children”, if you count “ordering a pizza” and “quarrelling over the last buffalo wing” the same as “side-questing” and “fighting”.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy playing this game, when I can actually play (besides enduring the videos, I have to contend for the right to be P1, because my Pepto-Bismol pink PS2 is co-owned) – unless of course the characters are speaking. Sadly, they spend a lot of the game nattering, and even have to spout “witty” one-liners in the midst of battle. I suppose it wouldn’t be as terrible in Japanese, but I’m currently playing a French version with English voices. Instead of dubbing different versions for each language, or just keeping it all in Japanese for everybody, or even making an English language version for the pesky American market and letting everyone else hear the original under their subtitles, they decided that for some reason the French would be happy with a twice-translated game.
The dubbing, by the way, is awful. None of the characters’ lips conform to any known laws of articulatory phonetics. About twenty percent of spoken Japanese consists of expressive and meaningful noises that are not words, and can really only be translated into English by using words, but the game carries on the industry’s annoying tradition of forcing American voice actors to imitate those noises, which sound out of place and unfamiliar in their throats; the effect is rather similar to an obsessive white anime fan making the “V” symbol in a photograph.
Let’s move smoothly over the script and pass on to more pleasant things. The music, for example, is just marvellous, so I suppose if you’re after the most enjoyment from this game, you don’t actually have to be deaf, just quick on the “Mute” button. The costume design isn’t too ridiculous (high praise for an RPG), and neither is the hair, unless you count Seymour, but counting Seymour is like that old maths joke where a rat in the middle of 9 cats makes each cat one-tenth rat on average; I’m not going to touch Seymour’s hair design with a ten foot pole (not that I would ever need a ten foot pole to touch that hair from anywhere else in the known universe). Yes, Tidus’ right trouser leg is made of egg crates and wrought-iron, and Lulu seems to be aiming for Romantic Goth Rastafarian Beachcomber with that whole ivory lace, skirt-of-belts and beaded cornrow combo, but whatever.
I swear, I enjoy playing this game. I’m not horribly bothered by the weird character management; I prefer the classic approach, but it’s refreshing not to have to obsessively change armours for once. I love the frustrating temples. The chocobos and cactuars are adorable. The scenery is unobtrusive, but pretty. The weapons have really cool power-ups. There is not a single thing wrong with Rikku (unless you actually want to use her). Tidus’ dad angst doesn’t take over the entire game, Auron doesn’t go all softie at any point, Wakka eventually stops whining, and best of all, Kimhari belongs to a race of gigantic mountain cats all voiced by Arnold Schwartzenegger.
7/10
(6/10 without the music)
Edith (a snippet of unused dialogue)
I am behind. I have caught the flu. In cases such as these, unloved and lonely paragraphs have their chance to shine – or at least fill the void.
[We open on Edith and Amy, drinking coffee.]
Edith: So I met this guy, when I was out, you know, at the club.
Amy: Oh yeah right, at the club, okay, I told you that it would be better if you got out of the house.
[While Amy is talking, we see a club, dancers flailing, and a man zooms into view. He’s handsome; his dark-brown hair is slicked back. He looks like a 1950’s clothing model. He smiles at the camera, and puts a dark wooden pipe in his mouth. He’s wearing a dark sports jacket and pants, and a white button-down shirt, and nice shiny shoes. There’s a shuddering, as Amy changes her obviously socially-conditioned and outdated image for a more modern one. The man grows tight jeans, a stylish printed t-shirt, long wavy hair, some metrosexual shoes. He’s now holding an ipod. His smile wavers for a minute, as Amy, on second thought, removes the ipod. The entire tableau vanishes jarringly when Edith speaks again.]
Edith: Yeah well, he cheated on me.
Amy: He what?
Edith: Did you hear me? He cheated?
Amy: I heard, I heard. He what?
Edith: He cheated on me.
Amy: Yeah okay, okay, he cheated on you. With who?
Edith: It’s not with who, it’s with whom, and it was with his dog-walker.
Amy: His what?
Edith: His –
Amy: Yeah I heard you. He has to be gay.
Edith: She was rubbing down his bulldog.
Amy: That’s a disgusting image, Edith, jesus I can’t believe you’d tell me the details of the – oh.
Edith (begins speaking during the word “jesus”): He has a dog, okay, a bulldog, she’s a dog-walker, okay, she gets extra money for grooming the dogs, and they started going at it while she was rubbing down his bulldog.
Amy: So, tell me the details…
Edith: Oh for crying out, I don’t know, their eyes met over the tufts of dander gently swirling in the air.
Amy: So how long were you together?
Edith: Together?
Amy: An item.
Edith: Uh…
Amy: You weren’t, were you. You just had sex with him and that’s it, right?
Edith: Well, we…
Amy: Am I right?
Edith: No. Actually. We were an item, at least, until I told him we weren’t. You know that problem I have?
Amy: With the…?
Edith: Yeah.
Amy: (pause) You really have to see a shrink for that.
Edith: How do I even know I’m doing it? I don’t know I’m doing it, how am I supposed to fix it?
Amy: How many boyfriends, Edith?
Edith: I don’t know, I don’t remember.
Amy: How many, Edith?
Edith: Five.
Amy: Five boyfriends since Mark and a lot of things that would be at least pocket change if not a steady income and every single one you have to tell them that they’re badly equipped when you orgasm, for god’s sake you have serious problems.
Edith: He couldn’t accept it, so I had to break up with him and then he cheated on me with the dog walker. The dog walker.
Amy: What kind of floozie gets a job as a dog walker, anyway?
Edith: Well, she’s…
Amy: Blonde and big busted, and wears frosted pink lipstick and… [As Amy speaks, an image of the woman quickly forms, and flirts with the camera.]
Edith: …a Yale graduate. [The image disappears with the visual equivalent of a “poof”.] She’s all porky and frizzy-haired, but he said she talks to him about Thomas Mann.
Amy: You did your thesis on Thomas Mann.
Edith: I know, I know, but she has some sort of “real-life insight”.
Amy: On Thomas Mann. What is she, seventy years old and German?
Edith: I guess it’s the pederasty, Amy.
Amy: Hang on, I’m getting more sugar for this. It’s so bitter. [She gets up and begins to walk away, and we hear the rest of the line from off-screen.]They probably never wash out the machine and there are years of coffee swirling around in my cup.
[As soon is Amy is out of her visual range, whatever that may be, Edith’s phone rings. She places it on the table, and stirs her coffee, watching it dance around and buzz annoyingly.]
