Aargh! Blogz!

01:28 am ~ Sep. 2009 ~ Week of 09/14/09

I have, for my entire life, and some time before that, had parents. Perfect parents? Perhaps not, but pretty damned good ones, definitely. I love my parents, and they love me (so far as I'm aware). This, some will say, again means that I have no authority to speak. These people will find any excuse as to why what I say should be ignored. Perhaps they are right, but what I am about to say is not new. When one person says something that goes against your opinion, perhaps they are a crank. If two people say it, the crank has a friend. But this has been said so many times, by so many people that you should start to think that there might actually be a point to it.

I'm not a violent person. The title of this post may scream otherwise, but truly I'm not. I don't actually want to punch anyone in the face, but I DO want the world to make sense. No, I don't think a collective world face punch, no matter how hard, would actually make that happen.

The world seems to have abandoned common sense. Who needs to think, when you can blame your deficiencies on the big bad internet, or it's older cousin, TV.

Time to get to the point here. Or one of them, at least. No-one can parent your children for you. It is not, and should not, be up to the government to ensure that your darling children don't have access to violent or racy material. If you want to protect your children, do it yourself. The tools are all there to make it easy for you.

For example, if a game is rated MA 15+, then you should not buy it for your seven year old. Period. It isn't suitable. You can't buy the game for your child because all their friends have it, and then get up in arms about it being violent. You get what you paid for. Lobbying to get game content changed to protect your child doesn't actually protect them. It just annoys everyone who can legitimately buy and play the game. Sure, there's no blood now, but your child is still shooting people. All you have done is given them a game where there are no real consequences. You are part of the problem.

When the Wii-zapper came out, I remember seeing posts and rants about how inappropriate it was for children to be given something which resembles a gun. Aside from the fact that similar toys have been on the market for years (can you say "duck hunt"?) these people were correct. It may not be appropriate for children, so don't buy it. The easiest way to protect your children from the evils of the world is to not expose them in the first place.

Which brings me to my next point.

If you dress your children up like skanks, give them dolls which are skanks, and let them watch TV shows or movies that are full of skanks, they will want to act like skanks.

Is that so hard to understand? Cause? Effect? Oh, no, children are having sex because of the paedophiles on the internet, not because you have dressed them like skanks. I may be old fashioned here, but when I was a kid, if something wasn't appropriate for me, I didn't get it. It didn't matter how many of my friends got it, I didn't. Why? Because my parents understood that they made my buying decisions. Sure, I could pitch in a suggestion (or whine a whole heap), but it was their money they were spending.

I did have access to some violent games, and some lewd movies. I'm admitting that right now, in the interest of fairness. They weren't hidden away from me, but at the same time, they weren't handed to me without my parents knowing what they were about. My parents didn't get up in arms later about it. They knew what I was getting into before I got into it. They let me access it when I was old enough to understand it.

I hope that I can parent my future kids even half as well as my parents did me. I'd like to think that I turned out well adjusted. I'm not a sexual deviant, or a rampaging psychopath. I'm actually pretty normal. And that brings me to my final point.

If you accept your children for what they are, then you're more likely to maintain a happy and healthy relationship with them.

It's not rocket science. Kids will be kids. When they grow up, they'll be adults. Don't treat kids as adults, or adults as kids, and it should all be OK.

Nothing new has been said here. I've got no authority to dispense parenting advice until I've had and raised my own kids. This is all common sense, though. I will be following this advice with my children, and hoping that it all works out fine.

Stop blaming other people for your laziness, and we can all get on about our lives. The government isn't there to be your nanny. Stop messing with everyone else's lives to make your own easier.

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07:49 pm ~ Mar. 2009 ~ Week of 03/09/09

Newton's Finest Gravity: holding stuff down since 1687.

Accept no imitations!

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12:55 pm ~ Jan. 2009 ~ Week of 12/29/08

http://cubeme.com/blog/2008/12/11/zombie-barbie/

what do little zombie girls play with?

Zombie barbie of course!

(damned if I know how she was converted. I can't imagine Zombie Ken would chase her for her tasty brainz...

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01:51 pm ~ Dec. 2008 ~ Week of 12/08/08

That's what happened to the second half of 2008.

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12:21 am ~ Sep. 2008 ~ Week of 09/22/08

I'm glad my head's not made of Plasticine. If it were, I'd always be fiddling with it, making adjustments to my face, never quite content. And not only that: like a hirsuit chap always worried about getting food caught in his beard, I'd always be checking that bits hadn't been squished or moved out of place. And of course, in checking everything was in order, I would inevitably squish some key feature out of shape.

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11:26 am ~ Oct. 2008 ~ Week of 10/27/08

Scene: two zombies who, for some reason give each other high five (perhaps pre-zombie buddies and this is still instinctive for them, even post-zombification?) Now these zombies are of the 'flesh seriously starting to rot variety' - and their hands are rotting - so their handbones get mangled and caught up with each other. They are locked together! (think people-with-braces kissing).

Hilarity ensues as they are now (post-mortem) conjoined zombies - with all the 'staying attached to each other' comedy you'd expect. If this joke wears thin, then further development could involve one zombie ending up with the limb of the other attached (after a failed elbow incident?)... the other zombie being then the butt of a bunch of 'armless' jokes

Note: I may extend and revise this idea (which is less than 24hours old and all thanks to Kitten and David) further on my wiki... please comment here or there... http://wiki.thorx.net/wiki/MovieScenes#Zombie ...any major rewrites I'll feed back to here also.

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11:02 pm ~ Oct. 2008 ~ Week of 10/27/08

I found this today, after playing around on answerbag for the last couple of days.

http://www.answerbag.com/c_view/5446

It's a category devoted to zombies. Brilliant!

Now for those who don't know what answerbag is, it's kind of like yahoo answers, but it seems less about getting the most correct answer as about making people THINK you have the best answer. For some reason it's decided to make answering questions into a competition, and as such, there's that elitist attitude that everyone has come to expect from such sites.

Basically the older users move in packs, voting up each other's answers and congratulating each other on being ever so smart, all the while complaining about newer users, and how much better it was before anyone else knew about it.

Anyway, I've got an account there, and I'm sometimes helpful, and other times a complete arse. It makes me feel better about myself when people don't know if they should trust my advice or not.

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11:39 pm ~ June 2008 ~ Week of 06/30/08

I'm going to start replying to spam... you know, just to see what happens. Hopefully hilarity will ensue, in which case watch this space for said hilarity. In case it doesn't, pretend that this never happened.

OK, spam ahoy!

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05:57 pm ~ Sep. 2008 ~ Week of 09/08/08

http://blog.4d2.org/2008/01/30/the-worst-of-yahoo-answers-episode-2-myths-and-misconceptions/

Especially topical... "If a zombie had sex with a human, what would it be called?"

 Answer: sexual intercorpse
 Answer: Pr0n Of The Dead
 Answer: Michael Jackson

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