Why winter is better than summer.

Well, it's that time of year again. That time where we northern hemisphere-dwellers stand on the threshold of Summer and are either skipping around in glee and anticipation while rubbing our hippy beads for good luck and jiggling asses to Mambo Nr. 5 (you) or shaking our fists in an act of defiance and grudgery towards these loathsome festivities and wishing we had a Christmas to steal (me).

I've never fully understood why people look forward to summer so much. I get why my fellow brethren of the learning establishments look forward to getting 7 weeks off school and I sort of understand how the increased hours of sunshine do much to lighten up people's spirits, but to me the cons have always outweighed the pros.


I've decided to itemise a list for you all in the hope that, despite your lobotomies and unwholesome genotypes, you'll finally come to the conclusion that winter trumps summer and that I'm incredibly awesome.

1) The Heat. What's that, you say? The heat is a GOOD thing? Maybe if you happen to work as a professional sunbather for a living, but for the vast majority of people who work in any other career besides that, it more often than not proves distracting, irritating, incredibly uncomfortable and usually ends up with sweat patches the size of sunspots on your favourite shirt.
There's nothing worse (apart from not being me) than toiling away in some stuffy classroom or office block with no air-conditioning, trying hopelessly to complete some vague and futile task put before you like a plate of rotting meat before a dog. In contrast to the refreshing coolness of a winter breeze, the usefulness of the sun's heat shrivels up and dies as an advantage for pro-summer numpties. Also, this paragraph wasn't biased.

2) Lack of Productivity. I was sort of alluding to this in the above paragraph, but I judged it important enough to merit its own point. Under the glare of the sun's mighty rays, many people become afflicted with Can't Be Arsed Syndrome (CBA Syndrome for short) and productivity plummets. Whether in a school or a business, people just lose focus and tire uncannily fast when exposed to excessive heat and light. You can't even combat it by installing air-conditioning because your subversive workers still have windows and are going to be longingly staring out of them at the endless stream of all-girl rooftop pool parties while simultaneously contemplating the nearest available exit.

3) Disease. And lots of it. I think any person with an inkling of knowledge will agree with me when I say that germs thrive in the heat. Sure you get a few minor colds and shit during the winter, but when was the last time you heard of a Christmas smallpox epidemic? Germs love the summer; it's kind of like their "mating season", and so the chances of contracting an illness during those three doomsday months are significantly higher than during the winter. The effect is even amplified by dangerously overcrowded social settings such as beaches, clubs and gazebos, creating a sort of "social exposure" effect.
And y'know what, just to rag on a little bit more, diseases during the summer are fucking uncomfortable. It's bad enough that it's HOT and STICKY and HUMID and some other horrible words, but to have hyper-dysentery and septicæmia on top of that is akin to being forced to have sex with a snowman on top a bed made out of icicles. Fetch me some icepacks, I'm starting to get a headache.

4) Things overheat faster. At the moment of typing this, I've had my laptop on for approximately 45 minutes and the battery pack is hot enough to fry strips of bacon on. See, if this were winter, my laptop would heat up at a much slower, more convenient rate and delay the inevitable circuit-frying my electrical devices all eventually succumb to.
Anything you leave on during the summer season heats up maybe 10-fold faster [source] than its solstice counterpart, which is again detrimental to productivity, again annoying and particularly unhelpful if you happen to be a surgeon or operating power tools (God forbid you do both at the same time, you sick bastard).

5) There's no snow.


To put it midly, SNOW IS THE MUTT'S NUTS! Not only does it provide ample opportunities to pelt people you don't like and not get arrested for it (usually), encourage lovers to coalesce under blankets with kisses and cuddles, and evoke feelings of joy in our cold, stony hearts, but it also makes everything look pretty- nay, beautiful. Everything from buildings to trees to spider webs look utterly spectacular in the snow and anyone who disagrees must be stupid.

(See the difference in prettiness?!)

So, by the power of science and logic I have deduced that winter is better than summer. You may say that's a futile conclusion because it is an opinion, opinions are subjective and I have no right to push mine above the heads of others and onto the plinth of the gods. And to that I say:

Shut up tubby, before I burst your beach ball.

Hot Choffee

Rather than babble incessently on about something you don't care about, I thought I'd take a more personal approach this time and drill a hole in the wall of the dressing room that is my life, and allow you to ogle me in ways never before seen. Again, possibly something you don't care about.

So since I never, ever, ever do anything the slightest bit interesting with my life, I thought I'd tell you about something I finished drinking about 5 minutes ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you: THE HOT CHOFFEE



Okay, okay, so mine didn't look EXACTLY like this...I mean, this picture was obviously taken from some fancy coffeehouse in America where clean-cut businessmen go to unwind. I on the other hand used this cup:

(Image actually contributed by me)

I like think that my humorous choice of cup is a lack of hauteur, rather than style. Anyway, it's not what's on the outside (of the cup) that counts, it's what's on the inside (of the cup). And what was inside of the cup was a strange and arousing blend of sweet, creamy hot chocolate and strong, bitter coffee which stirred feelings of both curious pleasure and mild xenophobia within me.

Perhaps it's just the deceivingly warm weather that my north-western European body is unaccustomed to, but I found the mixture a bit too much for me. Granted it was tasty, but the two different flavours were just too contrasting for me, creating a sort of sickly, cloying mixture which stuck to my palette long after I'd wanted it to. In fact, I found the whole experience so unbearable that I had to gulp down a few mouthfuls of water just to relieve myself of that sensory reminder determinedly lingering in my mouth.

I guess you could say this was a learning experience for me. I've learnt never to step outside the boundaries of what I know and have been taught. I've learnt never to use my freewill to try and create new things. I've learnt that what is homely is best, and that anything foreign should be sampled curiously and with suspicion. But most of all, I've learnt that drinking hot chocolate on humid, summer days is not only stupid, but also reinforces the theory that had modern society not completely obliterated natural selection with a comforting, nanny blanket of love, free healthcare and constant food supplies, I would most certainly be lying in a ditch somewhere being chewed on by a herd of rabid zebras.

~Tell me I'm pretty.

Stupidity, o come hither!

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you seriously question the cranial capacity of certain individuals and then, by extension, your fellow man? Being a regular reader of The Sun (-1 to argument credibility), but smart enough to know and be weary of what I might on a good day describe as "embellished truths", I still often find myself in that very same situation.

Even if I somehow managed to smack my head against a brick wall with enough brute force to inflict several months worth of amnesia upon myself, forgetting all about greedy MPs' casual spending (apparently in indirect proportion to economic state of the country), the fact that Paris Hilton's British Best Friend actually found airtime (supposedly to cater for the depraved and terminally unemployed demographics) and a CAT on Twitter having 720,000 followers*, I'd still be inundated with stories galore about people doing stupid things from friends, family and tabloids alike.

Now, I'm not saying most people are stupid based purely on that, because I'm not obnoxious enough to pretend that I don't do stupid things, you don't do stupid things, he doesn't do stupid things and her mum doesn't do stupid things. Everyone does stupid things; some with alarming frequency, others with occasional slip-ups.

Even despite the chain reaction that stems thus (person does stupid thing -> stupid thing gets widely publicised -> stupid thing becomes known to all -> stupid thing is forgotten 5 minutes later -> [repeat step 1]), I maintain quite a bit of faith in the human race, because the few people I know of who don't revel in stupidity are the ones who contribute the most towards society.

I like to think of all the inventors, high-ranking scholars, judges, master engineers and philosophers as a collective, finger-wagging nanny who, in between tidying the house and making her virginity abundantly clear, occasionally pops into our room only to discover that we're halfway through eating a bucket of lead-based paint. As she rushes us to the Emergency Room with an austere expression and cold, stony eyes, we sit and giggle all about it while simultaneously contemplating the easiest method to acquire a box of matches and some ethanol.

But y'know, I'm glad. I'm glad that I can laugh at stupidity and be satiated with the knowledge that most other people would do likewise. I'm glad that I do stupid things for other people to laugh at. I mean, if you can't laugh at silly things, you might as well be a tree or an inanimate dildo with no concept of fun and whose only purpose of existence is to obediently do what nature has planned for you.

I suppose could try and justify myself further with a load of semi-credible arguments about how there's a balance between being serious and being silly to be maintained, or how it's only human nature to be playful, but at the end of the day the only real reason I have the dignity to defend is because it feels good. After all, isn't that what really matters most in life? There'd be no point in spending the entirety of your existence in a constant state of ennui because then you'd have:

a) No reason to continue existing;
b) No reason to procreate; and
c) No reason to read this.

Even if you somehow managed to derive all of your pleasure from scientific and technological advancement, you'd quickly find that most people didn't. Or even if the entire human populous found a way to do exactly that, they'd still end being a bunch of boring, samey clones with no art, culture or variation (aside from which type of ringworm they prefer studying).

So my final conclusion is that stupidity is the driving force behind humanity. Sure it's not always harmless, but then again neither is science, or fast food. Enjoy it while you can - that is, until the future politically-correct, totalitarian government bans all liberal usage of the word "fun" and assigns us all 18-hour shifts in predetermined careers. Dibs on Loyalty Inspector!

*If I had a Twitter, I'd follow this. Also, if I were I cat I'd so want to be his friend.

Parris doodles (:

So after being eaten, chewed up, swallowed, digested and passed around the gut of Year 12, I find myself in the process of slowly being squeezed out of one of the less wholesome orifices, with more delight than you'd probably expect from that metaphor. Under the guise of (supposedly) "starting Year 13", I've still got another 2 weeks left in the bowels, but I'm using that time rather productively in terms of...Well, lazing around and being as unproductive as possible I guess, which is a bit of an oxymoron, no doubt.

But in between pretending to listen and staring into space, I like doodling little things on the corners of pages. I'm not a very good drawer and I never have felt myself drawn to any artistic vocation, but doodling is sort of therapeutic for me.

No essays this time! Just a picture of my own for a change, if only to balance my karma levels from continually stealing pictures from Google.

Pi, Pi, Mathematical Pi (8)...

Human Beings as Animals

I find the image of a man and a woman nuzzling up to each another quite interesting from anthropological standpoint because it reminds me of how penguins huddle together to keep warm, or how lions sleep on top of each other to create “safety in numbers”. Well okay, I won’t lie; I really only think it’s cute. It’s just that...Well, without preluding anything specific that’s going to appear later on in this pointless dalliance, I feel that whenever humans experience love, those previously suppressed (or even hitherto unnoticed) primitive instincts kick in. I guess you could say the same is true when humans experience intense rage, fear or jealousy, but there’s a particularly sublime beauty about the former that doesn’t often manifest itself anywhere else.

It kinda makes me wonder where it all comes from. Somewhere along the evolutionary line we’ve gone from ‘mating purely for procreation’ to ‘developing monogamous commitments (“ha!” you snort, laughing wildly from your king size bed while cohorts of underdressed women rub your chest hair lovingly) and unexplainable – logically speaking, irrational even – attachments to other human beings. I’m not trying to portray it in a negative light, but it is amusing to ponder the whys and hows of something that might possibly have no answer.

I wonder about the connection between humans and animals, because it’s often hard for me to see the difference between the two.

Now, as far as taxonomy goes, I’m very much aware that human beings do fall under the Animalia kingdom and are thus classified as “animals”. But I’m also aware of the fact that there’s something idiosyncratic about humans that makes us somewhat deviant to other forms of life – and, inadvertently or not, most of us view the differences with an air of hauteur.

Allow me to be bold and start my first real point by way of the Bible (don’t worry, I’m not religious and I won’t start preaching to you about how not going to church on a Sunday will cause baby Jesus to lacrimate a flood or something). According to the annals of Christianity, humans apparently preside over all other living things and animals are just here to be eaten and used by us; the crux of this declaration being that we mere mortals apparently have “souls” where the rest of the animal kingdom having brute instinct.

While it may be true that we’re significantly more intelligent than other forms of (known!) life, I find the whole “soul/lacking a soul” business quite redundant. Our determining differences, i.e. the collective knowledge to build aeroplanes and skyscrapers, our absurd cultural customs that give us an extra dimension of being and the supposed “free will”, are hardly hyper-advanced features of the divine work of God. They’re just qualities that come from having a greater sense of self-awareness. And intelligence.

Those people who bold-facedly claim that we are much more civilized than the animals are usually mollycoddled suburb-dwellers who have been shielded most of their lives from the more depraved side of human behaviour. To their credit, yes, they have may have formed a society based on morality and goodwill and other huggy-wuggy things, but if they ever happen to peer over the walls of their garden fences sometime, they’ll soon find that the majority of the human population lives a remarkably different life.

For example, the rapidly declining numbers of the Inuit and Amazonian tribesmen (two non-conventional groups of people from either ends of the Earth) live a very simple life which revolves around finding food, finding shelter and looking after each other – not unlike many species of animals. They have the potential to live a life like us, but doing so wouldn’t transcend them into some higher form of being; we are what we are.

Moreover, go into any major city and see the way people live their lives. Competing for the best jobs, competing for the best partners, trying to push themselves above one another, trying to have more than the next person, striving for stimulation – these are all animalistic qualities, just operating on a different level. We’re all propelled by a sense of self-preservation and act upon our impulses, but that’s not something to be ashamed about, it’s just how nature works. No living creature can afford to be complacent, because the moment they do is the moment they risk getting eaten or becoming subservient to someone who hasn’t.

I’m not trying to say that’s ALL we are, but rather, it’s the basis for what we are. We’re like flowers in the sense that no matter how high we bloom, how beautiful and extravagant our buds may become, and for all our colours and scents and varieties, we’re still rooted in the same soils that everything else has to grow in.

We may have the arts and sciences that have inspired us to create works of almost incomprehensible philosophy and technologies that allow us to communicate with people halfway across the globe. We may have complex and untameable emotions that have caused us to commit everything from the most appalling atrocities to the most philanthropic of good deeds. We may build upon what we are because...well, that’s human nature.

But what we are is undefined. If you choose to call yourself a chicken, I could ignore that, refute it, form an inappropriate pick-up line about how I want to “lay you”, but at the end of the day, if you remain utterly convinced of your existence as poultry, then that’s what you are. It’s just a shame I’m still legally restricted from killing you, dicing you and up and using the meat for a nice Tikka Masala.

Next week on Mr. Amazing’s blog – are aliens classified as animals?

[P.S. Here are my favourite Animals].

Video Games and Escapism

A Journey into the world of simulated stimulation

With the summer holidays rapidly approaching and this year’s exam season a small, unshapely blob surrounded by whirling dust particles in the rear-view mirror of my life, I’ve recently found myself with an abundance of free time and not enough money to continually inebriate myself into the comfortable depths of short-lived euphoria. In my quest for cheap entertainment, I recently came across an old relic of a game who for these past couple of years had been biding its time in the cupboard, just waiting to provide me with a sense of nostalgia and once again govern my attentions as daddy’s favourite toy. Placing Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into the disc tray of my Xbox 360, I sat down on the bed and eagerly awaited to relive what must have pathetically been the highlight of my 15^th year on earth.

As I began playing through the opening chapters, I found myself uncharacteristically musing on the philosophy of the whole experience – why am I doing this? I suppose the short-term, superficial answer would be “to kill time”. Yet that didn’t explain why I didn’t just go outside and ride my bike, or hang out with my friends or even attempt to get a job. Having stood timidly on the borders of casual and hardcore gaming for most of my life, I’m no stranger to the feeling of being able to lose oneself in the medium of video games (and indeed this may be the crux of any interactive experience), but I can’t help feeling slightly unsettled by the fact that I’m more than willing to neglect pretty much any aspect of life for that of a virtual experience.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with escapism if it’s occasional and not desperately sought after as an alternative to your current life, because if the latter is true then something has definitely gone wrong for you somewhere along the line. But escapism is a fundamental part of human existence; the imperfectity of the whole “live out your miserable childhood, then get a job and work for 50 years to support your wife’s shoe fetish” rigmarole is bookended by birth and death – supposedly cyclical in nature, but apparently not for Mr. Joe Bloggs (pun intended) – and our imaginations and impossible dreams are usually what keep us going for so long.

And then the paddle that is my argument once again hits the text and sends it flying into the other side of the court. The half inhabited by pessimism.

Gaming, much like alcohol, drugs, women and smoking is a breeding ground for those with addictive personalities. I’m not going to blame video games for being addictive, because I really think that’s more to do with the person in this case, but there’s no denying that masses of smalltown nerd paradigms are drawn to video games in a motion that can best be summarised as “magnetism”. Indeed, those a few a rungs below me on the social ladder (the type of poor, depraved human beings who spend their waking hours googling pictures of girls because they can’t hold a conversation with one in real life without hyperventilating) need something to fill the empty void in their lives usually satiated by sex and human contact.

Now, as far as limits go, I’m not entirely sure there is one. Some people end up literally living their entire lives on social substitutes like Habbo Hotel or Second Life, even allowing them to take priority of their relationships, and most of those people probably don’t see the harm in it. Nurturing, more than academia and definitely more than wealth, success and fame, is the most important aspect of human development (yes, shun my unilateralism declarations, but you know I’m right). Sure you have genes and DNA and other shit like that, but who you ultimately are depends on what you’ve been exposed to, and if instead of those all-important social experiences to bring you into the real world from those days where you’d cry and kick and scream if anyone other than your mother picked you up you have LCD screens and filth-encrusted keyboards, then you’re not exactly going to blossom into that cute, little flower of extrovertism, are you?

Video games have the potential to lead people astray, but that’s no more the fault of the video games industry than it is of any other media in society. I hate how they get so much stick for something that really isn’t their fault, and it annoys me so much that I’m going to list the main reasons for it so as to show you how stupid and illogical they really are.

1) Out-of-touch parents. Let’s face it, for every 1 parent who actively participates in video gaming, there are at least 8 or 9 trollops who wouldn’t know how to turn a computer on if the button glowed an arousing, neon green colour. Oh wait, most of them do. And the stereotypical ignorance of these austere, 40-something parents is particularly exacerbated in the likes of Christian mothers, particularly those from Texas. Whenever any angst-riddled teen decides that others are unworthy of God’s life-giving oxygen and sets out to empty a few magnum rounds into a nearby classroom, those buttcheeks are always the first to grease up the wheels, rein the horses and get the bandwagon of “video games are bad” rolling, usually with the support of a bespectacled, suit-wearing local Christian councillor. Pretty easy to blame video games, or violent movies, or Slipknot, isn’t it? Maybe if you’d spent some time encouraging the kid’s happiness instead of screaming bible verses at him whenever he so much as looks at another man’s sixpack this wouldn’t have happened, you fat, sexually-repressed theist.

2) A scapegoat for society’s decadence. Okay, so it’s easy for us to say that life is good and happy and wonderful, and that the sublime beauty of nature’s innocence manifested in the aimless fluttering butterflies’ of wings beneath the warmth of the morning sun is proof of this, but I’m sure we all secretly know that 90% of everywhere on earth sucks. Despite the fact that we’re lucky enough to live in a place where, even if you’re a talentless liability to the world you can still rely on state handouts to live a comfortable and secure life, there is a large degree of moral decay. Society largely revolves around money, success, materialism and shallow pretensions of popularity, coincidentally how we also usually how we measure our worth as human beings, and whenever something goes wrong in society (i.e. the rampage of a gun-wielding teen leaving two dozen families distraught), we’d much rather blame a minor influential force than actually consider re-evaluating the customs and very framework of our culture that drives people to murder - á la video games industry.

3) Manhunt/2. Yes, this is a specific reference to the series of games which ostensibly revolve around maiming human beings in the most horrific way imaginable, all for the sake of the sexual pleasure of some deranged sadist somewhere. Above all others, this game is particularly well-noted for its beef with the pacifist community, and as such often comes into arguments for why video games encourage violence. I kinda see how they might have a point on this one, because the game pretty much revolves around killing, but allow me to draw upon a few honest facts and compare them for you. While Japan has an alarmingly large niche market for rape games incontinently leaking depravity that usually involve underage schoolgirls, this couples with the country having one of the lowest rape rates in the world. Compare 1.77/100,000 people in Japan to 14.2/100,000 in United Kingdom or the 30.1/100,000 in the United States [Source] and hop onto my train of logic here. The government doesn’t encourage these games in Japan, but the Freedom of Speech movement lets them tolerate it and the effect that has on the subject matter being displayed is rather interesting. It’s not conclusive evidence from the results of any overhyped study, but it does support the point that if you loosen the choke chain of censorship on society then people tend to be more informed and less likely to do stupid things. Or maybe Japan’s just awesome, I dunno.

4) Ignorance. Although I’ve saved the least colourful for last, I do feel it’s the most important reason for pretty much any dissension between two parties. Most of the people that spurt out the same arguments against video games verbatim have usually never actually sat down and taken the time to experience a first-hand experience of what they’re ranting about. Their opinions are formed from advertisements, tabloid articles or sometimes even just being aware of a game’s existence, and this gives them no right to start making uninformed judgements. If you want to play a game for a while and then decide that it’s THAT detrimental to little Timmy’s development then fine, just go look at my other three points above, but you’ll probably end up at least questioning whether you’re right or not after you realise it’s not as bad as you thought. With the exception of Manhunt/2 of course.

To link this digression back to my original train of thought, bouts of escapism in games generally allow you to work off a lot of steam and have fun – pretty much what games are designed for. If you want to kill half the Wehrmacht in Medal of Honor or braid pigtails in Barbie’s Horse Riding Adventure, then go for it.

Just don’t forget you have a significantly lower resistance to bullets the next time you try to rob a state bank.