Halloween Costume Ideas!

So, halloween’s coming up and seeing as that’s a much less depressing topic than the mahoosive hurricane that’s been ravaging the United States, I’ll talk about that instead. Although I will say, for people affected, come to England and I will make you all a cup of tea.

For anyone looking for a costume this year, may I suggest some awesome ideas that your neighbors and your friends won’t have already thought of. I guarantee you’ll look totally original and not at all like an idiot.

1. The Wall – whether from Pink Floyd of Game of Thrones fame, get a bed sheet and hold two poles to either side of you to hold it up, you’ll look just like you’re favorite wall, and if you don’t have a favorite wall, you can just make one up.

2. Product Placement – want to make some money on Halloween? Call up your favorite brands and and get paid to dress up as the newest cereal box, or flavor coke, perhaps even a CD, in which case, get in a box and stick your head out of the middle of it, but remember to make it look like you’ve just seen something incredibly moving.

3. A Towel – Sew all your towels together and wear them as a costume; if your Halloween party has a science-fiction theme, no one will forget to bring you to it, and if not, put on a squeaky voice and guarantee yourself a spliff.

4. The Internet – This might sound vague, but all you really need to do is strap some boobs to your chest, hold up a kitten and wear a rage face mask. It might also help if you’re constantly updating your Facebook page rather than actually talking to the rest of the guests at whatever celebration you happen to be ruining.

Safer or Stricter?

Oh internet, sometimes I wish I could surf you while using a treadmill so that I don’t feel like a lazy slob, but then I remember just how expensive treadmills and standing desks are. Internet, you should get on making them cheaper, then I can feel less guilty about staying online all the time and I’ll be able to get away with trying to make the world a more awesome place.

I suppose if I want to start pretending that it’s already awesome I should just ignore reddit and youtube comments, but god damn it, they’re just so tempting.

Speaking of making the internet more awesome, I wonder if there will ever be a way to stop scams and charlatans making their living from websites and emails without issuing some sort of overarching regulation. Now, I’m all for regulating things when it makes the world a safer place, but is there any way to make this a thing without infringing on the way others can use the internet?

The problems with internet regulation laws (most of them are for copyright, which surely shouldn’t be as much of a concern as people selling fake cancer cures… I suppose we have it backwards) is that at the moment they’re vague enough that the average internet user is probably going to have broken the law, and they’re probably going to have done it multiple times. If you make reposting pictures equivalent to stealing then memes are a forbidden medium, and ain’t that a kick in the head?

But there are limits that can be placed, and the question that I want to ask you guys is thus:

Do you think putting restrictions on the internet to tackle scam artists would help or hinder you as an internet user?

Help me out here.

Daily Muse

The Internet has completely bailed on me today, so, hoping that looking at my university timetable doesn’t use up much data, I retreat to the unreliable piece of internetica provided by my phone. For the record, virgin media are doing a terrible job recently, so to anyone who lives near Richard Branson, please tell him from me, to sell that private island he owns, and spend the money from that transaction on an Internet service provider that doesn’t abandon ship every two days. Did it die so much when it was ntl? I can’t remember, so I’m going to say yes.

I’m going to be walking with bats tonight; well, they’ll be flying but I think it still makes sense. Hopefully when I get back I’ll have some semi-interesting insights on that experience, although I suspect most of my thoughts will be wondering how the hell it is that I’m turning 21 on wednesday; that, and the story that I’m still writing. This one’s going to be much longer than my first one, and with any luck it will look a thousand times better to agents.

Also, just in case, because I’ve got nothing to lose, if anyone knows someone that goes to Nottingham Trent University and would be interested in helping me start a skeptics/secular society, send them my way, I still need a few more names before I can make this a thing.

No Such Thing As Discussion On The Internet

Okay, can somebody tell me what it is that makes comments on sites like Reddit and Youtube turn into flame wars within the first few seconds? Places where people gather on the internet, especially places like Reddit that are designed purely for discussion, should surely be places for civil discussions where points are taken, criticisms are considered, rebuttals don’t consist of insulting or dismissing a significant proportion of the population and people actually learn from each other?

Could somebody point me to a place on the internet where this actually happens, because I’m rapidly losing faith in my hope that I’m going to find such a website in my lifetime.

I’ve met a fair number of people and most of them aren’t arseholes.

So why is it that whenever you look for a feedback section on the internet the discussion board usually smells very strongly of the stuff?

Could it be that, like I was talking about a couple of days ago, the only people with the passion to comment are the people that have a bone to pick with the discussion at hand, and are therefore more likely to be at an extreme end of the spectrum of opinions?

If so, I would encourage everyone to try and make a mark where you can, to try and add a voice of sanity to the spreading insanity that seems to happen when social media, anonymity and debate are mixed in a big cooking pot and thrown at people between the ages of 8 and 85.

Perhaps we should get some toddlers to join in, at least then we’d get some variance in responses rather than two extremes running headfirst into each other like the first scene in Lord Of The Rings.

On Modern Man

While I wait for my old phone to die so I can start using my new one I thought I’d once again say hello to the internet. I won’t ask it how its day is going, because to be honest this amalgamation of facebook statuses and porn probably doesn’t lead to a good time, especially when you’re living it every single day. I feel sorry for you sometimes internet, then I remember that you’re not a person and I feel better, keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll keep taking advantage of you to find some use for my fingers. There we go, now I’m contributing to the pornographic section of your mind, sorry about that.

I am somewhat concerned about the human population at all times and the fact that the two favorite subjects of internet users are friends and sex just fits the stereotype nicely enough for my pessimism about my species to appear to be justified, but perhaps that’s just because that’s my default position and in our minds, at least I assume (I know, never assume, make an ass out of me if you must) that in our minds, as preconceived notions, many stereotypes are the default answer to sects of humanity or humanity as a whole when we think about them/it.

As much as I’d like to say I ignore stereotypes, I’d be a fool to think anything but the fact that we’re all victims of this easy labeling of our fellow men and women, although something that I enjoy immensely is seeing people break the stereotype of whatever group they represent/appear to represent, there’s a certain social power about that that makes me smile inside, and occasionally on the outside too.

Britain Hates Pirates

Welcome back to the blog republic of internet.

I bet you thought I was going to say something about the pirate bay today didn’t you, with its relevance to pretty much anything to do with the spread of information across this wonderful invisible superhighway we take for granted?

Well, as much as I would give my right leg to save the pirate bay unfortunately the Queen will have my head if I even hint at such a thing. As such, under British law I am required to ‘keep my trap shut’ or ‘sod off’, but there’s England for you.

Even if I did want to rebel against this law it’s not like there are computer programs you can use to get around the forced-blocking of the site by Britain’s main ISPs.

Oh wait there are.

Well, there’s your answer, the world is safe for another day. You can illegally download the avengers and then realise that you missed out by not seeing that amazing, amazing, amazing movie on a mahoosive screen.

It does really annoy me when these kind of laws are dreamed up however.

I understand that there are issues with copyright laws and the income of the people involved in movies and the like that don’t make the millions of dollars per movie that Tom Cruise does, but it seems like a lot of the time people coming against internet piracy really strongly seem to ignore the other side and proclaim it ‘stealing’.

Stealing? Really? Fine, when I’ve finished the thieves guild questline in Oblivion I’ll come back to you and we can talk about stealing.

No More Exploring

So internet explorer 6 is officially dead.

Funny, I had no idea anyone still used internet explorer in any form, certainly when in university etc. it’s forced on you by the downloading restrictions, cheap computers and lack of thought put into what the users of the computers will actually want, but I was getting pretty disillusioned apparent by how many people have yet to move on from the microsoft-branded browser.

I have to say, based on completely anecdotal experience that internet explorer is the most clunky browser I’ve used, and even in aesthetics it pales in comparison to just about everything else.

And yet internet explorer 9 is still the world’s most popular browser?

Do that many people get on with their digital lives with just the programs the computer came with?

Do they not know there are other, less shitty options out there?

Perhaps I’m being a little overdramatic here, after all, it’s just an internet browser, and just because it’s restricted from performing certain actions doesn’t meant that it’s completely useless, just as compared to ableton and logic audacity isn’t completely useless, it’s just hopelessly incompetent compared to better quality programs that are made for the same purpose.

The internet has spoken I’m sure, during the past however long and deemed internet explorer near the bottom of the list of quality choices for browsing, and for a browser that’s about as dead as comic sans was to fonts I should probably not be surprised with the browsing equivalents of those funfair organisers that have just worked out how to use word art, deciding that they’re internet savvy because they’ve just installed a yahoo toolbar.

I suppose I can let these people off however, they can still get to this blog and hear my pointless ramblings, and as long as they’re not using bing at least they’ve got something on their side.

Phonedamentalism!

So, I was going to make this post a very long rant about some fundamentalist anti-gay, anti-science website I found a week or two ago. Apparently however, my internet’s recently been born again, because in protest of this little idea of mine (an idea I’d been delaying for a week) it’s decided to commit digital suicide, therefore forcing me to type this out on the horror that is the keyboard on my mobile phone.

I don’t really want to go into why the typing system on this phone is so god damn awful, partly because I’ve already been through it three times on here and partly because it’s actually being pretty nice to me today. And despite of my lack of belief in jinxes or the capacity of inanimate objects to actually want to be nice, I think it deserves to catch a break, at least for today.

I mean in a space that I often use to rip certain corners of the internet a new one, once in a while I believe it’s quite fitting to give something that’s doing its job a pat on the back.

And of course, while my girlfriend is in Boston for the week there will be ample time to unload my hatred for this revolutionary gadget that’s just inconvenient enough to be awkward, despite the convenience it was designed for. God I hope that made some sort of sense.

I don’t know if you can tell by reading this but it’s rather difficult to do a post on this phone without rambling. I have no idea how much I’ve already written, I can’t see a word count and I have no idea if these paragraphs are going to be of appropriate length without the reference point which is the fact that online it looks pretty much how it does on the site while you’re typing it.

There should probably be a comma or two in there somewhere, but just trying to read what I’m typing while my shaky hands force this device to wobble around is giving me a headache.

Coronal Gore Ejection!

This blog’s going out a little later than usual because of a certain essential service that cut out on me for around 24 hours.

That’s right, it’s the internet, that scoundrel, always available except for that certain time in which I just told you that it wasn’t.

That sentence probably wasn’t grammatically correct but I think you get the cut of my jib.

And the stuntedness it brought to my plans for the day was really quite shocking, I mean Jesus you’d think we wouldn’t be so reliant on something that’s still essentially in its early days but no, we, or at least I, am completely dependent on Al Gore’s baby and all it stands for, well, except for the viruses and naturalnews.com, they can go surf themselves.

And I’m not talking about An Inconvenient Truth here, if you hadn’t guessed already from the fact that I’ve said it x amount of times this is the internet here, there are no graphs involved in this blog.

Or at least not from what I recall…

Maybe I should work on that one…

But what would we do without the internet? What will we do when the CME comes?

What’s a CME you say?

You should be more alert with your astronomy because the internet could potentially be down for quite a while if we got hit by a large enough…

CORONAL MASS EJECTION!

and no, that’s not a porn movie, although it probably should be.

In fact rule 34 dictates that it probably already is a porn movie so I take that back.

It does sound dirty though.

But yes, when the sun lets of a huge burst of radiation it could potentially mess with our magnetic field and the electricity we so rely upon to live these days.

The last time this problem occurred there were just telegraph poles up so nobody really gave much of a shit.

These days however, there are more than telegraph poles, there are websites about telegraph poles!

Oh, and also there’s the entire infrastructure and economy we’ve built upon a system of millions of connections using the internet as its basis.

So basically Al Gore cares, and so does whoever makes telegraph poles.

He really fucking cares.

So what shall we do about this potential happening?

Well nothing, because it’s not coming right now, sit back and relax, but don’t tell Al Gore that, he’s very on edge lately ever since I referred to him without mentioning global warming once.

Okay Mr. Gore are you happy now?

From The Bowels Of The Internet!

My challenge for today is to do this post while listening to the smooth jazz version of nyan cat.

Without saying nyan, despite the fact I’ve said it twice already and am very tempted to make the rest of the post just that one word over and over again.

Needless to say it’s a little distracting but I think we can make it work.

Even if it does sound like Trey Parker doing it…

Maybe that’s why it’s hard not to laugh.

But really it’s strange what catches on over the interwebs.

I mean, who would have ever thought a cat with a pop tart for a body shitting a rainbow and mewing in japanese while flying through space wouldn’t land someone in the Santa Rosa mental institute?

A few years ago that single idea would have got you thrown away and treated like a menace, and yet these days we have even weirder… probably… I might need some time to think about something more obscure.

I suppose it’s just quite amazing what prevails in the age of the internet, I doubt Al Gore ever saw trololol guy coming, or anything that spawned in 4chan and managed to rape the rest of the internet in a sea of some sort of viral muddy water, I blame the mudkips.

Some of it is entirely necessary however, and it’s quite refreshing to see for example, a cooking show I can actually watch.

With all the masterchefs, the hell’s kitchens, the jamie oliver’s and the iron chefs I’m very grateful for epic meal time for showing me that cooking can be fun, and for encouraging me to try candied bacon…

mmm…

Seriously folks, if you’ve never candied your bacon you are missing out on one of the most delicious things man has ever discovered.

So make sure you get ready to smear some brown sugar all over your bacon today, and if you can, get thick cut, because it looks delicious, not that I’ve ever seen it in this country…

Maybe I’m missing out, maybe I should move to Canada…

Those pancake stacks look amazing too…

See you in Canada I suppose