There's no stopping the cretins from hopping

I was driving home from work and wondering about how to resolve free will and determinism. I always seem to struggle when it comes to formulating this conundrum as a simple question. Here is part of it: is the current state of the world (and by extension, all past and future states) inevitable? The whole causality thing is quite a convincing argument in this regard, although I do wonder if that is an incomplete approach. Another conundrum: if you consider some decision that you have made (this being exercising your alleged free will), given the same state of the world (and your mind) at the time that you made this decision, would you ever make a different choice? I'm going with 'no'.

At any rate, I was mulling over all of this (I tend to do think about this sort of crap) when I drove past a beaten-up old blue van with 'Jesus is the answer' painted on the side in yellow.

So apparently I have my answer, although I can't make any claim to understand it. It's a bit like answering 'that is right' to 'how did you get to the moon?'

Check it! A new post!

An indication of how industrious I feel when it comes to blogging.

A summarised version of what I probably would have blogged about over the last month:

How much The Island sucked.

How awesome the trailer for Sin City looks.

Damn miserable existentialists posing as biplane pilots.

Why you should listen to Apples in Stereo, Saturday Looks Good to Me and Charlotte Hatherley.

Why you must watch the original King Kong, if only for the Hispanic actor cast as a Chinese man. China, Latin America, what's the difference? Who can tell? Certainly not me.

Why cultural stereotyping is okay if the cultural group in question isn't around to protest.

That's about it. I'm going to go ahead and leave the task of thinking out the rest of these virtual posts as an exercise for the reader.

Grand Theft Auto malarkey

Apparently there is a rather dodgy mod available for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It is called Hot Coffee and it allows the player to have sex with their avatar's girlfriend. This has caused quite some consternation, check out this article for a longer explanation of the situation. In short, the people who released the mod claim that they unlocked some existing functionality in the game's code (i.e. they merely made it available instead of producing it themselves), but the folks at Rockstar Games claim that the mod was produced by malicious hackers etc...

Hilary Clinton is pissed off about the whole thing. She feels that the game should have been rated Adult Only (instead of the Mature 17+ rating it received). For those of you who are not familiar with the Grand Theft Auto series, the game involves being rewarded for a variety of criminal activities (stealing cars, running people down, shooting people/cops/hare krishnas). Maybe this has all changed since the first two GTA games that I played a few years back, but I truly doubt it.

This is the part that I don't understand: Clinton is pissed off about the simulated sex, yet apparently all the killing and stealing is okay? If video games really influence the behaviour of gamers, wouldn't we rather have more people having sex than killing people? After all, sex is a natural thing and in most places is not illegal etc... Stealing cars/killing people on the other hand, is generally considered to be poor practice.

Like eating glass

I might be wrong. Usually I am kind of dismissive of overly hyped bands (anybody remember last year when Snow Patrol, or Keane for that matter, was 'the next Coldplay'?) on account of I tend to prefer to form my own opinions (quite odd, I know). Yet sometimes the hype is totally justified. Arcade Fire being a case in point.

So when I first started hearing about how Bloc Party is next most amazing band or whatever, I avoided them for a bit. And then I saw this really cool band on MTV and it turned out to Bloc Party. It has taken me a long time since then to actually get off my ass and buy the album (this however, has nothing to do hipsters or hype - I'm the king of procrastination), but it the album is definitely a worthwhile purchase. There is a sense of urgency in most of their songs, which makes for compelling listening. Even though I haven't been able to make out many lyrics yet, the music sounds like it is somehow very relevant to right now (as opposed to 1986).

Check it!

Up in flames

Two predictions that I'd put money on (if I were a betting man):

1. Arcade Fire are the next Pixies. Over the next few years, they will release another three albums or so, all of which will be amazing, but will never be commercially successful. The fans will be rabid fans. Then they will break up for whatever reason and it will suck with great immensity.

2. google is going to rule the world in a few years. They are big brother, they are watching us and they are reading our email. They may even be monitoring where you live and work. They are the gatekeepers, they own our gateway to information. Check it. It really is a bit worrying when you consider how much we depend on google, and the kind of power that gives them.

Coping with the cultural logic of late capitalism part 1: ninjas

I don't like going to shopping malls. Not one jot. In fact I detest it. Shopping malls are like labyrinths, except labyrinths are cool and malls suck. (An aside: imagine you travelled through a wormhole in a supermarket, say Hyperama, and you were ejected back into the same supermarket at some point in either the future or the past, would you be able to tell that you had time-travelled at all? The music would probably be the same bland, inoffensive adult contemporary rubbish that they play today. Your only clue would come from prices...).

As much as I hate going to the mall, I find that sometimes it is a necessary evil. Like last night when I wanted to listen the Bloc Party CD at the CD shop. I find that walking around pretending to be a spy (or better yet: a ninja!) makes the whole experience more bearable. You should try it. Seriously.

dictionary.com tells me that the plural of labyrinth should be labyrinths, yet I think that labyrinthes is cooler. What do y'all think?

The Island

I've seen the trailer and I'm not too sure what to make of it. On the one hand, it is a triumph in terms of concept. What is better than a movie with Scarlett Johansson? A movie with more than one Scarlett Johansson! On the other hand, it is a Michael Bay movie. Michael Bay brought us such fantastic movies as Pearl Harbour and Armageddon! Eeee!