Here, have some funny oneliners for your Sunday evening entertainment:
Bonus extended Stewart Francis:
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This Is Why We Video Gaming
So yeah, Grand Theft Auto V came out this week and turned out to be a great game, but somewhat misogynistic as there no playable female roles nor any interesting female characters. Pointing this out activated the usual Internet Women Hating Machine, which prompted Leigh Alexander to write a sarky review as well as put it to song, as shown above in Jonathan Mann’s interpretation.
But what this all really proved is that the Saints Row games are just much better. Yes, the game play is largely the same, but it doesn’t take itself so seriously as “art”. More importantly, in Saints Row you can play as whoever you want to be and it doesn’t matter for how the game treats you. You don’t need to be a gross man who swears a lot and commits crime; you can be a gross woman who swears a lot and commits crime.
Thomas the Propaganda Engine
My eldest nephew is crazy about Thomas the Tank Engine. He can spent hours watching Thomas videos on Youtube, but best not to let him watch this one. Meanwhile, Drew Magary explains what makes it an awful, awful tv show:
Thomas and his friends live on Sodor and spend their days toiling endlessly, “shunting trucks and hauling freight.” (Shunting, by the way, sounds like a great Urban Dictionary term for silent fucking—”We shunted while his parents slept next door!”) The engines are only happy when they are being “Really Useful,” which suggests to me that they have been brainwashed by fearsome tuxedoed railway overlord Sir Topham Hatt to accept the bonds of slavery without question. These poor engines have never known freedom, and so the very idea of it is alien to them. The whole story could have served as an allegory for life under the Russian czars before the rise of the Bolsheviks. But I bet the Rev wasn’t that subtle. I bet he was just a man who thought trains were bitches.
On the whole though the show has an useful message for all kids: shut up, you’re not special, do as you are told. If you don’t we’ll brick you up in an abandoned railway tunnel:
Thomas the Tank Engine: propaganda to get kids used to the awful conditions of the UK railways, or just to get them used to being happy cogs in the capitalist machine?
Bubblegum Crisis
Back in the late eighties/early nineties, before the internet, when we had to rely on the local videostore to supply us with anime, Bubblegum Crisis was one of the first series to be widely available, through good, old Manga Video. I sort of knew something about anime, through scraps in American comics zines, but it wasn’t until Manga Video got going in the early nineties, that we got a regular supply of anime videos. Bubblegum Crisis, Akira, Appleseed, Dominion Tank Police, Wicked City: that first wave of videos was very cyberpunk influenced and they provided a vision of the future that was just around the corner for us, slightly too young to have seen Blade Runner at the cinema or have read Neuromancer and Schismatrix when new.
Explore the deep sea from behind your pc
One sign of living in the future is being able to watch live video from a NOAA deep sea expedition “along the Northeast U.S. Canyons and at Mytilus Seamount. Sandra would’ve loved this.