cock sex hot boobs fucking BANNED

Sometimes I know, way ahead of time, just what I'm going to speak about. Sometimes it'll be a quick something, and sometimes it'll be so big I can't talk about is coherently, but I have to break it into a over-sized illegible stream of consciousness. And this week, it's totally one of those weeks.

So thanks to Davy boy Cameron, we now know the biggest threat to our country. It's not cigarettes, as he's stopped the plain packaging initiative. It's not shale gas fracking, as he's said that's all fine, and water's meant to come out the tap on fire. It's not the dehumanization of people, as we have the racist van. It's not the destruction of the NHS, because he's done that ages ago.

It's porn.

Terrible, terrible porn.

Porn is the worst thing there is, and is going to be banned.

Well, I say banned, I mean it's going to be blocked from the ISP's directly and you'll have to ask them very nicely to turn their bloody filters off. And here's where I start getting a headache, because this whole thing is so utterly stupid, I have no idea where to start.

Let's start at the basic issues - the actual technical ability to do such a thing. One thing we were all apparently very proud of is that we've blocked The Pirate Bay from British shores. Whoo. Go us. Unfortunately, this isn't really true. For starters, The Pirate Bay takes a perverse delight in that it's had more down time due to drunken shenanigans than actual litigated blocks, and I, and by extension anyone in Britain, can easily still get on The Pirate Bay if so desired by it's myriad options of proxys.

Secondly, using filters? Really? Really. Great, so let's try something; porn, sex, penetration, hot, sexy, rammed, creampie, cum, blonde, lesbian, gay, big cock, fucking.

Does this mean my poxy little blog will now be banned? Because how is this actually going to work? Because honestly, the notion that my barely-read blog of all things is causing the moral decay of Britain, and is treated as such by the relevant authorities, fills me with a impish glee.

You're either going to filter so poorly that you'll miss things, like my phone; it came with adult content blocked, but nude pictures incorporated into Twitter had no issue getting through. Or you'll filter so strongly you'll block so much legitimate content it's legitimately un-fucking-funny. Each one of those words I dropped has serious non-porn connotations, and I'm honestly worried stuff like LGBT support groups, or sexual health / awareness sites are going to find themselves on the wrong side of this damn filter.

Secondly, what sort of porn are we talking about here? Because there's some real sodding variety out there in terms of erotic content: the classic photos, the newer videos, the brand new streaming content, to erotic poetry and literature. How's that going to work? Because, damn, we humans like a variety of wank material. I remember a comedian telling an old joke, "the internet is the only place where you'll ask for goat porn and it'll ask you back 'what sort of goat?'" And good luck trying to neatly snip out the porn and leave everything else intact.

Yet, amusingly, stuff like The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Daily Star have nothing to worry about. The latter and former have topless women on page 3 (often when I pass the newspaper stands, some helpful individual has peeled back the first page to ogle and hasn't turned it back, so everyone can see. Will someone please think of the children?) The Daily Mail's website on the other hand, is often filled with half-dressed teenagers, which is creepy as all fuck, people. But nope, they're not affected by this bullshit.

Oh, Daily Mail... change. Like, right now, you fucked up, evil, bastards.

Maybe The Daily Mail's website will fall afoul of the law, hopefully, which is the one silver lining of this whole crap.

The hypocrisy is incredible. Like the Traitor King, Nick Clegg going on about abolishing top up fees before tripling them, I remember Davy boy going on about how the nanny state is wrong and should be dismantled. That and how the Conservative party really should stop banging on about Europe, so it's just been a few bad months for you, hasn't it?

And then there's the whole 'rape porn' thing, which is... yeah... what? Ah. Davy boy. You do know, that a lot of the rape stuff out there? That's fantasy. It's fiction. Not that it doesn't exist, (sadly) but it's a scripted fantasy. And in the darker corners of the internet, where it isn't, where it's the real, sickening, deal? Well, it turns out, that's already illegal. Because rape is already illegal. Duh. Wait, does this mean Deliverance and The Clockwork Orange will now be illegal? What about that South Park episode with Indiana Jones 4? Actually, what about Indiana Jones 4?

You see, I choose not to see it, Matt and Trey. Somehow, I feel I'm the winning here.

What I seriously find disturbing is how this is being stated. Oh, that guy who raped and murdered Tia, he had 'normal' porn on his computer, and then later 'bad' porn, ergo all porn is evil and leads to pedophile rapists.

That argument.

Just that fucking argument.

Yeah, I bet you found coffee in his home as well, right? COFFEE MAKES YOU A PEDOPHILE RAPIST, QED.

So what this actually means, when you finally decide you've had enough of not being able to get to half of your internet, and ask your ISP to please take off the stupid fucking block, the government will treat you a potential sex criminal. Whee. Not a person sick to death of stupid, useless fucking filter's - no, as a potential sex offender. Great.

Quick question, to all you MPs: any of you know what a VPN is? No. Cool.

A VPN? Oh, don't worry. It's a type of... sweet. Yes. A... Very... Pineapple... Nougat. You should just forget about it, really. It's irrelevant, honestly.

Hmm. At this point does it really need to be said that this idea is a giant 'fuck you' to all our civil liberties? Huh. No, I see you all got that. The whole 'censoring the internet' thing does make people awfully nervous. I'm holding out that the EU may see this idea, and tell us to knock it off. While once again, this'll mean the EU is a champion and restorer of British people's human rights, it will unfortunately mean for a while they'll have to run a gauntlet of 'SICK EU SAY THAT IT'S A HUMAN RIGHT FOR TO PEDOPHILES DOWNLOAD ALL THE SICK TEENAGER PORN THEY WANT, LOOK AT ALL THEIR HOT, UNDERAGE, YOUTHFUL, GLISTENING BODIES ON PAGE 5.'

Perhaps I need another angle to get my point across. So. Let's try this out.

Look, Davy boy. I'm in my house. The curtain's are drawn. I have my headphones in. I'm all alone.

May I have a wank now? Please?

Selling off the Royal Mail? But who will deliver my restraining orders?

Fine. I'm actually gonna do it. I'm going to discuss something I dismissed out of hand last week.

Oh course, that means I will talk about the privatisation of the Royal Mail, because there's no way I'm covering the more serious / depressing stuff without way more chocolate and tact than I currently possess. Even though, in truth, the Royal Mail sell off is very depressing to start with.

While I'm about to praise the hell out of the Royal Mail, I still find this hilarious.

For the sake of transparency, I may not be the most unbiased or fair commentator on this issue. Without going to overtly boring detail about my job, I work in an eBay store and I am heavily involved in the sale and dispatching of orders. So I have to deal with couriers, and by logical extension, the Royal Mail a lot. So while not totally unbiased, for once I have sort of experience in what I'm waffling about this week.

And in my experience, dear lord do I like the Royal Mail the way it is now. Currently, we exclusively use Royal Mail's tracked services – their Signed For services, International Signed For and Special Delivery. And we use them in great confidence. They are delivered quickly, efficiently, and intact to the correct address... which is not something I could say about my experience with other private courier services. Royal Mail has basically priced themselves out of heavier, bulky packages for the most part, and whilst I won't name names, we can't seem to go more than a day with a different courier company without something going hideously fucking wrong.

Mis-sorted to wrong depot. Box looking like it's been delivered by the median of kicking instead of van. Courier unable to find house after we sent them a god damn map and picture of house. Box with six inch nails driven into it. Courier drove past at a billion miles an hour and couldn't be fecked to drop off the package. These are all things that I have experienced, and have come to wearingly expect from private courier companies. I've seen parcels go to China, get caught in customs for a few months before returning in better shape than a two-day fifty-mile round trip with a courier. We have a code, called '<courier name> ready,' which means 'to package with such oversight and severity that the contents are protected up to a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick.' Once, when testing the suitability of packaging, we jumped on it, because that's how far we felt we needed to test it for private couriers.

...and Royal Mail, in all the time I've been with them, have lost a parcel of ours... once. Just once. The person above me, who's done this for years has likewise only seen one parcel go walkies before, making it to a grand total of two parcels over many years. Impressive! And our parcels go to and fro looking pristine and intact.

So the announcement of the sell off of Royal Mail has filled me with absolute fucking dread.

Royal Mail has always treated our kit with absolute care and professionalism. And over the year's that's going to change.

Parcel prices aren't protected by law – those prices will go up. First class stamp prices aren't protected by law – those prices will go up. Six days a week delivery? Yeah, that'll last. Universal coverage of the whole of Britain? Pfft, no one goes there, no money there, scrap it! More costs to businesses to ship! Yay!

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

Look, Vince Cable? Mr Vinny C? You know what a fucking service is, don't cha?

A service is something you provide because it provides a benefit beyond the black dotted line. Let's look at Braintree Freeport, for example. They pay for a free bus to shuttle people back and forth from Braintree town centre and Freeport. This costs them a load of money, and do they do that from the sweet nougaty goodness of their own hearts? NOPE. They do it because it shuttles customers to them. Sure, some may be using it to be just cutting some walking time down, but the sheer amount of people it encourages to go to Freeport to spend money out of sheer bloody convenience makes it worth it. Selling off the Royal Mail would be as stupid as selling off our electricity, gas and train services OH WAIT WE DID THAT. AND WHAT THE FUCK DID WE GET, VINNY C?

For those of you not from Britain, I can assure you it wasn't endless cheap electricity and a wonderful train service.

No. Not in the least. Those services are a pile of expensive, unless shite, are conclusively the worst in Europe, which we still for some inane reason the British tax payer still subsidizes, and even more insultingly, we have a load of British customers paying money to France because EDF are one of our biggest energy supplies.

Not that I'm a Francophobe or anything, I'm just tapping that sweet, sweet, French-hating teat for views, you see? And please, if I saw another country stupid enough to let me sell them power I'd be all over it. Shine on EDF, and may the confusion between you and the EDL remain slight and fleeting.

And one of the few places are economy is still well and kicking is on the internet, providing goods and services and revenue to our country's coffers all posted over... the Royal Mail. Ah. You see, there's that service aspect thing again. Sure, it costs the country money on that big dotted line, but it helps the country make money in so many different ways is cancels itself out and puts us in the black in the big picture, like having cheap trains to shuttle workers from around the country giving them greater flexibility in employment and thus keeping employment high and oh no wait-we don't do that any more. Damn it.

I mean, I don't even get the timing. The Royal Mail made profit this year! Actual money! It's a service you accept that it'll just piss away money and it came back to you in other less tangible ways and this year it went and put actual money in your hands! Keep a hold of that, for the love of god! Though admittedly, making money would strengthen a case for a sale and weaken my own point, but's let ignore the hell outta that and say – this money you intend to get? Three billion, right? How much of our debt will that pay off? Well, we owe over nine hundred billion pounds, so that three billion is...

...Yeah, I can't be bothered to work out that fucking low a percentage that is.

Ugh. Just ugh. What a bloody mess. Oh, and Vinny C, I look forward to the upcoming postal strikes, you wrinkly old cock. Well fucking done. Bloody beautiful. Way to make my job just that bit more stressful. Thanks.

Film Review: Pacific Rim

You know, I lot of the time I come into the week dreading about what I have to write about. Will it be the nonsense of selling off the post office? The cruelty of legal aid changes? The insanity of Texas's fresh assault on women's rights? Or will it be the last minute contender, the oh-my-god-wut of the Zimmerman case?

So instead I'm going to talk about giant robots punching giant monsters IN THE FACE.

DUR DUR DUR DURLALALA DUR DUR DUR!

PUNCHING MONSTERS INNA FACE!

Pacific Rim is kinda hard for me to objectively review. Once in a while, I remember sitting in the cinema thinking to myself, 'Wait a minute, that didn't make sense,' before the film turned to me and screamed, 'I PUNCH A MONSTER INNA FACE WITH ROCKET ARM, YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID.' And quite frankly, I was totally okay with that.

I mean, come on people, why am I even pushing this movie? The core concept alone should have you clamouring to go see this movie, unless you suffer a complete dearth of joy in your soul.

Unlike the totally dire Lone Ranger film, this film wasn't ashamed of what it was. It didn't spend the whole run time undermining it's core message because it was trying to be 'edgy,' or 'cynical,' No. This film is, in a sentence, about giant robots punching giant monsters in the face. The whole film revolves around that, and it's great to see a film embrace it's core concept with such love and joy instead of shame.

BOAT SWORD BOAT SWORD GONNA HIT YOU WITH MY BOAT SWORD.

So, fine, an actual plot synopsis for you: Giant monsters, called Kaiju, have risen from a hole in reality from the seabed. And do what monsters are supposed to do - wreck the mother fucking shit outta everything. And they're pretty good at it, so humanity, realizing that their biggest tanks are no more threatening then the average perturbed puppy to these thing, go for broke and build the Jaegers, our giant monster smashing robots. To get the best out of them, they need two pilots to neurally sync up with the robot, as a single pilot can't handle the mental strain and normally ends up with brains dribbling out their nose... which does put a damper on your fighting prowess. In goes the Jaegers, and what do you know, giant robots kick all sort of ass!

So much ass is being kicked that eventually, the Jaegers stop being replaced, and the authorities start winding down the program to instead built a less awesome giant ass wall, in the spirit of, 'Well fuck you, we didn't want the Pacific ocean anyway, you take it.' However, the Kaiju are getting bigger, badder, and more numerous as our heroes realise these Kaiju aren't going away and are about to swamp the planet on mass. So it's about time for a crazy plan involving getting an ex-pilot back into action with a new partner, a nuke... and punching monsters in the face.

Yeah. Honestly, I'm just gonna stick with the 'giant robots punch giant monsters in the face.' Way snappier.

Whoever wins, it's going to look awesome.

This really is the epitome of the summer blockbuster. Big, loud, pretty, and not utterly stupid, and not without flaws. I will admit, discussing it after watching just lead into a long conversation of the film's more silly bits - anyone care to explain the whole digital / analogue engines bit to me again? Hell, the only answer I could come up with is that modern Jaegers have digital engines, which can be on or off (hence digital) where the older nuclear powered Jaeger could be on, off, or overloading... so that's not digital? I don't know.

It is interesting that it doesn't push the human connection into the background either. While making sure a film around giant robots vs. giant monsters is primarily focused on that rather than just it's human cast - looking you, Transformers - the fact that the Jaegers are piloted by two pilots that need to be in sync with each other by linking minds allowed a lot of development in dealing with emotional baggage and the power of teamwork. Very nice. A lot of lesser films would of passed over that.

Most of the more stupid bits to me felt that it wan't a raging plot hole but moreso just bad explanation. The guy in charge of the Jaeger project, Idris Elba who's character's name I forget and so I just called him Stringer Bell, couldn't pilot a Jaeger again without it killing him. He said it was because of radiation poisoning from older Jaeger models - fine, that makes sense, but it was presented that syncing would kill him... which would also make sense, as he piloted alone for a bit which messed him up. But radiation poisoning and sync death are two very different things. It was one or the other, but it was shown as both at the same time which was confusing.

Then you're talking about how we're told that powdered Kaiju bone is ridiculously expensive, yet we have the Bone Slums were poor people live within the rib cage of a long dead Kaiju. Yeah. Considering I can't get a train nowadays without a delay due to some fucker nicking the cabling, I guarantee you those ribs would of lasted about forty seconds surrounded by that many desperately poor people.

The other criticisms I could pull up which are't niggles of misunderstanding - and I'm spoiler tagging this bit here - was that I was highly disappointed that we had so few other Jaegers to play about with, as that got knocked out of the grand plan pretty early, which was a great shame as they were much more visually distinct of all the Jaegers. Boo! 

Look, this film will bring you joy. It's that simple. It's a great, brash, sorta silly film, and it's delivering what it's got with great aplomb and cheer. It's music is bombastic and incredible, and this film is one of those films, films that really must be seen at a cinema with the sound blaring at you and sights dazzling you. And seeing it will hopefully put more studios in the mood to show us new ideas, rather than sequel after sequel. So go see Pacific Rim, now!

Before this film becomes a bust, loses out to Grown Ups 2 and we never see anything new again.

Silly little problems

As I dropped my bag into a convenient chair, I turned to the History Common Room as a whole and asked:

'Let's say I'm on the 11th floor of a 13 story building and it's about to collapse. I have around one minute. Any thoughts on anything I could do to survive?'

My friends all looked at me rather confused.

You see, sometimes I have very silly problems.

Back in the day, when I was still in university and was only a proto-adult (students aren't really adults at all, really) I was playing a tabletop RPG World of Darkness. Normally, you'd all take the roles of vampires and werewolves or some other mystical creatures, but we'd decided to play a game in this universe as the squishy humans. Very, very squishy humans. Normally human's in these campaigns are barely background noise, as powerful as a gnat squaring up to the Incredible Hulk. Sometimes humans could be a problem, but only in great numbers. There were six of us. Only. In a world where certain beasts could kill us with a stray thought, we thought it'd be fun to up to said beasts with a silly little stick and poke it repeatedly.

Very shortly us squishy humans had found a cult on campus, a clone military attempting to take over and fungus zombies crawling up out the woodwork. For any of my reader even partway familiar with World of Darkness this is not exactly usual. We been tasked by the cult to kill a daemon / bug hybrid currently camping out in on of the towers, now surrounded by a giant creeping ivy plant covering the entire building, whilst in turn further surrounded by a ring of nervous clone military covering the plant as it occasional spat out fungus zombies at them.

I would like to take the time to express that at the time, none of this seemed weird.

One of us fluked their way into the clone military force, by means of accidentally stumbling into the officers building and on the way out was given a lieutenant's ID due to a phenomenally bad guard, who made the assumption that anyone leaving the officer's mess had to be an officer... and no one saw fit to correct him. Armed with a fake ID, we waltzed into the armory, picked up... all the guns, and went into the giant creeper zombie-infested daemon / bug hybrid thing lair.

Somehow we ended up on the eleventh floor before being noticed, when all the fungus zombies attacked. All of them. Because each fungus zombie was a originally a student, I made quick few sums in my head, and came up with a estimate that we'd just found ourselves in a fight with approximately one hundred and four zombies, or up to a hundred and fifty if we were unlucky. So, logically, we dropped a thermite grenade behind us.

It was actually a very smart plan. Really! Thermite, as you no doubt know, gets spectacularly fucking hot. So fucking hot there was soon a 10 foot wide floor going down five bloody floors, and counting. But by dropping it up the corridor behind us, it prevented any fungus zombies from that side of the floor getting to us, and funneling every zombies to the stairs, of which there was one entrance point we were currently covering with a SAW.

Nothing like one of these to give that lil' bit of confidence.

Sure, we had many, many fungus zombies to fight. But fuck it. Clearly we were ill-suited to this stealth lark and killing absolutely everything in the building seemed an actual achievable option, so we went for it. I mean, if everyone is dead, there's no one to witness you being there, it's basically the same as sneaking in, right?

Until the same guy who bluffed us into the building saw through the hole we made the very daemon / bug hybrid we came to kill a floor below and leapt on it. Where he was promptly eaten. At which point he promptly detonated every grenade he had on him. And then, in a feat of absurd rolling I have never seen before or since, the die decided as the dust settled that the guy was completely sodding unharmed, and the daemon / bug hybrid blown to smithereens.

However, he had specified that he had pulled the pins on all his grenades. And he was, unfortunately, carrying a second thermite grenade. Now, a building might be able to survive one hole ten feet wide and five floors deep... but not two. Yeah. The session ended there, and we were told we had about one minute to get out.

Come to think of it, that was context I probably should of started with in the first place.

This just goes to show that once you get people around a table for a tabletop pen and paper RPG they are going to do silly things, and have silly problems.

(Incidentally, after a week of researching how building collapse and void space, it turns out one of us revealed he could concentrate for about thirty seconds and teleport us all to safety, as long as we were in a 5 metre radius from him. Yes, we may of all been squishy humans, but by that point, some of us were less squishy than others. Also: that still wasn't overtly weird.)

Nowadays, I'm playing Only War, where in the grim dark future of the 41st millennium, we're playing the puny Guardsmen armed with a flashlight guns vs. everything that could kill us with a stray thought.

I may have a thing for impossible odds.

In the middle of an ork invasion, they've landed a Rok on our planet. And by Rok I mean they put engines on a small moon and called in a spaceship. And by landed I mean... well, they rammed our planet. So we have a shit tonne of dust in the air, so no wireless communication or powered aircraft is happening. And our group of Guardsmen were bored waiting on the front line, waiting for the orks to turn up, when we realized the orks were late because they were advancing with their Stompas and Gargant. And by Stompa I mean two high rise building slapped to together and covered in guns. And by Gargant I mean think of a Stompas, but only if Stompas were child-sized and Gargants was a moridly obese parent. And we have guns that are popularly referred to as 'flashlights' because that's how effective they are at killing things.

And because we were bored, we decided to kill a Stompa. By ourselves. All six of us.

Our plan is... well... I say a 'plan,' but...

We're going to board a plane, glide it through the dust cloud, jump off it using fancy high-tech parachutes, somehow land on top of Stompa, somehow get on board the bridge, somehow kill everything on the bridge, somehow hold the bridge, set a giant-ass bomb, somehow work out how to use the controls, somehow turn it around and walk away from the ork horde that's following, jump off the Stompa with our fancy high-tech parachutes, and walk away all cool like not looking behind us as the Stompa explodes behind us.

Incidentally, have a mentioned that one, single, solitary ork is probably more than enough to kill two of us, and the last time we thought an ork higher up he one-hit KO'd us so fucking casually he may as well have been sipping coffee with he free hand?

Yeah. This plan, in itself, is a silly problem.

Once again, this just goes to show that once you get people around a table for a tabletop pen and paper RPG they are going to do silly things, and have silly problems.

...so, originally, when I asked my friends for help, they couldn't provide me with any. So. Anyone. Anyone at all have any ideas how to make this plan any way more survivable, without suggesting to not do it?

Because I get the feeling, that this silly problem we made for ourselves is gonna blow up in our faces hilariously.