I’ve returned from the dead, and I’ve brought a whole stack of stuff with me.
The PoB Community Collaboration Project (PoBCCP) is what I’ve brought with me, and you are going to help it happen.
Yes, YOU!
Here’s the deal:
First we’ll need to have all the participants ready. When everyone who wants to join has done so, I’ll send a posting order. The idea is to have every participant post, after which I send storylines and occurences to every person. People can send me a PM to join (’ll give you all several days time) and then we’ll start.
Introduction
As none of you know, you will be making the story of one of the characters who have signed up (willingly or coerced) for a deadly new bloodsport somewhere in the near future. They are given a weapon they may choose from an assortment and are then dropped at random places in a ruined city. The rules are simple: last man alive wins the game, and may ask the Network (the only entertainment company in the world, and the organizer of the games) for any prize he desires, limited of course by the Network’s possibility of fulfilling their desires. However, only one of the hundred participants can claim his prize. The rest will be brutally terminated. And naturally, everything that goes on will be broadcast via satellite cameras to every living room in the civilised world, giving the weary and extinguished citizens something to kick on.
Well, it seems I need to cast my gaze to the cancer that is killing the world. LOVE!
Love is a chemical imbalance in the brain which can be fixed with heavy doses of alcohol and copious amounts of sex with women whose names are unimportant after the deed is done.
“But Looshkin,” I hear you cry, “Why this hatred towards two people falling in love?” I have no good answer, something in me is sickened by the sight of people being happy in a relationship. Now this doesn’t stem from some childhood trauma, my parents are still together, and I can think of no other explainations, other than the fact that I’m lousy when it comes to women. I have been in a relationship for seven years, and through the ups and downs I learned alot. Mainly that I’m done.
I do believe that love exists, I’m not that insensitive. However, it’s those we fall in love with that can determine the course of your life. I’m not the best specemin in the gene pool, but at least I’m not a chav, however, at some point in my future I want a family, a wife, kids, a cat that doesn’t sit on my face when I fall asleep on the sofa, the usual list of material items that a good job and a steady income can provide etc etc.
My girlfriend on the otherhand, doesn’t.
I love her, but I cannot honestly say that the feeling is mutual. Not anymore. My problem began with the internet (my rant on this subject will be at a later date, so I’ll skip those parts and head for my point). My girlfriend is addicted to the internet. She cannot spend more than an hour of being awake away from her PC, and needless to say this has put a strain on the relationship. Granted I spend alot of time on the net as well, but sometimes I wish I didn’t. I would like to go out, see a movie, eat at a restaurant that didn’t serve fries. To put it clearly, I cannot see myself with her for very much longer, because I cannot carry on this path.
I’ve told her that at some point one of us will have to leave, most likely me. She responded by saying that I wouldn’t leave because I’d never find anyone else. The part that scares me is that she may be right.
I’ve been out of the dating arena for seven years. In those seven years I’ve changed from the thin, bespeckled, weedy guy hoping to catch that elusive look from any girl, to an overweight man with a god-complex, chronic insomnia and megalomania, OH! and is looking to settle down.
Now before I get emo and people start killing themselves, I…
I need help.
NOW THEN!
To all those kids out there who think they’ve met the right girl, picture yourself in 5 years, then 10 years, then 20. If you can honestly say to yourself, without a shadow of a doubt, that you’ll still be together, then good luck to you. If at any point in your mental journey into the future you see a gap, then it’s not to be. That doesn’t mean you should give up, but don’t pretend everything is fine when it’s not. A good relationship is built on honesty. Forget trust, no-one can be trusted, but honesty is the key. Everything else is superficial. If you cannot be honest to the person you plan to spend you life with, or they can’t be honest with you, then that relationship is a dead horse, and although you may get some semblence of life from the jerking movements it makes as you whack it with the baseball bat, it’s still dead.
Also if anyone reads this, and is female, in the Swansea city area, aged 18-32, likes eating, drinking and movies, drop me a line. Smoker prefered. No time wasters, no fat chicks, no chavs. It won’t lead anywhere, but I need a distraction.
I leave you now with a song, a song that gets me through the day, and is sometimes how I feel.
It’s that time of the week again where your Lord and Master, Looshkin, bellows his insane ramblings from the highest tower he can find. This week he tackles the subject of computer games.
So. Computers have been around for over three decades now, and we have gone from building sized monstrocities to computers so small you can swallow them. The term computer can be applied to any electronic device that uses mathematics to perform functions, from the simplest calculator to the Xbox to your mobile phone. I love modern technology and all it’s applications, and I am personally excited about what can and will be done within my mortal timeframe on this rock before I re-ascend to my throne up on high.
“Whoa, Looshkin? Is that really you? Where’s all the hate?” I hear you cry, and I’m getting to that.
The main problem I have with computers are computer games. As a child of the Eighties (I can remember when floppy disks were actually floppy, and fondly remember Thunder Cats and He-Man when there were “ALL NEW EPISODES”, and kids weren’t abducted from outside their homes, and e-coli didn’t exist) I have owned almost every computer console that’s been released in the UK market, from the DragonX2 (who’s games came on tapes and took 3 hours to load), then to the classic Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Master System, Mega Drive, then onto the N64, PlayStation, Dreamcast, Xbox, PS2, Game Cube and finally the Xbox 360. And now to my point; Games these days are shite. Yes graphically they have improved a million times from the days of Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Mutant Camels From Outer Space, and that’s a good thing. My beef is that games have gone from fun games to kill a few hours or serious games that take maybe a week to solve, and these games actually felt like you’d achieved something when you completed them and then walked into school the next day and proudly announce “I’ve completed Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts! Bow before me!”
These days a game scan be finished in a matter of hours, and there is no sense of acomplishment. In fact completing a game these days is akin to nothing unless you’ve played all five difficulty setings, earned every achievement, and all within the space of an hour. Yes it would be impressive, but who would honestly care. I’m happy if I can finish a game on medium settings and feel no compulsion to play Hard, Legendary or Impossible modes.
The other thing that annoys me is that games are pretty much carbon copies of other games, and that’s not including EA’s strategy of releasing the same game every year, they are clones. I recently went into Game and picked up (that’s picked up, NOT bought) a copy of Saint’s Row 2, and really considered buying it. Then I noticed that the store had a machine set up with the game, and I played for ten minutes. My conclusion; they should have named it GTA: Carbon Copy 2. I was dissapointed to say the least and then pre-ordered a copy of Wrath of the Lich King.
I spend a good deal of time playing World of Warcraft these days, and I’m perfectly happy to pay £8.99 a month to play it because of it’s graphical simplicity and is quite fun, but I’ve also been waiting for Warhammer Online for the last six years. When Warhammer: Age of Reckoning was finally released, I rushed to the store to pick up a copy. However, the one thing that stopped me from buying it was that it’s more expensive than WoW, in terms of initial cost and the monthly cost. At £14.99 a month to play it’s slightly outside what I’d be willing to pay, and so I sadly placed the game back on the shelf and left the store, my heart heavy and full of rage. I’ll just wait for the trial version and then decide if Games Workshop deserve my hard earned cash. It’s these type of things which stop me from getting games such as Age of Conan and other MMORPG’s, aside from the fact that most MMORPG’s are trying to be WoW.
I have mixed feelings, but in the long run, we’ll see where things go. Needless to say that games can only get better, and the day I can plug myself into a game and actually experiece it through my own eyes, will be the day I bid farewell to my life. However, you have to remember that those days are not going to happen, and so life will go on and the human species will continue. When it does come, you can guarantee that those plugged into the games will be those who could never breed anyway, and so the human race will be doing itself a favour.
I leave you now to ponder my words, and I wish you all a good day.
If you need me, and you will, I’ll be playing WoW.
Welcome to issue two of my weekly arguement with the world. This week I tackle something which is true in British society, teenage pregnancy and the creatures responcible.
While it is true that some teenagers getting pregnant is the unfortunate side effect of rape, and luckily the statistics for rape are low. Which leads me to believe that most girls aged 13-15 (the age at which a girl can concieve a child, but have not reached the legal age for sex) are doing it on purpose. Why do I believe this? Well, let me spin you a tale.
I’m working in my restaurant about a year and a half ago, and a girl chav (from hereafter refered to as a “chavette”) enters the restaurant. She is about 14 and pushing a screaming toddler, who’s age could be estimated to be 18-24 months, in a pushchair (that’s a stroller for Americans). At first it was easy to assume that the child was the chavette’s sibling, as the mother of the chavette was also present. However, once they had finished their meal the chavette comes across to me and asks for the key to the baby changing room so she can “change her son’s nappy.” I was taken aback, but I didn’t let it show, and once they had left I almost cried out in rage.
I later found out from one of my staff members, who had spoken to the chavette and her mother, that the chavette had chosen to keep the child once it was discovered she was pregnant, and the “father” was serving a suspended sentence for rape as he was 10! Whilst some mother’s under the age of 15 could very well have planned to get pregnant and could turn out to be very good parents, it’s the fact they are, for the most part chavs.
Chavs are the scum of society, the fact they breed at such an early age, and the father’s are often spawning several chavlets at the same time, leads me to believe in bringing back corporal punishment and compusary military service. If you don’t know what a chav is, then count yourself lucky. They are white kids, aged 6-18+, who think they are black, drive shitty cars which are “blinged-out” with drainpipes, under-car lighting, and other pointless accessories. They listen to shit mass-produced music by shit studio singers who’ve never seen an instrument, and blare it out at maximum volume whilst driving at 80mph in the middle of the night, and then they have the nerve to start fucking breeding!
I have always been a firm believer that people should take a test before having children, and the chavettes who are shitting out chavlets left, right and centre deserve the derision and scorn they get from older people. These days, a chavette and chav have a chavlet, this automatically grants them state welfare and a fucking free flat to live in. Yet this isn’t the thing which bugs me, if they have another chavlet, they are immediately given more money from the government and an even bigger home to live in.
When the revolution comes, I will be at the front, flamethrower clasped firmed in my hands, and I will be going door to door. Any sign of Burbury clothing, tracksuits or men’s pink shirts, and they are history!
Welcome to the first edition of Rant ‘N’ Rave, a weekly post by your lord and saviour, Looshkin.
This week I will go easy on everyone, and insult the people of the world, therefore diffusing responcibility through-out the teeming billions of humans that infest this wasteland you call Earth.
We live in a monoculture.
What does that mean? Well, go out to your town centre and stand at a street corner. You’ll probably see a McDonalds’ Restaurant, CNN on a screen somewhere, and a GameStop/EB/Game. You’ll go into a record store and see the usual suspects, maybe a special Eminem display rack.
Go out onto a street corner in London and you’ll see the same thing. Same in Prague. Same in Sâo Paulo. Same in Osaka, and Grozny, and Tehran, and Johannesburg, and Hobart.
That’s what a monoculture is. It’s everywhere, and it’s all the same. And it takes up alien cultures and digests them and shits them out in a homogenous building-block shape that fits seamlessly into the vast blank wall of the monoculture.
This is the future.
This is what we built.
This is what we wanted.
It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn’t we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn’t want to live like this, we could have changed it at any time, by not fucking paying for it.
So let’s all celebrate by going out and buying the same burger.
I know I don’t make many announcements, but my writer’s block has finally been lifted, and the Cheap Rip-Off Series reaches the quarter century mark. Although this series was the original one I created, it has only just reached 25 but still continues, and apart from the PoB/CRO War, is the longest series I have made to date.
Yes I realise that The Generic Adventures series was a spin-off of Life & Times, which technically puts it in the 30 issue mark, but they aren’t connected except by two characters, therefore they don’t count.
Anyway, happy 25th to the Cheap Rip-Off series, may it someday reach the big 100!
