Sand and iron(y)

Here’s your dose of irony and humor for the day, plus a handy tip to top it all off. First, the tip: always secure your stands — for both safety and financial reasons, this is a good idea if you think there is ANY chance whatsoever that they might be knocked or blown over. Okay, now for the humor and irony.

In a short news clip from southern California, reporter Michele Gile is telling viewers about the volunteers at Seal Beach who are filling up sand bags for people to use to prevent flooding.

Sadly, whoever set up the C-Stand to the right of Gile didn’t think to ask any of the volunteers for a couple of sand bags of their own… and so the stand that was sitting there was blown right onto her head as she was signing off. To her credit, she handled it like a champ.

Im saying WHAT now?

Ok, here's what happened. I was having a conversation with Alanna which somehow turned to the "predictive text" feature which I personally feel is just an annoyance. However we tried what you see here. A randomly chosen word was typed and when it suggested the next likely word to follow, it was accepted, after which another was suggested based on the previous word and well..... Looks like there may be a use  for it after all.

Game platform makers need to sort their $#!t out..

Here’s a rant based on a conversation between myself and four friends over the weekend on the somewhat troubled situation the gaming industry is finding itself in. The current situation is something that a corporate press release would describe as a "Challenging time" for console manufacturers in the same sense that a tube with barbed wire down the middle would be a challenging time for a prison inmate's @$$hole.

Console gaming is going through a strange and slightly traumatic graduation and no one seems o know what it’s going to do with its life afterwards. Maybe get a job and build a future, maybe move back in with its parents, or maybe it’ll just drink a load of mentholated spirits and pass out on a public train. It might be time for a rundown of the candidates now that all three have at the very least made some kind of awkward stammering announcement about its new console. So far it’s been like watching the most retarded game of Texas holdem ever played, where everyone just sat and eyeballed each other for 6 months before someone finally called in the most wheesely non-committal way in the hopes it would make someone else show their hand whereupon the flop cards were revealed to be a joker, a get out of jail free card, and a mages of the vineyard from magic the gathering. Of course the odd man out is Nintendo and keeping with the poker metaphor they were dealt a pair of 2's right at the start and immediately went "ALL IN MOFO'S!" only to realise later that one of the 2's was actually a 4 that had been partially covered by a big fat touch screen controller someone had left on the table *cough**cough*. there’s not much left to be said about the Wii U, suffice to say that everyone is trying to find SOME new innovation to keep themselves alive but Nintendo's innovative idea to have a console with no friggin games doesn’t seem to have payed off as well as they hoped. Maybe it could still come back if it brought out the usual suspects, but even Mario has a shelf life, and recently a critical blow was dealt when someone at EA announced they weren’t making any games for it. Because if they had to bring water to a dying man in the desert then giving some to the one with no arms or legs who refuses to stop eating crisps might be a bit of a waste. They did end up backtracking on that remark though perhaps realizing that before you burn a bridge it might be good to wait and see if the other two bridges aren’t going to spontaneously combust.

Which brings us to the first of the two enigmatic candidates, the PS4? Announced earlier this year although announced might be too charitable a word because they didn’t reveal the console or the price or the release date or much of anything really....besides the new controller! Which they were super excited about because they came up with the idea of a dedicated "annoy all your friends" button. As I said everyone is trying to find a way to innovate because previously you'd sell a console by showing that it lets you play bigger and better games, and that’s not going to work this time because the increasingly inefficient ways AAA games are made is only making them blander and blingier. Next Gen can’t even bring itself to pretend that if all you want to do is play the best games available all you have to do is stick with current gen or BUY A PC..... Especially since everyone is shunning backwards compatibility like it’s a physically abled person trying to enter the Special Olympics. So instead Sony is throwing its eggs into the social media basket with the ability to instantly show your friends what you’re doing and even let them take control. So the PS4 is for people who not only want the latest games but also don’t particularly want to PLAY them. This is like a hair dresser buying up all the advertising space in a cancer ward. Surely if someone sits down and turns on their PS4 it’s because they want to PLAY something. Not watch someone ELSE play something. If I was trying to enjoy a game and some ass kept pestering me to watch them play something else and maybe fight the final boss for them because they couldn’t be bothered, I tell them to become intimate with a cricket bat. Any chance of getting a dedicated boot-to-the-head button Sony? It also has the ability to record video footage and upload it to YouTube but little to the degree in which you can edit it, because this will be the difference between Sony enabling a culture of criticism, and Sony just trying to get everyone to do their marketing for them. And I think we all know which one Sony would prefer, being a console manufacturer, which in the current climate is an entity with the demeanour of a cornered wolf and the financial stability of a tin miner in a super nova. If it came down to a snarling fight for pack dominance id probably bet on Microsoft because it seems to be the slightly more desperate of the two.

The Xbox One then! Which gratifyingly was already called the "Xbone" by the end of announcement day. An announcement day that seemed a bit premature because no one at Microsoft seemed to have a clue what this big black ring binder of a console actually did. First it was going to be "Always on", then it wasn’t, then it has to call home once a day or else Microsoft won’t pay the randsome, first pre-owned games wouldn’t work, then they would, but only if you payed a fee, then you can only INSTALL them if you pay a fee..... Why is the seller of an alleged entertainment system being as evasive Julius Malema during an audit?  What we DO know is that you can’t use it without internet, can’t play 360 games, can’t use 360 controllers, can’t use an SD tv,cant turn the gorram 'connect off so it will permanently stare at you from the corner of the room occasionally licking its pencil and taking notes on your preferred wank material. This is sounding more like a CANTsole....eh? eh?! Oh never mind. Oh but the connect needs to be on so it knows when you’re barking orders at it? But I want to be comfortable talking about in front of it. I might unguardedly say something like "I hope Xbox does not nuke china" and then who knows what might happen.

You know, video games didn’t always need marketing events that resemble political rallies because used to sell themselves. "Here’s a thing that lets you play fun games!" it would say. "Which games?" we would ask "These ones!" they would reply "Ooooh they DO look fun!"  we would agree. Now the same statement has so many asterisks next to it, it looks like a gorram star map. The only reason a console would need a spin doctor is if it benefitted the corporation selling it allot more than the poor saps buying it..... or anyone who just wants to play fun games... At this point I personally would only buy a next-gen console if it had an exclusive game I really...REALLY wanted to play. But it would not be a healthy consumer product relationship, it would not be a console providing access to some thing I want. It would be a console holding something I want hostage until I give it my wifi password and credit card details. So to summarise this buyer’s guide to next gen consoles.....DONT....

Achievement unlocked!

Achievements I have unlocked to date:

Original images can be found  HERE . Ill add my own later as well, this is fun /:3

Mondaaaaaay bloody mondaaaaaay!

I know Ive said it before but it really is funny how things tend to work out. And whether it works out for the better or worse, its always in the most bizarre string of things you simply cant discredit as coincidence. This morning I found myself getting ready to head in to work, as one normally does on a Monday morning /:3, though, today I felt no compelling need to hurry or I might be late. I pulled out, drove down the road, decided to pull in at the local SPAR to pick up a cold drink and something to snack on, no hurry at all. Cruising down the highway I think to myself "Hey.... I wonder if my phone's GPS agrees the route I take is the quickest one to work." So, even though im quite familiar with the way, I fire it up and set it to good ol' TUT. Now, about 15 min from work it gives me this little message saying "New rout found! We've found a quicker route for you" and it began to re plot my course. Now, normally Id have just blown it off and continued on my usual route disregarding the little bugger, but just as I approached the corner of the street it suggested I though what the hell? And turned as instructed, stopped a little later on the right side of the road at the traffic light, and just as I was pulling off I hear a 'clank!' and my foot hits the floor. Super! My clutch cable snapped! Luckily Id just managed it into first gear, so the car had started moving, but it jumped out again, and I was losing momentum. Now, here's why I say someone was watching out for me, and its funny how things work out: The spot where I broke down was close enough to an open curb for me to climb onto with the little bit of momentum I had. I Had no air time to call with, and no cash on hand at the moment, but, surprise surprise, to my immediate left stood a cell phone shop selling air time, and to my right an ATM... now while I got out and got some cash to buy air time with someone was kind enough to offer to help me push the car off the curb, since its arse was still in the road, backwards through traffic which was held back by his friend, and into a side parking which 'happened' to be open. So I call the dude who usually services my car and explain the situation and wouldn't you know it.... his tow truck just 'happened' to be heading that same route, so picking me up wouldn't be a problem. Sitting in his truck on the way home I did some calculating.... had I gone the normal route, Id have broken down in the middle lane in front of....the...court house I think? One of the busiest areas on my usual route. I imagine the odds of not getting ploughed into there, not to mention getting someone in to tow you from there would have been slim. Sure the replacement cable, the towing and the service set me back more then Id liked, but given the circumstances? Id say it was well spent. Oh! There's a little epilogue as well. Having dropped the car off at the mechanic's, I was only about 2 blocks from home so decided to leg it. I stopped somewhere in the middle, contemplating if I should go back and wait, and as I turned around, I found myself staring smack into this:

Strange how things happen hmm? :3

Evil pussies....

Cats have many different ways of communicating, but the meow is every cat's go-to vocalization when it wants to tell us something; be it, "I'm hungry," "pay attention to me" or "I just took a dump, go clean it up." However, far from the one-dimensional barking sound that dogs use to communicate, cats are like living stereo equalizers that are able to fine tune the pitches and tones of their meows... so they can better manipulate you into doing what they want.

A recent study has shown that people subconsciously can tell the difference between a pleading or soliciting meow and a run of the mill, casual one just by listening to sound clips taken from different felines in different situations. The subjects said the soliciting sounds came across as more urgent and less pleasant than a normal meow, much like the cries a human baby makes when she's hungry.

In fact, further studies have proven that a cat's cry for food or attention shares a remarkable similarity in frequency to a baby's cry. It's not coincidence- it's pure, kitty evil genius.

Using their expertise in Soviet-style subliminal advertising, cats adjust their purrs and meows to include this frequency which then prompts their owners into responding to them more quickly. Like well trained animals ourselves, we respond because, not only is the sound annoying to us, but it also stimulates our natural instinct to immediately nurture anything that sounds like our offspring, even if it is covered in fur and named Mr. Bojangles.

Amount...Armoir..Armor funyon? Seriously what the hell are you going for here?

Traditional African healers believe that amafufunyana is a kind of spirit possession brought about by witchcraft, and is responsible for driving countless youths mad as well as exploding spellcheckers everywhere.

The perceived method for this bewitchment is weird on its own: it's accomplished by pounding ants that have been feeding from a grave into a poisonous paste that the victim must ingest. But the outcome is even weirder: once they've ingested the grave-ant pudding, the victim begins to hear voices... coming from their own stomach.

Often these voices actually speak a different language from the victim. Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, for example, have reported hearing voices speak Zulu, and vice versa.

And the stomach voices don't just want to talk about the weather or last night's episode of Lost. No, they get very aggressive and begin issuing orders. They've been known to threaten seizures, demand tributes, request acts of violence and, if that's not crazy enough, there have even been a few situations where a case of the stomach-dickheads went viral: at a junior high school in Africa, one outbreak of amafufunyana had over 400 children reporting swollen stomachs and bizarre behavior.

The children ran out of control, rolling their eyes, babbling and striking out uncontrollably at anything around them. One teacher later reported that, upon squeezing the children's stomachs, she could clearly hear the Zulu voices claiming to possess said children.

Might be going out on a limb and suggest that the auditory hallucinations have something to do with eating huge portions of poison ants. As for the schoolchildren all joining in on the act, that sounds like good old-fashioned mass hysteria, since among humans, crazy is more contagious than any disease.

Also, at this point one might be starting to think there's a hidden part of the human brain that just wants an excuse to fuck shit up and blame it on ghosts.

To die for...

Remember when we said Aokigahara was the Niagara falls of suicide? Well, for centuries the abbot in the small Czech town of Sedlec has been the Niagara Falls for dead people, regardless of cause of death. Ever since someone sprinkled soil from the Holy Land on the local cemetery in the 13th century, people from all over Europe started demanding to be buried there and the Sedlec graveyard kept growing until 1870, when the priests decided to finally do something about all those surplus bones lying around. Something insane.

Today, the Sedlec Ossuary is a chapel famous for being decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize the church's extensive skeleton collection. The results were huge mounds of human remains in the four corners of the chapel, a terrifying chandelier built from every bone in the human body, and a massive skull coat of arms adorning the entrance.

We realize this is the Czech Republic and all, but it has been 27 years, surely Poltergeist was released out there already. Like, maybe last year or something? Why are they still playing with human bones as if they were Satan's Lego blocks and making them sit through Mass every single day for almost 140 years now? On the Tempting Fate scale, the only thing worse would be to start using some of the skulls as ceremonial mugs or chamber pots.


At this point, does it really surprise anyone that the church became the inspiration for Dr. Satan's lair in the Rob Zombie movie House of 1000 Corpses?

Happy rainbow fun-fun forrest.

Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around.

What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. How many suicides does it takes for a place to get that reputation? A dozen? Fifty?

More than 500 friggin' people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s.

The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. After that-always eager to prove they are bizarrely susceptible to suggestion-hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves among the countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is reportedly so thick that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely surrounded by darkness.

Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing! Please reconsider!" or "Think of your family!"

In the 70s, the problem got national attention and the Japanese government began doing annual sweeps of the forest in search of bodies. In 2002, they found 78. But who knows how many they missed? In all likelihood there probably is a hanged person somewhere in Aokigahara on any given day. WARNING, NSFS (Not Safe For Soul).

By the way, if an entire dark forest full of hanged corpses wasn't bad enough, a few years ago some people noticed that a lot of the dead in Aokigahara probably had cash or jewelry on them. Thus began the proud Japanese tradition of Aokigahara Scavenging where people are running around the Death Forest, looking for dead guys to loot.

Are they out to friggin annoy me?

Ok Ive been meaning to comment on this for a long time now but somehow always forgot somehwere along the way.... Why is it, whenever I open a medicinal box, be it pills, syrup, capsules or powder, no matter which side I chose, when I open it, the first thing I see is.... the little info slip. You know, the one with all the useless info on it, how to use, what not to feed it to, what would happen if you got one stuck in your ear, that thing. And no matter WHAT, I WILL open the side that has this annoying little slip of suffering ready to grin up at me and say "Aha! Youll have to go through ME to get to th~ Hey! HEY! Put me down! Dont throw me away im important informatioooooo........" Because thats exactly what always happens, I end up mangling the box to rip out the litle sucker and toss it far from the sight of me..... am I alone here?

Mass...err.....i mean Quantum Zeno Effect...

For years, scientists have been scouring the cosmos for some kind of bizarre hypothetical anti-gravity bits they're calling "dark energy". And they've had some success with it ... perhaps at the expense of our mortal souls.
To grossly simplify it, on a scale smaller than atoms, the quantum level, everything suddenly turns into a friggin circus. Quantum physics is to regular everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster. We're talking particles popping in and out of existence, being in two places at the same time, and generally acting like assholes.
No doubt the strangest part is the Quantum Zeno effect, which points out that simply observing and measuring particles changes them (specifically, changing the rate at which they decay). How? No one knows. It appears to be the closest science has ever come to proving black magic exists.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
One prominent scientist theorized that the changes caused by simply observing dark energy could cause it to collapse, taking the universe with it.
Scientists, eager to see if this is true, are furiously observing dark energy whenever they get the chance.
So, Basically It's Like...
It's like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, apparently.
How Long Have We Got?
That scientist, Professor Lawrence Krauss, thinks it may already be underway. Apparently, in the late 90s, scientists were looking at a bunch of things exploding in space when they caught their first glimpse of some dark energy. This may have put the universe into a state where it may or may not pop like a soap bubble at any given instant. Just because we looked at it. Holy balls.
This ... this can't be right, can it? Surely the guy's just nuts. Then again, he appears to be one of the most prominent physicists in the country and has published a huge list of papers and books on the subject.
Then again, one of them was The Physics of Star Trek and, now that we think about it, we're pretty sure he stole this whole scenario from an episode of The Next Generation. :3

Man Dies from Breathing Own Farts

This one was sent to me by a colligue, had to share xD

A terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but an autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage (and a couple of other things). It was just the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed. Had he been outside or had his windows been opened, it wouldn't have been fatal, but the man was shut up in his near airtight bedroom. According to the article, "He was a big man with a huge capacity for creating 'this deadly gas.'" Three of the rescuers got sick and one was hospitalized."

Moral of the story is: if yer gonna eat beans, keep the bedroom window open at night.

Taip-ooooooh

Just a short post during work, but this was too good to pass up. A student popped in just now, and in a thick african accent wished me a "Happy Violence Day". Now I know what he MEANT but what the hell? :3 To all my fellow single people out there or if you just think V-day is a waste of time, lets make this our own official "Violence Day" instead! >:D

Bleeeeeep....

So here's a thought: Is society over saturating the young with the facts, laws and norms it has become comfortable with and now wants to push down on as many as possible? Just seems to me like almost everywhere you go, people, particularly young'ns stick to a somewhat sterile, cold, hard, factual [even though most cases the facts in question are simply an oppinion /:3] you know, almost like they're being turned into single minded organic machines no longer thinking for themselves, discovering new things and deducing their own way of thinking around it.

Fill them full of logic,
and bring them to the floor,
and make them dance,
a dance of death.